News!  News!  Our first day at Kenilworth Market this coming Tuesday!  Strawberries, lettuce, and spring onions join our current products!  Just one week 'till Harbor East and the brand new Greenspring Station Market!  Plus, round out your garden with our leftover tomato plants in four inch pots - including yummy heirloom varieties!  Exciting week, eh?

Schedule

• Sunday - Greenbelt Farmers Market 10am-2pm
• Tuesday - Kenilworth Farmers Market 3:30-6:30pm
  
• Wednesday - Wakefield Park Farmers Market 2pm-6pm
  

Market Produce

• Apples - Golden Delicious, Cameo, Granny Smith, and Rome Beauty are all remaining crisp and tasty
• Strawberries - Spruce up that morning cereal, make a shortcake, make a pie, eat 'em right out of the box - it's all good!
  
• Asparagus - likely the last week
  
• Rhubarb
• Lettuce - our first-ever heads of Romaine, Buttercrunch, and the really pretty and delicious Red Leaf!
• Spring Onions - kick it up a notch!
  
• Herb Plants - Genovese Basil and Parsely "Gigante di Napoli" from imported Italian seed, 4" pots - supplies are limited
• Tomato Plants - what's left after our planting - many varieties to choose from
  
• Homestyle Apple Sauce
  
• Canned Peaches - continue to be popular
  
• Apple Butter - 3 kinds
  
• Pear Butter - with/without sugar

The Trap Is Set!

Exciting times around Three Springs Fruit Farm.  Our early crops are coming on right in time for our first full week of markets!  Saturday market fans have only one week to wait until the freshness returns to your neighborhood!

In another preview of an upcoming webpage about growing practices, I wanted to take a little time to talk trapping to the throngs (if you pardon my illeteration).  Trapping is the main thrust of our scouting program here at Three Springs Fruit Farm.  We have approximately 80 traps that I personally check every week to monitor the population of eight different species of pests.  Checking these every week insures that we know what's in our orchard so we can set our management plan based on what we know is there, not merely on some kind of guess.  So when we say we only spray when we have to, its based not on some calendar - its based on what we know is in our orchards, not only in our traps but in what I find on the slow drive between all of our trap sites.

Here's a picture of one of these insect traps.  The same pheromones used in mating disruption are used to lure males into these triangular contraptions.  Not pictured is a sticky piece of paper on the floor to glue them to the spot until I arrive to count them and scrape them off.  As noted in the writing on the inside of the trap, this trap will catch Oriental Fruit Moth (OFM) and Lesser Apple Worm (LAW) in the same trap.  These counts are put into a spreadsheet and reviewed by Dad, Uncle John, and I to decide what, if anything, we need to control and how best to do it.  An example of the graphs these spreadsheets generate is also pictured.

Codling Moth (CM) fly high in the tree, so when my cousin Greg Wenk (John's son) helps me put them out, we have to put them on poles and hang them at the tops of our trees (pictured).

Just another way we limit our sprays at Three Springs!

From Our Farm to Your Home,

Farmer Ben

We're getting close to having some new stuff for everybody!  Spring onions and lettuce are going to be really close to being ready this weekend, be sure to check our current products page for the most up-to-date product listing.  We have also fielded a lot of questions about CA storage of apples, so I got a little in depth with the subject on our blog, if you wanted to learn more about this valuable innovation.

Schedule

• Sunday - Greenbelt Farmers Market 10am-2pm
• Sunday - Headhouse Farmers Market 10am-2pm
  
• Wednesday - Wakefield Park Farmers Market 2pm-6pm
  

Market Produce

• Apples - Golden Delicious, Cameo, Granny Smith, and Rome Beauty - Empire are expired!
  
• Asparagus
• Herb Plants - Genovese Basil and Parsely "Gigante di Napoli" from imported Italian seed, 4" pots
• Homestyle Apple Sauce
  
• Canned Peaches - continue to be popular
  
• Apple Butter - 3 kinds
  
• Pear Butter - with/without sugar

Planty, Planty, Planty!

Planting season has peaked and we're head and shoulders on the other side of it!  Whew!  100% of your favorite 3Springs tomatoes are in the ground, meaning a few of our leftovers should be arriving to our stand in 4" pots in the near future.  Peppers, eggplant, okra (new), melons, squash, and cucumbers the same (the latter after a whole year's hiatus)!  We're also rapidly getting our apples thinned off to insure good cropping for this year and next.  It's been a very busy week to say the least!

I know most folks are swamped with email these days, myself included.  This being said, I certainly appreciate you reading our contributions to your inbox!  It would have been easy to just mark it read and move on, so thanks for taking the time.  I do want to take the opportunity to point out that many of our markets to have email listservs as well, and I found a few of them to be particularly good this week. 

Both Greenbelt Farmers Market and The Food Trust in Philly came out with email updates this week with not only good information about the market, but also with nifty recipes!  While our recipe selection is sparse at the moment, Greenbelt had this offering for those wondering how to prepare rhubarb - this Balsamic Rhubarb Compote sounded yummy.  The information is good for us to have before we arrive and I'd wager it'd be the same for you as well.  So check 'em out, see if you find them helpful - signup at these market websites:

Greenbelt

Harbor East

Headhouse (Philly)

From Our Farm to Your Home,

Farmer Ben

It's no secret.  The best apples you'll ever have will be eaten in season, picked just before their arrival at your favorite farmers market.  While your appetite and enthusiasm for apples might not be as seasonal as the crop itself, don't worry!  Research has led us to a great discovery in Post Harvest Technology that will maintain a respectable level of crispness nearly the whole year round!  This crispness is achieved through Controlled Atmosphere (CA) storage.

Controlled Atmosphere, or CA storage is used all over the country to improve the shelf life of fresh apples.  Apples, as you know, can continue ripening after they're picked from the tree.  They absorb oxygen through their lenticils (little dots on their skin) and release carbon dioxide as they convert their starches to sugars.  "Natural Air" cold storages are kept at 33-35 degrees Fahrenheit with approximately the same atmosphere as the air we breathe.  CA storages are kept at a similar temperature but the atmosphere is altered to remove all but 1 to 2 percent Oxygen when it would normally be 21%.  This keeps the fruits from respirating and maintains crispness.

So if respiration is converting startches to sugars, maybe I want a sweeter apple?  Let it go - don't mess with it!  To the contrary, you want those sugars to be put there by the tree!  When the apple loses starch, that's when you end up with those dreaded mushy, mealy apples that, much to our chagrin, commonly end up on grocery store shelves.  The answer to this problem is simple (and you know it already): Buy Local!  You may not always find Three Springs Fruit Farm apples in the cold winter months, but you can always find Eastern apples!  I'm betting you'll taste the difference!

Some Historical Perspective

For your own amusement, below are a few pictures of how apples used to be stored before they were processed into juices and sauces.  We have no dates for these photos, but our estimates would be the late 1930's and early 1940's.

The fruit would be picked into crates, stacked, and heaped up.

The fruit was piled up between the makeshift walls you see above.

Corn stalks were added as insulation.   They would trap the cool evening air underneath and keep the apples cool... "back in the day"

And when you were done, this is what a cold storage looked like at the start of the 1940's!

And when you have all of the apples stored, you jump into your dandy automobile and head home for supper (as opposed to dinner).  This picture added to give an indication of what year we're looking at.

Hello again, and welcome to another edition of our weekly produce updates.  News from the farm is up and down this week as the rains held up long enough to get the last of the apples trees in,  but only half of the tomatoes and other veggies.  It's also slowing our progress in placing our mating disruption ties in the peaches and apples.  First week of Greenbelt market this week!  Our selection is virtually the same for another week.

Schedule

• Sunday - Headhouse, Philly 10am-2pm
• Sunday - Greenbelt Farmer's Market, 10am-2pm
  
• Wednesday - Wakefield Park, Annandale, VA 2pm-6pm

Market Produce

• Apples - Golden Delicious, Cameo, Granny Smith, Rome Beauty, and Empire.  Empire are nearly gone!
  
• Asparagus
• Herb Plants - Genovese Basil and Parsely "Gigante di Napoli" from imported Italian seed, 4" pots
• Homestyle Apple Sauce - Quickly becoming a favorite.  It's your local, farm fresh babyfood option.
  
• Canned Peaches - Our "No Sugar Added" supplies are exhausted but we might be getting some reinforcements labeled.
  
• Apple Butter - 3 kinds, No Sugar with Spice outpacing the rest
  
• Pear Butter - with/without sugar

Pheromone Mating Disruption and You!

Before you get too excited, I'm not getting personal - I'm talking sustainable orcharding here!  Pheromone Mating Disruption is an innovation we use to limit our sprays on your fruit.

The rain that's trickling down our window pane here at Three Springs Fruit Farm "HQ" is, so many times, a blessing and a curse, as I alluded to at the beginning of this email.  Whereas Western growers in arid areas like California and Washington's Yakima Valley have to pay for water rights to irrigate their crops, we come by the majority of our irrigation naturally and on the cheap.  However, that irrigation water never touches any fruit or foliage in Western orchards and our is routinely drenched.  Every drop that moistens the leaves and fruits creates an environment for many ubiquitous pathogens.  This is why organic agriculture is so difficult here in the East. 

Luckily for everyone, fruit tree research has given us a great tool to help control insects without sprays.  Imagine for a moment you're a attractive, single male Oriental Fruit Moth trying to find some female accompaniment - maybe start a family.  Now imagine you stroll into a bar where you know available females can be found and you find yourself surrounded by them... but you can't see them!

This (sort of) is how Pheromone Mating Disruption works.  We buy tens of thousands of ties - they look like plastic pipe cleaners or tags (pictures forthcoming when it's sunny).  These pheromone ties emit the insect's pheromone for a period of 100-150 days, approximately.  We place these ties in our orchard to create the illlusion that tens of thousands of available females populate the area.  When the males seeks the females out, these ties send him on a confusing "wild goose chase" of sorts and mating is successfully disrupted!

Here at Three Springs, Mating Disruption is a key component of our IPM program.  We've had some form of mating disruption on our farm for over 5 years now and we're currently disrupting 100% of our peaches and nearly 90% of our apples, covering four harmful insect species (we don't know ties exist for more species than that).

Again, stay tuned for pictures of pheromone ties and our crew placing them once tomatoes are planted and the sun is shining.  We like mating disruption too much to take bad pictures of it in cloudy weather!

From Our Farm to Your Home,

Farmer Ben

P.S.  Congratulations to my sister Rachel who graduates Saturday from Penn State with a degree in Classical and Medieval Studies!  She always was a better student than I was and she deserves a lot of credit for all her hard work.

Hello again from 3Springs.  We're back in action for week two of the market season.  It's looking like more of the same in terms of our offerings.  We'll soon be adding our first-ever crop of rhubarb and tomato plants to our mix, so keep a heads up for that.  It's looking like planting week around the Three Springs veggie patch - I'm hoping to make a blog entry out of the event.  We're also busy putting up insect traps and pheromone ties this week - I'm trying to document these events as well so I can demonstrate how it makes our produce unique, so heads up on that.  Also, ask for a sample this week - we're planning on doing much more sampling as the year goes on.  Don't be shy - have as many samples as you like!

Schedule

• Sunday - Headhouse, Philly 10am-2pm
• Wednesday - Wakefield Park, Annandale, VA 2pm-6pm

Market Produce

• Apples - Golden Delicious, Cameo, Granny Smith, Rome Beauty, and Empire from last year
• Asparagus
• Herb Plants - Genovese Basil and Parsely "Gigante di Napoli" from imported Italian seed, 4" pots
• Homestyle Apple Sauce - Seek out a sample of this stuff at your market this week
  
• Canned Peaches - The "No Sugar Added" is nearly gone.  See, I wasn't bluffing!
  
• Apple Butter - 3 kinds
• Pear Butter - with/without sugar

Mom's Day!

We're excited to celebrate Mother's Day with all the mothers reading this in addition to all who should happen by our stand this Sunday.  And if you do wear proudly the title of mother, ask for your free apple in observation of Mother's Day and all mothers do for all of us.  I'm fortunate enough to be spending all day Sunday with my mother and I certainly appreciate all she continues to do in my life, not the least of which is help me with my Farmers Market pursuits.  Thank you, mom!

I had a good time playing a little music with Cowmuddy last week.  I'd anticipated a lot more "jam time" when I saw the rains were imminent, but we ending up being very busy - so thanks for braving the rain.  We're looking forward to our "Grand Sunny Opening" this week at Headhouse.  And here's hoping the skies are equally sunny the rest of the week - especially Wednesday for Wakefield.

From Our Farm to Your Home,

Farmer Ben

PS, since I had a word about music... I'm really enjoying The Avett Brothers Emotionalism cd and highly recommend it!

Greetings, locavores!

Its with both trepidation and anticipation that I blog my first entry at our new website!  Not only has the website come along nicely, but so also has a number of other things around the farm.  Meanwhile, we're preparing to attend a few May markets for the first time and, in light of these things, I'm getting awfully nervous about this crop season... but then again, if things always went as planned, I wouldn't have chosen this dynamic, frustrating, unpredicatable line of work in the first place!

The good news - lots of new things happening around here!  Specific to what you can expect to see at these early markets, we have lettuce, broccoli, and radishes we're gonna try to have early for all of you.  These should be ready to plant out next week or the week after (more on this later).  So that's good!  Our first-ever batch of Three Springs Homemade Apple Sauce turned out very well!  In a more broad sense, as you've likely noticed by now, the website, while not complete, has progressed to the point where it feels like "ours" now!  That feels good too.  We've also been busy planting with so much more to come - the 2009 half of our exciting, progressive sweet cherry planting is in the ground!  We have plenty of new apple varieties (old apple varieties but new trees, in some cases), plus plenty more peaches and blueberries all on the docket for our spring planting schedule.

Which leads right into the trepidation!  We certainly needed the rains over the weekend and we were fortunate enough to miss the nasty stuff.  Now, if fortune could smile on us once more, we'd get the 10 days of sun required to take the edge off my worried mind in consideration of all those things above that we've yet to plant.  Right now, the near future is pretty wet, so we'll have to play it by ear.

The countdown is ON!  Here's when you can expect us where to start the season!  The next time you hear from me, it'll be our first "Fresh From Our Farm" update of the season!

From Our Farm To Your Home,

Farmer Ben

OPENING DATES (see also, our calendar):

May 2nd - *brand new* Lutherville, MD Market!  Corner of Joppa and Falls, 2:30 - 6pm
May 3rd - Headhouse
May 3rd - Greenbelt
May 6th - Wakefield Park
June 6th - Harbor East
June 9th - Kenilworth