Meet Our Staff Part One
Every year we hire a small crew to help us with the work on our farm. Our staff not only work on the farm doing tasks like harvesting, weeding, and transplanting but they’ll also be present at our Farmers Market stand and help with our CSA pickup locations and delivery route. We’d like to take a moment to introduce you to some of them with additional introductions coming in part two.
Meet Katey
My name is Katey and I’m a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota. In my free time I enjoy anything outdoors including hiking, golfing, fishing, planting flowers, and especially feeding the birds! This season I’m most excited for the Farmers Market. My favorite vegetable is sweet corn!
Meet Maggie
Hi! My name is Maggie I’m currently at South Central College in North Mankato going for Agribusiness. In my free time I enjoy fishing, gardening, baking, and playing cards and games with family! This season I’m looking forward to learning more about sustainable practices. My favorite vegetable is green beans!
Spring projects continue here on the farm and it’s great to have the extra help getting these projects done.
Landscape Fabric
As a team building exercise and also a necessary job the crew laid down landscape fabric yesterday. This job was extra difficult because the wind was a little stronger than we like for installing landscape fabric.
We use landscape fabric in several ways on the farm. Landscape fabric is made over woven plastic “threads” that allow water and air to pass through but smother weeds. We use it on crops that will be in the field for a long time and are difficult to cultivate like tomatoes and peppers. We also use it on our lettuce which helps it to stay cleaner by limiting the amount of soil splash up from rain and irrigation and smothers the weeds. We’re also experimenting with using landscape fabric on our winter squash this season. We’ve always had trouble keeping the weeds out of the winter squash and we hope that the landscape fabric will make our winter squash more weed free!
Direct Seeding and Transplants
We’re on schedule with our direct seeding and transplants as we continue to experience dry weather allowing us to get a lot of field work done. The farm crew transplanted lettuce, bok choy, kohlrabi, napa cabbage, red cabbage, green cabbage, broccolini, and broccoli.
On the direct seed side I planted the next round of sweet corn, beets, carrots and cilantro as well as our vine crops including cucumbers, honeydew melon, watermelon, cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini. We really need a good shot of rain to get these seeds going.
