Spring Harvest

     Here is an update on what is going on at Sweet Summer Farm. We are really enjoying our  first Spring harvest. We just planted a few rows of potatoes to see how they would do in the hard soil. We didn't buy any potatoes, we just planted some leftover potatoes we got from the farmers market. We are excited to have harvested over 50lbs of potatoes. We've also started harvesting a few onions and that's  good because we use lots of onions. Grand puts them in almost everything she cooks.We have also harvested our garlic and came home with a "table full" as you can see from the pictures below. The tomatoes are doing very well and we hope to get a large harvest. There are many little tomatoes, so we are very hopeful. We are looking forward to some great tomato sandwiches. But it is going to be hard not to pick them green and fry up some green tomatoes. Wouldn't they be good with some homemade pimento cheese? Just thinking about it makes my mouth water!!! Guess we will have to wait and see which one wins out in the end.  The truth is I am sure there will be plenty of both. Hopefully, lots of canned tomatoes to enjoy this winter, maybe some homemade ketchup.  The cabbage, however, isn't doing very well. It has some worms and isn't looking very good. Still, we think we will have a few small heads to cook up with the potatoes. We hope to harvest it very soon. Our peaches are also getting bigger and are looking good. Well, they looked a lot better before the deer came by, but we are thinking we might get a peach or two. It would be nice to at least get a bite of fresh  peach. Well, if the deer don't mind!  The peas are growing fast, plus we have more of them to plant. The peppers look great and lots of baby peppers are enjoying the hot weather here. We have some squash seedlings we will be planting this week, as well as some okra and butter beans.  We're so looking forward to the next couple of months at the farm. We will keep you posted on how everything is going. See pictures of our harvest down below.

A "Table Full" of Garlic

Love that Garlic!

Love Digging Potatoes

Potatoes & Onions

Tomatoes are looking good.

Baby Tomatoes

Swiss Chard

Purple Hull Peas

Green Peppers

Blueberries

Raspberries

Our Biggest Crop, Japanese Beetles!

Farm Update

A lot has happened on the farm lately. We've planted tomatoes, peppers, Marigolds, Celosia Flowers, Sunflowers, and Onions. We also now have ducks. We have seven Indian Runner Ducks, that have now been moved to the farm. They are living in a room in the barn with a run on the side that is 10'x20' If you want to see "The Quakers" Come by and say "Hi." We like visitors. We did, however, have some unwelcome visitors. There used to be 8 ducks, but one day a coyote came by and had a duck dinner.

Bear claws in feed sack

We also had a bear tip over a 100lb food bin and drag out a 50lb bag of chicken food and a 50lb bag of duck food. We are currently repairing a room in the barn to keep the food bin in. Then, we have some smaller visitors, Cabbage Worms. The Cabbage Worms have almost decimated the cabbage crop for this year. We tried sprinkling Diatomaceous Earth on the cabbages and sprayed them with an oil mixture, but nothing has worked. We have ordered some Dipel Dust, an organic pesticide, to try to get rid of the worms. They have also ruined the Broccoli crop and we had to throw it to the chickens. On a good note, we now have a harvest of Farm Fresh Potatoes! Some of the potato plants died so we decided to dig them up to see if  they had made any potatoes.

We only dug up about 25% of the potato patch and ended up with 10lbs of potatoes. Grand made supper out of some of the potatoes. She boiled them and mashed them and put butter, salt, and pepper on them. They were absolutely delicious! Then, she cooked cabbage and Kielbasa Sausage and dinner was served. We also have had our first Garlic crop. Some of the garlic heads had become uncovered so we pulled them up and they were fabulous. Nice and large. Then we cut some

Garlic Scapes. They were a bit greasy, but next time mama will remember the top to the oil. We still have a lot more garlic to harvest and it is green and doing well. We hope it will be finished by the end of this month. We have a start on our tomato crop. Some of our "Compost Tomatoes" have finished blooming and are covered in small green tomatoes.
All of our other tomatoes are still in bloom. Compost Tomatoes are tomatoes that come up in a composer voluntarily. We planted some of these at the farm and they took off. We also had two meals off the Swiss Chard we grew We have had some disappointments but we're still doing well and look  forward to the next few weeks with more harvesting.

We'll keep you posted. If you have any gardening or farming experiences please tell us by commenting below.