Market season is upon us, and we’re reflecting on our second spring in production as a farm!
Learning From Last Year
This spring, we made a lot of progress in managing aspects of the farm that ranged from so-so to outright terrible last year. First and foremost, we have a much better understanding of our weeds, when to tackle them, and how. Last season, we devoted lots of time to dealing with growing beds that were simply out of control. Huge weeds, sod-like clumps of grass, searching through a mini forest to find a carrot, etc.
The takeaway is something that any seasoned farmer will tell you: small weeds turn into big weeds. It seems so simple, but having a proactive, consistent weeding schedule since the very beginning of spring has been night and day for our weed pressure. Aside from a few problem beds, our farm looks utterly pristine from a weed perspective. Plus, we spent less time this spring keeping it that way.
We are also really pleased with how our direct-seeded crops have been doing. Last spring, we were hit or miss with germination rates on carrots, peas, beans, radishes, cilantro, and dill. While this year isn’t perfect, these crops are doing much better out of the gate than last year. Particularly the carrots. In fact, I dare say that we will be flush with carrots from late May right through the summer.
We’ve also made great improvements to protecting and hardening off seedlings. We lost quite a few seedlings and transplants last year because they experienced weather beyond their preparation or tolerance. The most challenging was losing our tomatoes to a late-April freeze.
This season, we’ve hardened plants off longer, protected them more proactively, and avoided windy/cold weather when possible. We planned our tomatoes to be transplanted 2 weeks later than last year. The result? The tomatoes are flying, and we’ll likely have them 2-3 weeks earlier than we did last year.
The High Tunnel Continues to Be a Game Changer
After having some good success growing cold-hardy crops through winter, we wanted to use our tunnel to another advantage: extending our season farther back into the spring.
One thing we’re learning is that there are simply limits to how early you can harvest a crop in the field. Most crops don’t care when you plant them, they won’t be ready to harvest until the days and temperatures are long and high enough.
One great example is carrots. It seems clear that field-planted carrots, even the fastest varieties, won’t mature until late May or early June. But what if we planted them inside our tunnel? Would this allow them to be harvested earlier?
We planted carrots 3 days apart, one planting inside and one out in the field. The performance could not have been more different. The carrots in the tunnel germinated, grew, and matured much faster. So much so that we believe the high tunnel carrots will mature 2-3 weeks before the same carrots planted outside. That is a HUGE difference!
We saw similar behavior for other crops planted in the tunnel vs outside. This insight is inspiring us to plan to use the tunnels even more efficiently next spring!
Challenges New and Familiar
Nothing in farming is without challenges! We had our fair share of returning challenges from last year, plus a couple of new ones.
In the pest department, we experienced a similar onset of flea beetles that certainly delayed our radishes and turnips. Luckily, our arugula was spared by keeping it covered. Slugs have also been more prevalent in and around spring lettuce, but not to the point of concern at this time.
Groundhogs have stayed away from the farm, I think due to taking time to make sure they don’t have any holes near growing beds to make a home out of. One pest that seems to have found the farm is rabbits. They have actually done some serious damage to things like snap peas, beans, and the bed of edible flowers we are trialing.
While spring winds are always tough here, we’ve done a much better job securing tarps and row covers, and also looking ahead to plan out our work around big wind events.
One challenge that continues to remain mostly unsolved is spring fertility for our heavy feeders like cabbage, broccoli, squash, etc. We severely underestimated fertility for many of those crops last season, and while this season has been better, we are still noticing that our transplants spend their first few weeks in the field doing absolutely nothing before starting to show good signs of growth. We think this is primarily due to our main nitrogen source (blood meal) taking much longer to break down and become available in the cold spring weather.
Some early trials with our homemade compost seem to show promise, but next spring we will be updating our transplanting methods for these heavy feeding crops.
Conclusion: A Huge Leap
Overall, we think the farm has taken a huge leap in 2025. Not only have we grown our CSA by nearly 3X, but we also feel that we will have at least 3X the production as last season. The summer harvest and market season will tell whether this jump is more than we can handle (we’re confident that it’ll be busier than last year but manageable). Onward to the best time of year, feeding ourselves and our community!
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