MAY AT LEWIS CREEK FARM

May is a great month on the farm. Perhaps it’s the brilliant green of the grass which seems so unique to spring. It’s very satisfying plowing down the cover crops which have held the soil and nutrients all winter. Winter rye is our most common cover crop and it grows incredibly rapidly during May. It can grow from 6 inches high to 30 inches high in one week. It’s important to plow it down before it gets too large or the large proportion of carbon in the larger plants will tie up all the nitrogen in the field and leave nothing for the vegetable crop.
The fields start really filling with crops in May. The potatoes are planted in late April or early May. We’ve been planting weekly plantings of spinach and beets since late April and the first few plantings of lettuce go out into the fields as well. Early to mid May we seed our first plantings of sweet corn at the same time the dairy farmers are planting their field corn. In late may when the dairy farmers start thinking about their first cutting of grass, we put out our cucumbers and tomatoes. We plant over 10,000 tomato plants! May is a chancy month with respect to frosts. Sometimes we’re OK as early as May 10th,
Hardening off plants from the greenhouse before the go out to the fields.

Plowing down a Rye and Hairy Vetch cover crop. This rye is a bit too large for my liking.
though most years we need to wait until the 20th or so. Still, May is always a risk because one year we had a frost on June 3rd.
Our Farmstand is open in May with tons of plants: Annual flowers, Perennials, Herbs and Vegetable Plants. All the plants are grown in our own greenhouses, and are the same plants we use for our own field crops. Check out the Visit the Farm page for directions on getting here.
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