Sparkle is a strawberry variety that has superb flavor and sweetness, short shelf life, and small- to medium-sized berries. The short shelf life means that they are unsuitable for most marketing, but once they make it to the hands of the eater there’s little worry that any will be left around long enough to go bad.

Plants flower in April. Our first tend to ripen around the middle of May and they are usually done by early-to-mid June. We generally pick daily during the peak of production. We’ve found that protection from racoons is critical; a few low-strung lines of portable electric wire fence has worked for us.

The plants are rather difficult to manage because they runner aggressively, but produce plenty of material for expanded plantings. The biggest berries are produced on plants that are well spaced, a result that we’ve found is more easily achieved by establishing a new planting than by thinning an old one, which tends to fill itself in again quickly.

Gray treefrogs are relatively common amphibians at Chert Hollow Farm. We often hear their trill in the spring. They are hard to spot in the woods due to their excellent camouflage, but we often see them clinging to walls of farm buildings during the warm months of the year. We’re happy to have them around eating insects & other invertebrates.

Though it may look like a hot pepper, Jimmy Nardello’s Italian Pepper is actually a very sweet, flavorful pepper. The flesh is relatively thin. They’re great raw, cooked, or dried for later use. We quite often eat these straight off the plants in late summer when we’re hungry and need a snack. This is Eric’s favorite sweet pepper.

This is an open-pollinated, heirloom variety that the Slow Food organization has recognized as being exceptional by including it on the Ark of Taste list.

Organic seed source: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

Hornworms of the genus Manduca can be a major pest of tomato plants. Contrary to the claims of this Mother Earth News letter, hornworms can and do eat the fruit of tomato plants. Our hornworm population was happy to provide photographic opportunities to set the record straight, as we did here.

To minimize hornworm damage, we pick them off by hand and smush them with a boot. The trails of droppings are often the first sign that these well camouflaged moth larvae are present.

A relatively short, pointy variety that does well in heavy soils. Very sweet in cold weather (fall/winter harvests). Spring plantings also have good flavor. Our standard carrot.

Organic seed sources: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange; High Mowing Organic Seeds.

Rabbits deserve their reputation as enemies of vegetable growers.

We’ve seen populations vary over time at Chert Hollow Farm. They were minimally problematic during our first few years (to the extent that we didn’t even list them with other pesky mammals on our first organic certification form). But there was a population explosion during the summer of 2011. The 2011 spring peas grew with no protection from rabbits and an early summer edamame planting was fine, but they devoured late edamame plantings several times over and barely minded an electric line that we put up around the plantings for protection.