Piles of Radishes
Prepare for piles of radishes at the market this weekend! We have been planting and filling all our spaces on the farm. Mushrooms will not be ready this weekend but we have been doing the production work for the future fungi. I’m looking forward to running the booth at Coppell this Saturday.
Why are all the radishes ready at once? Well in the spring time the day length is getting longer so even if the succession of planting is done a week or ten days apart, the crop can still be ready on the same day. We plant radishes alongside something that starts out small but is a long term crop that gets much bigger. An example of this would be tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and cabbage, broccoli or cauliflower. We will also use herbs like dill, basil and parsley as the small edge crop to grow on bed edges. In some of our wider beds we have statice flower growing with peppers in the middle and dill on the other edge and tomatoes with basil and beets. Space is precious, especially in the tunnels, but just in general on a small farm. What I love about growing in less space is it is manageable to keep the growing space pristine, free of weeds, and highly productive. It is very pleasing to have manicured beds. Even on less than an acre though we can’t keep up with it all.
April 21, Matt and Marc harvested all the beets and carrots our of the greenhouse and ‘flipped’ the beds to complete its planting in sweet peppers. ‘Flipped’ meaning to clean harvest a crop and prepare it to plant something new, which will be the remainder of our sweet peppers with radishes seeded on the sides. Matt prepared mushroom substrate to sterilize and has been keeping up with two of these ‘mushroom runs’ per week.
We have new spawn coming in the mail, liquid syringes from mycelium emporium. So in the summer we will have ‘Lion’s Beard, Shiitake, Black Reishi, and Turkey Tail’. We are reducing our oyster production due to the high labor needs they have of daily harvesting. Last year we went though a lot of different employees and this was mentally draining and costly, so instead of doing that again we are finding ways to reduce the work load. This is why we are not growing micro greens, and have turned our south garden into cover (rye grass). Thankfully there are other growers that produce those products (oyster mushrooms, micro greens) at the markets and we are trying to only focus on the crops that are needed, and vegetables are highly sought after throughout the year.
I will be doing the Coppell Farmers Market this weekend. My mother is watching the kids at home. This will be the first time of me doing a market by myself ever. I’m excited to see how it goes. Matt and Alexander will be in Denton. We will have lots of kale and radishes, a few carrots and beets. Sadly mushrooms didn’t produce much this week and there will only be a few lions mane available. Hopefully the wind won’t blow us away and we can talk about good food!
Andrea Gorham
