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

Another cloudy, cool, kinda chilly day. There’s always fieldwork to do, but this type of weather is also good for building, fixing, organizing…indoors. Today, some long-planned greenhouse upgrades. They may not look like much, but it’s a pretty big bunch of improvements! As part of Shannon’s kinda intensive “this is what I do around here,” hands-on experience (with full narration!) on this tiny farm, I showed her how to use a couple of basic power tools—cordless drill, chop saw—and she built simple legs for a wooden tray that I use for various small, often-used bits of gear (the tray’s shallowness is an automatic organizer: things can’t get really buried!). Really simple, rough carpentry, but if you haven’t used tools much or at all, and then you build something that’s immediately used in the course of the farming day…it all makes more sense! At the other end of the hoophouse, I put up another wooden crosspiece for leaning long-handled tools, and we separated the most-used and put the least used at the other end. Again, by avoiding a pile of stuff, everything’s easy to grab and put away. And then, we pounded a couple of 2×2 wooden stakes into the ground (pounding with a mini-sledgehammer was also on the farm experience menu today, I pound a lot of stakes for tomatoes every year as well…), and screwed another 2×2 as a crosspiece to make a leaning rack for the seeders and the wheel hoe (you can see one end on the right of the pic, one of the posts has orange tape on top). Finally, a machinery addition, a big, old, rusty, dangerous-looking high-volume fan on a really heavy iron stand. I’ve been meaning to work on greenhouse ventilation for ages…but always ended up using much smaller home-type fans. This one, which was actually being stored in the chickenhouse, I hadn’t noticed till now. It moves a ton of air, and reduces the temperature a full 10-15°F in the middle of a hot day. Cool! To look at, these little building projects are absolutely basic and kinda primitive, but they’re quick, easy, solid cheap, and really make a huge difference when you actually use them… (I just noticed in the pic how the right side of the end wall seems to be sagging, it doesn’t look that way at glance, I should check it out and see what’s up…)

Took a trip to town today. During the winter, I get in once every 3-4 weeks, so it’s a bit of a novelty. This time in, we checked out an agricultural show, 28th year, filling the new fairground’s 45,000 sq ft of indoor exhibition space. It was quite busy, geared to the bigger conventional farmer, with aisles and aisles of heavy equipment, commercial seed, bank financing,… Outside, some even bigger machinery, like the combine harvester in the pic—it’s set up for soy—that could run over my entire garden in about 10 minutes (although the wraparound view from that air conditioned cab looks mighty inviting for a hot summer’s day in the field!). Inside, it’s mostly men in and around their 60s, with some wives scattered in. These guys were here with their fathers three decades ago, discussing new gear as family farms passed from fathers to sons. Now, the sons are the old farmers, and the next generation is nowhere in sight. Quite odd… Oh well, on to the super-sized supermarket, a Loblaws’ Wal-Mart killer, a huge deal with a produce court half the size of my market garden (not literally, but it’s pretty big), bakery, meat and fish counters, endless aisles, automated mini-bank, wine shop, tobacconist, full pharmacy, a whole section of clothing and housewares, and acres of convenient parking outside. It’s the old General Store, scaled up! I seldom do the grocery shopping for the farm, so when I do hit a supermarket, I head straight for the veggies first (I still kinda laugh at myself doing a “professional” veggie appraisal, this is the LAST situation I would’ve imagined myself in not too long ago). I bought some groceries: a bit of “fresh meat”, “fresh-baked bread”, a tub of mixed baby salad greens (and mine so soon to come!)… Only $200! Then, a quick fast food stop at A&W, not a guilty pleasure, or even a pleasure, just an old habit, a town routine… And there it was, a trip through the OTHER local food chain, 12 miles (19km) and a whole world away from the tiny farm. It’s a little surreal. Back to the seedlings… ;)

Like machinery everywhere, gear on the farm tends to break down just when you need it. This may be obvious, but it’s no less annoying for it!! Some breakdowns you know are coming sooner or later, like when you decide to let it wear out rather than fix it at the first signs of trouble. This you can avoid with regular maintenance including INSPECTION—checking things out for looseness and wear always eventually pays off—but often I, uh, don’t get around to it (as with, recently, the riding mower). Most breakdowns are, at least on the surface, sudden failures, like today, when in the midst of tilling with the 48″ rototiller on the back of the Kubota compact tractor, the tines suddenly stopped turning. This had happened once before, so the diagnosis was easy: broken chain. And that’s a good one. Every time something breaks and we fix it, I stock up on extras of whatever was used in the repair—DIY repair and a good selection of spare parts go hand in hand on the tiny farm! So, for the chain, there are parts: full links, offset links, master links. A replacement chain is also quite cheap and a good thing to have on hand. This particular repair job is dirty but extremely simple and straightforward, same as for a bicycle chain. Pop off the chain guard, scrape off the excess grease, bang out the rivets on the broken links and add new ones, or decide to replace the whole thing, put the chain back on…it’s about as simple as that, and you’re back in the saddle again!

No sooner fixed than in the field! This combo of little riding mower and old snowmobile trailer is possibly my favorite tiny farming tool, a decadent* alternative to walking up and down the garden plot. Around here, you can walk miles in a day, especially if you forget things and have to go back—although, walking around, taking different routes each time to check stuff out, is one of the big pleasures, too… What a simple life. :) Anyhow, after trying a couple of different garden utility belts, overalls with 50 pockets and a garden cart, nothing has come close to being able to toss all the stuff you need onto the trailer and go. I use it whenever there’s too much to carry. Here, I’ve just finished the second seeding of mesclun and spinach, four beds each (on the trailer: Earthway seeders with plates in the coffee can, my most used rake, measuring tape and stakes for marking new beds, a pail for rocks, and seed in the green trug; the empty trays just happen to be there).Up until I took this pic, it was a gloriously sunny day, after three days or so of cloud and drizzle (which added up to 20cm of rain). Little luxuries. *The mower is actually pretty energy efficient: it uses maybe 30 gallons (114 l) of gas in an entire season, and that includes mowing paths and hauling harvests.

Surprise! I feel like a kid with a new go-kart. I plan to learn how to weld this year, and I’d been discussing with Bob this specialized harvest cart as a first project. Well, he went ahead and whipped up his own interpretation, using parts that were hanging about. Voila! The cart sits over a bed of mesclun, spinach or other low greens, wheels in the paths, you lean forward to cut, and move it a foot or two at a time with your feet. The minute I sat on it, the improvement from crouching or straddling the bed and bending over was clear. Cutting in comfort, and it’s supposed to near double your speed. It moves easily even in pretty wet soil, and the height seems right, but it’s still a prototype, to be harvest-tested and refined. Over the season, I cut TONS of greens (maybe not literally, but feels like it), so I’m excited!

The Troy-Bilt Horse walking rototiller is back in action for the first day of tilling in the field. I prepped a 50′x50′ section for snap peas. The Horse is noisy and uses a fair (though not unreasonable) share of gas, but it’s also a very handy machine for larger areas (in fact, I would’ve used the rototiller on the tractor, but the ground is still too wet to take the weight). All things in moderation on the way to becoming a fully-rounded, taking-it-slow farmer! (Gear note: This Horse is c. 1990, from the original Troy-Bilt line, before the company was gobbled up by a bigger one and the construction got more lightweight. I bought it used, at half the price of new, and in near mint condition. It should last a long, long time—in my first farming year, I borrowed a rusty 30-year-old Horse that did just fine.)