Tour The Late July Fields | Ottawa Farm Fresh

Hey folks, Farmer Joe here, coming at you fresh from the field. Here we are, end of July, there's a lot going on on the farm and often we're too busy to actually do these seasonal updates at this time of year, so I want to take a moment to show you around. So here we are, we got this beautiful section of celery. So these celeries, you know, we've got different successions of celery. We started harvesting about two, three weeks ago, and we have all these different generations of celery all the way, you know, down to these small ones that'll be harvested in October and stored in our cold room all the way into December. And so the celery's been looking nice. Celery is a very high demand crop, it requires a lot of organic fertilizer, a lot of irrigation, got to keep a lot, a lot of maintenance goes into making that big juicy celery. Let's move on. All right, then over here we've got our zucchini, we got our cut flower section, on this side we've got our tarped area. So this is a section of the field that's been cover cropped for three years, and so cover crops are plants that we grow purely to enhance and enrich the soil. So it's been a cover crop for three years, and now we've covered it with tarps, and so it's going to kill the grass and the hay and the alfalfa and red clover, and so we're going to start moving those tarps over to the other areas of the field and start working up this ground, disking the soil, working it up, getting ready. This will be greens this fall, so like arugula, salad mix, spinach, actually these tunnels in October are going to get taken apart and put over here onto already established cold hardy crops like kale and lettuce and cilantro and parsley and all that. So we got to start working up this soil so we can start planting those crops in August so they can be nicely established by the time October comes around, and then we take apart those tunnels, build them back on top of the already established greens, and that way we get greens from the field into November and probably December, depending on the weather. Here we are in the tunnels, and so these are pickling cucumbers. We got peppers. They look nice. The peppers have been a little challenging. Year after year they're challenging. This year they were a little bit stunted. I think we left the fruit on too early, and so next year we're going to be experimenting with removing all the flowers up until the third node and thus encouraging the plant to do more vegetative growth before it starts setting flowers, because what we had was a lot of early green peppers, and then like all the flowers were aborting, and so we went through last week and the week before and we harvested some green peppers, hopefully to allow the plant to focus more on vegetative growth, which they have. They're looking healthier, but now we need some of those fruits to start setting so that we actually get some yield off them. So peppers are sort of like, yeah, not one of the huge success stories of the farm this year. The cucumbers are looking great. It's the first year we grow pickling cucumbers, and what I love about cucumbers is that they basically self-trellis. Just with their little tendrils, they reach on and they grab, so they're really low maintenance in terms of trellising, and we just started harvesting this week, and so it's the first year we ever grow them, and I'm excited. Hopefully we'll have loads of little pickling cucumbers for selling the farm store. Back here we've got, so this area was in cover crops for a number of years. This is our first year growing veggies here. It's actually our first year ever growing veggies in this section. It's been in cover crops ever since we moved to this farm six years ago, so it's a little bit of a bump here you can see, and so the top of the hill is a little bit sandier soil, a little bit more depleted. I wasn't sure how it was going to do, but it's working out fine. They're working out pretty good. We've been growing these like giant lettuces this year because what we did was we basically gave them all more space. Instead of planting them at 12 inch spacing, we planted them at 18 inch spacing, and we also added an extra fertilization four weeks after planting of some of that pelleted chicken manure, and wow, they are giant. If you've been to the farm store, if you've picked up a CSA basket, you know I ain't kidding. We got some giant lettuce this year. We got our tunnels full of tomatoes, which we've already started harvesting here about mid-July. We got our first harvest, but really I can just hear that tomato tsunami coming on, and so over the next couple weeks into mid-August, it should be building, building, building, and I anticipate usually somewhere between August 20th and 27th, we're really hitting that peak. End of August, early September, we're peaking, and then you know once we get into the second week of September, we're coming down from that. So over here, I want to talk about a couple different things. So this is a section that's been vegetables for the last five years, and so this year we planted a cover crop, and so basically it's a mix of oats and peas, and underneath we got some clover and alfalfa established. So under the oats is clover and alfalfa and grasses, and so this week or next week, we're going to mow this to kill the oats and the peas, and they allow the clover and alfalfa to grow back, and so this will be clover and alfalfa for three years. So that's our basic rotation, five years of vegetables, three years of cover crop, five years of vegetables, three years of cover crop. Speaking of which, over here this was a section which was in its fifth year of veggies. All the early vegetables, early broccoli, early cabbage, early Chinese cabbage, early lettuce, early spinach, and a lot of weeds, more weeds than what I would really like, but here you can see the beds have been destroyed, and we're getting ready to plant a rye and clover cover crop, so that'll become, you know, cover crop for the next three years. And I want to show you the brussels sprouts, another exciting, exciting development. All right, so here we are in the brussels sprouts. We don't usually grow brussels sprouts, but some of you may have met our awesome field employee named Catherine. Her favorite vegetables is brussels sprouts, and she's been asking me for years, hey can we grow brussels sprouts, can we grow brussels sprouts, and finally I caved, I said yes, and I'm so grateful that I did. I mean look at these plants, they are gorgeous. Here we are, end of July, we've already got some brussels sprouts forming. This week we're going to go through and just do some leaf removal. As you can see in this plant, I already took off the leaves from the bottom. That's going to help improve airflow, mitigate against fungal and bacterial diseases, and yeah, I mean these plants are gorgeous, so thank you Catherine for insisting on that. And over here we get to our carrot section. So this here, we've got 24 beds of carrots at different stages of growth. All of them in theory will be ready for carrot fest, which is September 26th, and also we're going to have a second week of carrot harvest the week after, I think October 3rd. So stay tuned for more details. There'll be food, there'll be music, there'll be carrot harvest. This will be the seventh annual carrot fest, so it's looking pretty good. They're looking pretty good in terms of weed control. Not 100% perfect, but pretty damn good. Last year we lost eight beds to the weeds because we just never got around to it, and so this year part of my strategy has actually been to reduce. So we're actually doing less veggies than we usually do, and we just took more agreements with other farms to produce veggies for us, and so by doing less we're able to do less better. So we're able to focus, I don't know if you saw, you noticed earlier in the video we were in the tunnels, they are looking gorgeous in terms of pruning. Last year they were a jungle, the carrots are looking beautiful. Last year it was a jungle of weeds, and so yeah, sometimes less is more, and so we've decided to focus and do less better, and in that way have more time and energy to better serve the community. That's a lot of carrots, folks. About 10,000 pounds of carrots is going to come from this field. This field will produce about 10,000 pounds of carrots, which will be enough carrots for our winter CSA. So if you don't know, we're actually open 45 weeks a year, which is really unusual for a local organic farm. Most farms are open maybe 20, 22 weeks a year. If they open in June and they close in October, but we've decided to push the limits based on popular demand. You ask and we listen to you, and so we've come through and we're open 45 weeks a year from February all the way to December. All right, and last but not least, the greenhouse. So here we are in the greenhouse. This is where we grow the greenhouse tomatoes. So as you saw earlier in the video, we grow tomatoes outside and we grow tomatoes in the greenhouse, and the point is that in here we're able to plant much earlier and get higher yields, but we don't have as much space, so we don't quite grow everything we need, so we still need to grow out in the tunnels. This is also where we grow all our regular cucumbers. They've been harvested, so there's none. Oh, there they are. You know, this is where we grow our regular size cucs, and because in here we're protected from the cucumber beetle, which really love this type of cucumbers, and also it allows us to get a longer season. So we start harvesting cucumbers here in late April, early May. We start harvesting tomatoes, cherry tomatoes in late May, slicer tomatoes early June, so by the time the plants are still tiny outside, we're already harvesting in here. So yeah, there you go. That's a little update from the farm. Thank you all for watching. Thank you for being part of this community. We couldn't do it without you. You know, it's a lot of work, and it's worth it because we know there's people like you who are out there appreciating what we do, and it's such, you know, we're so grateful for your commitment to the farm, and every time, you know, I see you or I hear feedback from Jen or the other FarmStore team or through email or online reviews about how much you love what we do, it's so meaningful to us because it's a lot of work, and we don't just do it for the money. I mean, money's pretty slim in farming, but we really do it to have a contribution to make a meaningful contribution to the world, and we love when we hear from you how much you enjoy our products and how much you enjoy the farm. So if you have any suggestions, any ideas, if you want to get involved, if you want to volunteer, if there's some project you've always dreamed of doing you want to talk to us about, let us know. And yeah, anyway, thank you for being here, and we'll see you later folks.