Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

Shareholders coming to the farm this year are encouraged to harvest as much of their share as they feel like! Here, it’s sorting through mesclun and spinach on the screen table, removing bad leaves and the odd weed, before packing in their own bags. This approach is great fun all around, with me explaining what to do and helping out when needed. There are only a couple of on-farm pickups (most are at the farmers’ market), so this approach might be a little more personalized than if the number of shareholders was bigger. Regardless, this DIY approach is a tiny farm first that seems to work!

Rain, rain, go away… Not something you’d actually hear me say, or even think, lightly. This morning’s market didn’t quite qualify, although it rained heavily and steadily for the first three hours. Rain at the market has never been too bad for our stand, people always come out. Today, the stand set-up was still in fully compact mode, across two sawhorses instead of four, but there was a fair bit of veg, including the first 60lbs (27kg) of snap peas (Sugar Ann), around 40 broccoli, and a (relatively!) vast supply of all-lettuce mesclun, spinach (Spargo), garlic scapes (Music) and beet greens from assorted varieties. Enough to just make the minimum return from market needed at this time of year to keep this tiny farm ticking. By the end of the morning, all of the CSA pick-ups had picked up, and most of the veggies were sold out. Which is…good!

Michelle harvests the first broccoli from knee-deep in weeds. After taking off the row cover, it made more sense to wait a few days till harvest and then turn the whole bed under, than to spend precious fieldwork time weeding the paths—a race for the broccoli to beat the weeds before they went to seed…

Tiny farming has given me an extra appreciation for the color GREEN, in different shades, shapes, textures, combinations. Green on green. My favorite greenscape so far is probably row upon row of different varieties of bush beans, each with their own shade, deep and dark, to delicately lime-hued. Today’s small harvest of sage, oregano and flat-leaf parsley, stashed in a bucket of water and headed for small bundles in the CSA shares, had a great green look. The photo, especially at this size, doesn’t really capture the simple, entrancing effect, but I guess it’s the next best thing!

Libby’s first day on the farm: a full day in the field, plus a Big Salad lunch! There’ve been a few first-timer days this year, and a bit of a casual presentation routine has developed. Starts with a tour: “How much detail do you want?” The difference between growing more or less by hand, as we do here, and different degrees of tractor-based farming is probably the main point I try to get across. And then, it’s on to the fabulous WORK, a taste of the many tiny farming fieldwork pleasures. Today, Libby pulled weeds from carrot beds, on her own for a while, and then I joined in. Weeding carrots and tomatoes, hand-pulling and with the wheel hoe, setting up some home garden-type tomato cages, transplanting lettuce…the time flew by. Chatting is usually a big part of working in the field (with no noisy machines to get in the way): farming stuff, trading bits of personal history, and inevitably, it seems, some Bigger Topics. Today, the concept of MINDFULNESS came up and really stuck with me… And so, another fine day on the tiny farm. Libby seemed PRETTY HAPPY with it all. Cool. We’ll see her next week! :)

Barely a week after the arrival of the laying hens, egg production is in full swing, with about 20-21 eggs a day from 25 birds. From the start, all of the hens took to laying in one particular nest, I only occasionally find the stray egg elsewhere. They’re averaging about medium size, getting closer to large by the day (that’s the extent of my egg size terminology so far). Donated stacks of egg cartons are coming in from all directions. We’re surrounded by tasty little brown eggs…!

A solo weeding day for me. There’s lots of mostly PIGWEED, shooting up faster than the crops, loving the rain and bursts of heat, with or without sunshine. So, a photo of WEEDS, or a random, up-close look at…oregano? I went for the oregano, which is doing great after thinning the three-year-old patch earlier this year…

For the month of June, after Shannon, who’d been in the field just about every day in May, and while waiting for Lynn to start full-time for the rest of the season (July 1st!), I’ve been back working in solo mode, which has been, surprisingly to me, a little strange and…unfamiliar. Right now, there are several great people sharing the tiny farm experience (TFE ;) each week, but coming on single days. Here, with Lynn and Raechelle (Tuesdays!), we take an extended Endless Salad lunch break in the backyard. It’s as relaxed and fun as it looks. This, I think, is how it SHOULD BE, a laid back mix of fieldwork and practical leisure. It’s a lot different than the 10-12-hour, garden-obsessed days of the first 3-4 start-up years, when I worked largely alone. After working with Conall right through the season last year, I realized that my original solo mission, one-farmer-one-field mode had…changed. Evolved. To continue to grow on this tiny farm, it seems I’ve taken the path that needs not more production acreage or machinery or straight, head-down hours of labor, but simply more happily committed PEOPLE. Hmmm… Not a brand new discovery, but driven home over the last month. An interesting twist on tiny!

Spent the early morning harvesting a few CSA shares for a Monday drop-off. This is the first week of shares, and they’re still small, mainly greens… There are many tiny farming routines, things you’d probably never do in a bigger operation, that I find extremely relaxing and fun: the final rinsing and putting together of a handful of shares is one of them (it’s not really economical to separately harvest and drop off less than 10 shares or so, this is an…exception). There’s something deeply satisfying about this final post-harvest step, with the veggies together at their finest, the memory of the different quick individual harvests—picking, cutting, pulling—still fresh, that’s…cool! The spinach (above) was quickly dunked in cold well water to rinse off dirt splashed up from recent rain, then allowed to drip dry for a bit on the screen table.

Picked two types of beet greens, Golden Detroit and Scarlet Supreme. The stems are a little long on these—it all depends on the density of the rows, the weather, the harvest timing, leaf size is the luck of the draw since these are really thinnings, they’re not being grown just for the greens. Still young and tender, the baby beets and all can be cooked up, or the leaves used raw in salad (or as a salad!). Really tasty…

And mesclun, of course. This all-lettuce salad mix is a staple crop this year as usual, always on my mind! This cut’s nice and clean! Unrinsed—I let the morning dew dry off a bit on the screen table… More simple pleasures for the simple of mind! ;)