Thursday, March 31, 2011

March Progress

Hard to believe that it is already almost the beginning of April - the huge storm that blew through last week threw everyone off a little I think! Fortunately we sustained no damages here on the farm, the field was really wet for a a week but it looks like many of the crops actually benefited a good deal from all that wonderful rain.  Now the weather is absolutely gorgeous and hopefully spring is here to stay! Everyone is feeling motivated to get out in the field this weekend and prep beds, pull weeds and begin the spring planting season.
onion patch, Northwest corner of field
garlic beds



Sugar snap peas, climbing





















'Trionfo Violetto'



Our seed orders are starting to come in, and we are really excited about some new crops we plan to try out this year.   In addition to our tried and true favorite pole beans - 'Blue Lake' and 'Italian Romano' - we also got seed for 'Yellow Wax' beans and a beautiful purple Italian heirloom called 'Trionfo Violetto'.  While the unique Lemon cucumber has long been a favorite, and we have always grown crunchy little pickling cucumbers, we also will be raising some sweet slicing cucumbers this season as well, and have added a few fun specialty pumpkins for the pumpkin patch too.



Dahlia beds all planted and ready to grow!
Yesterday we spent the morning replanting all the dahlia tubers that we had divided earlier this month.  The weather was fantastic, and we got 6 beds planted full of these amazing flowers! We will also be planting some of the tubers into gallon pots and plan on selling them once they begin to flower.  The rest of the flower seedlings look great too - we are looking forward to armloads of snapdragons, sunflowers, asters, statice, zinnias, black-eyed-susans, sweet peas, poppies and more.

We are expecting to begin our CSA boxes at the beginning of June and will soon be sending out information and details via email.  If any of you, or someone you know, may be interested but are not on our emailing list please contact us at casalegnofamilyfarm@hotmail.com
And don't forget - the farm stand is still open! The last of the oranges, little lettuces, chard and kale and still some broccolini and of course our amazing organic pastured eggs for only $5/dozen have really kept us going all this winter!  We should be harvesting carrots, sugar peas, beets and radishes sometime in the next month too.

This is going to be a big, busy weekend full of hard work, but seeing the field all cleaned up and prepared will be really rewarding.  Looking forward to sharing the outcome of the next few days work with you all next week!