Fruit Now Available to Order!

Just added to our online store, 4/30/20:

• Homegrown Apples

  • Empire

  • Premium Snap Dragon (limited quantities)

  • Premium RubyFrost (limited quatities)

• Locally Grown Potatoes

• Locally Grown Onions

• IQF (Individually Quick Frozen) Fruit

  • IQF Sweet Cherries

  • IQF Sour Cherries

  • IQF Blueberries

• Raw, Local Honey

Facebook Live Greenhouse Tour 4/28/20

Chad and Katelyn took us along on a greenhouse tour at lunch today, with facebook live! It was wonderful to see the greenhouse filled from one side to the other with gorgeous plants. We are so excited to start putting them in your hands, through our online store! May 1st is a big day!! All of our flowering annuals will be online by then. You can still watch the video of the tour anytime:

• 4/28/20 Facebook Live Greenhouse Tour

Since our greenhouse is closed to shoppers this Spring, we plan to share live tours pretty regularly. You’ll be able to see how the plants are doing, and exactly what a “Great Balls of Fire Merlot” geranium looks like (at least as well as a digital image can communicate). Do you have any requests? Let us know, and we’ll be sure to include it in one of our tours!

Helpful links:

• Online Store Helpful Tips

• Curbside Pickup or Drive-through Pickup - which one is best for you?

• Complete List of Vegetable Plants

• Complete List of Flowering Annuals

• Our Facebook Page, where we post photos, news, and occasional live walk-throughs of our greenhouse and market!

COVID-19 Adjustments, Spring is still blooming!

It’s impossible to know what the future holds, but for now we’re planning to take online orders through May, available for curbside pickup or drive-through pickup. Our market and greenhouse will not be open to shoppers until we feel it’s safe for our customers and employees. We are very excited to be able to bring you our plants and produce with minimal contact. Building a drive-through and moving our entire greenhouse inventory to our online store was no small feat!

We’re all dealing with new circumstances, and new challenges, and everyone at Kirby’s sends you a giant hug with every flower and berry we grow. <3

We plan to post weekly, or more frequent updates here, as a reliable place for current information. We don’t want to make you wait any longer than necessary for the first fresh, homegrown, fruits and vegetables!! So check back every Monday night to learn what’s new in the online store. Without further ado….

Available Now (4/27), Order in Our Online Store

• Vegetable Pre-orders - Until May 1st, you can order your vegetable plants in our online store, and we’ll set them aside for you. As of May 1st, you can choose which day of the week you would like to pickup, no earlier than two days after you order.

• Hanging Baskets are now available in our online store! The rest of our flowering annuals will be there by May 1st.

Here are some helpful links!

• Online Store Orders, Helpful Tips

• Curbside Pickup or Drive-through Pickup - which one is best for you?

• Complete List of Vegetable Plants

• Complete List of Flowering Annuals

• Our Facebook Page, where we post photos, news, and occasional live walk-throughs of our greenhouse and market!

Greenhouse Preview Soiree

Friday, April 26th, 7pm - 9pm

Join us for a celebration of Spring, and an evening of beautiful flowers, before we open the market for the season!

At our Spring Soiree we'll feature our favorite new annuals and perennials of the season, and highlight butterfly and bee attractors. Browse garden gifts and Spring decor in our market, and special displays in our greenhouse.

Light refreshments include Cider Punch, Cherry Dessert, Cheese and Fruit Board, Iced Tea, and Product Samples from the market. Door Prizes throughout the night will include a Hanging Basket, Perennial Trio, and Fruition Seeds Packets!

You're invited to tour the greenhouse with Tim Kirby, as he explains our IPM program! Did you know we put special insects to work for us in the greenhouse? Learn how certain beneficial insects help us control pests. Grower Tim Kirby will introduce you to our tiny friends, and explain how this ecosystem works. Tours begin at 7, 7:30, and 8.

We’re hoping to see lots of familiar faces to help us start off the new season, and plenty of new ones too!

Delicious September Produce

What's in season now? Read on!

New: Pumpkins, Cider, Gala Apples, Babygold, Cresthaven, and Gloria Peaches
Also in season: regular, plum, and cherry tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, sweet corn, plums, pluots, zucchini, kale, cucumbers, Zestar, Gingergold and Paula Red apples.

Call in your canning orders now! This is the week!

It would seem that Fall is really here! Today we got in the very first of our delicious apple cider, and yesterday the first truck load of pumpkins came in!. Locally grown concord grapes are starting out very slowly, but we will have them for several weeks. 

Early apple varieties that have been in the market for about a couple of weeks, (including Gingergold, Paula Red, and Zestar)  are now joined by Gala. This is the perfect apple for back to school, since it's small and sweet. 

This week is a week of abundance, with plenty of tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, sweet corn, and peaches. Call to place your orders for canning, this week is your safest bet! Next week the regular tomatoes will be fewer, but we'll have plenty of plum tomatoes for a while. 

We are now picking our last peach varieties as well:

• Babygold, a clingstone variety, is available in the market in small numbers, but can be picked to fill any order. Our favorite for canning! Their firm texture holds up well when canned, and you don't have to peel them. 
• Cresthaven is a nice all-around freestone peach that's great for baking, canning, and jam.
• Our third variety is Gloria, an unusual peach variety that doesn't get soft. But it's excellent for baking, retaining it's shape with a pleasantly tender pie texture. 

We also have a lot of plums, also known as prunes, which are great for canning, eating fresh, drying, baking, and roasting (my favorite).

Happy September!

The 2018 Farm to Table to Excellence Dinner

When: September 22nd
     5pm :  Cocktails, Live Music, and Wagonrides
     6:30 : Dinner is Served

Where: Kirby's Farm Market
Purchase tickets at Wegmans

Why: To raise funds for BEST, an organization that "enhances the Brockport Central School District’s goals of creating and expanding programs, activities and opportunities to help provide the BEST educational environment available for our students". And to enjoy good food in good company!

We are very excited to work with the BEST organization to put on another Farm to Table Dinner this year! In just two weeks, our hard working greenhouse will be transformed into a beautiful rustic-elegant dinner party setting.

There are so many reasons we love this event: working with the wonderful volunteers of BEST to benefit Brockport students; sharing the beauty of our farm with our community; and enjoying every moment of a first class dinner that features the fruits (and vegetables) of a season of hard work - are just the top three.

Read the menu below, you'll be excited too! (Small adjustments might be made to the between now and the event, depending on Mother Nature.)

Menu

• Assortment of New York State cheeses and fruits
• Charcuterie of artisan cured meats and salamis with marinated olives
• Crostini display with assortment of bruschetta, goat cheese with balsamic reduction,
• pickled vegetables with smoked Gouda cheese, Tomato with herbed ricotta
• Veggie crudités with a large assortment of fresh Kirby farms produce and veggie dips

Salad: Mixed greens with watermelon Carpaccio, candied pecans, feta cheese and a Riesling vinaigrette

Entre’: Beef Tenderloin (Robb’s Farms) with grilled peach chutney, llyonaise potatoes
tossed with caramelized onions and pancetta, broccoli au gratin

Vegetarian entree’: Quinoa stuffed Thai eggplant with roasted red pepper coulis and Balsamic reduction, on a bed of rice pilaf

Dessert: Apple Pie

Gold Sponsor Wegman’s Food
Catered by Garnishes Catering
Wine by Mahan’s
Craft Beer by The Stoneyard Brewing Company

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. 

2018 CSA Prices

A lot of thought goes into balancing the many aspects of our CSA. For example, our planting schedule (how many times we plan to grow each vegetable this season) is in the top three for trickiest balancing acts; for every fruit and vegetable we grow, someone hates it and someone loves it. Our CSA survey results always have "More kale!" followed closely by "Less kale!".

Taking up the number one "most challenging" spot is balancing the cost, value, and price of our CSA. We are all very aware of the rising costs of utilities, goods and services. It's just a fact of life. For the last several years we ignored this pesky fact, and kept our CSA shares at the same price, $15 per week for the Half Share, and $30 per week for the Full Share. This year, we had to face reality and increase our prices. After a detailed cost analysis, we are confident that we can maintain our CSA quality standards, and even add a little more produce to the boxes each week.

If you are a past CSA member, and you think that the price increase will be an obstacle for you, please contact us about work exchange opportunities. 

2018 CSA Share Prices

Full Share: $32 per week
    23 Week Season: $736

Half Share: $16 per week
    Regular 23 Week Season: $368

Quarter Share: $8 per week
    23 Week Season:  $184  

Chomper (Half Share, 4 weeks): $64
Nibbler (Half Share, 1 week): $16

Winter Fruit at Kirby's

By now, you've probably heard about our monthly Apple CSA Pickup Day in January, February, March and April.  (If you haven't, head on over here to learn the details!)  

This year we're also making our IQF Sour Cherries and Blueberries available. Stop by on the third Tuesday of each month, January 16th , February 20th, March 20th, April 17th .

If you're interested in Apples, be sure to place your order by the previous Friday! Email your name, order, and phone number to info@kirbysfm.com

Kirby's at Foodlink's Festival of Food

We had a lot of fun at our first ever food festival last night. There was so much amazing food to try, and so many people to meet. We're already looking forward to next year. Did you stop by our table? Let us know what you thought!

Our partnership with Grind's 122 Cafe was a great match. We brought bushels of fresh tomatoes, red peppers, peaches, and beets to the cafe and transformed them into Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup; Grind's Fresh Peach Scones; and Arugula Salad with Grapefruit Pickled Beets. What a great trio of flavors! And it's alway more fun to spend a few hours working in great company, so there was that, too. We're looking forward to future projects with our Brockport neighbors!

The tomato soup is my own creation, and I will happily share the recipe! It's super simple to make in my kitchen, but I have a few key ingredients in the pantry. Normally I take one quart jar of our own canned tomatoes, and a whole roasted red pepper from my freezer. Simmer, blend, and finish with a tablespoon of butter. So easy! To make the soup for the festival, we started from scratch, so here's the breakdown for you. If you stop in at Grind's Cafe today, I think you can have a cup already made for you!

Kirby's Tomato and Roasted Red Pepper Soup

3-4 pounds Kirbygrown, Regular Tomatoes
1 Roasted Red Pepper
1 tsp salt
2 Tbsp  Lemon Juice

1. Place the tomatoes in boiling water for a few minutes, until the skin cracks. Remove from boiling water and allow to cool until you can handle them. Then core and cut into chunks. 
2. Simmer tomatoes with the rest of the ingredients for at least 20 minutes.
3. Add 1 tablespoon of butter.
4. Puree with immersion blender or carefully in a regular blender. 
5. Garnish with a touch of sour cream, basil oil, or a Lemon Gem Marigold.

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!