Magicland Farms 2009 News

January 26, 2009

Well, its been a cold and snowy winter. While there have been low temperature records set in neighboring states, especially Illinois, we so far have been fortunate in that as cold as it has gotten at Pickerel Lake is -8F. The coldest it got at Magicland Farms was about -5 (estimated). When the lake is frozen it gets colder near the lake than at the farm on clear calm nights. When there is no ice it's warmer near the lake than at the farm. Why am I mentioning this? Well, peaches! Peaches, peaches, peaches! They don't like arctic cold! At a temperature of -14F the flower buds of the hardy varieties like Redhavens, start dying. At -20F all flower buds are gone and one is unlikely to even find one live tree come spring. Well it looks like so far so good this year! There still is February, though. A week of mild weather means that the -14F critical peach temperature will be higgher--perhaps even as high as 0F! While we try to plant hardy varieties--at least as hardy as Redhavens--few, if any, can take temperatures as low as -18F. But they are ooh so good! And customers just love them so we keep plantin' 'em. Our previous peach orchards were frozen out in 1984 and 1994. We are again into peaches and our (mostly) young trees should be increasing in the size of their crops. GO GLOBAL WARMING--ARE THE PEACH TREES SLOGAN! We might re-open in the spring, say in April, and put up for sale the apples we are storing in our new cooler. However, the crop was small last year, and the cooler is only about a quarter full. Though we won't have many for sale, the quality of the apples in April should be much better quality than other Aprils since the apples were in the cooler since shortly after picking.

February 17, 2009

Despite the forecast for more snow tomorrow, it's obvious spring is on the way. For one thing, the squirrels around here are getting frisky :). But more importantly, our early tomatoes and our onions are coming up in our indoor, flourescent "sun/light room." Another sign of spring--people are starting to ask us about our sweet corn. Well, we have ordered all our sweet corn seed and already have received about a quarter of it. My wife Annemarie has started a Magicland Farms Blog. Click here to go to our blog. This blog was designed by my daughter Catherine. She does a great job designing stuff on the web. Maybe some day I'll ask her to do this website to make it look professional.- Of course she already is super busy ...

February 24, 2009

Despite the fact that it really doesn't feel like spring is coming anytime soon, our onions are up and the first planting of peppers are poking above the potting soil. Also growing well our the tomatoes we planted that will be put in our high tunnel. (A high tunnel is simply a tall unheated greenhous.) We hope to plant them in there sometime alte in April and start picking in early to mid July.