The busy Spring planting season is now behind us! We have fun raising our little seedlings, working the ground and planting, but we are also ready for a break! Now, it's about helping the plants grow and keeping the weeds at bay while we wait for the treasure. We have now planted all of our plants. With growth in our
pepper sales we are now up to about 700 peppers in our small area. Most of those are hot peppers. People ask us all the time how many acres we have to have that many peppers, but really it doesn't take that much room. All those peppers are on less than 1/4 of an acre because we use a compact planting style with double rows of offsetting plants that are 18 inches apart. All of the peppers did better this year with only the last round that we planted experiencing a little sunburn. March, April and the first two weeks of May were ideal for our seedlings and initial plantings, but things got hot and dry in a hurry in the middle and end of May, which made the last few rounds of planting a bit tougher to transition. We added a lot of new peppers this year. Read more about them
here. We were able to plant about 25% of our crop this year from our own harvested seeds from 2017 and 2018. We hope to continue to increase this number and also be able to offer some of our seeds to you in the future. This year we germinated most of our supper hot varieties around 90%, much higher than the industry normal of 50-60% germination rate.
We were so happy to have a tiller to use this year. Thank you all for the purchases you have made over the last few years! It is because of those sales that we could buy our first full-size tiller, which cut our soil prep time by days! I would say we spent 25% of the time and effort as in the past few years. We also changed how we lay out our rows to cut down on washing issues during heavy rain, though thus far we have not had any major storms this year. Hopefully, it will stay that way. but if it doesn't I am confident we will not lose near as much as
last year when the majority of our peppers were washed away.
A new addition to the farm this year were tulips. Spring looked better than ever!
Our main focus this year is on our hot peppers, but we still have plenty of
vegetable variety. Squash, zucchini, cucumbers and tomatoes are going strong and already blooming. We also will have sweet peppers, cantaloupe, watermelon, eggplant and potatoes. We did more beans this year, both green and black varieties. The black ones were just so good last year that we had to plant more, mostly for our own bellies. We do hope to be able to offer some of our black beans for seeds in the future. They are so good that we have to share! We also have many sunflowers and gourds to help attract pollinating bees and butterflies, along with providing us a few bonus treats like sunflower seed snacks and scrubbing luffas. We have dried our luffa gourds from last fall and will be prepping them in the coming months. Look for some natural scrubbers to available soon!
We will also have a few herbs this year including mint, basil, cilantro and shiso. We continue to build up our asparagus, blueberry and raspberry crops, and are adding fruit trees all the time with several apple, peach and fig varieties now growing strong. Our
garlic has done well this year and should be ready for harvest in the next few weeks. We are excited to have five varieties to offer up this year once they are dried and ready for storage.
In addition to getting the plants going, we have been working hard on
jellies and jams as well. It seems like there is a new flower or fruit coming into season every other week. We continued on with our staples like Violet, Dandelion and Strawberry, while adding some new varieties like Forsythia-Dandelion and Honeysuckle. They are selling fast so better grab one while you can! This season's jars have a new lid label on them that we designed ourselves. We have now shipped to over 30 states! That blows my mind every time I think about it. We actually sell more across the country than we do right here at home. We have gotten quite the following out west in states like California, Oregon and Washington and are so happy to be able to ship to you guys!
Forsythia blossoms
White violet flowers
New Forsythia-Dandelion Jellies, available in Regular and Honey varieties. The Honey is sweetened with local honey from right here in our own county!
Our classic Strawberry Jam is back for another year.
New Honeysuckle Jelly. If you like the way honeysuckle smells you will love the taste of this super sweet jelly!
Once picking is in full swing, expect to see some Veggie Sale days near the farm. We do not plan to have the Roadside Stand this year. While we had plenty of traffic passing by our location, not many people stopped. It was a lot of time and effort with little to show for it, so we will be putting our efforts into online selling and Veggie Sales. We also hope to get our peppers and jellies into some local markets. While that has been a difficult task so far, we will continue to work on making progress here locally. We know our quality and prices are better than anyone around, we just have to get people to give us a try.
For anyone interested in our
Soldier Fly Grubs, they are finally available again. The cool nights kept them dormant longer this year, but they are now active and making us compost. They can do the same for you. You can also use them as feeder grubs for pets, or fish bait!
We are also still offering local
lawn care services to our neighbors. We promise we can beat the prices and quality of the other guys in town! Just contact us and we can talk about handling both your lawn and landscaping needs.
We hope all of our readers, supporters and customers are doing well! Thank you all for the support and we hope you have been happy with the purchases you have made. We truly appreciate all the wonderful feedback in our
Etsy and
eBay stores. Thanks and happy summer!
