The butternut squash plants are now so big that it looks like we will not be able to get through the fields any more to fertilize them without stepping on the vines.  We sprayed them last week with a mixture of organic fertilizer and an organic product that smells like cedar.  The cedar smell is designed to repel the cucumber beetle which was starting to invade the field.  The delicata squash field is full of blossoms and small fruit.  The fields are all fairly clean of weeds and many of the plants are big enough now that they will shade any further growth of weeds. The salsify crop is about 6” tall and the rows are full with plants.  We have about 3500 feet of salsify planted this year so we hope to have a good supply of salsify this fall.  Some of the first planting of sweet corn is tasseling so we will be watching the corn now for ear formation.  The raspberries are ripe and it looks like there are a lot of them so we will be picking them on Monday.  The potato planting was finished last week.  We received a lot of the all blue variety of potato seed earlier this year so we worked up an extra field to plant them.  There will possibly be a lot of blue potatoes available in September when we harvest them.  We didn’t need the entire extra field for the potatoes so the rest of the field was planted with a cover crop of buckwheat.  Buckwheat is a fast growing grain that forms a good vegetative mass which shades weed growth.  It will be chopped down before it goes to seed.  When buckwheat flowers, the honey bees at the farm find the buckwheat blossoms and resulting buckwheat honey is quite good.  Earlier this year a neighbor loaned their brush mower and tractor to us so we could cut down some winter rye that was about 5 foot tall.  It was too big for us to use our chopper to chop it down so the brush mower worked very well for doing that.  Last week we decided to purchase our own brush mower.  It is hooked up to the 3 point hitch on the John Deere tractor and operated by the PTO on the tractor.  We can now get into small areas and mow down weeds before they go to seed.  Some thistles were starting to go to seed so before we got the mower we had started cutting them by hand with a scythe.  Unfortunately, after we cut them, while the thistles were lying on the ground, the seed heads opened even more to the point where they were ready to blow around with a wind. So we flamed the seed heads first and then went into the field with the brush mower and mowed them down.  Thistles usually grow in patches in fields so they are somewhat controllable if they are continually cut down.  The brush mower will also permit us to mow around the edges of the fields which will help to keep the fields looking a lot nicer.  Because many of the crops are earlier than normal this year, we will be watching the garlic this week for dying of the leaves.  Each leaf on the plant represents a wrapper on the bulb so when a certain number of leaves die back, we will dig the garlic to preserve the maximum number of wrappers on the bulbs.  More wrappers on the bulb enhance the storage of the bulbs.  We dug some garlic last week and the bulbs are already big and the flavor is quite good.   

George Kohn
West Star Farm