Recovering from the Frost & Enjoying the Sunshine

Village Farm Team,

The sun is out, the temperatures are back to springtime levels, and we couldn’t be happier! Though we did lose a lot of crops in the ground, we have many that survived. Here’s what beat the frost: scallions, leeks, carrots, beets, bok choy, spinach, baby kale, lettuces, fennel, and Napa cabbage. Our rainbow chard had significant damage on the outer leaves so we’ve trimmed those off to give the healthy inner leaves a chance to grow. We’ve been using the past few days to take notes on what varieties did well and how we can improve our preparation methods for next time.

Luckily, the greenhouse did its job and kept all of our seedlings warm and healthy. This means that we are still on track for our planting schedule for the tomatoes and peppers. We’re aiming to begin transplanting our tomatoes the first week of March and peppers shortly thereafter. The upside of losing some of our crops is that we now have ample room to transplant these warm weather favorites!

In case you were worried about our animals, they are doing great. They’ve been enjoying time in the sunshine just as much as we have the past couple of days. Egg production among our hens will start to increase with the temperatures and lengthening daylight hours. And, you’ll most likely see our goats sunbathing quite a bit in the coming days. A big thank you to everyone in the community that volunteered to help us take care of them last week!

As for the veggie wagon, we’ll remain open each Saturday morning with limited quantities of farm fresh veggies until we’re able to catch up with production.