Friday Field Update Vol.2 No.6

My evening view from the seat of a tractor

A beautiful sunset over our Albion farm. As you can see in the foreground, we are performing some serious renovation on the land. A couple years ago we overhauled a tiling machine that had been in our family since the 1970s. It digs a trench and lays a large perforated pipe in the bottom of it. Then we have to go over the entire trench and fill it back up with soil. Once it is in place and functioning, this tile will help remove any extra water in the ground that would make it too wet. It is quite an investment to install, but proves to be a priceless tool once it is in place. 

A lone honey bee sucking up the nectar and collecting pollen on her legs.

This sunflower I'm sure has been loving all the sunshine we have been getting. Only because I have been giving it all the water it needs! For a good amount of time in July I was consumed with irrigation. Irrigating apple and peach trees, our new strawberry planting, the broccoli, the sweet corn, everything! 

A baby ear of corn, just pushing out it's silk to be pollinated. 

For me, it's hard to imagine that this tiny ear of corn will be transformed into a fully mature ear, ready to eat in only 20 days. Nature never ceases to amaze me. All it takes is three weeks for it to become thrice as juicy, and grow ten times it's weight! And 20 times as delicious in my opinion. I recently learned that this is indeed where the baby corn in asian cuisine such as stir fry comes from! It is no trick, simply baby corn (baby carrots are usually just chopped and ground down large carrots). 

The growing point of this pickle plant is attempting to escape the trellis we have it wrapping around. 

The high tunnels certainly have exploded with growth and fruit over the past month or so. The plants are so carefully protected, fed, and watered that they are producing nearly perfect fruit, as you can see in the following images. I'll leave them nice and big so you can enjoy them as much as possible. :)

Seedless pickling cucumbers (pickles) from the high tunnel.

A red beefsteak tomato ripe for the picking. 

Fruit Update

Starting from the left, we have a branch where a sweet cherry used to be, now happily harvested. Next is a beautiful Garnet Beauty peach, ripe and probably picked today. After that is a prune (plum) deceitfully purple, but so very green inside. And lastly, we have some gingergold apples, ready to pick in maybe three weeks!

Thank you for reading! 

Friday Field Update Vol.2 No.5

For a little while there I was worried 2018 was going to be another 2016. Hot and extremely dry. But fortunately we got a little rain in the beginning of the week, and it looks like we are going to get a lot of rain this weekend.We certainly need it! We were about to start irrigating some of our older apple trees, which only need water when it’s really dry because their roots reach so deep. However, thanks to all this rain, we can focus our irrigation efforts on the fruits and vegetables with more shallow roots. Above is our irrigation gun attached to a reel. It’s watering the mums that were just planted, and then it will be watering the first four plantings of sweet corn as it is “reeled” in. When nature doesn’t make it rain, sometimes farmers have to. Water plays a huge role in the quality of fruit. Too much can make it soft, too little can make it small. And flavor can also be affected by how much water the plant is given.  

The chrysanthemums have been planted! In this picture I am watering the pots after our guys plant them. They have a great system down, and it only takes a few hours to plant a couple thousand plants. After the mum is placed in the pot, it has to be watered with a good amount of force so that the soil fills in around the roots and makes it feel right at home. This group of mums was our first planting, and we will get a second planting in a short time to finish filling up the mat.

Friday Fruit Update

Everything has really been moving along with all the heat we’ve had. The cherries are almost ready to pick! Some cherries in a different orchard are even darker than the one pictured here. The apples have lost their fuzz, and each variety is now starting to develop its unique shape.  This is the time of year where we go through the apple and plum orchards and thin. Thinning is just what it sounds like, removing the apples when there are too many on the tree. Each tree only can give so much energy to its fruit, so we try to make sure it’s the right amount. Notice the word try, nature has her own way with the trees that we can not predict. So we do the best we can, and hope mother nature doesn’t change it too much.

Thanks for reading everyone, and happy growing!

Friday Field Update Vol.2 No.4

I find myself talking about animals so frequently on here. I think it’s because I see so many different critters everyday. Farming truly is sharing with nature if you think about it. This beautiful specimen is a painted turtle; one of the two I have seen emerge from our swamp to lay eggs. I’m not sure exactly why or how the soil got se wet around her. My best guess would be she made it like that so she could more easily dig a hole for her eggs. Only about 15 feet away from where I found this turtle, I found a different type of ground nest hidden in the strawberries! I haven’t figure out what bird species yet, but it looks similar to a sandpiper or plover (which look like mini killdeer).

Ok, on to some actual farming. While we are still deep into planting season, I’d like to talk about the two ways we plant our crops in the field: transplanting and direct seeding. Transplanting is a great way to get plants earlier, because you can start them inside in the warmth while it is still too cold for them outside. Then, when it finally is warm enough for them to grow, you can plant them outside and have a huge head start. However, transplanting costs a lot more money than simply putting seeds in the ground(which is not actually a simple thing).  Tonight, I just finished planting our pumpkins and hard squash with our vacuum seeder (pictured above, which is direct seeding). Using a fan powered by the tractor, it creates suction against a rotating disc with holes. The seeds get sucked against these holes, and then dropped down a tube into the ground which has been opened by two discs, and is then closed and tamped down tight by two packing wheels. This last part is very important. You need to have a lot of “seed to soil” contact in order to help the seed germinate. The more soil is contacting the seed the more water can get to it. Seeds need water to let them know that it is time to open up and become a plant! There is obviously a lot more going on in the planter than I mentioned here, but this should give you a good understanding of how ours works. To the right is another type of direct seeder. We purchased this little gem (pictured below)over the winter, and I used it for the first time this spring to plant dill. It works extraordinarily well for being a seeder that you just push. We don’t always plant huge fields, so this comes in very handy for smaller plantings. I will talk about transplanting in a future post, after we plant our fall brassicas(cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage).

 Fresh pick of the week: strawberries!!

That’s it for this week! Keep your eye on our facebook and instagram (@Kirbysfm) tomorrow for the fruit update.

Thanks for reading everyone, and happy growing!

-Farmer Chad

Friday Field Update Vol.2 No.2

Wow. These fruit blossoms have me blown away. Donut peaches, cherries, regular peaches, and plums are lighting up our farm. I took these pictures Wednesday night just before the sunset, which gives off such a unique color light. After walking through all the orchards, I would say the plums have the most fragrance; it’s so strong!

Some sweet cherries decorating the backyard of our market. 

 How to properly enjoy the orchard at the end of a long day of work. 

Donut peaches! They are just as amazing to look at as they are to devour.

Speaking of flowers, our greenhouse is bursting at the seams with annuals. We’ve been working hard since the beginning of March to grow and sculpt our potted flowers and hanging baskets for you! Mother’s day is here, and we are ready. Shout out to all you wonderful moms out there. Including one of my favorites: Mother Earth. I’m very happy to say that we are recycling all of our plastic trays from the greenhouse this year! We have been collecting them all spring in the huge bags our potting soil came in. Then, at the end of the greenhouse season, we are going to take a big truck load to the recycling center. I am extremely excited to take this step in continuing our progress towards eliminating waste in our business. 

Ben traversing a gutter as we change the one of the plastic roofs on our greenhouse

Greenhouses hold beautiful flowers yes, but ours has plastic roofs that need to be changed every few years which can be fun and a bit daunting to do. We take our time and walk carefully in the gutters high above the ground taking the old roof off, and putting the new one in place. In order to do a good job, we have to wait for perfect weather conditions to do this with. No rain, or wind.

Brand new rhubarb patch enjoying the spring heat. 

In other spring news, we planted this rhubarb last year and it’s really taking off! All this growth is just from the past two weeks of warmth. Unfortunately we won’t be harvesting any from this patch this year, but hopefully next year it will be ready to share.

Friday Fruit Update

I thought it would take longer than a week for these buds to burst, but I was quite wrong. I think due to all the heat, they really took off. They peaked at full bloom on either Wednesday or Thursday, and then quickly went past peak into the next stage called petal fall (no idea where they got that name...), and lost a lot of petals to all the wind in the past few days. The apples are the exception in this case, in which some varieties, like this Gingergold bud pictured here are exiting the "pink" stage and opening up into full bloom. The blossom you see opened is called the king bloom, which is the same for strawberries, which they are closely related to. This king bloom is going to create the fruit we will harvest, and through the process of thinning (done mostly in June) we will eliminate the other four buds that haven't opened yet. Otherwise, the apples wouldn't get any bigger than a golf ball!

From left to right: Sweet cherries, peaches, prunes, and apples. 

Friday Field Update Volume 2, Number 1

It’s so good to be back at it! I think I enjoy the winter a little more than the average Western New Yorker; it’s a time for me to take a step back and breathe. However, once we get the flowers going in the greenhouse and I smell the fresh soil and green growth, something inside me switches on and I’m ready for the new season.

Farmer Tim breaking ground with an offset disc on Earth Day. 

Once the snow finally melted in late April, we were able to break ground on Earth Day! A very fitting day to farm I think, even though it’s three weeks late for us. Usually we have our Peas Planted on April 1st, but they can’t really grow when it’s snowing outside, so we opted to wait for when that was done.

One thing I am very happy with this year is that we didn’t plow on our Brockport farm. Usually, plowing is what you have to do first to loosen the soil, turn any weeds that may be growing completely upside down and start fresh. Plowing is a great tool, but recent research has shown that the negatives far outway the positives. It compromises soil structure, creates a compact layer called the plow pan, and disrupts the soil microbiology, which is extremely important to crops. Large scale field crops (soybean, corn, wheat) farms have more tools and methods at their disposal to help minimize tillage(plowing and other soil working methods) than a diverse vegetable farm. When you are seeding small plots, and making raised beds covered in plastic, plowing or other types of tilling are basically the only option you have. However, with the help of a cover crop called the tillage radish, we were able to skip the plowing process, and disrupt our soil that much less. In the late summer and fall, this radish grows 2-3 feet deep, and 2-3 inches in diameter. Then in the winter, the radish is killed and rots away leaving a huge hole in its place. The holes create a space for all the meltwater from winter snow to drain into, and also help break up the soil (slowly through the growth of the actual radish) and when the soil is worked, create a fluffy, tender layer without plowing!

Using a subsoiler on our new high tunnel.  

I am excited to announce that this year we have created a second high tunnel! We have actually converted one of our small greenhouses out back into a high tunnel where we can grow crops directly in the ground. This is different than a normal field situation. We had been using this greenhouse for over a decade to grow flowers in, and over the winter store various equipment and tools. All this use has created a lot of compaction, which we needed to break up. That’s what the subsoiler on the back of the tractor in this picture is doing. Digging deep down, and breaking up the compaction we have created over the years.

Marco and Francisco waking up our strawberries! 

One other thing we have been up to so far this spring, is uncovering the strawberries! This is always one of the most monumental moments of spring for me. The straw acted as insulation for the strawberry plants over the winter, but now must be raked into the walkways between the rows, so the plants can regrow and produce this years crop in June.

Friday Fruit Update:

Every week, I will post pictures of the four major tree fruits we grow: cherries, peaches, plums, and apples. The pictures will be of the same (I hope) buds/fruits every week so you can see exactly how they grow.

From left to right: Sweet Cherry, Peach, Prune, Apple. Bursting and ready to break. 

Bonus: Peaches are healthy and alive as of right now!! You can see that this flower bud is bright and intact. It’s looking like a pretty darn good year so far. 

Friday Field Update No. 24

Happy Friday, and happy harvest! After starting to pick our Gala this week, it efeels to me we have really kicked off apple harvest. Gala is a very important variety, and an absolutely excellent eating apple. So that brings our total up to 5 varieties so far: Gala, Jersey Mac, Paula Red, Zestar, and Ginger Gold. About 20 more to go!

A very peculiar gala apple found yesterday. 

This week I wanted to show off our “garden.” That’s what we call it at least. It may be a little larger than what most people consider a garden: about 7 acres. In our garden we have all of our melons, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, and some beets. We do have other plantings of beets, pickles, sweet corn, and the summer broccoli a couple fields over. And our cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage is down the road on another property.  We have a few gardens. Here are some pictures:

Our diverse block of eggplants.  

What tomatoes are supposed to look like.  

When you do a really good job growing tamatoes and they tip over your posts and trellis.  

Untrellised  tomatoes. We grew some this way to avoid the cost of staking all our tomatoes. 

This is such a crazy time of year for me. Personally, I have just been working on selling our produce. I really haven’t been “growing” anything anymore, which I really miss. But I love working with my customers, and making people happy because of the beautiful produce I supply them.

Unfortunately that is all i have for this week. Come back next week for more apples and other farm news including our own farm to table dinner! As always, thanks for  reading!

Friday Field Update No. 23

​Happy Friday, and happy September! We are down to the last four months of the year, and I am so excited! I get a very specific feeling in Autumn(so close!). It is this heavy nostalgia that is full of warmth, beautiful colors, happy memories, and delicious seasonal food.

Goldenrod is certainly one of the brightest and most naturally abundant contributors to the early fall color spectrum. It is especially illuminating one particular area on our farm at the moment: the bee habitat. The bee habitat is about two acres of wildflowers and whatever else happens to pop up, right in the middle of one of our farms. A few years ago my dad began noticing more and more how many native pollinators there actually are around us. There are way more than just honey bees. So, in order to help out the natural pollinator populations(which does include honey bees), we stopped farming a very hilly piece of ground, and let it turn to wildflowers. The majority of these flowers are goldenrod, which helps make a big portion of the honey we harvest in the fall time.

Half of our hilly be habitat with my wife Mandy , and our fur babies having the best time. 

Fortunately, I am not allergic to goldenrod, so I can enjoy it a bit more than some of you might like to. However, if you are allergic to it, or if you have other allergies from pollen, eat local raw honey! Especially from the season that you are allergic to most (spring, summer, or fall). I have heard from a LOT of people, raw honey can significantly help reduce your seasonal allergy symptoms. Raw honey is not heated, so therefore all that powerful pollen the bees drop in there isn’t destroyed. When consumed, the pollen acts like antibodies and helps battle your allergic reactions. We have plenty in our store for sale right now from our friend, Bob’s Bees who lives just two miles around the corner from us (only 1 mile as the bee flies!). Which means his bees could actually be foraging nectar from our farm! Bees fly up to two miles away from their hive in search of nectar sources. Fascinating creatures. Back to produce:

What Summer means to me.  

This is what my Friday’s schedule consisted of. Peaches, tomatoes, all sorts of peppers, cantaloupe, pickling cucumbers, plums, and sweet corn picked just before I delivered it. This is why I love what I do, who wouldn’t enjoy working with such beautiful and delicious food!

My monarch caterpillar friend.  

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned as we dig into apple harvest season! And with apples comes pumpkins and all that fun stuff. As always, thank you for reading and see you back here next week!

Friday Field Update No. 22

Happy Friday and happy harvest!! We have really started bringing in the apples now. Yesterday, Zestar and Paula Reds were harvested for the first time this year. Still no varieties for the hard-core (pun intended) crunchy apple enthusiasts, although Zestar has a good bit of snap to it. I have heard it referred to in the apple-verse as the “poor-man’s” Honeycrisp, but that is a little bit of a stretch in my opinion. We will be picking Ginger Golds very shortly too, which are a great, crispy apple. All three varieties we are offering at the moment are still mouthwateringly juicy, and a very refreshing treat after a summer without them. Yes, we had our own apples out of controlled atmosphere storage, and sure, you can always get apples at the grocery store, but there is nothing like new apples in the late summer. I know some of you aren’t ready for summer to end, but I love to embrace the seasons. Nothing primes my palate for fall more than fresh apples. The “fall harvest” can be different for different farms, but for us at Kirby’s, apples are a huge chunk of it.

Sun colored red apples on the bottom left, and yellow, newly exposed uncolored apples on the right. 

Despite how much apples are a part of our farm, it is one of the crops I am least familiar with. I have been growing our vegetables and small fruits, in an attempt to focus my efforts and hone my skills on these crops first. That being said, I apologize for not talking about apples more in this blog. Just because I haven’t talked about them a lot, does not mean we haven’t been doing a lot of work in the orchards. If you are a healthy, growing farm, apples aren’t all about the harvest. They are about year round care and management, with a little love. More like a lot of love. One thing that caught my eye this week was a job we are working on even now in August: summer pruning. If you are at all familiar with apples, you know they are trimmed/pruned in the winter time while the trees are dormant, and will be injured less. However, sometimes it is worth the slight damage you may cause to take off some branches in the summer. Summer pruning has several benefits: better color on the apples, and less of a response from the tree. When the trees are pruned in the winter, they react by growing several new branches out from that point, creating a tree that is much too dense. So when the tree is pruned in the summer, it doesn’t react with as much vegetative growth. Summer pruning creates better color on the apples because more of the fruit can be exposed to the sun. Sunlight is actually how the apples gain color. The best weather for coloring apples are warm, sunny days, and cool nights. Basically what we’ve had this week! In the picture above, you can see how uncolored these gala were. But now that the leafy branches were pruned out of the way, the sun is shining right on these apples, and is going to color them up beautifully, making them much more valuable. Ok, on to other summer fruits we are harvesting:

Elderberries!! 

We are so excited to be harvesting our elderberries for the first time ever! For those of you who don’t know, elderberries have incredible health benefits, as well as being delicious. The berries don’t have much flavor when eaten raw, but when cooked in a pie, or made into a syrup they are fantastic! As well as being loaded with antioxidants, they are a huge immune system booster. When you get a cold in the winter, a little tasty elderberry syrup will really help you out! I plan on making a few jars to get me through the winter. Maybe some wine too if I get really ambitious! So many possibilities! One thing to keep in mind is that like all berries, they are extremely perishable and need to be kept refrigerated at all times. Also, I want to share a great tip for working with elderberries my dad discovered after doing a little research. In order to get the berries off of their “umbles” or bunches, throw them in a large bag in the freezer overnight, and then once frozen solid, roll them around and gently crush them. The individual berries will fall off like marbles, leaving the stems behind. It’s quite amazing how well it works, and how fast it is!  

Alrighty, now that my mouth is watering, I’ll sign off. As always, thank you berry much for reading, have a great week, and we’ll see you back here next Friday!

Friday Field Update No. 21

Happy Friday and happy optimism to you all! Mostly to me! That’s the type of spirit I try to maintain at least. Even with all this rain… yeah it isn’t easy. On the literal bright side, I have seen a personal record amount of rainbows this year. With all these spotty clouds, there is plenty of time to let the sun shine through and create beauties like this:

Another bright side is that the weather has been much cooler than normal. This makes for great harvesting weather. We are not sweating quite as many buckets as usual. Especially compared to last year! There is also a lot less pressure on us to keep everything irrigated. This one is pretty obvious, but I wanted to point it out! It makes a HUGE difference to our costs. However, in situations like our chrysanthemums, which are all outside on the “mum mat,” we may need to irrigate even if the pots are wet. The mums may be getting plenty of water from the sky, but this water has no food for them. We have to make sure they are getting the amounts of fertilizer necessary to grow a proper mum. Wait...is that a blossom! Oh my goodness, they are blooming already!

It’s August 18th, and the mums are blooming… I think this is the normal time of year, but it feels early to me! Fall is so close, it’s unbelievable. Technically, we still have a little over a month until the first day of Autumn, but we are harvesting apples right now too! Jersey Macs are our first variety of the year. They are not the most crunchy apple, but they have plenty of flavor, and are super juicy. 

Another crop in blossom now is our cover crop of buckwheat! I haven’t gotten a whiff of this field yet, but trust me… you know it when you smell it. Don’t let it’s beauty deceive you, buckwheat is a foul smelling flower. Picture a washcloth that has sat on your counter for maybe a week or two. This may not be the best way to go about trying to sell the honey we are making from the plants, but it’s the truth! Surprisingly, the honey tastes much better than the flowers smell. We are partnering with our neighborhood beekeeper, Bob’s Bees to make this thick, extra dark and delicious honey. He has four of his hives sitting not very far away from the buckwheat field. With a bloom as thick as this, you can be sure those bees are all over the field, sucking up every last drop of delectable nectar. 

Only two days after seeding,  radish seedlings emerge and brighten the drab landscape.

The second cover crop we seeded so far is called tillage or forage radish. It is very closely related to the daikon radish, and looks almost identical. They grow as thick as three to five inches in diameter, and can reach three to four feet deep in the ground. They are called tillage radishes because they do some serious “tilling” for you. The deep roots break through compacted layers in the soil that the roots of our crops would not be able to. The texture difference of the ground in the spring is very noticeable and much more friendly to work with. The radishes are killed from cold temperatures in the winter, and the only thing left in the spring is a shriveled radish corpse draped in a gaping hole. That reminds me of another great benefit of these radishes: the huge holes help drain the snowmelt in the late winter/early spring, drying up the fields much quicker. The sooner the fields dry up, the sooner we can get our peas planted!

Ok, that's all for this week. Thank you so much for reading and see you back here next week!
 

Friday Field Update No. 20

Happy Friday! I’m really feeling in the harvest mode recently. Technically on our farm we are harvesting different crops from Asparagus on, but now in late summer, there are just a lot of items adding up. I start noticing it when I am writing out a bill to a roadside farm stand we wholesale to, and I almost run out of lines on the invoice pad because there are so many items! We are not quite there yet, but getting really close! On my deliveries to Wegmans the past few days I step in the back of the truck and am hit with the smell of peppers. They permeate the entire back of the truck with their chile aromas and it smells like pure summer. Even one of the Wegmans produce managers commented on it yesterday.

Seedless watermelon plumping up. 

Here is another favorite of summer… Watermelon! These are ripening up beautifully in the melon patch. They are very inconspicuous, mostly hidden amongst their leaves. We have five different varieties of melon this year. One of them is even SEEDLESS! Very excited about that one. The other four are what we have done in the past: red and yellow seeded watermelon, cantaloupe, and a mini, personalized cantaloupe called sugar cube.

Remnants from the pickle patch, before it's cover cropped. 

Here is a part of summer that is not so fun. Cleaning up the rows of plastic from spring and early summer vegetables like zucchini and pickles (I know these are both technically fruits… you do NOT want to get me started on that rant). We start by mowing off the vines so they are not in the way of pulling up plastic. Then we go over the beds with a simple tool on the back of the tractor that lifts up the edges where they are buried to loosen the plastic. This job can get real dirty, especially if it’s rainy and muddy like it has been. However it is necessary so we can get cover crops in place to regenerate the soil, and all sorts of other awesome benefits. I will get into that plenty more when we get some planted.

Everything is going well on the rest of the farm. The peaches are still coming and we are getting into the freestone varieties now, like Redhavens, Glohavens, and John Boys. We have a yellow and a white donut peach right now too! For those who haven’t tried them they are extremely tasty, and easy to eat. The yellow variety has a firm, I like to say bouncy flesh. It reminds me a lot of a baby gold peach.

Ok, back to work I go. Thank you so much for reading and see you back here next week!

Cantaloupe vines on the left, watermelon vines on the right.  

Friday Field Update No. 19

Happy Friday! What a sunny week it has been. All our crops are really enjoying this strong flow of energy from the sun. Pretty much all of our apple varieties now have color on them. My dad actually ate a Jersey Mac a couple days ago, so you can expect to see those coming in VERY soon. What did I just say?? Apples? Wow, we are halfway through summer already. That reminds me of tomatoes, and boy oh boy are we harvesting a lot of them out of our high tunnel right now. Here is what it looks like at the moment. Maybe a little bigger than the last picture I posted(back in Field Update No. 10, May 25th)?

These tomato plants really took off. You can’t tell from the angle of this picture, but most of the plants are just as tall as I am. Cornell Cooperative Extension has been assisting me with the nutrition program by sending in leaf samples to an agricultural lab for analysis every two weeks. This has helped us keep a fine tuned eye on them, and feed the plants exactly what they need to produce the best fruit possible. Something else that has helped these plants explode with growth is the rootstock we grafted them onto. I talked about this more in depth in Field Update No. 1 and a little in No. 2 as well. There are 15 plants in the tunnel that are the same fruiting variety, but not grafted. This allows us to easily visualize how big of an impact the grafting process has.

Just outside the high tunnel is our ⅓ acre mat we grow our chrysanthemums on (usually simply called mums). The mum mat is completely full right now with mums that are also loving the growing conditions. We have three different plantings of them so that the blooms are spread across the season. Pictured here are mums from the first planting. I wanted to talk briefly about the irrigation we use. The mum foliage has grown so much, you can barely make out the black irrigation line running along the tops of the pots. This irrigation line posed a bit of a problem the first year we set it up, which was only two years ago. Due to it’s black color, it absorbs a lot of heat from sunlight, and actually expands and contracts. When this happens, the little holes that let water out of the line and into the pot move outside of the pot and drip on the ground. This also meant they could not be completely fixed on each end. We figured out that bungees worked the best at keeping the line tight and centered over the pot. Nothing is ever easy! Now on to those strawberry renovation pictures I promised you.

The picture on the left is after the first two steps. And the picture on the right is after step 3, the final step. The strawberries are weed sprayed, and then mowed down pretty hard. It sounds pretty counterintuitive, I know. Mowing off all the foliage you’ve worked so hard to grow? However, it is a sacrifice you have to take now in order to maximize the crop for next year. Once the plants are mowed, I go over them with a 4 foot rototiller. We take teeth out of the middle, and drive over the center of the row so the only plants left behind are nice and organized. I plan on taking pictures every other day, so we can watch as the rows regenerate and green up. I’m excited to see how quick they take back their field!

Ok, that’s all for this week. Thank you so much for reading, and I’ll see you back here next Friday!

Friday Field update No. 17

Hello there everyone, and Happy Friday! I know many of you are expecting to hear from Farmer Chad, but we are trying something a little different this week. Some of you know who I am because of our CSA interactions in Rochester, but for those of you who are confused as to who this strange woman is communicating the Friday Field Update, let me give a quick introduction. I am Mandy Kirby, Farmer Chad’s wife. Chad and I have been together for 4 years and have been married for almost one. Early in our relationship, I can remember Chad telling me he wanted to continue running the farm. After talking only for a minute about his choice, I knew that this was the right choice for Chad. As the years have gone by, I continue to be blown away by Chad’s passion and dedication to his work.

​As for my part on the farm, I do what I can to help out in the summer. When the apple harvest starts, I begin heading back to my classroom and preparing for the new school year. This summer, my job has been to deliver the CSA shares to the fine folks in Rochester, Gates and Ogden. It has been such a great experience too! I love being able to see the excitement in our customers’ eyes when they get their box full of goodies! Not to mention, we talk about different ways to prepare the food and what’s to expect in the coming weeks. Speaking of what’s to come…

Peaches! I know many of you are just as excited as I am about this fruit being harvested! Chad and I actually live on one of the peach orchards and we have been keeping a watchful eye on them throughout the seasons. As many of you know, it’s very difficult for this tropical fruit to grow in a northern state… Especially in Western New York. One ill-timed bite of frost in the spring can take a toll on peaches and many farms experience that in our region. However, this year is different. We were lucky enough to make it the whole spring with no damaging frosts! Because of this, the peaches are doing very well. The trees are absolutely beautiful and the fruit is delicious! I can smell the cobbler, jam and pies now!

Not quite this many tomatoes yet, but they are in their way! 

In other Kirby Farm news, we are approaching the end of picking broccoli, but we are just beginning to pick green beans. There will even be some yellow wax beans in the mix too! We have also started bringing in summer cabbage and… (brace yourselves because this next bit is pretty special) Chad and his team have picked the first 100 POUNDS of tomatoes from the high tunnel! This is especially exciting for me because it offers so many opportunities to spend time with all of the members of my families. Over the years I have learned to appreciate spending quality time with my family in the kitchen. Every year my dad makes red sauce for spaghetti dinners, chili sauce and much more with these tomatoes. I love sharing my husband’s home grown produce with my dad and learning how to make the products last! The Kirby side also has a tomato tradition that I treasure. Each year we gather in Linda’s kitchen and make batches and batches of stewed tomatoes. Everyone has a job and the whole family gets involved. It’s always a blast! One of the best parts of being involved with this farm is seeing the family traditions get passed down (on Chad’s side and mine). I hope that you and your family are able to use our produce to create experiences of your own in the kitchen!

I hope you have enjoyed this special edition of the Friday Field Update and wanted to thank you all for reading and supporting our farm! Have a wonderful week everyone!

Friday Field Update No. 16

Happy Friday and happy rain! This summer has been a completely different season than last year. I’m sure most of you remember the absurdly dry and overly warm summer we had in 2016. That certainly was not good broccoli growing weather, even for the newer varieties we have that are more heat tolerant. However, this year has been great for growing broccoli so far. We haven’t had to irrigate the field once! And the temperature hasn’t been above 90ºF for very long at all. There has been rain about once a week on average, and the broccoli along with most other crops are loving it. If there was too much rain, it could cause infections in the roots of many plants from being so wet and cold. As long as we continue doing a good job keeping our vegetables protected from diseases that grow on the leaves in wet weather, we should be in great shape.

Honey bee doing its thing on a sweet corn tassel.  

One of the crops that we usually have to spend a lot of time irrigating is sweet corn. This steady rain has kept the corn coming along beautifully! In this picture a honey bee is collecting pollen from the male flower parts of the sweet corn. Yes, sweet corn flowers too! The parts you can see hanging down from the tassel are the anthers which produce pollen, lots of pollen. This is why I believe the bees were going crazy for it. July and August is about the time of year(called a dearth) when there are very few flowers producing a lot of nectar or pollen for the bees. Both of these are essential for the bees to grow healthy larvae. They reduce the nectar down to honey, and with special glands turn the pollen into “bee bread,” which is absolutely loaded with nutrients. A lot of humans actually eat bee-collected pollen for it’s health benefits. Back to the corn… It has separate male and female flowers just like pickles do. The female flower is actually the ear of corn when it emerges from the stalk and sprouts it’s silk. The pollen is usually just blown by the wind from the tassel down to the silk in order to pollinate each kernel. And for every kernel there is a strand of silk attached. That’s why when you see some bumpy ears of corn, and there are kernels missing, it means the ear wasn’t properly pollinated. Walking through the fields like this is when you can find real treasures on our farm, and all along Ridge Road as well.

This is a picture of the first complete arrowhead(technically probably a spearhead, it is a little large for an arrow I think) I have found myself! It is 2 ¼” long, which is pretty hefty. A few days ago I was just driving the tractor along the zucchini, happened to look down, and there it was. I actually got shivers when I jumped down and held it in my hand for the first time, trying to believe what my eyes were seeing. My dad informed me it is one of the largest that has been found on our farm in one piece. A lot of times you can find broken off tips or arrowheads with corners missing. I count myself extremely fortunate to have found this piece. One of our employees consistently finds these arrowheads, and spends a lot of time walking around our farm looking. The best time to look is after a rain in the spring, when the ground has just been plowed. The rain washes away a lot of loose, small dirt particles and leaves larger rocks exposed on the surface. Because of the large amounts of arrowheads we find, we think at one time, centuries ago, there must have been a campsite on our property. To think how much effort was put into creating this little piece of ancient technology, and how much history it holds blows me away. I will not soon forget the day I found this beautiful piece of native american history.

Quick update on the babies! They’re not quite babies anymore! If you can make it out there is a killdeer adolescent in the middle, right of this picture. I apologize for the poor quality, but these little guys can really run! As you can see, they are doing extremely well and will probably start flying any day now.

That’s all for this week, thank you so much for reading! I will see you here next Friday!

Friday Field Update No. 15

Happy Friday and happy summer! It really is making a presence recently. The rain clouds have finally parted for a spell, and the sun is shining generously. Of course, this means fruits and vegetables are really putting on lots of growth. The peaches are looking absolutely gorgeous and the earliest varieties are starting to color and finish sizing up. We are estimating only two to three more weeks until the first harvest! And there are a lot of them, that’s for sure. I have been debating on calling this the year of the peach. It has a nice ring to it.  

One crop we are really hauling in at the moment is beets. We seeded a large first planting this year and they sure are beautiful. We have filled several twenty bushel bins like the one pictured here with beets and there are still plenty more to go. They are a huge hit at Rochester Public Market, as well as with some of our CSA customers. I know not everyone loves beets, but those who do are very, very happy. The greens on them are just stunning, and loaded with nutrients. So if you do happen to have some beets to eat, don’t throw those greens out! Boil them like spinach, toss them in a salad with our lettuce, or mix them in with a quinoa or other grain salad. God save the greens!  

Like I mentioned, beets have been one of the items in our CSA share for the past two weeks. In this picture from week #3, the beets are packed in there tightly with garlic scapes, edible pod peas, a living basil plant, apples, zucchini, and buttercrunch lettuce. This is a full share box, and it is filled to the brim. I absolutely could not resist taking a picture of it. If anyone doesn’t know what a CSA is or how ours works, head on over to the CSA page on our website and there is all the information you need to know. If you do have a question, feel free to call our market or email us!

Moving on to one of my favorite crops: the pickle. I believe I have clarified our terminology before, but allow me to refresh your memory. There are two basic types of cucumbers in my mind and on our farm: pickling(pickles) and not pickling(slicing). For me, the only ones that really matter are the pickling cucumbers. Why? Because they can be sliced like a non-pickling cucumber, but also stay nice and crunchy when you pickle them! That is the major difference here. For some reason I don’t exactly understand, the pickles maintain their delicious crunchy texture much better than the slicers, but can still be sliced and eaten raw! So why do we even need slicing cucumbers? I haven’t the slightest idea…

These beautiful little darlings are the blossoms that pickle plants produce. There is a difference, can you see it? Like many other vegetables, especially cucurbits, there is a male and a female flower. Fascinating, right?! You can tell which one is female because of the baby pickle that is just beginning to take shape at the base of the flower. The male flower only exists to provide pollen in order to grow the seeds inside the fruit (pickle). I know, cucumbers sound like they should be vegetables, but in reality they are a fruit. This is because they are something the plant produces, not part of the plant itself.

Time for the mystery vegetable!! Or fruit? You tell me! This tall and ferny beauty is loaded with tiny yellow flowers and some little green balls too… hmm...interesting. Let me know what you think it could be in the comments!

Thank you for reading all about my life as a farmer, I truly appreciate it! See you back here next Friday!

Friday Field Update No. 14

Happy Friday! Not so happy rain, though. I think I’m pretty much over it. However I try not to complain too much because I feel like us farmers are constantly saying it’s too wet, or it’s too dry, or too hot! Most of the time these statements are completely accurate, but I’ll try not to go on about it too much here.  

The rain turns our soil into my favorite shade of brown. Ideal for photographing, especially when you have a beautiful patch of cucurbits coming up. The second planting of pickling cucumbers (we just call them pickles) is pictured here, but they also are sharing the field with more zucchini plants. The rain may have created wonderful contrast for a great picture and eye candy, but it can also have many negative effects. Too much rain can obviously be a serious problem, but that’s not what I will discuss today. *Here comes my weekly weed spiel* Weeds are astounding. Again and again they surprise me, and it has yet to be a good surprise. When the rain saturates the ground, especially as of late, cultivation does not work nearly as well. Whether you are using a Farmall cultivator tractor, or a big drag, the weeds are dug up with a tooth and relocated in the soil. Their roots are ripped and damaged, but most of the time are still present. So when the ground is nice and moist, the weeds are slightly displaced, but are planted back in wet, loose soil and sometimes continue to grow like crazy! This is why you shouldn’t plan on doing any cultivating or dragging in wet soil after a rain, it would be a complete waste of time!

The sun was hitting this pile of packed zucchini and I couldn’t help myself, I had to take a picture. 

Zucchini is one of our biggest early crops. Pictured are boxes that have been packed to be sent off to Wegmans. For those of you that didn’t know, we sell a considerable amount of fresh produce to Wegmans. If you keep your eye out in the produce section for our sign, you can probably see my dad holding a crate of sugar snap peas (which is our second biggest early crop). Throughout the year we make it to almost every single Wegmans in the Rochester area. They do a good job supporting the local agriculture. Delivering to them is definitely one of my favorite jobs. I love seeing our beautiful produce getting settled into it’s new home.

I think I will conclude this week with some pictures of this delicious, violet colored blossom called Borage. The first wave of clusters has started blooming. I think these might be my favorite edible flowers so far. When you bite into them, it is the softest crunch you have ever bitten. The taste is very subtle at first, but quickly develops into a cucumber flavored, big, juicy mouthful that you were not expecting. I think these would be great on certain desserts, maybe with cream cheese, and also as a garnish on cocktails. Or even just floating in a simple glass of ice water.

Thanks for reading everyone, it’s time for me to get farming. Have a great week and see you next Friday!

Friday Field Update No. 12

Another Friday has come, and another week has gone. Time flies so fast sometimes! For me, this time of year I am always very busy, so the time is always flying.

I will start with a bird, nest, and overall nature update, as per requested. Since I last mentioned the mystery bird(looks like a plover or sandpiper) and Killdeer nest, I discovered three other Killdeer nests. This week there was only one nest with a bird still sitting on eggs. I have seen the little mystery babies running around (they do this adorable little up and down bob thing with their head and butt), and also chicks from one of the killdeer nests (featured in the picture). I can only hope that the other two nests have hatched successfully and are now running the town(...field?).

Only one or two day old Killdeer chick! I apologize for the blurry picture, I don't want to get to close and give them or their parents a heart attack. 

One of our many common snapping turtles who ventured out to lay her nest. I'm pretty sure that is a leech on her back if anyone is wondering. 

Constantly being surrounded by nature is one of my favorite perks of this job. The fields around our farm market in Brockport are bordered on the South by a beautiful wetland. This includes a swamp and a pond brimming with wildlife of all different kinds. Driving by on the tractor I can always count on seeing painted turtles sunning on top of floating logs, or great blue herons and green herons soaring in. Occasionally, I can also catch a glimpse of our resident pair of yellow warblers or baltimore orioles flitting about the trees. The closest encounters I have had are two types of turtles: the painted turtle, and the common snapping turtle. I get to see them the only time of year they leave the water, to go lay their eggs in the field. They have a little trouble trying to run away from me. Pictured is one I found this week laying her nest.

Yellow nutsedge, twelve o'clock.

In the field right next to wear this snapper laid her eggs there was a stand of yellow nutsedge, one of my least favorite weeds, trying to establish itself. Notice I said “was”... Pictured here is me in the middle of destroying the nutsedge with our offset disc in preparation for our second planting of zucchini and pickling cucumbers. Yes, I take great pleasure in killing weeds, especially this patch of yellow nutsedge. We have been battling it in this specific location for a few years now. It may have won a few battles, but right now we are definitely winning the war.

I was SO disappointed this big guy wasn't quite ripe enough yet when I found it. 

Currently, we are in the heart of strawberry season, and it is absolutely delicious. Starting this weekend we will begin offering U-Pick Strawberries. You may not find one quite as funky as this monster, but I know you will find plenty of deliciously juicy berries if you come try your hand at picking! From what I saw while handing out the first CSA box of the season, everyone was thrilled with the berries. I am proud to report all of the berries that went out on Tuesday were fresh picked that morning. Keeping our products fresh is something we try to do whenever possible. It is the easiest way to maintain a high quality product, which is what we strive for on our farm.

You can see a blossom cluster above my thumb, as well as a couple pods to the right, one with a petal still hanging on. 

In other crop news, the peas are getting big! The first wave of pods is so very close to harvest. They are about 3 inches long now, and will start growing fatter any day. Pea plants grow their pods first, and then once those are established, begin to fatten up the peas inside the pod. In edible pod peas, the pod is where you get a lot of the juicy crunch and green flavor, and the pea is where you get the sweetness. Keep your eye on Facebook, we will announce when the first peas are picked!

Foodlink Executive Director, Julia Tedesco cutting the ribbon!

This week I will conclude with a very special topic. Wednesday was a great day for me. We were invited to attend the Grand Opening of the new processing kitchen at Foodlink. Rochester City Mayor Lovely Warren spoke, as well as a local hero, Danny Wegman. They are pictured here along with part of the Foodlink team, some of whom I have worked with, for the official ribbon cutting. It was a very moving ceremony, and educational as well. I learned a lot about how big of an impact Foodlink has on the Rochester community. We have been working with Foodlink for several years now, and it makes me very proud to be able to say that. As well as donating food, Foodlink has actually been able to purchase some produce from us when we have a surplus. They have been buying a large number of apples from us (over 1,000 bu!) which may increase this year now that their new kitchen is up and running. One of the largest rooms in this kitchen is called the value-added processing (VAP) room. The largest piece of equipment in this room is an enormous apple slicer. It has increased their capacity to slice apples by twenty! A lot of the food they prepare in this kitchen will be sent to inner city schools, along with these sliced and half cup packaged apples. Being a part of such a great force for good in Rochester is a huge inspiration for me. I plan to continue working with them, and helping them achieve their goal of not letting food go to waste.

Ok, time to get out to work. Hopefully today the zucchini and pickles are going in the ground! The rain was great for us yesterday, even though it was a deluge at times. The field is now moistened through, and these seeds won’t have any trouble germinating. Thanks for reading! See you back here next Friday.