Spring is here, and so is our fickle weather!! Remember, your summer-loving plants are really not happy until nighttime temperatures remain at 50 and above. These true summer lovers include your tomatoes, peppers, and especially basil. If you are lucky enough to live in the warmer areas of the High Desert where your last freeze date has passed, feel free to direct seed (plant in the ground) your cucumbers, summer squash, radishes, carrots, and hardy herbs such as parsley, cilantro and especially dill (dill loves cooler temperatures).
Here at Moonstruck Farms, we were hit hard by those two weekend storms in April, with high winds and low temperatures bringing the wind chill easily down into the teens. This is when I really wish we were colder during the Winter and everything was still safe underground. All the plants that overwintered and stayed leafed out are now burned, such as our roses and irises. They are on the ugly side but are already recovering with the roses starting to bud (or were until this week’s cold snap), and the irises are blooming again. The last of the daffodils are peaking out, but we lost at least 1,000 tulips since they were just starting to bud, and that was just too tender a stage for even hardy tulips to survive a deep freeze like that. But onward and upward we go, and we are just grateful at this point that we were behind planting lilies. Lilies require cold to root, but if they had leafed out, that hard freeze would have killed the flower for the season. They are now going into crates, and the fields have been filled with bachelor buttons, marigolds, cosmos, rudbeckia, bee balm, and snapdragons. The sunflowers and zinnias are being seeded in transplant trays to go out in the next two weeks. We will be seeding sunflowers every week to have a beautiful selection of sunflowers all summer long in colors you have never seen before!!
The markets are undergoing their Springtime changes, with the Phelan Farmers Market now at 2 pm to 6 pm each Monday at 4128 Warbler Road in Phelan and the Wrightwood Farmers Market now at 4 pm to 7 pm in the Wrightwood Community Center parking lot. Remember, both markets are year-round markets, so simply move inside for the Winter. Thanks to our farms bringing produce from the Central Valley or Inland Empire, you will begin to see the beginnings of summer produce, and before we know it, it will be stone fruit season, starting with apricots and cherries!!
