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

Here’s one of the more extreme displays of crazily labor-intensive tiny farming technique. Andie surveys our work, the result of deciding to try landscape fabric in place of burlap to help carrot seed germination. It’s actually a double experiment, because one of the beds is green onions.

The burlap method has been the way to start carrots around here for the last two seasons: tried and true. The main purpose is to preserve moisture in the seed drills, and the increase in heat helps as well.

After a good run, the first round of burlap expired, and I couldn’t find rolls of it in time for this season (I know it’s out there, somewhere). But, I spotted this gear, landscape fabric, a porous plastic mulch used to permanently suppress weeds in…landscaping. It’s light, and just wide enough (3′/30 cm) to cover 4 rows of carrots (that’s a little closer than usual for the bunching onions). I tried it on two beds earlier in the season, and it works fine!

One little problem: it tears easily, so how to hold it down? With the burlap, we made wire staples out of heavy guage wire. Here, we placed a LOT of heavy rocks, close enough together that there’s no room for the wind to get under and start really pulling. This does the trick for now, but overall, it’s a little TOO intense. The hunt for burlap: still on!

It’s a start. Whenever they reach 3-4″ (7.5-10cm), I trim back the onions to about 1″ (2.5cm), and now they’re thick enough to collect and EAT! I don’t have the greenhouse up yet, so didn’t start lettuce REALLY early, so it’s not a whole seedling trimmings salad like last year… But these baby greens are great: tender, with a delicate onion flavor and just a bit of bite. Taste-wise, they’re easily over-powered by stronger, heavier foods. We tried them on burgers and in a salad, but they’re best more on their own. My favorite: quite finely snipped and sprinkled on a boiled (farm) egg, with only salt and pepper. Tastes like the garden!

Friday harvests are getting quicker as the season winds down. This has happened at least for the last couple of years. Where earlier in the season, we finish around 8-9pm, we’re now mostly wrapped up by 5 or 6, and sometimes with less people than during the summer. I’m not quite sure why this happens. Probably, a big part of is that everyone out there in the field is now experienced and comfortably fast. Also, many of the crops in the weekly veg line-up are preharvested: garlic and onions first, and now, winter squash, pumpkins, potatoes and the new sweet potatoes. Still, it’s a pretty big harvest, and quantities are the same now as earlier in the year. Then there’s the shortening days—it’s starting to get dark around 7:30pm now, down from 9:30 in late June-early July—and CHILLY WEATHER that likely speed us up! Anyhow, this is the most time I’ve spent wondering why—whatever the reasons, getting done quick is good! The trailer-load in the pic is about half of the day’s field haul, and there’s also the preharvested stuff. In this week’s harvest, in no particular order: carrots (2 varieties), cauliflower, beets (3 varieties), sweet peppers (several varieties), hot peppers (several varieties), green onions, spinach (2 varieties), summer squash (3 varieties), beans, tomato (several varieties), parsley, basil, all from the field, plus, preharvested, garlic, potatoes, winter squash (several varieties) and onions (2 varieties).

If it’s Friday, it must be time to harvest! After a beautiful weather week with barely a cloud in sight, an otherwise welcome gentle rain today meant a bit of a muddy harvest. Here, the picking and pulling has all been done, and we’re about halfway through the sorting and rinsing. Ramrod green onions are all bundled and ready for a quick rinse. Nelson carrots are underway. And, a couple of several bins of tomatoes, with Juliet saladette in one, and a mix of smaller heirlooms in the other. With toms, we only fill the bins 2-3 layers deep to avoid squashing and splitting, especially with big heirlooms. (I suppose getting cardboard tomato flats, one tomato deep, would be more space-efficient, ’cause the pick-up truck that we use does get full around this time of year, but so far, we’ve managed without.) Everything’s looking and tasting good!

It’s 11 am and most of our harvest is sold. This is good, because the quantities of what we’ve been bringing have been fine. Still, with no early tomatoes, late green beans, not much summer squash, a wiped out first planting of cucumbers, and hail-killed first round of much of the peppers and eggplant, the pickings feel a little slim. It’s funny how variety seems to work at the market (and probably in the CSA shares as well): the greater the selection, the happier people seem to be, even though they don’t really buy more, or still buy mostly the same things. Maybe it’s because, as consumers (here in North America, at least), we’re so accustomed to being wooed by apparent choice, a regular parade of the “new” and the “improved” and cleverly repackaged, that having the same staple crops for a couple of weeks in a row makes the stand seem a bit stale. It’ll be…amusing to see outlooks change if (when) fresh food starts to get scarce. Well, all in all, a good day at the farmers’ market!

On-going debates about the merits of rinsing are…academic right now as the near daily rains continue, and the soil remains between moist and mucky. Even on a rare hot and sunny day like today, crops are coming up caked in mud. Carrots are messy…

…and so are green onions (being rinsed by Mike) with tangled roots that hold clumps of mud so well…