Nearly all the crops are early and big this year due to the timely rain and warm weather. Even the popcorn is nearly 8 feet tall and forming ears and silks.  The raspberries are nearly ready to produce a second  crop for the season as the branches are now loaded with green buds.  The potatoes are forming hooks underground.  The hooks are formed on the root structure of the plant and each hook represents a potential potato. We started applying an organic fish fertilizer to the potato plants  to help set the hooks on the plant so they do not abort.  A few of the plants that we dug up last week had 15 to 16 hooks.  The blue potatoes were planted this year without cutting the seed.  As a result, the rows are heavily populated with potato plants and it looks like we could have a lot of blue potatoes available this fall if they all mature.  With the organic fish fertilizer, we incorporated an organic product that will hopefully help the plants resist the late blight.  Late blight has been confirmed in both potatoes and tomatoes in several counties in Wisconsin.  The tomatoes are starting to ripen fairly fast now so we should see a good crop in the next few weeks.  As always, the sun sugar cherry tomatoes are sweet and the plants have lots of tomatoes.  It is hard to walk by the plants and not pick off a tomato to eat.  The small greenhouse was planted earlier  this year with tomatoes, okra and ghost peppers.  A lot of okra has already been harvested from the plants and it looks like a lot more may be ripening soon.  The ghost peppers are the world’s hottest pepper at 1 million scoville units.  They are also known as the bhut jolokia  pepper.  The plants have lots of green, wrinkly looking peppers on them so we will leave them on the plants for a while to see if they turn color when they ripen.  We began harvesting corn last week and expect to have more this week.  There is a difference in ear size depending on the variety of corn.  The trade off is that the variety with smaller ears seems to have a sweeter flavor than the larger ear variety but all the varieties harvested so far this year have a very nice sweet corn flavor.  A lot of attention last week was directed toward cleaning up some small areas of weeds between rows and around the perimeter of the fields.  Some weeds are forming seed heads so we do not want to see them go to seed.  We will probably not see a lot of new weed growth any more this year but the seeds from the weeds would still be around next year to cause problems.  The fields look very nice when they are free of weeds so it makes us all feel good about working at the farm.

George Kohn, West Star Farm