It has been a while since we’ve given you an update about what is growing in our fields. Winter will do that in New Hampshire!
Since February, those of us on the field crew and garden center team have been joyfully setting up all of the greenhouses. We are very excited about filling them with bedding plants and vegetable starts for your garden. Our vegetable production greenhouses are also bursting with fresh salad mix. The plants in our "tomato house" are doing well with some good size fruit already forming!
What the field crew has been itching to do is to leave the protected nature of the greenhouses and get out into the dirt! That has finally happened.
The first thing we took care of was taking the mulch off our strawberry plants and garlic bulbs. As the frost leaves the soil and the soil temperatures begin to rise, our June bearing strawberry plants start to come out of their dormancy and sprout new growth. It’s important to get some of this straw mulch off of the strawberry beds to ensure this new growth can grow into the sunlight.
After taking care of the strawberries, we quickly moved on to prepping some of our fields for our first plantings of peas and sweet corn. As of April 13, we had planted two acres of sweet corn planted and a half acre of shell and sugar snap peas. In the next few days, we will be covering all of the corn and pea plantings with our floating row covers. The row cover essentially acts like a big thermal blanket to keep soil temperatures warm enough so the sweet corn will germinate!
Hopefully, you are as excited as we are to begin another growing season. We look forward to seeing you around our farm market and garden center and hearing what questions you may have!