May 27, 2022

Last year I didn’t have enough dried beans and cowpeas, as can be seen from the fact that I only have a couple varieties left on my market table and we’re still several months away from the new harvest. I aim to have more this fall, so this week I focused on sowing beans and cowpeas. Twenty varieties are now in the ground and will have been happy for the rain we had yesterday.

Actually, most things will have appreciated the rain, since we’ve been short all spring. The one exception is strawberries, which are inordinately finicky about such things (they want lots of water but not right before harvest). The strawberry harvest today will, sadly, be lower both in terms of quantity and quality as a result of the rain.

On the other hand, I should have new potatoes for tomorrow’s market, which is always an exciting addition. I say that without having dug any yet … But, given what the plants look like above ground, I’m pretty confident there are potatoes to be found underground and I plan to find some of them before tomorrow!

In between rounds of sowing, I also took photos of a few more species of the flora and fauna on the farm (such as the Margined Calligrapher in the photo above). One of my non-vegetable growing goals for the farm is to make it a much more ecologically rich place than it was when we bought it. To document that progress — or what I hope will be progress — I’m periodically taking photographs of the various species I see on the farm and posting them to iNaturalist. This week was a bit of a milestone in that I passed the 400 mark for species that I found on this property and documented on iNaturalist. I tag all the photos from the farm with a “Pearl Crescent Farm” tag — you can browse them by clicking on the last link. If you can identify any of the species yet to be identified, even better! — Sydney

This week’s items

Items we plan to have at the market this week (an asterisk indicates unusually limited quantities):

• Beans, dry (Peregion, Pinto, and Tiger’s Eye*)
• Beets, bunched (red and yellow)
• Broccolini*
• Cabbage
• Chard
• Collards
• Granola (Cushaw Pecan)
• Kale
• Kohlrabi*
• Microgreens (peas and sunflower)
• Potatoes, new (Red Gold)
• Radish, spring (red, purple, and Polish yellow)
• Squash, winter* (Butternut and Tetsukabuto)
• Strawberries*
• Turnips, Japanese salad