Transplanting Butternut Squash & Seeding Watermelons

Village Farm Team,

We’ve implemented a plastic mulch system over in the Silo Field to see how it fares this growing season. With this system, the shaped beds are covered in a thin, black plastic and the soil is mounded up on either side of the furrow. This major benefit with this method is that it suppresses weeds and is overall lower in maintenance. When planting in the black plastic mulch, we simply cut a small hole for the transplant or seed. We spent the last week planting the Silo Fields with nearly a thousand butternut squash transplants. We’re trying out a new variety this year from Row 7 to see how it does!

As our winter crops are slowly phased out, we’ve been focusing our efforts on our swiftly growing spring and summer crops! To prepare for our cucumbers, we set up a trellis made of netting to allow them lots of space to crawl and sprawl. Though cucumbers can be grown without trellis support, it’s much easier to harvest and keep them healthy when they have room to grow vertically instead of just horizontally. Extra trellis support is added nearly every week at this point to keep up with our growing tomatoes. In doing so we’ve been able to take stock of the different varieties and observe their varying rates of maturity. As you can see below, the Indigo Cherry Drops have already started turning their characteristic shade of dark purple.

A few different varieties of melons were seeded in the greenhouse this week including Crimson Sweet Watermelon, Sugar Cube Muskmelon, and Milan Muskmelon. Crimson Sweet is a quintessential watermelon with dark and light green stripes and sweet, reddish-pink flesh. This variety produces larger melons that can be upwards of 20 to 25 pounds! We expect to be able to harvest these around the end of June just in time for summer.