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

The days have warmed up now, mostly around 60-70°F (15-20°C), but the nights are unusually cold, dropping sometimes to freezing or a few degrees above. Frost burning off in the early morning sun is pretty when you don’t have anything in the field for it to kill, which I don’t… Let’s see: broccoli, cauliflower, radish, carrots, spinach, chard, beets, peas, parsnips, all-lettuce mesclun, tatsoi-mustard-arugula-bok choi mix… Nope, no worries there. (Funny thing, while pea plants are hardy, I believe the pods aren’t… I’ve never seen that in action, fall peas haven’t worked for me so far, and I don’t think there’ll be frost 40 days from now when this year’s first peas come in…). Meanwhile in the unheated greenhouse, although I’ve only fired up the kerosene heater once, just to be safe, row cover goes on all the tender stuff (toms, eggplant, peppers, and now, cukes, pumpkin, melons and squash, just about to poke up): on in the evening, off in the morning, better safe than toasted!

Moved the first wave of tender seedlings—100 tomatoes, plus eggplant and sweet peppers—to the greenhouse yesterday, with zero (32°F) predicted for the overnight. There’s just no more waiting, with all of the light space in the Milkhouse…taken. It’s a long way from the ambitious barely-heated greenhouse plan of February, but there’s row cover, and the new KeroWorld heater is ready for action (it’s the white box in the middle)… That’s how some plans go when you’re dealing with the WEATHER. Elsewhere in the hoophouse, I’ve let the early lettuce and mesclun blend with volunteer lettuce and arugula from last year’s early stuff going to seed. It’s unruly, tasty, and growing fast. I don’t know how much of it will make it to the farmers’ market: since there’s too much to do around here, I’m not aiming to go extra early this year (yesterday was the first market day), but one way or another, the greenhouse greens will get eaten!

Another little new-season milestone: the first of the original veggie gang has appeared. These are Gypsy (hybrid) sweet peppers, seeded six days ago, along with other varieties of pepper and eggplant. They started to poke up in the last day or so, and by this morning, the first leaves had unfolded. Along with tomatoes (soon to be seeded), I think of these three—toms, eggplant, peppers—as my original crops. These are the veggies I started first (and way early) in Year 1: winter was storming along outside, while these brilliant little splashes of green were popping up in the warm, bright bubble of the first seedling room (a side room in the farmhouse). I was fascinated and kind of amazed. I used to come downstairs in the middle of the night to check ‘em out, make sure they were still alive and growing… Actually, it’s not so different even now! :)

The mildly ambitious veggie outpost experiment of earlier this year has returned in pieces. The stand came back today, courtesy of Conall, who took it apart and dropped it off (you can’t help but notice, he’s pretty thorough when it comes to taking things apart…). In any case, a nearby coffee shop wanted to sell a small, choice selection of organic veggies. They were buying upfront at normal prices and marking them up a bit. Our part was to harvest once or twice a week, and deliver (only 12 miles)—building the stand was basically a last-minute favor… Why it didn’t work came down to that simple consideration that supermarkets are built on: SHELF LIFE. The coffee shop couldn’t get a handle on how to keep the veggies perky and fresh. I heard about an attempt to revive baby eggplants, shriveling after a day in the sun, by misting them like salad greens. Yikes. I would’ve helped if I could’ve, but I have zero experience with storage in a store-type situation. I’d kinda assumed that, since they prepare and sell food, they were equipped to figure it out. Not so. At the farmers’ market, I start in the cool early morning, it’s only six hours, and the veggies move quickly, so it’s all fine, without refrigeration or cooling, even on the hottest summer days. But keeping displayed veggies perfectly presentable for even a couple of days is a whole other specialized thing. Anyhow, after six weeks or so, we stopped. There was no ill will or anything, and we continued to supply mesclun for their salads for the rest of the season. The bottom line is a lesson I learned long ago, but failed to act on in this case: when you’re involved in something NEW, if there’s no plan that clearly deals with the DETAILS, chances are there will be…TROUBLE. I look forward to tackling this particular puzzle—how to handle daily fresh veggie sales—next year, when we FINALLY open the farm stand. ;)

Yes, the weather’s crazy. According to the min/max thermometer outside the greenhouse, last night’s low was a chilly 18°F (-8°C), cold enough to kill off all but the hardiest. Finally, and only six weeks or so late—the endless autumn harvest is interesting, great for personal use veggies, but otherwise, it mainly throws off the fall clean-up schedule (I haven’t changed zones, have I?!). Here, the eggplant is clearly toasted, while the peppers, which had been under fairly light row cover (I pulled it back today to harvest some), came through in relatively fine shape . And the oats, well, it’s a monster, lush and green and if not exactly growing anymore, it seems to be getting thicker. It’s fascinating the way cold works in the field. Wind, cloud cover, mini-windbreaks, slight elevation, all kinds of factors add up differently in spots only a few feet apart to determine life or death by cold. Anyhow, can’t wait around forever. I’m soon going to roll up the row cover and till it all down!

Unlike the super-early tiny eggplant at the other end of this season, these guys have come to the party a little late. Warm, frost-free autumn weather means crops like eggplant and peppers put on a new bloom and even start to form fruit… Unfortunately, they’re doomed. Even if the warm conditions continue for another month (and THAT seems like as not), the short, weak-light days aren’t gonna give up the energy they need to get in harvestable range. Oh well, they still look pretty…

Tucked away and safely shaded from scorching sun, a Dusky eggplant happily expands. The earlier tiny eggplant puzzle, while never solved (eggplant and peppers were fruiting extra early, tiny fruit on tiny plants), no longer matters, and the brief Colorado potato beetle onslaught was successfully weathered. All varieties of eggplant are doing great (that’s Dusky, Black Beautry, Vittoria, Fairy Tale and Millionaire), with abundant fruit well ahead of any other year on this tiny farm!

In today’s field photo choice, there was a kinda cool shot of a last season carrot starting to flower, a freshly hand-weeded onion patch looking quite sharp, or this shiny, slimy cluster of baby Colorado potato beetles, going to town on a Black Beauty eggplant. Pests and disease have thankfully not been a big problem in this organic field. I like to think that the garden is in some sort of balance, but perhaps it’s just location and luck… In either case, there have been some outbreaks: many tomato hornworms on the…tomatoes in Year 1, same for Colorado potato beetles on potatoes, early blight on tomatoes three years ago when the summer was cool and almost always cloudy and damp, and, of course, the everpresent flea beetles (brassicas) and striped cucumber beetles (cucurbits). The last two are defended against with floating row cover. The rest have recently died down, to the point where I let them do their thing, handpicking a few, but really accepting a small amount of leaf damage (they all eat leaves) and no plant loss. This year, the CPBs seem to have crossed over to eggplants (another of their natural targets, but one they never really took aim at in past). They seem to be favoring the Black Beauty eggplant… This highly visible damage happened in probably less than a day, as I’d taken a walk through there just yesterday. Only about four or five of 60+ Black Beauties had a significant presence, with a few loners on other varieties (and I’d noticed no eggs on the leaves in earlier checks). So, I squished ‘em. Vigilance is somewhat increased.

Tiny eggplants—this one’s about 1″ (2.5cm) long—are appearing on a few plants, also, tiny peppers! I’m not sure what this is about, heat stress, maybe, although it hasn’t been that hot. And the seedlings weren’t old, oversized, or root-bound when transplanted—no great STRESS all around (unusually stressful situations seem to make plants, like people, do odd things). As far as I can tell, conditions this year, from seed starting on, haven’t been overall different from in the past, so why all this early, TINY, flowering and fruiting? I’ve seen this when plants were left too long in small pots and…miniaturized, but that wasn’t the case for these guys. It doesn’t worry me so far, but I’ll check into it. Meanwhile, off they come, and then, well, as usual, we’ll see what happens next!