Hello Farm Family! Wow! Today has been a busy day! (Originally started this segment on 4/30). Thankfully, it was the kind of busy that we actually enjoyed. Can you guess why? Ok…..we’ll tell you. We participated in our first Farmers Market in over 2 years! It was absolutely amazing to be back out in the community and we quickly realized just how much we’ve missed it. We were both so excited that we completely forgot to take pictures, but we did share a quick live video to our page before the rain came in. We made our crowd pleasing lemonade and were delighted to see some familiar faces who came to get a cup or three!
A huge shout out goes to Louis at 2 The Olive Fruit for inviting us. We want to say thank you him and to all who came out and supported this Market. We look forward to many more this year.
So the next logical question is where right? Well we know for sure that we are planning to participate at The Enterprise Farmers Market, but dates are TBD. Today we learned about many other events and the plan is to fill our calendars up.
Speaking of Enterprise, we learned from the market manager that Thursdays are one of the days that are available for us to choose from. Our question is would we have the support needed to make the drive and spend the time there? Of course its been a while, but if our customers up that way would like to have us, we would love to do so!
As a matter of fact, a new Summer Share was just announced with Kith & Kin CSA, and we could open up membership to Enterprise residents who would like to pick up during the Thursday market. If you’re a family who would love to join, drop us a line using our contact page.
Last month we about talked how ”April showers bring May flowers” and our home garden as well as the farm are just beaming with blossoms. Admittedly, some of those blossoms are crops that have gone to seed, but we don’t mind. Allowing crops to seed gives us the opportunity to feed the bees and add to our growing collection of saved seeds. This is something we’ve grown to love because we are collecting heirloom varieties that can be planted for many years to come and doing so also helps us save money in the long run…..which is vital to small farms like ours.
Speaking of saving money…..Have you started your garden yet? If your answer is no, It’s not too late to start now. With the rising prices of groceries, everyday necessities, and gas one way to save money may be to grow your own garden this year. Remember that the key is to start small. It’s very easy to get over excited which always leads to being overwhelmed when it comes to growing. So with the hot weather on its way think about what plants love the heat and plan on planting them. Of course your local farmers have your back if you don’t have the time or a green thumb to get it done, so don’t sweat it. We do still have a few plants available to help you start your garden and throughout the season and we will be starting more.
On a sad note we saw our very first garden pest of the season the other day while irrigating the farm. It was a pretty good size stink bug hanging out on our tomatoes and that means there are more on the way. With my chemical sensitivities and our farm being Certified Naturally Grown there are limitations on what methods we use to control garden pests. One thing that has been very effective for us has been the use of essential oils in the garden. This is a subject that we’ve studied up on and it’s been both mind blowing and cool to learn about how nature can be used to control….. nature.
OK so let me tell you all about what’s growing. In both our home and farm gardens and we have many tomatoes, peppers, okra, squash, and beans.
This month we will be harvesting both potatoes and onions. At our house we go through onions super fast so we are stoked about being able to have a fresh batch of our own again this year. The ones shown below are from previous years.
Potatoes never seem to last for long so we are planning to run a trial in the late Summer-Fall in hopes to harvest more this year. We are currently running trials on some new tomato varieties and will be doing the same with peppers over the next month. It’s always our goal to bring something fresh and new to the Wiregrass plus we like a challenge.
Do you have a favorite that you’d like us to grow? Please sure to let us know! For now we say thank you for being here and well see you soon. Until then…….