I had been thinking of writing a newsletter about the differences between unheated greenhouses and caterpillar tunnels, but that idea quickly fell by the wayside after my field inspection this morning.
The drought of the past few weeks has finally taken its toll on our irrigation ponds, and as I write this, we are in the process of installing new pipes to feed those water sources – and by extension, our thirsty vegetables.
Because a picture is worth
a thousand words,
the ones taken of our ponds this morning speak for themselves. One pond has just two or three days of water left, and the other a week’s worth, at most.
Under other circumstances, all of this would be very stressful for any market gardener –
but not here at Arlington Gardens, fortunate as we are to be blessed with a lovely little river which meanders through our fields. It bears the highly original name of “North Branch of the Pike River” – a fish that was no doubt abundant in times past but that is nowhere to be found today…
The situation triggered quite
the scramble on the farm,
as we searched through the entrails of our barns to find hoses capable of carrying water from the river to refill one of the ponds, and to reconfigure our irrigation system to support our drip irrigation tubing. In short, not exactly the start to the week I had envisioned – but every week brings its share of surprises…
In your basket this week:
eggplant, cabbage, lettuce, cucumbers, summer squash, blueberries, corn, tomatoes, and fresh herbs. I usually start the pepper season with the so-called green varieties, but not this year. My usual seed supplier for the Cubanelle variety—a real treat—accidentally sent us a packet of seeds that turned out to be the cute but quite spicy Jalapeño. We are talking 300 pepper plants (!!!) now happily growing in our fields. I will still bring some, of course, but you will have to wait a little longer for the coloured peppers (red and yellow) which will ripen by the end of August.
See you very soon!