Photo Updates: Then and Now

One cool perk of having this blog is that I can look back and see how much everything has grown since the beginning of the season.  In my blog about sowing our first seeds we saw this garlic picture.  Taken way back in mid-March.  

Now, 3 months later, the garlic are huge!  

We have been bringing fresh-pulled green garlic to the Farmers Market (and eating lots of it at home) and it is delicious.  We’ll likely pull the garlic around the 4^th of July and then we’ll start bringing traditional garlic that can be stored for months at a time (although I bet you’ll use it faster than that).  

The tomatoes that we planted several weeks ago (see blog here) have grown like crazy and are covered with green tomatoes.  If we can keep the birds and woodchucks out of them this should be a great tomato year.  I can’t wait to have my first BLT of the season!!!!

We planted small tomatoes a few weeks ago (read about it here)...

And they turned into big tomato plants with green tomatoes growing already!

Yum

I can't wait for them to ripen!  Stay away, crows!  These are mine!

The hop shoots that I blogged about in April (Hoppy April!)  had just emerged from the ground back in April.  

A small hop plant back in April...just starting to grow.

Now look at them!  The hops are a perennial rhizome and should grow better each year.  The saying goes, “In year 1 they sleep, in year 2 they creep, and in year 3 they leap!”  Well, these hops are only 2 years old, but I think that they are more than creeping!  Hopefully these cones will continue to develop and will give us a nice crop of fresh hops to use in our homebrewing.

Whoa!  That was fast!  These hops are looking good!

Tiny hop cones.  We'll use them to make Brittany Hollow Homebrew later in the year.

Finally, the potatoes.  We planted them back in April (read about it here), and now they are almost ready to eat!  The potato plants are HUGE and have just started to flower.  Supposedly, when the plants begin to flower it is safe to start “stealing” some potatoes from the sides of the hills.  We did this the other night and cooked a handful for dinner.  Those new potatoes were awesome.  They were sweet and smooth, and didn’t need to be peeled.  We are looking forward to bringing our first potatoes to the market in 2 weeks…just in time for 4^th of July potato salad (we make ours with red, white, and blue potatoes….don’t worry, I’ll post a picture).

A picture of me back on potato planting day in April.  Contemplating life perhaps.
Those seed potatoes are now almost ready to eat!

Baby red potatoes...so delicious!

Everything else on the farm is growing well, too.  If you drive past our U-Pick flower land on Rt. 9 just ¼ mile south of Hannaford, you’ll see that the cut flowers look great!  We should be opening the U-Pick sometime around 4^th of July.  Keep checking this blog and our facebook page (www.facebook.com/BrittanyHollowFarm) for updates!