Scott catches a beautiful sunrise on the farm. Photo by Scott David Gordon

We've been so busy picnic-ing, selling transplants, and featuring our incredible staff that it feels like we haven't checked you in with the JBG fields recently. We've been as busy as ever keeping the farm running, and Week 15 marked a notable shift in the tasks at hand on the farm. Here's what we've been up to this week...

One of the most noticeable shifts these days is that our spring transplanting frenzy is at it's end. It seems like the transplant crew has been going nonstop since the JBG greenhouses were bursting at the seams back in January. Now, those same greenhouses are all but empty and we've hit a little calm before the "storm" of summer crops is here. Before you know it, we're all going to be swimming in tomatoes, melons, peppers and more, but for now we're enjoy the spring season.

Look out for new potatoes, another crop we just started harvesting this week! Photo by Scott David Gordon

Some new crops will be making their appearance on our market tables and in your CSA boxes soon. We are starting to harvest our spring crop of cabbage this week - we'll have green, red, and savoy cabbage starting this weekend at markets. Our spring crop of broccoli is heading up as well! This is a CSA favorite, and members can look forward to full spring broccoli heads in their shares for the coming few weeks. The summer squash from our high tunnel continues to produce well, and we even saw the first few okra pods on our early spring crop coming out this week! Also check out the photos of our grape crop - we've been working hard to install irrigation, bamboo staking and trellising this week and the plants are really looking great.

Katie has been working hard on our grapes. Thanks, Katie! Photo by Scott David Gordon

Our new harvest trailers have really been exceeding my expectations - especially as some heavy crops start to come in. Even more than me, the JBG harvest crew has REALLY been loving these trailers!  Harvesting broccoli, squash, cucumbers, potatoes (and many more) heavy crops used to be a very laborious. The harvest crew would fill up bins of veggies moving down the rows - once these bins were full, they were carried to the end of the bed to put into the harvest trucks. This meant carrying bins that weigh anywhere from 20-60lb (or more!) up to 200 ft! Now you know why I'm always so impressed by the hard work and dedication of our farm staff. Now, once a bin is full, it's placed right onto the arm of the harvest trailer and brought in with the tractor. The engineer in me loves a tool that makes harvest more efficient, and the farmer in me loves that we are able to better care for JBG employees by significantly cutting out a lot of heavy lifting.

The arm of these harvest trailers cover 5 beds. We can now harvest right onto the trailer instead of carrying bins to the end of a row! Photo by Scott David Gordon

If you're interested to hear more about what's going on in the JBG fields, and how we developed ideas and systems for the farm, I hope you'll take some time to listen to a chat I had with Chris Blanchard of the Farmer to Farmer Podcast. I was honored that Chris asked me to come onto the show - we got to talk about everything from the nitty gritty of our farm's management, to challenges of growing year-round here in Central Texas, and even the story behind the JBG branding and logo. Thanks so much for having me, Chris, I really enjoyed it!