Weekly Update: May 10

It’s Mother’s Day, so I (Jim) am filling in for Kat on the blog this week.

We had another productive week on the farm including lots of planting; 1,200 hot peppers featuring a number of varieties, vegetable starts, transplants from the greenhouses and giant pumpkins to name a few. We’re still way under what he want to grow annually but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. And a lot of time is going into cultivating and hoeing what we’ve already planted. We’ve had a hard time keeping up with it and and brought in a couple of crews to help us catch up. One of the crews has been coming to this farm to help with the strawberries more than 30 years!

A lot of effort is going into the store also. It’s re-roofed, re-insulated and re-painted and now we’re starting to build it back up. This includes a new 36-foot produce case which arrived this week, a rebuilt walk-in cooler and lots more. Covid-19 is making some of this difficult and we’ve been struggling to get vendors to commit to providing us products to fill the shelves and trouble getting the many government agencies to keep up with our requests for various licenses and certifications. That said, we are confident it’s all going to come together in the next few weeks and we can finally start to open.

MeriBeth and the gang, planting veggies.

Ian and Topaz Farm staffers hoeing the garlic.

Hot peppers to come.

This crew has worked the strawberries on this property for more than 30 years.

The parking lot is finally cleared.

Beautiful clouds over the newly pruned apple trees.

Beautiful light at 6am.