August 09, 2010
Monday, August 9, 2010
Written & Published by Scott Kelland
Written at New Terra Farm
13510 County Rd 15
Merrickville ON
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Garden Update
Well, the clean up and replanting continues here at the farm. Here's the current status: the tomatoes and sweet peppers were almost completely destroyed, just about all the fruit on the plants were damaged, and are rotting before ripening. There are a few tomatoes in the greenhouse, but a dozen plants will not replace the 200 that were lost. Some of the hot peppers will produce.
Some cucumbers survived, and will hopefully produce (in limited quantities) in the near future. We had to prune off damaged vines and fruit, but new flowers are appearing.
The summer squash, surprisingly, seems to ne making a recovery. Once we removed the damaged vines and fruit, about 50% of the plants seem to be regrowing, so hopefully we will have a harvest from them.
Most of the mature greens and cabbage and broccoli in the garden were just shredded by the hail. We are just pulling hundreds of these plants out, and replanting to crops that will mature before fall.
About 50% of the root crops survived, so we will have some of these to deliver in the near future.
The mature snap bean plants were just about a total write-off, but some of the last planting survived; they will begin producing in a couple weeks.
We are filling up garden beds as we clean them out, planting them to short-season and storage crops that should produce by fall. We should have ample cold-hardy greens- chard, kale, spinach - by then.
All in all, this has been a depressing couple of weeks, hauling wheelbarrow loads of damaged vegetables to the pig pen and the compost pile. The plants that did survive are weakened, and increasingly susceptible to bugs and disease. For them, all we can do is hope they survive to produce a crop.
What's next?
After assessing where we are, we think we will be able to resume limited deliveries in a couple weeks. We won't have enough to deliver to each family on the regular schedule, so we will try to spread out the deliveries as fairly as we can. Hopefully by the end of the month, we will have more stuff available. I'll be in touch when I think I can bring you some stuff.
Other stuff
I've still got about a dozen free-range organic meat birds to sell, they average 5 to 6 lbs in weight and are on special for $3.85 a pound. I usually do delivery runs on Saturdays, so let me know if you want some.And, I'm also selling my second car, it's a 2004 Cavalier, 4 door sedan, 170K on the odometer. It's in the garage right now getting fixed up (checking brakes etc, saftied, e-tested).
I'm asking $3,900 for the car, if you know someone looking for a good second car, drop me a line. I drove this one back from Newfoundland, so I think its reliable.
regards,
Scott
Scott' e-mail
or call me at 613 269-3884.