Spring farming update

It's another late spring following a long, cold, snowy winter.  I have a memory of winter being long and cold when I was growing up - and usually snowy.  In the past decade it seemed that winters had gotten somewhat milder - sometimes snowy, sometimes not.  But this past winter felt cold and snowy.  If -15 degrees kills powdery mildew spores on the plants and in the soil, we shouldn't have much problem with that this summer - with all the nights below -15 we had over the winter.

The apple trees are just past full bloom - the early blooming varieties are at petal fall - the earliest strawberry varieties are blooming like crazy - and the tomatoes in the hoop houses are also blooming.  Of course, the dandelions, shepherd's purse, creeping charlie and other plant pests are also blooming.  Farmer Bill and his crew are working long days, when the sun shines, trying to keep up with it all.  On rainy days, they work on equipment and try to take a little time off.  [Personally, I wish they'd work more on straightening up the chaos of the equipment shed - it's a bit tricky to find things in there these days.]

Every year during this spring time, Farmer Bill insists that he's going to start dropping crops from his plans next year.  I've long suggested to him that just the strawberries and the apples would keep him plenty busy - without adding 5 other crops in as well.  Last year he swore he was dropping the sweet corn in 2014, but shortly after the first of the year, sweet corn seed appeared at the door... This spring he swore, again, that it was gone next year.  We'll see.

Raspberries may end up gone just because they may become too hard to produce, with the new fruit fly pest that has arrived.  We're setting out attractant traps to scout for the first of the SWD (spotted wing drosophila), and will have to use a spray on the raspberries when they arrive.  There is no effective organic treatment - spray or cultivation - yet.  But since this fruit fly is causing incredible damage to soft fruit crops across the country, I'm betting the chemical companies are working hard to come up with something that works and can be certified for organic production.  Another bet I'd put money on: the price of soft fruit - certified organic or not - will go up. So far, in Minnesota, the June-bearing strawberries haven't been greatly affected by SWD.  All of the other soft fruits have had problems: raspberries, blueberries, ever-bearing strawberries, etc.

We had a few blueberries last year - enough to need to pick them, not enough to make a decent display at the markets.  Farmer Bill sold a few, and I picked a couple of times for baking and freezing.

Most (maybe all? sometimes I'm the last to know) of the melons have been planted into the fields.  While we could, theoretically, have a cold snap and an overnight frost, it doesn't feel like we will.  Even better, the weather forecast from the NWS doesn't indicate anything like that for the next 10 days - which puts us squarely into June.  There were a few really early strawberry blossoms that got nipped in the last frost.  There may have been a few apple blossoms that got nipped, too, but mostly it's been an easy spring for Farmer Bill, frost-wise.  He hasn't had to set up the irrigation system yet (a several days to week-long process) and hasn't had to spend any sleepless nights monitoring the weather and the sprinklers.

At least one field of sweet corn has been planted - again maybe more.  Farmer Bill usually tries to plant sweet corn for early ripening so he doesn't have to spray for corn ear worms.  Also, he gets too busy with the melons and apples to be messing with later sweet corn.  We could quite easily plant enough for us to freeze and have corn at many meals with a bit of the time not spent working ground and planting fields would save.

That's about it. Lots of planting, weeding, mowing, repairing, sharpening, fine tuning going on.