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| | | Hutten Family Farm Newsletter for Monday Mar 28, 2022 |
After some on-again / off-again snow squalls today the sun came out and it was fairly nice. We have been thinking about planting the first crops outside but are still waiting for the temperature to stabilize a bit. We spent some time today digging some over-wintered parsnips in the field. They look and taste really good, especially when they are roasted. I even found a few radicchio plants that survived the cold winter without any protection. Very interesting and a bit unusual. They taste much less bitter now than they would have tasted in late November.
The coldframes are in full production with overwintered greens now. We areb picking lots of spinach and mixed greens and we just started picking some baby Russian kale. Both spinach and baby kale will be in the CSA this week as well as the spring parsnips. Some of the overwintered greens are starting to bolt to seed now and we are removing them and replanting the coldframes with spring crops like Asian greens, hakurei turnips, leaf lettuce, and romaine. One of the coldframes is completely planted with garlic and mulched with straw. I had some damage in that coldframe from flea beetles the last couple of seasons so I did not plant any brassica type vegetables in it for the winter but rather planted it to garlic as a rotation. I do not know if this will work but it looks promising. The garlic is currently about 12 to 14 inches high and looks great. Hopefully we will have lots of scapes in a few weeks and some very early garlic as well.
The root vegetables are getting pretty low and somewhat limited so it is a good thing that the fresh greens are really coming on now. I always find this time of year to be the most difficult season to maintain good variety for both the CSA and the market. By late April and early May there is just so many more spring greens growing. We are also fairly limited on apples right now but the latest storage room will open in the next couple weeks and we should have a good selection of our apples again for about 6 or 8 weeks.
We spend considerable time these days pruning the fruit trees, cutting firewood, and working in the heated greenhouse and cold frames picking and weeding. There are a lot of transplants growing now that we will start planting outside under row covers in about two to three weeks. It is feeling a bit ominous when you feel the season approaching but that is not unusual. It gets very exciting and busy once we start and we do not really think about it at that point.
Have a good week. Try to eat the parsnips within a couple days to get the maximum sweetness from being overwintered.
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