Skip links

Tiny Farm Blog

A day-to-day journal – growing local food with two acres and some tools...!

Header Right

Archives for May 2007

Set to explode

Leave a Comment

Onions, carrots, garlic

There are many particularly exciting points during the growing season, and this is one of ’em! We’re on the third plantings for some crops, things are emerging everywhere, and some plantings are just getting ready to put on serious growth towards maturity and harvest. In other words, the field is getting ready to explode with veggies. This happens several times during the year, in different sections, with different plantings and crops, but the first time is right across the field and always a thrill. For me, it still seems like kind of a miracle when all those tiny seeds and plans and energy actually turn into…the new Veggie Garden! Here, green onions (in the faint furrows) and carrots under burlap are recent second plantings (yesterday), and the garlic is starting to shoot up on the way to tasty garlic scapes in June…

Evening harvest

Leave a Comment

Evening harvest
In the greenhouse, harvesting in the first and last couple of hours of the day is the only way to ensure tasty salad greens. Daytime harvest is near futile, as the leaves go limp and require serious rehydration. In the chilly evening weather, plants perk up, and it’s all right as rain! Here, cutting greens in the evening before market means clearing the arugula that bolted during the week and rapidly buried the lettuce. Out of arugula chaos comes delicious, garden-fresh salad mix! (On the tomato front, yesterday’s field transplants did well, only a few leaf burns where they touched the cover, this despite quite a hard frost. That’s good.)

Tomatoes go in

1 Comment

Transplanting tomatoes

The first of the tender, warm season transplants—tomatoes—hit the field today! About 175 seedlings went in: Juliet, Striped German, Stupice, Emerald Evergreen, Mule Team, Yellow Stuffer. On the transplant team: Conall, Sherry and, new to the season’s crew, Jo. Compared to doing transplants alone or with one other person (my experience so far), this was quite the operation. Teamwork!

Juggling the weather and part-timer scheduling, I took a bit of a risk transplanting today, with patchy frost forecast for tonight. Still, the plants have been through highs and lows in the greenhouse, row cover will help, and tomatoes have…never let me down. I’ll be up at dawn to see how it went. Everything’s a gamble!

Spring rain

1 Comment

Spring rain

Finally, not a moment too soon, 40mm (1.6″) of gentle rain over the last day and a half, with likely a little more to come. Slow and intermittent is best for soaking in. This is great. Things were starting to get really dry: over the last week, I had to fire up the pond pump and (inefficient!) sprinklers to help along the just emerging and newly seeded beds. Now, we’re good for better than a week, for some of the crops at this stage, even two (the clay-loam is great at holding moisture). Some days, gloomy is good!

More hands on deck

1 Comment

All-new organic grower returns

Conall, the all-new organic grower, is back after being unexpectedly called away two and a half weeks ago. That happened after we’d worked together for seven days straight. For me, making the transition from essentially solo tiny farming to having regular help was that quick. Having everything bouncing around in your head, with little need to explain it, is a luxury and efficiency of sorts. On the other hand, if you have people who you can sync with, sharing the gardening in an ongoing way seems like even more fun. And you can grow MORE STUFF with LESS WEEDS!! :) It’s a really welcome return. FREAK FROST: Three nights ago, according to the min/max thermometer, the temperature bottomed at a little below 0°C (and there was no reported cold snap or hard killing frost), but some of the brassicas (Brussels sprouts—see the whitish spots on the leaves on the right of the pic, bok choi, cauliflower) and two out of three varieties of peas got fairly toasted, burnt by the cold. Many of the pea leaves were totally killed off. I only noticed the extent of the brassica damage when we took off the row cover today. This is something I’ve never seen, and Bob, with 40 years of farming, hadn’t either, especially with peas, which can grow in the snow. The additionally odd thing is that some varieties (one of the peas, broccoli) weren’t affected at all. These are all plants that can normally take an overnight freezing and bounce back no problem—temperatures around zero should be nothing. Weird. My random theory: a very rapid temperature drop, many degrees in a few minutes, that didn’t give the plants enough time to adjust…? Anyhow, everything’s recovering just fine! The crazy weather effects continue…

More seedlings to the greenhouse

1 Comment

More seedlings to the greenhouse

The spring seedling starting days are rapidly winding up. Moved about half of the remaining trays from the Milkhouse to the greenhouse, including most of the experimentally late-started tomatoes. Based on the marginally useful long-range weather forecast, I’m aiming to begin the main field transplants around the end of this week…