If you are to believe the weather models for global warming, then this weather is certain confimation that global warming is here. The weather pattern this year has been similar to the past two and fits the models perfectly for the northeast: cooler and damper.   All which has been great for he  lettuce and greens, but not so hot fot the strawberries, corn and vine crops.   We started picking  our first strawberries back June 7, and I bet we havent  had  two full days of sunshine since we started. We havent gotten all the rain that many of  my farmer friends in New England have experienced. As a matter of fact, despite the cloud cover, we were dry enough  so that we drip irrigated our peppers,tomatoes and vine crops last week. But in the last two days our moisture  issues have been  addressed with 2.5″ of rain and more in the forecast. Hmmmm….not so good with the fourth of July coming and the last  half of the strawberry season in full swing. The good news is that the outside crew are champs in getting the stuff  harvested for the stand and bulling through a full afternoon of catch up farming. They are working 12 hours a ady at least 4 days a week. The guys at the stand  and at the greenhouses (where we have a plant sale going on) are short handed as well, yet things still look pretty fresh and  kept up. A good crew, indeed…

Speaking again of global issues,we got notification and call from our extension crop specialists informing us that  the disease Late Blight of Tomatoes and Potatoes (the same one that caused the Irish  Potatoe Famine in the mid 1800’s) has shown up in New England  2 months early this year. The damp,  sunless, weather is perfect for spreading it and  it usually works its way northward  on weather systems from the south in a normal year. By the time it gets here in late  September  the growing season is well over, and harvest is already underway. But this year it seems many of the box stores in New England that carry garden  starters have been buying their tomatoes from southern growers, and the NH University Extension pathologist has, as of yesterday, identified  garden tomatoe plants in 4 different box retailers who had  plants covered with late blight that they were selling to home gardeners. Despite her request that they pull  pull them from the shelves, they would not. (She has no legal powers to make them)   By not doing so they are going to sell diseased plants out into the communities and help spread the disease around. As if the weather was not enough of a problem.  So the commercial growers, organic and conventional, can look towards a summer of spraying  their tomatoes and potatoes  more than ever, all while hoping the  weather  improves and the disease doesnt show up in their fields.  Farmers trying to figure out reprocussions of global warming and a global economy.

The  last few weeks  have been a  whirlwind as  the rush of planting season has been coupled with some abnormally  late frost events and  cool nights. Nonetheless, Mother Nature  marches  on as we start harvesting  the first early fruit from  our strawberry beds on black  plastic. This system of raising berries is an adaptation of  a method that comes to us  from California and the deep south originally and  like  all good ideas,  it has its drawbacks. The drawbacks are the plants  bloom very early in the spring and are subject to frost damage, meaning more nights of pumping water to protect them. There is  additional expense in the  plastic mulch and drip tape that is used in the system of developing the bed, and  an upfront  cost of   additional plants   because  the way the system  functions depends  on a much higher plant population per acre  as compared to a traditional matted row system, (which constitutes the  majority of what we still do here on the farm.) The plus side of the equation is  twofold for us;  earliness is the main factor, but  there is another subtle benefit for us. With plasticulture we can  bring a given acreage of land into meaningful production in half the time, essentially allowing us to double crop our land in the summer.This is because traditional matted row strawberry beds take a full year to establish, whereas a matted row system allows you to fall plant, thus allowing  you to produce a short season vegetable crop on the same land as well. So it fills a void for those of us with limited acreage, allowing us to utilize our already short season here in the northeast. We  still do both traditional mattted row as well as  some plasticulture…. they both have their places.

People often ask about  how the crop looks, and I usually  respond  given the  amount of winter injury that I can see in the plants as they come out of the winter. The truth is, not only is  this a  guessing game, but it has little bearing on the profitablility of the crop for us. The plants  can  be  in the best of  shape and loaded with  fruit going  into the harvest season   only to loose a high percentage to fruit rot if the weather  turns dark and damp. This is  particularly a problem with a dependence  upon  Pick Your Own for harvesting….the  PYO crowd  only works  on nice sunny days.  So, you can have a great crop only to loose it at the very last  minute due to  uncooperative weather. On the other hand, you can have a  rough winter and light fruit set and if the weather is relatively cool,sunny and dry during the harvest season you might  harvest a higher percentage of good  berries  harvested between the farm and PYO crews and actually make out better financially.It is really a crap shoot.

So this tempers our enthusiasm  as we enter our  33rd strawberry season. It’s early in the season and the  plants  endured a fair amount of winter injury.  But the weather of late has been good for the  plants with no extreme heat and a fair  amount of sun despite the unseasonally cool nights. The  birds and ground varmints havent really  arrived yet to extract their  pound of flesh from the crop, so their is an air of anticpation about here. We shift our focus as greenhouse sales wind down a bit and we ready ourselves  to open the farmstand in a couple of days and the strawberries will be on the shelves when we do. If you see  me and and ask me if it looks like a good year for the strawberries,  don’t be surprised if I shrug  my shoulders. I am a believer in the words of  that  great Yankees baseball catcher Yogi Berra who said “It aint over till it’s over…”

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Ray brought the 1st ripe strawberries to  me today.  They came from the rows we  planted upon the black plastic,but it surprised me none the less because  the spring has  been pretty cool thusfar with the exception of a couple of scorchers back in  April. We may have a few to pick by next weekend but I dont see us wading in them for a couple of weeks. We got lots of things  planted out this week, thanks  in part to the arrival of our two jamaican workers and the arrival of the college help.This is their  8th year  they have been coming and they pretty well know the ropes at this point, such that they can work with the green college kids. Despite getting a frost three nights ago we were able to  put out the  peppers,tomatoes,cukes, and summer squash. We cultivated and  hand hoed  the onions(about an acres worth)  this week, but up  until two days ago  irrigation was  a major activity. Thanks to the 2″ of rain that we got, we can focus on weeding, which will really pop up  once we get some  heat after this rain. Field preparation is still an ongoing activity, but the intial heat of getting land prepared is behind us and George Cilley, our tractor operator who does the lions share of it, can take a well deserved break to mow his lawn and do a few  a few things on the list that has been growing while he has been up here the last month or so playing in the dirt and manure.

Memorial Day is behind us, and the weather has been kind to us such that greenhouse starter sales have been pretty good  despite the dimmed economy. It  hardly looks like we  sold much at all when you walk through the greenhouses, but Sarah assures me that the  plants that remain are just spaced a bit more apart because they are larger. The stuff looks really good, so if you are in need of  ornamentals please come down and give us a look as the selection is still very good.  We havent set a date to open the  route 12A farmstand yet…but I am sure Mike will tell us when we get close to harvesting  greens and lettuce and berries.

It never ceases to amaze me at how entitled customers think  they are or perhaps it is the depth of their  lack of knowledge concerning things remotely horticultural.  This  years best story to date is about a customer who came in and bought some rhubarb roots that  were still dormant. The  pot  contained the dormant root, it was the 23rd  of April and there was no foliage yet showing.  I  heard his  somewhat indignant voice on the message  machine about a week later (May 4) saying that there was no  harvestable rhubarb yet and what were we going to do to make it  right. I think my wife politely informed him  that we would make it right if something turned out to be wrong with the  product, but that he should be a bit more patience.  This was probably the correct way to handle this…not the way I would have approached it had I called the indignant fellow back when I first heard  his message.

I understand that we are a society that has come to  expect to get everything we  want, and that  we want it now. Fast food, wide screen televison, hi speed internet–whatever.  Gardening demands a bit more patience and a bit of knowledge. As far as the knowledge goes,  a recent interview was done of us in a local paper, and one of the angles the reporter was charged with was  to get  simple steps to guarantee  success with heirloom tomatoes. I had to inform the reporter that in my neighborhood their were no gurantees to having a successful gardening experience  year in and year out.  If was all that easy to be successful in farming  wouldn’t I have a 2nd home in some exotic locale to which  I could fly my plane  after thirty five years in business?  I tried to give her a list of things that were important to do to be  susccessful with growing heirloom tomatoes,  but that phrase  –guarantee success”— seemed to smack of more of entitlement. The reporter got a story, I guess….probably just not the story the editor wanted.

Me, I currently feel that I am entitled to no more frost until fall  and I would like about an inch of good soaking rain in the  next 48 hours. It would surely simplify my life as it it is very dry and difficult to get things transplanted out  in these conditions.  Mike was harrowing up some ground yesterday and it was surprising how dusty it was. Last spring was  verymuch like this until the middle of June when  the rains came and took a month to go away. Hopefully we will not experience that again, but that would be  a better choice than to continue on thiis dry spell that we are on.  Not too far south of hear they are getting more than adaquate rainfall (Bellows Falls/ Brattleboro) and I have  a friend in Rhode Island whose back teeth are floating because of all the rain he is getting.  But despite  the dryness, the potatoes are bounding up out of the ground, looks like a good stand of 1st planted carrots and so far the deer have stayed out of the lettuce. Nobody’s sick or hurt and the machinery currently is running like a  Swiss watch.  And these are the signs of good things  that  we can take heart in.

Interesting weather we had last week. We hit 90 or very close to it for 4 days running, and a couple of those high temp days were accompanied by a 30 MPH wind. It was pretty tough on trying to  transplant anything–in the greenhouse or field—and we spent a lot of time watering. As a result, the dogwood blooms are gone by (they bloomed for about 20 minutes in that heat) and the daffodils are on the downside of their display. Even the maple leaves  (which usually don’t make their appearance until the 15th-20th of May)  are unfurling. Welcome to New England.

Now that we are back to more seasonal temps the work continues at a more measured pace. The onion transplants are in, some lettuce and beet transplants out, and carrots,beet greens, and greens like arrugual have been seeded in the field. We are trying to nurse the strawberries along with supplemental fertilizer and  extra water (we are pretty dry here and havent gotten the showers that our other farming friends have gotten) by irrigatiion. The winter was pretty tough on them and it puzzled us until my brother in law Pat McNamara revealed to me that they lost every stitch of alfalfa in their fields, that the same went for other dairy farmers up and down the valley. We  went out to field dig some  field grown perennial delphiniums for sale at the greenhouse and found that very few survived the winter. Best we can figure is that although we had  good snow cover early in the winter (open winters can  raise hell with perennial crops) we  experienced an ice and heavy rain storm  back around  Christmas and  must have caused some problems at that time.

The greenhouses are filling up and we are struggling to find places for things. Its too dicey to  start leaving displays up at night outside the greenhouses, as there is still a high incidence of frost for us for the next 3-4 weeks. So a lot of moving of plants (we have a fairly inefficient layout of greenhouses and space) in and  out. When somebody transplants something and the call goes out on the radio as to where the transplants might be located, there are often voices coming back that say “Dont bring it over here, I have NO Room in my greenhouse…”  Hopefully, after Mothers Day some space will open up.

The greenhouses have  consumed vast amounts of time  over the last 4 weeks. As we open the greenhouses for trade this coming Thursday,we have additionally had to straighten up the pottery barn and organize the driveway and parking  areas in preparation  for  opening. A few folks  have  alreadyt meandered through, picking up some lettuce and  onions  and pansies, but by next weekend we will be  retailing in earnest. The temperate and sunny spring  thusfar  has dried things  up in the fields  so that we are actually  hoping to pick an inch or so out of the next forecasted rain event in a couple of days. We got underway with field work  about 10 days ago with our tractor guy, George Cilley,  getting  much of the winter stockpile of dairy manure spread and  incorporated. Some  chisel plowing,fertilizing and harrowing has  been started and  by tomorow we should get a spring cover crop of  field peas and  oats planted on a field that will ultimately be planted to late fall sweet corn in July when we incorporate those  peas and oats. Although we don’t have any peas,greens,onions or potatoes planted, we should have some small veggies in the ground by mid to late week. Blueberry pruning is finished, the strawberries are demulched and Ray, Mike  and Jenny have been laying out irrigation  pumps and pipe in the strawberries, just in case we dont pick up any moisture this week. People are working longer hours and the heat is on….

Well, here we go again.  Yesterday it was 60 degrees for the first time since November. It felt great. A little too good, in fact,as the freshly transplanted  tomatoes in the greenhouses wilted a bit, because of the intense light and heat inside the  greenhouses. No complaints, it sure beats the ice and cold  of the winter and the  rumble of greenhouses furnaces burning propane. We had 9  unannounced people drive by looking for  jobs yesterday, indicated they were stirred both by the springlike conditions and a need  to get some employment. What  most folks dont understand about farming is that  farmers who do this for a living just dont come out of dormancy  like bears the first warm day in April, stretch their arms , yawn and say   ” I guess, its time to start growing something for this year..”  We are in full swing this time of year, and do most of our hiring in February.  It is truly a year round activity for the 5 core family members  here. In between dealing with snow around the greenhouses, there are furnaces to clean, thermostats to fix, greenhouses to maintain, hardgoods and seeds to inventory,  stock plants to maintain, field machinery to service and a mountain of  paperwork that has to be dealt  with  that seems to get larger every year. The 2009  greenhouse season actually started in December 2008  when I took my first begonia leaf cuttings and geranium slips.

So now we are in the thick of planting season in the greenhouses. Perennials potted up, annual seedlings being transplanted, moving about flats of leeks and onions for the field and the  first of the grafted greenhouse  tomatoes planted. Mike,Ray and Jenny have pruned the finicky  peaches and we have been pecking away at pruing the blueberries when we can sneak away from the greenhouse responsibilities. Saturday is supposed to be nice, so I am in hopes of sneaking off with the little tractor to beginning removing straw from the  strawberries and rhubarb. Sarah,Donald, Anne and the rest of the crew continue to plug away at the mountains of  trays of  rooted cuttings and seed flats  that  keep appearing at the doors of the greenhouses. The welcome hum of activity is back after a the dark winter.

Flavors of the Valley will be held this year on April 21st from 2-7  pm at the Hartford High School Gymnasium.  For those of you that don’t know about this event it is an opportunity to meet farmers, producers and folks  related to the local food scene here in the Upper Valley.  We will have a booth there do discuss with anyone interested what it is that we do down here and the products we offer. Drop by and say hi.

Although the days are shorter and  the remainging crew starts later in the morning, (it’s getting tough to ignore how cool it is in the morning) we are still  very busy, mostly  buttoning up  for the winter and trying to get a few things done that we  wont have time for once we start greenhouse season in mid February. We have  recovered 5 greenhouses with new poly skins and  finished replacing  our old 28X96 greenhouse. Mike has electrical  work to do in it yet as well as reconfigure the bench layout within. Anne, Jenny and Sarah have been dividing,weeding and getting the  perennials ready to cover outdoors  in the field with insulation and a sheet of old greenhouse poly to keep them from getting any more wet than they are (it’s  been a very wet fall up here,so far.)  I have been occupying myself with  smaller  clean up  projects and trying to get the  machinery repaired and serviced and ready to go  for spring  09.  Most of the field work is done and we  took down a great many trees that were overhanging  the lower level greenhouses and along the river’s edge in the lower meadow. Our first tractor trailer load of straw will arrive  tommorrow and we will probably start mulching the strawberries and rhubarb next week,weather permitting.  Then we hopefully will try to prune some blueberries before winter really sets in. That should take  us   into December, so if we get anything major done outside after that,it will be gravy. Of course, there is tax preparation for Anne to contend with as our fiscal year  ends December 31.  She has already been ordering flower and perennial materials but we will have to  do the vegetable seed orders. When those tasks are completed, we can officially declare it to be the Holiday Season!

Today the Route 12A farmstand  closes,(although if  any of you still want root crops for winter storage please feel free to contact me through the e-mail).  It  has been a difficult and challenging growing year for all the area growers, and the weather and  economic situations still govern  how sucessful we ultimately are  as farmers.  But here at Edgewater we had an enjoyable work environment with a great crew of folks this summer, and that-more than the oftentimes disagreeable weather–is what I will take away from this year .  Many  of them will  drift off  to other jobs or travel in the next couple of weeks, making late fall  a bittersweet time for us.

So  with the closing of the doors of our retail arena we begin anew the  work toward the  2009 year. Although we will still be  packing out root crops  for wholesale, we  are well along in our fall field work with cover crops  in and fall clean up  well underway. We have already begun inventorying pots and plastic for the greenhouses and fertilizer for 2009. We are in the midst of  replacing an older greenhouse and  I have started to  do  the  annual  pressure washing and maintenance on the the tractors, machinery and tools in hopes of getting  them all put away and ready for spring  before the snow flys. We have a  lot of tree takedowns to deal with in the hedgerows around the fields and in particular  near the greenhouses, where the trees have grown to a height  where they are cutting down on the sunlight. We are moving plants into the stock plant house to winter over and propagate. Garlic will be planted tommorrow. So although many  people believe that  we have acquired a lot of spare time on our hands, we actually hit the ground running with a full slate of things to do as the days become ever cooler and shorter.

We are greatful for your patronage and support. The kind words are a great boost in validating our work, and we want to thank those of  you who felt a plate of cookies or pan of brownies was an expression of your appreciation. (editors note: in the future, please drop all food down at the barn wash area as the girls at the farmstand sometimes don’t share well with the field crew) To those of you in the CSAs,-both the Eastman Box drop  and the debit shareholders -we  will be meeting this week to evaluate  what we have done this year and what we will do in 2009. You will be  contacted  with a proposal  or the proposal will be  posted on the  farm home webpage.

Have a great fall and we hope to see you out and about.

No frost   down on the river yet, but can it be very far away? Our last planting of corn actually ripend up a lot the last 4 days with the  murky  damp tropical depression. The tomatoes have held up well to this point but I suspect that the warm damp nights have  unleashed a Pandora’s box of disease and they will start to go down quickly. Nontheless, the stand looks nice with colorful ripe peppers and tomatoes,corn, different colored potatoes, flowers and  fall apples,squash and  pumpkins. As Yogi said: ” It aint over til its over” so we muddle on, with  no frost yet and the stand closing dates set at Columbus Day weekend.

The field crew has been busy with wholesale: potatoes,tomatoes,peppers to the  coops,  sweet corn to a few farmstands and pumpkins,raspberries,(when weather permits) and mums to area stores and farmstands. I have been  getting some of the fields  cleaned up  and seeded down to various winter cover crops.The irrigation pipe is all picked up and out of the fields.  Soon I will be putting up  deer fence around the small fruit crops so they don’t chew the leaves and branches. All with an eye towards winter, but we are not worried yet. There is lots of nice fall weather to be enjoyed yet…