Well it feels like it has been a long time coming but we are finally starting to pull some measurable product out of the fields. Sweet Corn started July 20th and about a dozen other crops are starting to fill in the gaps too. This is a long post, why because it rained today!!! It was a MONEY rain for us as it has been dry and we needed it. So I will cram a bunch into one day. Lots of words, lots of pics, lots of video. Hope you enjoy what’s comin’ up down on the farm.
The growing season has been strange this year. It has been much cooler and cloudy than usual especially for July. Great to be a human but not so much to be a corn plant. We have been using some new crop fertility products that go along the lines of natural I suppose you might say.
Basically they reduce the amounts of chemical based fertilizers and crop protection products we would use and stimulate the bacteria in the soil to breakdown the nutrients already present making them avaliable for plant uptake. We will see how it works, so far things seem to be working well as we have very good growth especially in our curcurbites with not so great weather. Our watermellons are about two weeks ahead of past years, just sort of strange, maybe this “snake oil” actually works??!! Go figure!
You see people always talk about “organic” and I just have to laugh knowing what I know about soil chemistry and plant fertility. You see EVERYTHING is a chemical or made up of elements in different combinations. Organic chemistry is powerful stuff and just to think you can simplify things and that will make all things all better is naive at best. Good crops come from healthy soil and that takes a balanced approach to how you treat them. You can just as easily mess things up going the “organic route” as you can mess things up by getting soils out of balance by going the “commercial” route.
All in all most of us eat pretty well in this country. It is mostly a matter of choices what we put in our mouths. It is mostly a matter of balance. It is still better to eat a piece of food that our bodies evolved on that has a part per billion of something that if hunderds of tons of it were eaten in a given period of time may be harmful, than not to eat it at all.
We have a marvolus food system despite some of its faults. It’s development and use has allowed we as a people to do things today we take for granted like only work 5-6 days a week, only 40-60 hours a week, take vacations, days off, run and exercise for fun or “health”, eat out, the list goes on and on.
All I am saying is thank you very much for supporting us at farmers’ markets and the like, thank you very much for appreciating the simple things in life that give a family farmer an edge but also remember you can hardly think of the last time you went hungry in this country.
BB