July 6, 2021- hot season and cover crops

We made it to July!!  For us that means one more month of craziness and then we move to a more manageable pace.  June was more pleasant than usual.  We were incredibly grateful for the lower temperatures.  Lots of tomatoes are starting to come in these days, along with the other hot weather stalwarts like peppers and eggplant.  The larger plantings of potatoes, onions and garlic have all been brought in and are stored in our cool room to include in your boxes over the next 2 months.  We were sad to lose a large percentage of our blueberry crop this year to the late freeze in April but have been able to pick enough to include them in your boxes fortunately for these recent weeks.    

Our diversity starts to go down in the hot months, but I am still amazed by how much we can grow.  Crops like okra, peppers, eggplant, field peas, and edamame can survive more easily so we plan for them to come in during the later months of summer.  We have had to adapt over the years for some of the other crops, but I continue to learn new ways to grow things.  We can grow lettuce through the summer now, thanks to important plant breeding work and some technical adaptations.  Plant breeders have selected for heat tolerance in lettuce.  There are only 2 varieties we can grow well but that is better than none, which was what we used to be able to do from July-September!  And we learned that if we draped a 30% shade cloth over our highest tunnels that have wide open sides and end-walls we could lower the temperature enough to get them to grow well.  We are grateful for the ability to adapt this way.

Another big focus throughout the summer months is growing cover crops.  Cover crops are plants grown for the protection and enrichment of our soils.  In an organic system, we are very dependent on these plants to continually work on improving our soils.  They provide organic matter which burns up quickly in our subtropical environment.  We depend on organic matter to both improve the tilth of our heavy clay soils but also to help hold onto nutrients to provide nutrition to our food crops.  We can use this window, when some fields are free of food crops, to focus on growing these plants to improve our soils.  Right now, we focus on growing cover crops in the fields that will go into fall production and in the fields that came out of spring production.  Our main summer cover crops are sunnhemp, sorghum-sudangrass and cowpeas.  These plants thrive in the heat and grow quickly, and we are happy to incorporate their biomass into the soil after 2-3 months.  If you come to the farm, the fields that are full of one crop (usually looks like a grass) are almost always cover crops.   We have also learned how to incorporate these cover crops into our greenhouse and hoophouse rotations.  It is a little more challenging to manage them in these environments, but we believe they are especially important to keeping our soils healthy to be able to grow healthy and nutritious crops.

We hope everyone is enjoying their summer and figuring out ways to beat the heat!  Celia