Weed gone to seed

With more people in the field this year, end-of-season clean-up is already well underway. Here, Midori, visiting after moving to France a couple of years back, removes weeds that’ve gone to seed from three older beds of mesclun that’re waiting to be tilled in.

Ideally, finished beds would be promptly mowed down, spread with compost, tilled, and then seeded with a new veggie or cover crop a week or two later. Things aren’t usually that efficient, finished beds sometimes sit for weeks, weeds pop up in the interim, and if they go to seed, have to be removed before tilling so as not to add more seed to what’s already there…

Lying around: the green plastic garden totes are quite useful once the handles have been properly reinforced with rivets; the old builder’s wheelbarrow comes in handy for rocks, fallen tomatoes and the like.

The grass in front, in need of mowing, is part of a wide path on one side of the greenhouse, the grass beyond is the magnificent oats green manure cover crop.

Oh, no frost last night, as you can see from the happy peppers at the top of the pic!

Tossing rocks

What better to do on a pleasantly cool and misty day in the market garden than some leisurely rock picking? It’s a relaxing if neverending task, often put off during the busier days of spring and summer, performed here by Heike. In the field, fist-size rocks push up every winter, get raked from the beds to the paths in spring, then get in the way of weeding all summer long. They’re a growing season harvest all their own, and picking is ongoing. The biggest, 10lb (4.5kg) and up, and quite rare, are set aside for anchoring row cover. The rest are collected in buckets, and taken by tiny tractor to a spot along a fence where I’m gathering quite a pile. Been thinking of building a low rock wall, but haven’t decided on a perfect spot—get it wrong, and it’d be kinda hard to move.

A September view…

A rather warm (28°C) and sunny Sunday, feels more like late spring than the early days of autumn. The field is looking oddly full, thanks to the sections of oats, and quite orderly. Specks in the distance, Heike from Germany (the red dot), our third WWOOFer of the season, weeds spinach, and to her right, Conall waters in another fall seeding of salad mix and spinach. A laid-back day on the farm…

Tiny farming down the road

Most of my last four years as a veggie grower have been spent on the farm, like, practically every day (this seems perfectly natural to me, although some wonder how I handle it—they just don’t know how absorbing it is and how much there is to do in and around a big garden!!). This year, with more people in the field, I’ve gotten out a bit. Today, as an extended field break, Conall and I headed a few miles down the road to visit a brand new tiny farming operation, Richard’s home veggie plot. Richard is a physician, taking what I’ve gathered is a fairly new view of nutrition. Over the last two years, he’s dropped by the stand at the farmers’ market to buy nice quantities of veggies (he juices) and we’ve had long chats every week, about growing stuff, food and health, and lots of farther ranging topics. This year, he started a veggie garden on his 100 acres of farmland and forest. It was all hand work and learning as you go. I felt connected from all the conversation, so it only made sense to check it out! The garden was started a little late in the season—Richard sees it as a trial run!—still, lots of tomatoes, summer squash, beets, carrots, potatoes, more. Besides my own TF efforts, this is the first time I’ve seen and heard about and commented on a substantial veggie garden start-up… Next year, he plans to more than double the area to over a quarter acre and go for a full-on effort to supply his own garden veggies. The people part of small farming continues to reveal itself to me!! Fun!

Japan to the field!

On her last day of a week that flew by, Mami, WWOOFing from Japan, works to rejuvenate a bed of Swiss chard battered by the drought. Despite a fairly formidable language barrier, there was much conversation and laughter about life, times, Hollywood movies, smoking laser printers, the apparently grave state of the world…the usual field chatting fare! For no one reason I can put a finger on, it was an energizing bit of cultural exchange, and a lot of extra fieldwork got done as well. Through this blog, tiny farming has become for me kinda…transnational, and Mami’s visit made that feeling even more real (the ClustrMap comes alive!). It’s really all about People in the Field!!

Roofing the stand

Screwing down a galvanized steel roof for the veggie stand

Finally got around to putting the roof on the farm stand. We recycled the old galvanized steel roofing that was replaced during the Milkhouse extension last fall. In the end, a quick job, three hours or so of matching pieces, handing them up one by one (watch the wind), and screwing ’em down. Luckily, there was very little cutting to do, sheets of old metal can be a real nightmare for slicing and gashing (working without gloves, I nicked a finger only once—every so often, it’s good to see a little bit of your own blood running red and true :). In the pic, I’m screwing things down while Bob selects sections. The farm stand is definitely not on course for the ambitious plans of earlier this season, but in good tiny farming fashion, it’s moving along! (Guest photo by Mami.)

Pigweeding and local food

Pulling pigweed

In the foreground, a pigweeding throwdown with the crew of the day: Eoghan and Alison (trying out a little tiny farming for the first time), Jo, Mami (our second WWOOFer, also from Japan), Conall. Everyone pull! (The most alarming giant pigweed specimens had already been ERADICATED by the time this photo was taken!) In the background, a house on the subdivision to the east of the garden field (it was severed from the farm years ago), home of our nearest CSA member. Their veggie farm for the season is literally a stone’s throw away—local food doesn’t get closer than that!