{"id":4589,"date":"2015-09-28T18:59:47","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T18:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/?p=4589"},"modified":"2016-04-06T13:26:28","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T13:26:28","slug":"farm-focus-this-week-on-the-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/farm-focus-this-week-on-the-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Farm Focus: This Week on The Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"There is an ever evolving list of projects on the farm. Here\u2019s what is going\u00a0on this week. We have an exciting new project for our garden endeavors. A\u00a0greenhouse is in the works! We\u2019ve cleared a couple of rows of trees in between\u00a0our packing shed and the dried fruit lot to make room for a new permanent\u00a0greenhouse. Marlene is very excited about this new structure. We\u2019ve been using\u00a0a modest soft plastic hoop house, but in order to make our summer vegetable\u00a0projects more viable, we need more space. Our winter starts can go into small 6\u00a0pack cells so require less greenhouse space but our tomatoes need to be placed\u00a0in 4\u201d pots to grow to an adequate start size for planting and eventually maturing. This coming spring she\u2019ll have plenty of room inside the new 40\u2019x 16\u2019 hard\u00a0plastic polycarbonate structure for the larger tomato pots and more. In addition\u00a0to seeding benches and tool storage inside the greenhouse, we will be adding\u00a0a shaded area for working outdoors and for bringing out the plants to \u201charden\u00a0them off. \u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHardening off \u201d is a process by which you slowly acclimate seedlings from a\u00a0stable, climate controlled environment to one where there are fluctuations in\u00a0temperature, wind and moisture. When seedlings are raised in a greenhouse\u00a0they don\u2019t have the opportunity to develop the strength and structure necessary\u00a0to withstand the elements that outdoor life presents. To acclimate the plants\u00a0we bring the seedlings out to a protected shady area for a few hours every day.\u00a0Each day the plants stay out for a few more hours until they\u2019ve acclimated to the\u00a0outdoors and can be put into the ground. This process usually takes about 7-10\u00a0days.\r\n\r\nIn the orchard, the Tree Team has already begun pruning our apricot trees.\u00a0Each member of the Tree Team prunes about 2 trees an hour and we prune\u00a0about 200 trees a day. With about 30,000 trees in the orchard, it takes the Tree\u00a0Team around 6 months of daily work to prune everything.\r\n\r\nLastly for this week, we\u2019ve pulled out a few acres of Suncrest peaches to make\u00a0way for two new varieties. The first is a white donut peach called White Saucer\u00a0that ripens in May, so we can have an early variety peach for our CSA boxes.\u00a0The other variety is called Sierra Beauty that ripens in mid-June. We are trying\u00a0Sierra Beauty as an alternative to the Suncrest variety that ripens during that\u00a0same window. The Suncrest peach is an heirloom variety that has outstanding\r\n\r\nflavor, but has an inconsistent crop. About one out of every ten peaches we pick\u00a0may have the flavor that has awarded the Suncrest the Slow Food Ark of Taste\u00a0status. When a Suncrest is good, it is very very good, but one out of ten isn\u2019t\u00a0a great ratio for us or for our customers. We\u2019ll always keep a few acres of the\u00a0Suncrest variety in the orchard in order to preserve the genetics and to enjoy the\u00a0one out of ten outstanding peaches, but we are looking for an alternative variety\u00a0that will deliver more consistent flavor and texture quality.\r\n\r\nThere\u2019s never a dull moment in the ever changing scene of work around the\u00a0farm at Frog Hollow.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is an ever evolving list of projects on the farm. Here\u2019s what is going\u00a0on this week. We have an exciting new project for our garden endeavors. A\u00a0greenhouse is in the works! We\u2019ve cleared a couple of rows of trees in between\u00a0our packing shed and the dried fruit lot to make room for a new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farm-focus"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5HwAU-1c1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4860,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4589\/revisions\/4860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}