Spring has turned out pretty well, although, as always, the weather has produced a few surprises. It is almost December, the official start of Summer, and still the mornings are often cool, and still we await rainfall in decent amounts. The hot, wet weather will come. Of that you can be assured. So, we might as well enjoy our mild entry to summer 2012-2013. We can also count the benefits. The pleasantly mild, if dry, Spring has brought us an extraordinarily good harvest of squash, zucchini, tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers. To come in the next week or two, we should also enjoy a bumper harvest of sweet, sweet corn.
The downside of the dry entry into Summer is that cultivation has been difficult, and the greens are not growing so well. The weekend showers will provide some relief, but we would like further and more substantial rainfall soon to avoid further problems.
Out on the farm, we are now planting leaf crops in our North
Field. There are some rows of carrots still to be harvested. However, the 100 rows in this field are almost entirely empty, ready and awaiting some new seeds or seedlings.
Meanwhile, in the South Field we have rotated from leaf crops to fruit and root crops, such as zucchini, squash, carrots, radish, capsicum, eggplant, okra and sweet corn.
Such rotations help us keep improving our soil fertility while producing, because different types of crops take different nutrients from the soil and, on the other side, put different nutrients back into the soil. The diversity effect of rotations also has beneficial effects on building a diverse range of living organisms in the soil, which is the key to building fertility.
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