Brookside Farm has accomplished an initial goal of getting our veggies to young children and into a local institution! North Coast Opportunities pre-school has agreed to purchase two shares from the CSA at Brookside Farm. The kitchen staff is looking forward to utilizing fresh farm produce and cooking according to the harvest season. It is exciting to see that there is demand for our produce and the goods of a Relocalized food system.

View of North Coast Opportunities Preschool

To meet the demands of the CSA, we set to work preparing our first beds in order to transplant spinach and lettuce and to direct seed onions, beets, carrots, lettuce, and parsnips. We removed cover crops with a scythe, broke the soil with the low-wheel cultivator, loosened the soil with the broadfork, and cross cut a final time with the low-wheel cultivator in order to ready vegetable beds. The following is the sowing dates and area for the crops that we direct seeded.

Direct Seeding Beets by Hand

According to our planting schedule, March was slated to be one of the most active months in the greenhouse. Lettuce, cabbage, chard, spinach, kale, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and tomatillo were on the list of a scheduled 1600 starts. Unfortunately, we had poor germination on many of the starts that were seeded early in the month (kale, spinach, and cabbage). We monitored the Max-Min thermometer in the greenhouse and were noticing overnight lows in the 30 and daily highs in the 70’s. After considering what might have led to the poor germination and we finally concluded that the average soil temperatures and nighttime temperatures were too cold. We utilized the warming temperatures toward the middle of March to catch-up on the plants that did not do so well earlier in the month and continued to sow starts to remain on pace with our greenhouse schedule. By the second week of the month we had sown our peppers and tomatoes in David Drell’s greenhouse. David used electric heating mats to secure sufficiently warm germination temperatures, and by the end of the month we had excellent stands of little peppers and tomatoes awaiting transplant from their seed-flats into four-inch pots. It was amazing to see the difference between plants started with the heated soil mats and those that fended for themselves in the early part of March.

Tomatoes and Peppers in Four-Inch Pots

This month we also began a relationship with a local welder to make adjustments to our low-wheel cultivator and the broadfork. Last year we had a terrible time shearing off the bolt that connected the stirrup hoe implement to the low-wheel cultivator. Kevin, at KLR welding, suggested that he weld a small plate near the back of where the stirrup hoe connects to the frame. By adding the plate excess and needless motion has been eliminated, the implement base remains rigid, and we have significantly reduced the threat of shearing the bolt. We are also asking Kevin to weld reinforced tines onto the broadfork. This should make the tines sturdier and less apt to bend and break off as they did last year.

Glaser Hoe with Metal Block to Limit Excess Movement

Broadfork with Reinforced Tines