A Lazy Summer Sunday

After spending yesterday out and about marketing, we got down to the business of farming today. We seeded fall crops in all the empty spaces in our gardens that remained after our recent garlic, cabbage, and snap pea harvests. The crops we plant now will be ready after our CSA program concludes so we made sure to plant the vegetables that our family really likes to eat and that will either grow quickly or can withstand any early fall frosts. 

Given our farm's microclimate, we have found through trial and error over the past decade that this is typically too late in the growing season for us to plant green beans, beets, or turnips since they often don't have long enough to grow big enough to be worthwhile or the plants die from frost within days of the first beans being ready (disappointing). Playing it safe, today we decided to stick with sowing lots of carrots (frost tolerant), snap peas, spinach, leaf lettuce, and swiss chard. We also planted our fall cabbage and head lettuce seedlings that I started a month ago in pots. We then fertilized all the gardens with chicken manure and watered everything thoroughly.

In addition to this, we harvested some borage blossoms to start making vinegar infusions for our upcoming CSA baskets. These pretty blue blossoms are honey bee magnets so we were extra careful when picking to avoid accidental stings and we left lots of blooms for our honey bee ladies to enjoy too. Sharing is caring. I planned to get in to do hive checks this afternoon but Alistair refused to nap, so this task had to be delayed.

Borage blossoms

Instead of hive inspections, Ali and I spent part of our afternoon swinging in the hammock and watching the leafy canopy of our maple trees rustle in the breeze. A lazy summer Sunday, indeed.