{"id":3288,"date":"2012-05-16T17:04:57","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T22:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/?p=3288"},"modified":"2012-05-16T17:04:57","modified_gmt":"2012-05-16T22:04:57","slug":"countdown-to-opening-day-green-island-farm-stand-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/2012\/05\/countdown-to-opening-day-green-island-farm-stand-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Countdown to Opening Day: Green Island Farm Stand 2012!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I have been secretly harvesting a few greens here and there for a customer in need. But I\u2019m trying not to pilfer too much as I want to be stocked up for opening day\u2014which is, yikes, 10 days away! Next Friday is the start of Memorial Day weekend, and Green Island Farm Stand will be open for business. (At least during the weekend. We\u2019ll probably close during the weekdays until late June.)<\/p>\n

I am both giddy and nervous with excitement. There is such a huge learning curve with growing\u2014and it begins to go up more rapidly as the years pass. So I can\u2019t help but feel good about some things I\u2019ve finally got figured out. (See the photo gallery below.) At the same time, I can already see that despite doubling the size of the garden this year (Roy finished enclosing the \u201cback 40\u201d this weekend while I transplanted tomato seedlings into pots), I still wish we had more of some things\u2014especially our beautiful greens. The salad lettuces are simply stunning, and all of the Asian greens are flourishing under cover of Remay. Hopefully, there\u2019s enough to keep up with demand in June, since greens are the main deal until the early carrots and peas come in. (I sort of never thinned the peas, all of which miraculously germinated, so I hope they don\u2019t strangle each other. If not, there will be a lot of peas!)<\/p>\n

The trick to growing and selling greens is to seed new flats every week and transplant when holes open up. Or to transplant some and direct-seed new beds at intervals. (Some greens, like the lettuces, the mustards, and the kale will provide multiple harvests\u2014and we do love them for that\u2014but once a head of baby bok choy goes, it goes. Arugula is good for a couple rounds, but then the new growth toughens.) But knowing these tricks (finally) doesn\u2019t make them necessarily doable. When we get the hoop house built, that will help a lot. But there\u2019s only so much space we can devote to greens, too, since we like having the farm stand\u2014and that means we have to make room for a variety of vegetables and that will yield at different times during the season, filling in gaps when other things wane. It\u2019s a big puzzle, but a very fun one.<\/p>\n

Of course the other way to deal with all this is to just dig more beds! And now that we have the tractor, well\u2026we just bought a bunch of asparagus crowns\u2026and more rhubarb plants\u2026and a few strawberry plants. And we turned the old chicken yard into a patch for Roy\u2019s gladiolus. Yeah, we are not too good at saying \u2018enough.\u2019 (Witness the new flock of chicks. And yes, they are all doing fine!)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a photo gallery preview of the goodies to come (and a look at the “Back 40” awaiting a gate, beds, plants, and a new irrigation system!):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been secretly harvesting a few greens here and there for a customer in need. But I\u2019m trying not to pilfer too much as I want to be stocked up for opening day\u2014which is, yikes, 10 days away! Next Friday is the start of Memorial Day weekend, and Green Island Farm Stand will be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[46,61],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3288"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3302,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288\/revisions\/3302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}