From the Fields - Mike Reeske

By Mike Reeske, San Diego County farmer 

We’re planting flats of tomatoes and chilis from seed to plant in another two months. Both of those will go into a greenhouse. We hope to have a very productive season. Last year was really good, particularly the chili, which is called Peachadew. It has the heat of a jalapeño and the sweetness and the flavor of a peach, which is very unusual. We’ll be preparing smoked Peachadew jam from last year’s harvest.

We’ve been doing a demonstration project for San Diego County on what wheat varieties will grow in this area. That started a year ago with a wheat that was chosen for productivity. It’s called Jammu, which is an heirloom wheat from India. We’re raising these varieties as dry-farm wheat. We can do that because of the climate here. Last year’s production was pretty good. The intention is for San Diego artisan bakers and breweries (to use them). We have two sourdough bakers that have already made bread from the wheat. There used to be a lot of wheat grown in San Diego County but no longer (because of) land values and cost of irrigation water.

We’re going through last year’s beans and picking out the seeds for this year’s crops. We’re cleaning beans—all done by hand—and getting those things ready to grow. We’re planting some new varieties that we’ve developed from some of the older ones to see how they work. In another month or two, we’ll be making the rows to plant beans. The field is being cultivated. We had a really bad year last year because we had close to 23 inches of rain. The weeds were just incredible. It affected our yields. This is an organic farm, so we don’t use any chemical weed killers. The big thing in growing beans is getting ahead of the weeds, so the beans will shade out the weeds.