Calling it scrap lumber doesn’t do any pile of spare wood justice. On the tiny farm, you always make space to accumulate someday useful stuff that elsewhere might get tossed. Waste not, want not! This collection of old fence boards, rough cut cedar planks, odds and ends of 2×4’s, and other bits will piece by piece have its day. Meanwhile, it needs to be moved to a more sheltered spot, raised off the ground, before the snow really comes in. Today seemed like a good day to do it…

In today’s mail, the first seed catalog of the season! They start arriving around this time every year, it’s always been EXCITING, and now is no different. What I said last year just about covers it once again. I strive to live in the moment and enjoy every day, but….SPRING IS COMING!

A third trip to the new farm, with more tiny farming conversation and checking things out. The weather: beautiful once again. The view in the pic: a perfectly south-facing slope (when you’re thinking about growing, pictures of promising farmland never fail to excite!). The benefits of a gentle SFS are well-known, and they’re particularly precious in a climate like ours, with harsh, snow-bound winters and a relatively short summer growing season. A slope facing south receives sunlight much more directly than flat land, so the snowpack is much lighter during winter, and more quickly melted off in spring. Then, the soil warms up more quickly, and gravity does its thing, providing better drainage, allowing the ground to dry out more quickly. All around, this simple incline could provide a couple of weeks of spring headstart, compared to flat land right beside. How well this actually pans out will be fun to see!

Eight of the Frey’s Special Dual Purpose roosters are still around, in fine form, roaming the farm. I have yet to kill them! Not even one… We’ve been eating chicken quite a lot, but there’s still a good supply of fat, frozen White Rocks. I imagine the meat on these guys getting tougher by the week as they run around and do their thing: fighting, digging deep, bowl-shaped holes, hopping on goats, sitting on fences, crowing at all hours, scratch and pecking. It’s a little out of control, but also fun to watch, and they haven’t done anything really bad so far (one is has grown quite mean and somewhat vicious, though, and menaces or even attacks people—he’ll be first to get it in the neck! :) They’re truly free-range, they’ve put on impressive weight strictly by foraging, which includes stealing some of the goats’ grain, but mainly involves bugs and whatever else they find in the fields. Most mornings, they get a little scratch, or some of the girls’ feed. Sometimes I’ll hand-feed ‘em for a few minutes, for no real reason, but maybe to keep ‘em feeling safe with me, and easier to catch down the road…

We’re still digging potatoes! Ryan, Corrie and their youngest, Hannah, came out today to salvage some potatoes. There are still a few 50′ (15m) beds of Chieftan and Kennebec. With all the rainy summer and wet ground, a lot of the potatoes were coming up with rotten spots (I heard this from other growers at the farmers’ market as well), with lots of sorting and quite low yield in some rows, so I decided to harvest the post-season balance only as needed. I mowed down the whole potato plot and invited anyone who wanted to dig. It looks pretty scary, in this particular spot, grass and other weeds didn’t take long to start taking over, but in the bright sunlight, it’s looks a lot worse than it is (a bit of tilling and left to overwinter, and it’d be right as rain). To find the treasure, locate a couple the dried potato stems—they’re short but easy to ID once you know what you’re looking for—then dig in a line! The haul of crisp red skin-white flesh Chieftan potatoes was pretty good! The fall harvest continues…

Spent the day at Tara & Michael’s farm, my second visit, and a beautiful day it was. I took the time to walk around alone, checking out the fields for veggie garden locations. It was a great feeling, deeply exciting, to look out over new farmland, and start to apply all of the things I’ve learned from six seasons of tiny farming in one place to another. The field in the pic has about two acres of fairly flat land that looks good. There’s also a south-facing slope that looks perfect for a small, early spring garden to take advantage of the faster post-snow drainage and quicker soil warming that a southern incline provides. I checked for twitchgrasss (nope!), and signs of other invasive weeds (it’s all hay that’s grown out to mainly grass). From a couple of samples, the soil seems like a clayey loam, similar to what I’ve been working, but it’ll be easier to see when it’s plowed up. Looks good so far, clean and ready for tiny farming action! Nothing like a fresh challenge to force you to review your thoughts and experiences, and discover conclusions you may not even know you’d come to. At least, that’s how it feels for me. Change is in the air! It’s excellent!!

It’s summer again! At least, it’s suddenly a whole lot warmer than it’s been for a while, as any fly can tell you. I headed out to the greenhouse in the late morning to find flies all about, buzzing to get out, and basking on the plastic outside. It’s kinda creepy how they slow as it gets colder, like some sort of tiny machines winding down, eventually disappearing off somewhere to hibernate (I think that’s what they do), only to suddenly reanimate given a little heat. Anyhow, a few days of 60°F+ (15°C) and sunshine are in the forecast, and I believe it!

Well, Friday harvest is over…what to do? A few onions and a little winter squash you’re  set for ALL-TERRAIN ONION BOCCE. Libby used yellow cooking onions (Stuttgarter), Grant took a mild white (Superstar), I went red (Red Wing), four onions each. A stunted orange acorn squash (Table Gold) served as the target ball. Toss away!

The rules are simple: the player with the closest one or more onions to the squash scores a point apiece. The all-terrain part means the winner of a turn gets to toss the squash anywhere. We played up and down the gangway to the barn, through gravel, long grass, chicken hazards (roosters peck onions)… Good thing no-one got really competitive, ’cause onion bocce is pretty imprecise, what with eventually exploding onions (largest piece counts), and ragged edges that make down-to-the-millimeter measuring kinda futile. Still, we did get out the tape measure… Wholesome outdoor fun on the farm. With veggies. Must be a new age of innocence! :) (Guest measurement photo by Libby)

The trusty 6hp irrigation pump was dutifully hauled out to the pond in May, and never seen and barely thought of since. Besides priming it when it was first set out, it had zero use this year. That’s what happens when you get many inches of rain a month, every month, for an entire season. I could’ve brought it in a lot earlier to save it from some weather beating, but today was the day (and it’s a pretty rugged, all-weather pump). So, into the Kubota compact tractor’s loader bucket, and back to the drive shed. Test run for a while, drain the water, and it’s away for the winter!

Every few days, at two dozen a day, along comes one very big egg. It’s hard to see with the chipped paint on the old egg scale, but these big guys take it right off the chart. Beyond measurement by this technology. Poor girls (I think, or maybe not). They’re too big to fit into extra-large egg cartons, they won’t let the cartons close, so I put ‘em aside and eat them. They’re pretty big, fat eggs!