May 6, 2009: Our strawberries are doing well. They are yielding good, have nice size and shape, and have an excellent taste. U-Pick is now available Monday through Saturday. If you plan to pick a bunch, Mondays and the early part of the week are definitely the best times as it only takes a few minutes to pick a gallon since the berries are so plentiful (we don't pick on Sundays). Our squash should actually begin to produce in less than a week now. This will be the earliest in the year we have ever picked squash by far. Our tomatoes and peaches look good and did manage to survive the chilly temperatures. We should have our own tomatoes and peaches by around the middle of June.

We are excited to announce that Earth Fare in Rock Hill is now carrying our strawberries. Also, each Saturday we are now selling at the Charlotte Regional Farmer's Market. Please take a look at our Announcements page for more news from the farm.

We have finished planting our cotton for the 2009 season. Much of it has germinated and the rains we are getting this week will certainly help the young cotton. All of our produce is under irrigation but none of our grains or cotton can be irrigated.

April 19, 2009: Our produce stand, The Market at Cotton Hills Farm, is now open! Our hours are 9AM to 7PM, Monday through Saturday. U-Pick will begin sometime next week depending on the weather and how fast the berries continue to ripen. Please call The Market for details, 803.581.4545.

As expected, things on the farm are busy. This time of year we are trying our best to get everything planted. Many of our crops are planted several times throughout the year in an effort to stagger maturity. Our cotton is planted just once. However whether we are trying to plant some or all of a crop, there is a great deal of planting to be done. Getting the seeds or plants in the ground in a timely manner is very important but also very difficult.

We are also still working on installing the irrigation for our new 25 acre peach orchard. It is important to provide sufficient water to the young trees. Despite the wet season that we have had so far, we know that the weather can change for the drier in only a matter of weeks.

April 2, 2009: It has been quite rainy the last few weeks. The rain has delayed us in being able to put our irrigation system in on our new peach orchard. The rain is making our wheat grow fast now and it is looking good.

Our strawberries are coming along well. It looks like they should begin to ripen by April 17th. We have decided to go ahead and open our store on that date. We will probably wait until April 22th to start U-Pick because there will probably not be many berries until then. We plan on picking up other produce such as tomatoes from the Columbia Farmer’s Market to sell at our store along with our fresh strawberries. Our strawberries should last well into June. After April 17th, feel free to call our store at 803.581.4545 if you have any questions. We will keep you posted on how the strawberries are doing.

March 16, 2009: Spring is near and things on the farm are really getting busy. We have spent the winter working on equipment, selling and delivering many of our crops such as our straw, pruning our current orchard, and planting a new 25 acre peach orchard. Before we planted any trees, we had to prepare the land and then using surveying instruments lay off the exact location of where each tree would go. It is important to plant peach trees in a place with good air ventilation in order to keep the blooms from being killed by frost. The 3,120 trees were first started by a nursery in Tennessee and then we planted each of them by hand using shovels. Later this month we plan to install irrigation on these new peach trees. If things go well, we should begin to pick peaches out of this orchard in the summer of 2011.

Our strawberries look good and we hope they will begin to ripen in about one month. We planted more this year than last and hope to have plenty for u-pick and we-pick. We plan to open The Market when our berries begin to ripen in mid-April. Please check back for the exact date.

Past Journals