Friday, August 13, 2010

Field Walk Reveals Healthy Crops



A big part of my job here at the farm is to manage the health and happiness of crops in the field. Every week I take a tour of all the fields and monitor crops and their condition in great detail. During these field walks I generate a list of the activities necessary to keep each crop in each field doing their best. Then it's back to the office to use that information to generate the weeks job lists for each crew here at the farm.

I could not resist sharing some pictures of the Kahout field from yesterdays visit. The beans all look wonderful. We have been harvesting from the first planting for about a week and pictured here is the start of the flowering cycle for the second planting. These plants look great, healthy with a prolific flower set; I hope you are hungry for beans.
The real surprise in this field has been the vigor of our Solanaceae; the peppers, tomatoes and eggplant. Despite a terrible spring that left these plants struggling to grow in substandard temperatures with a deluge of spring rain, they have really come around. We will be harvesting peppers soon, we have already begun harvesting some cherry tomatoes and we are hopeful that the forthcoming warm weather will mean even more ripe fruit next week. I even found a few ripe eggplant.