Protecting the strawberries

We've been drooling over the last two weeks over the incredible amount of blossoms on our strawberry plants and with below freezing temperatures predicted we have to protect those tender babies! Insulating blankets and crossed fingers, we'll just wait and see.......

Cauliflower Update

Success with the Styrofoam cups! Take a look at the picture and notice the row on the right was one of the rows covered (cauliflower from prior video) and the one on the left is broccoli that we didn't cover.

Our first attempt at protecting Round #1 of transplants failed (see the Remay blankets frozen stiff in between the rows). After the wire tunnels collapsed we made a second attempt late Monday afternoon to cover as many babies as we could (1,000) with Styrofoam cups .... mostly cauliflower and a few broccoli (do you hear the sleet in the video?). As our son put it, "Mommy, I really hope people like cauliflower because this is a lot of hard work!" He's learning early the true meaning of labor of love!

Water Wheel Transplanting

What an amazing implement! Before we borrowed this from Grace at A&T State University we just crawled around on our hands and knees and planted one plant at a time. Talk about a time saver!! Now we can plant about 30 flats (48 plants each flat) in half a day. My apologies if it's a little dizzying to watch, but it was quite a feat to record a video and keep up my side of transplanting.

It's hard to believe that we are on Week 12 of 16 for the Spring/Summer CSA shares!  We thank everyone who has participated in the first season of the year.  Our second season of shares will begin the week of August 18th. This season will include produce such as tomatoes, red okra, eggplant, colored bell peppers, sweet potatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, collards, kale, summer/winter squash, beets, carrots, pie pumpkins, muscadine grapes, and more!

We have also added a third pickup location in addition to the farm on Monday evenings and the Greensboro Farmer's Curb Market on Saturday mornings. We are available at New Garden Nursery on Lawndale on Thursday's from 9-1 as well.

If you would like to participate in this 10 week share, just download the application from the link below and mail payment by August 1st. Please let us know if have any questions.


                               Farlow Farm Summer/Fall 2013 CSA Application

Planting sweet potato slips

Thanks to craigslist we were able to find an old tobacco setter last fall that works absolutely perfect for setting our bare root sweet potato slips. As long as you didn't get the giggles, setting the slips were a breeze!  With 4,000 planted, we'll need lots of help around mid-September to harvest!

Sweet potatoes here we come

So last year we thought we had lost our minds planting 1,000 sweet potato slips. Well, this year we decided to quadruple that. Yes, that's right, we'll be planting 4,000 slips next week! We are quite looking forward to using a new implement that we bought this winter as opposed to crawling on our hands and knees to plant like last summer. It's an old 2-person tobacco setter. Stay tuned for pics/videos.

Russell bedding up hills for the sweet potato slips.