Steve’s off at an organic fruit growers’ conference in Leavenworth, Washington this week, so I’m holding down the fort and hoping to get through the week with no major emergencies (like the broken mainline irrigation pipe last week). Sometimes the little and big emergencies on the farm seem to take up most of our time!
Steve’s presenting at the conference with Joji Muramoto, a UCSC researcher with whom we have collaborated on a number of research trials. They’ll be talking about cover cropping and organic fertilizer options for growing strawberries, and Steve will attend sessions and tours concerning other fruit that we are still novices at growing. Hopefully Steve will fend off the farm emergencies next week long enough to write about the conference.
We’ll open the strawberry patch up for Strawberry U-Pick this weekend. We have the berries planted at our Redman House farmland this year—that means it’s easy to get to from Highway 1, though it’s not as scenic a spot as our home farm. (We rotate the berries to a different field each year to foil the fungal diseases that always build up in the field during the long berry harvest year. Once a field has been planted in strawberries for a year, we don’t plant strawberries in that same place for at least 4 years.) The field is quite full of fruit (see picture above) so come on out and pick to your heart’s content. See details below.
The first new potatoes are in your boxes this week. We look forward to the new crop of potatoes so much each year that Steve presented me with a bucket of freshly dug potatoes for our anniversary last week. He’s so sweet. We hope you enjoy them too.
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