Hey all here are some photos of what you can expect to see and buy at the market on April 25th at Wise hall. We have our sought after salad mix and spinach and have a new addition of fresh greens this week with our romaine, red leaf, green leaf and head lettuces. You can still buy our famous eggs, fantastic dried fruit, apples, walnuts, no sugar jams, and our fabulous apple juice.
We have lined up six new apprentices for this season. We are very excited to have the opportunity to have them on are farm this season and to share our knowledge with them. One is starting next week just in time to get the onions transplanted in the fields another starts in two weeks and the other four start around May 1st.
We have been very busy getting the hole dug for our apprentice building. Unfortunately the cold weather has slowed this project down! We now have the footings poured and the foundation walls are being poured today. We had hoped to have this building up this year for our apprentices. It looks like we will have our apprentices living in our house with our family till the building is done.
Kevin and Ron have been doing the donting task of getting the orchard pruned, the apples, cherries, nectarines, and grapes are done and they have now started on the peaches.
The children have been on spring brake this past week and it was time to get them out of the house!!! So we have been picking up the pruning’s and putting them in to piles at the ends of the rows so that we can get them chipped. We use the wood chips as bedding for our chickens and mulch in our herb garden. Believe me it is not all work and no play for the children they have had many of sword fights, races, breaks and many trips with our apples to the drier to get our apple chips made.
The greenhouse has been planted with salad greens, broccoli, lettuce, spinach and basil. The first pick on the salad greens will be on Friday, so be sure to get to the market this weekend and get your hands on some of the first salad greens of the season!!! We have also been busy getting all our peppers seeded and germinated.
Our farm has grown from 5 acres with 4 acres in tree fruit to 40 acres with 18 acres of tree fruit. This means that there is a lot more pruning to be done. Kevin and Ron have been making their way through pruning the apples, it is very cold and there is still snow on the ground. Winter is the best time to prune apple trees. During December, January and February, trees are dormant and aren’t using their energy to grow and reproduce. We take advantage of this annual “downtime” to shape and trim our trees. Here is a picture of Kevin pruning the Mutsu trees.
Between pruning trees and getting the farm reorganized for the spring Kevin is kept very busy. The greenhouses all needed repairs before getting them going again and just a good cleaning had to be done in the packing shed. We always look forward to the downtime in the winter but still like getting outside in the fresh air to do the things on the “to do” list. Lots of little things that don’t seem to get done during our busy season.
This winter we have been sorting apples, lots of apples. We sort our apples into four different sizes. Extra large apples for drying and making those incredibly healthy delicious apple chips, large apples for selling loose, medium to small apples for bagging and those extra small and not so perfect apples for making our divine apple juice.
We have been working our way through all that fruit we froze last summer for making our delicious fruity sugar free jams.
What is happening at Klippers Organics at this time of year?
I am always happy to have a helping hand in the greenhouse. This morning our 4 year old son Landen decided that I needed a cat to help me in the greenhouse. So off he went to his dress up box and got dressed up as a cat. This little kitty cat helped by putting the inserts in the trays and filling them with the soil mix.
The onions have been seeded and have popped up out of the soil. A fine sight to see, the first new on-farm veggie greenery of the season!
They have grown it to strong onion starts! Ready for their first hair cut!!
If you had a chance to make it down to the Winter Market on the 14th of February I hope that you picked up some of our fresh cut onion greens. If not we will have more at the next market on the 28th of February. These onion greens have a mild sweet fresh onion flavor. They are an amazing addition to an omelet made with Klippers Organics fresh free range certified organic eggs. You could add to a tomato soup made with Klippers Organics fresh frozen vine ripened heirloom tomatoes make sure you garnish the top with a few onion greens a true culinary delight. Add these onion greens to your salads to dazzle your taste buds. These are just a few suggestions, the ways that these onion greens can be used is endless. Have fun with them, their season is short!!!
These onions will be transplanted to the fields in late March and April…
So many things are going on at once—seed starting while working on our B&B, pruning the apples, and raising our young children.
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