West Star Farm Availability & Newsletter
Certified Organic by Midwest Organic Services Association - Grower # WI-G0084-99
We will start selling Vegetable, Herb, and Flower plants around mid-April. Check back then for our Availability.
West Star Organics Customers,
The peppers were seeded into 98 cell trays last week and placed into the germination chamber. Most of them started germinating in about 5 days so we covered the trays with clear plastic domes and placed them back out onto the greenhouse tables on heating mats to finish the germination. The ace variety of pepper was the first to geminate and are now nearly all germinated. We are still waiting on the bhut jolokia pepper. In addition to saving seed from the bhut jolokia plants last year, we also purchased seed from a company that ensures the most pure strain of the ghost pepper. The lavender plants that we purchased as organic plugs are starting to form flower buds so they should be flowering by next month. The lavender plants that were started from seed are growing fast so they too may be flowering in a couple of months. The mints are starting to put out runners in their pots. Sometimes those runners get into an adjacent pot making it difficult to pull the two pots apart so we continually cut off those roots to keep the mint plants in their own pots. One variety of mint was especially attractive to aphids last week. We were seeing more aphids than what the beneficial parasitic wasps could handle so we had to had to use an organic spray. This week we will release most of the beneficial wasps on those mint plants. Some aphids are necessary to provide food for the wasps to survive so hopefully the remaining aphids will help to enhance our population of wasps. The rosemary is growing quite fast so we have been continually trimming it. Trimming it causes it to get more bushy as opposed to just growing vertically. Nasturtium hanging planters were each planted with 4 nasturtiums and they have fully grown now to fill the planter. We would like to see them flowering by the end of next month. The petunias, pansy’s, impatiens, geraniums and other flowers are also filling the pots and have a nice dark green color. We are especially anxious to see the harlequin marigold and the night and day nasturtium flowers as they looked very nice from the pictures. West Star Farm customers who received our catalog will not see these flower plants listed in the catalog. We will however list them on our weekly availability list on Thursdays when we start sending it out next month. The first planting of the 5 varieties of basil has been transplanted into the 3 ˝” pots and some of them are 4” tall and have formed their third and forth sets of leaves. One new variety is Mrs. Burns lemon basil and it has a very distinctive lemon flavor. This week will be the first seeding of tomatoes. We will seed them in greenhouse #1, get them germinated, and then move them, and the peppers, into greenhouse #3. Greenhouse #3 is set up and ready except that it needs to be washed and sanitized which we will do this week. We will start making potting mix and moving it into that greenhouse for transplanting the vegetable plants which will start the week of March 14.
West Star Farm
