Cropthorne Farm

We’ve been busy!

Killdeer eggs, luckily missed by the tractor and disc

About 75% of our potatoes are in and we have just seeded our second plantings of carrots, beets, turnips etc. Our hoophouse is full of tomatoes, the Brandywine’s, Sungold’s & Cherokee Purple’s along with the rest of the tomatoes have put on some good growth since being transplanted out. The chard and kale that was put outside in late April is also growing well. (Now that we have prevented rabbits from a free meal by placing row cover over these crops.) Our fall planted garlic crop is looking tall, lush and healthy, another month or so before harvesting garlic scapes.

We have also had a few setbacks this spring.

The Spring weather has been less than cooperative this year. Our clay soil, while it is much appreciated in the dry summer months due to the water holding capacity, can be a major issue in the Spring. Every time there is a rain event, we not only loose that day but up to 3-5 days more in terms of getting our equipment on the field. Not only do we push back seeding dates but the plants out in the field are slow growing due to the lack of sun. We have had a rough go at finding the ever elusive ‘good weather windows’. With that being said, we got on the field on  Tuesday and it was spent madly seeding as much as possible and preparing beds before the rain for the remainder of the week and the extra hands that came out to help was much appreciated. I don’t remember the fields looking so empty this time of year, I am convinced our CSA will be a later start this year due to the poor weather.

Onions

Another issue for us this year was that we have been dealing with a fungus in our seedlings. It has only affected our cabbage family but we have lost over 60 trays, which is over 5000 seedlings and for our small farm it is devastating. The cabbage family is one of our major crops on the farm,  along with cabbage it comprises of broccoil, bok choi, kohlrabi, kale along with many others. We spent the weekend sanitizing trays and our workspace and trying to figure out the source. While it is a major setback for us we hope that our latest seedlings are healthy and if there is any solace it is that we are lucky that we did not spend the time transplanting them out into the field to succumb to the disease there. So we will start fresh and will be harvesting cabbage, broccoli etc. a little later this year.

We have also been dealing with Wireworm. Wireworm is an orange, underground, hard-skinned worm that causes damage to a number of crops. This year we have had extremely high pressure in our hoophouse and have lost over half the cucumber plants. We have now put in potato traps to lure them away from the cucumbers and tomatoes that are planted in there. Wireworm are attracted to potatoes and is one of their preferred food source, along with sod which is what our field used to be before we started cultivating it a few years ago. While we have known that wireworm has been our major pest problem on our farm and have adjusted our growing practises accordingly we were surprised to see the severity of the problem this year. We were trapping up to 8-10 per potato trap, with the economic threshold being between 0.5-1 per trap. While there are very few organic ways to prevent damage, we will be looking into more ways to abate it.

Spinach

While we have had some setbacks we know that a few good days of sunshine is all that is needed to set us back on track. We have trialled a few different ways to increase  earliness on some of our crops but that will have to wait until another post.

Our first farmers market of the season is at Kitsilano on May 22nd.

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