Updates

If there is such a thing as a "Holiday Weekend" when it comes to projects like this, I used my credit this weekend. Before anyone jumps to any conclusions about if I'm losing momentum or just plain getting lazy, note that I spent today, Mothers' Day, building and planting a raised planter bed at my mom's house. I even braved the sporadic down pours and planted cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, tomoatoes, spinach, and radishes for her garden. With that said, I did not plant anything new in the Farmville Reality Project this weekend. I did buy a few more plants that will get planted this week. All in all, this is probably a good thing. Sometimes in the spring, even when you space plantings a week apart, they all become ripe at the the same time in the summer. When we grew vegetables for the local wholesale markets, we would calculate the planting intervals carefully so when one field was finishing up harvest, the next one in line would be just reaching the optimum level of maturity. This is very easy to do on paper but when applied out in the field, it can be a very different story. We found that in the spring, if the plantings were seven to ten days apart, in the summer, we would be able harvest at optimum maturity around six to eight days apart. As you moved through summer and into fall, we would have to plant two to three days apart to end up with six to eight day intervals between fields the following fall season. Goes to show you how Mother Nature missed the memo on using perfectly linear progression when it comes to how plants should grow. This did add to the challenge and truth be told, the fun of trying to plan planting schedules. There are so many moving parts when it comes to planting schedules, it becomes mind boggling at times. Most of the ground preparation is done in stages at just the right soil moisture conditions, so you couldn't work too far ahead for the sake of convenience. If you did get too far ahead and conditions dried out, the price you paid was to have to work in a quick irrigation on the field to get it back to the desirable moisture level. Most of the time, that would ultimately result in "stutter steps" in the planting schedule because things wouldn't dry down as fast as we thought they would.

Anyway, back to this week's updates. As you can see, the broccoli is starting to form heads. Spring broccoli in this area is always a risk for early flowering. If the weather warms real quickly, the heads open into yellow flowers in a matter of days before reaching a good size to be picked. I plan to keep an eye on the forecasts and if ninety degree days are in the cards, it's best to pick the broccoli on the small side while the quality is still good. Another picture shows the Yellow Finnish Potatoes. They have grown like crazy and really seem to like the spot I planted them in. The trick with these is to keep the top parts growing so they can "feed" the potatoes growing just under the surface of the bed. If the we get a blast of hot weather and the tops get stressed, the potatoes underground will stop growing. If this happens a few times, they end up with weird knots and shapes to them. They like to grow on a very steady pace with no starts and stops. The last picture are green onions just starting to emerge. As they grow, I'll pull within the rows to thin out. These small ones thinned out are great in salads. The remaining ones will be able to grow larger and when a bit bigger than a pencil, they can be picked. Even though I slacked a bit this weekend, I hope the updates and information helps everyone visualize all of the great things that lie ahead in this project.

Also, I have added new pictures on some of the earlier posts to show the progress. Please excuse the lame state of the pictures for this post. I have no more patience to try and get all three of them in one row on top of the text. One of these days, I'll have to learn how to work with some of the editing tools for this blog site, but today is not that day.