Tunnel Produces Big Strawberries - Really Big!

Here are a few strawberry pictures - Charles picked these this morning out of the high tunnel.

We put the ruler there, because the strawberry is over 2 inches across. We put it on the postal scale, and it weighs 2.1 ounces! (It would only take 8 of these monsters to make a pound!)

The strawberry on the right is a normal sized, one-ounce berry. In the center is one that is about 1.7 ounces. The monster is on the left.

Oh yeah, they taste so juicy and sweet too! We'll have some at the Morgantown Farmers Market Saturday morning. Come early and stay in line - they'll go fast. (Market starts at 8:30 am).

Giant Peas Take Over High Tunnel - Makes a Nice Hedge Row

Woah, look at these sugar snap peas!

Charles is 6 feet tall, and they are over his head in places. The first blooms are about 5 feet high. As the peas grow, they will put out more blooms above the first ones. Good thing we have the step ladder in the back of the tunnel! We'll need it for picking in a few weeks.

Had a great weekend planting and mulching!

Wow, what a beautiful weekend! Thank goodness it stopped raining for a few days, as we are painfully behind where we would like to be in regards to weed control, planting, and growing veggies.

We were able to plant some seeds, such as peas, beans, beets, and the like. We got 200 pounds of potatoes planted as well. We transplanted some more sweet corn and our first tomatoes outside. And the strawberries are now mulched between the rows. It's amazing what you can get done in a long weekend!

We're still behind, though. We still do not have enough veggies getting ripe each week to fill our subscriptions. We may even have to postpone our start of our veggie subscriptions a week. We usually try to start at least by mid-June, but we're afraid it may be later in June before we start.

So for a few more weeks we'll just take everything to the farmers market in Morgantown. The Cumberland market starts this week, but we don't have enough to go to both.

Pray for more sunshine!

Where's the sunshine?

OK, enough with the RAIN! Our greens barely grew this week - we have much less to take to the market tomorrow than we've had the last two weeks. With no sunshine, things just aren't growing like we would wish them to.

We're hoping the rain holds off during the market at Morgantown tomorrow morning. Markets in the cold rain are downright miserable.

In other news, Charles was able to trod through the mud and transplant some onions this week, along with some Swiss chard, spinach, and lots of lettuce. We still have some plastic mulch to lay, but we have to wait until the fields dry out.

Please help us by praying for some sunshine! (And warmer weather!)

Morgantown Farmers Market Farm Fun Day this Saturday May 10

Saturday May 10 will be a super-fun day for families who attend the Morgantown Farmers Market.

We're having a Fun Farm Day, where we'll have contests, trivia, and good old-fashioned fun at the market! Lots of giveaways for kids, and balloons, and prizes will be available.

Visit the market between 8:30 am and noon at the corner of Fayette and Spruce Streets in Morgantown, West Virginia.

And by the way, we'll have lots of veggies for sale as well! Come get spinach, two kinds of kale, Swiss chard, and more! Plus other vendors will have tomatoes, herbs, plants, crafts, and jellies.

We hope to see you there!

Planting Has Begun!

We got a couple rows of cabbage, cauliflower, and the like planted in the patch along Rt. 219 on Friday evening. If you drive by while we're transplanting, you'll think we're just sitting in the field, but we're actually moving, very slowly! The tractor has a "creeper" gear, so it can go down to as slow as 0.1 miles per hour.

It goes that slow so we can plant behind the tractor. After the wheel pokes a hole and dumps some water in it, we have to shove the root-ball of the plant into the hole, and squeeze some of the mud around the roots to get the plants started nicely. So when you see someone riding behind the tractor, with their feet up, know they are actually planting furiously, not just sitting back having a joy ride!

Strawberries are Planted!

Last weekend we were able to get all our strawberries transplanted into the ground. Yay!

Why rejoice? For several reasons.

We had the strawberries potted up into cell trays, sitting in between the strawberry rows in the high tunnel. That means we had to water them once or twice a day, depending on how hot it got! It means we had no room to walk between the strawberry rows.

It also means that when a vole or mole started tunneling under the plant trays, and started eating the strawberry plants, we had not recourse!

So, after the trays were out of the tunnel and on their way to being planted, one of the voles/moles was eradicated (we'll spare the gory details). Not sure how many more there are, but hopefully not many!

The strawberries are looking good in the field. Now if we can just keep the deer and other wild creatures from finding them...