Nature never stops teaching + this is why we do.
Greetings from Fibonacci Farm! We wanted to check in and let you know what has been going on at the farm and offer some personal tidbits about why we have chosen this path in life.
May brought its challenges and taught us that we need to be more cautious and fastidious when it comes to cold weather snaps and the animal pests that pressure the farm. In May, we saw freezing temperatures on a few occasions. Each of those times presented us with a lesson about which of our plants in the field and the greenhouse couldn’t handle those changes in temperature. We lost a few trays of vegetables and flowers to frost. Similarly, we have lost countless veggies in the field to gophers and marmots. We are realizing that while there are some variables to cold snaps and pests that we can’t really change, we’ve definitely learned some valuable lessons about what works and what doesn’t to address them.
OK, OK, Alright! Just had to get that off our chests; now we can talk about some of the progress that we made in May and what we have to look forward to! We finally got our drip irrigation system set up in the field and pretty much have it dialed in to where we can water as much or as little of the field as need to. We’ve found that our pump, even with the attached filter, is powerful enough to water the entire field at once!
We reached a pretty big turning point in the season last week when we were finally able to plant out all of our tomatoes. We can already see some growth and it is looking like July tomatoes are upon us! We went ahead and planted some Genovese Basil in the tunnels with the tomatoes so that all we need to do now is walk down the aisles with a hunk of mozzarella cheese for the freshest Caprese in town.
We have begun the process of planting successions of all of our favorite flowers and now that our nights are getting warmer we can finally see them growing much quicker than they did in the greenhouse where they were born. We have begun to see the bees buzzing around our farm and we are pretty sure they are as excited for flowers as we are!
Because of the losses mentioned above, we decided to add microgreens to our market offerings! This is very exciting for us as we love microgreens and it gives us another way to bring some brassica sprouts that the marmots have no way of destroying. Now that we have an abundance of microgreens we have been using them in so many ways. Of course veggie sprouts can spruce up any sandwich or salad, but did you know that some of the heartier microgreens are excellent when cooked? Try adding some of our pea shoots to your next pasta dish to add a bit of earthy sweetness to the acidity of a red sauce. Try adding Sunflower microgreens to your next batch of braised greens to bring a slight nuttiness. Research comparing microgreens to more mature greens shows that they can contain nutrient levels up to 9 times more powerful than mature greens. Further, they contain a wider range of antioxidants than their mature counterparts.
If you’ve read our website you might have seen our motto; “Proudly promoting positive health and wellness to Central Oregon through food + flowers”. While catchy and cool, this motto also means a lot to us. 2020 was a bad year, tbh. For some more than others. Seeing and personally experiencing loss, trauma, depression and anxiety amongst ourselves and friends and family, made us realize we wanted to do something that would promote positive mental health and wellness. We wanted to express that mental health is as important as physical wellness. It can sometimes be treated as taboo to talk about, even amongst co-workers. It’s important that we take this seriously and listen to people who are in need. By offering flowers, this is a small gesture we can give our customers to show someone they love them, appreciate them, or care for them buy giving a beautiful bouquet of fragrant flowers.
As far as physical health goes, it kind of goes without saying that eating lots of organically grown veggies is one of the best things that you could do for yourself. One thing that often gets overlooked though is how much better homegrown or small farmed vegetables taste than their store-bought counterparts. We are putting every ounce of our energy and soul into Fibonacci Farm and every day we are so happy to be doing something so positive and we really hope that we can in turn bring positive health and wellness to you all in Central Oregon.
