NOW OPEN FOR WINTER SPRING! Try out the new Tiny Farm Questions! Share the wealth. Ask questions about veggie growing, and answer them, too! :)
[From 12-Nov-2012] Yep, like just about every year, the new growing season starts here with fall garlic planting. Miserable, damp day, though not so cold. Andrea (close) and Rochelle (far) are working on different sections to hedge bets on which areas of the field dry out first in case of a disastrously wet spring. Crafty! The little metal pails, paint pails that happen to be from…Home Depot, turn out to be perfect for this job (they’re useful all over the place). Handy!
The Nesco/American Harvest Food Dehydrator & Jerky Maker: a lil contraption purchased last summer, waiting for winter experimenting (thinking about the extra garlic). There’s of course some research to do, like the difference between drying and freeze-drying, what gets lost on the way, and how to test if it’s dry enough to store safely for a while (fruit should bend, but a dried pea when hit with a rolling pin should…shatter!?), the usual…stuff. Then, lots of garlic slicing!
Just snow. At least a foot down in the last few hours and still falling, fast and blowing a bit, but far from what I’d call a blizzard. Pretty! Next, warm and raining forecast for a couple days from now to take it all away. Up to a couple of years ago, I still hung on to the idea of an annual schedule for when to start and stop watching the daily weather that would mark the beginning and end of the growing season. Now, it’s take it as it comes, any time. Always exciting! (Where did the woodpile go?)
At the top of the winter reading book stack. From the 1970s. Bought by chance from a used book table in the trade show at an organic farming conference. Always fun to hear someone explain what they know and believe, in simple, articulate words. As opposed to…weasel words!
“When I am milking my cows in the barn early in the morning or when I am working in the field, sitting on a tractor for many hours with little interruption, sometimes with searchlights into the night, who is there to talk to? It is then that I have put questions to myself and tried to find the answers, and in writing about farming, why not retain this form?”
Um, why not! Dirt Farmer’s Dialogue, Carsten Jens Pank, B-D Press, 1976. More to follow…
It’s crispy out there. The latest crazy weather trick seems to winter acting like…winter. Except colder. And with less snow. Still, the sun is getting higher, the days are getting longer, another season in the field…comin’ up! I’m quite excited!! (In the pic, next year’s firewood is a real wood pile, a motley assortment of softwood, hardwood, and the occasional bits of lumber, gathered from around the farm, and so much of it that it was easier to cut, split and pile for a while and sort and stack later.)
It’s the last of the beets, a mix of varieties – Red Ace, Bulls Blood, Chioggia – from different beds, golf ball-sized, cold-sweetened, nice! Leaves, not in the greatest shape, were trimmed, leaving enough stem to avoid bleeding. Around 50 lbs, and that’s it for this year’s beets.
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