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

A satisfying planting day: all of the onion sets (around 2,500) and 300 lbs (136kb) of potatoes are in. For the onions, Raechelle (first day in the field), Lynn, Jamie (a new CSA member), Shannon (here for a month), and I made quick work of the onions: Stuttgarter yellow cooking and yellow Spanish. It’s amazing how much fun people working together in a garden can be, there’s a positive, happy, energy that I think comes from sharing time in the dirt (maybe that’s just the tiny farming romantic in me, but I think not… :). Plus, potentially tedious tasks are done in no time! For an encore, Shannon and I polished off the potatoes, finishing just as the sun set and another chilly evening set in. This year, I used the furrower attachment on the Horse walking rototiller to plow what turned out to be excellent trenches, in ground that had been tilled up about a week ago. Varieties are Yukon Gold, Chieftan (red), and Kennebec. This time around, all varieties were about chicken egg-sized, so, no cutting into pieces required. In-row spacing is 12″ (30cm), between row is 24″ (60cm), with a bit wider path every two rows. We covered them by hand-raking. In all, 40 x 50′ (15m) rows, which is about 2000 plants. Every year, I’ve tried a different potato approach—last year, I made much shallower trenches with a hoe: as far as set-up, this time around was the best yet. The onions are in a bit later than usual, I’ve had them done as early as mid-April, but no worries, potatoes are around the usual timing. For a market garden, I grow a relatively small quantity of both of these crops, they always sell out, and they feel like a good fit for CSA and farmers’ market from the middle of summer on, so having them at the absolutely earliest date isn’t that important at this stage. And what would tiny farming be without always lots of room to improve?! :)

This is the not-good look of torn metal, not something you want to see on gear that’s both fairly essential to the tasks at hand, and ALWAYS expensive to repair. Right in the middle of some very satisfying tilling on Thursday, I heard a mild, unalarming scraping-squeaking sound coming from the rototiller on the Kubota compact tractor, so I stopped to check, just in case. When I rotated the tines by hand, I noticed the shaft had a lot of play on the left side, you could move it up and down a good inch or two. I cleaned off some wound up bits of plant and then dirt from the end and found the cap protecting the bearings had been split and peeled back. Uh-oh. It turned out to be not great, but could’ve been a lot worse. Somehow—not enough grease, or dirt finding its way into the bearings and gearbox, or both, or…something else—the shaft that drives the tines had completely pulverized the bearings and had been rotating directly against metal! Imagine the heat, the tortured, red-hot metal-on-metal—but it was still tilling real good… In the pic below, you can see where it ground out its own path, that extra piece of  hole on top of the larger one. It had burned through the tiller housing, another plate behind it, and a heavy die-cast fitting that supports the shaft (that bolted-on square piece in the pic above), and jogged up enough to split the dust cover. Man!

Of course, PARTS are always at hand, it just takes cash and a call to the tractor dealer, and presto, delivery by next day. Like an expensive little miracle… I hate buying parts, you need ‘em, have absolutely no way to tell what they’re “really” worth, and they cost a fortune. This little boxful: $400 (well, besides the 4-bolt flange bearing, oil seal plate, bearing cover, and a couple of other bits, that includes the annual air and oil filters, and oil…). Anyhow, that’s the way it goes: things break down, gotta be fixed! This morning it was put back together, like nothing had happened at all…

Left to the last possible harvest in the fall, brassicas like kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower (above), were eventually winter-killed and now have to be cleaned up—one of the first field-readying jobs of spring! Today, I started. (EVERY day is a field day from here on in, through November at least, or the first heavy snow that sticks.) A day of tiny farming fieldwork is really just a whole lotta gardening… Now that the ground has dried out enough to be tillable (that could’ve been yesterday, but…errands and CHICKENS), and warmed up enough to direct seed the crops that germinate in cooler soil, it’s a whole new world of things to do…and think about doing. There are two basic ways to ponder the progress of the season’s garden: by timing and by area, each useful in its own way. Timing is mainly about the plants: when to seed, when to water, when to harvest. Area is about where to locate particular plantings, which in my case doesn’t mean absolutely running out of space, since there’s lots more field to expand the garden into if I wanted to (which I don’t), but more like where to position stuff efficiently, so you’re maintaining crop rotation, but not having to, say, drag hoses all the way down the garden to a couple of newly seeded beds that need daily watering in (although there’s a field production plan made up, there are lots of adjustments on the way—where to put stuff will come up again and again!). So, the start of the season is mainly about area, because you have to prep beds and get veggies in in a rough order—cool soil seed, then cool weather transplant, then warm soil seed and transplants—and the timing is a constant: it’s all right away! One way I keep overall track of this garden is by counting sections: it’s about 2.5 acres, divided into 40 50′x50′ squares (each fits 10-16 beds, depending on width). At some point in the next six weeks or so, almost all SHOULD be planted out, nearly 40/40. Today, I started seeding in one…

Tilled and untilled: Partially composted cow manure was spread and incorporated in the fall. Now, a light rototilling to prepare for seeding is all that’s needed. Today, I used the tiller on the Kubota compact tractor.

Rock beats tiller: There are lots of stones in this field, they work their way up continually, and even a fist-sized rock, caught in the right way, can stall out the 48″ rototiller on the Kubota (it’s a tiny tractor!). No problem: remove and restart.

Getting set to seed: I work mostly one or two sections at a time, prepping an area with the tiller, marking the beds, then seeding (or transplanting). This way, I can get the crops that need to be started in as quickly as possible. Here’s the cart towed by the riding mower, loaded with assorted seeding gear (and some transplants being ferried to the greenhouse).

Making beds: Oh, there’s A LOT of tiny farm history behind my bed marking methods. :) I’m still working on the most efficient way to set up beds. Right now, it’s fairly streamlined, involving a 100′ tape measure, stakes, and pacing off distances. This year, I’m planting in 3′, 4′, and 5′ beds (that’s path included), depending on the crop.

Customizing the Rake: Every season, I re-ink faded measurement markings on a couple of hand tools I use the most. Here’s a convenient mark for 42″ from the top of the handle (that’s the planting area width for a 5′ bed. There are other marks further up the handle, and the whole rake is exactly 5′. It’s convenient for quick checks, especially on the favorite rake that I use for touching up beds right before seeding. And so, off we go…!

The new section at the north end of the garden, all clear after yesterday’s rototilling. The area is 120′x200′, about half an acre. Although it looks light and crumbly after drying for a few hours in a stiff breeze, the clayey soil is pretty heavy and moist. It never really dries out after mid-October or so, it only gets wetter until it freezes… A low cover crop, to winter-kill and then be tilled under in spring, would be great. I’m working on it, and this is the next best thing: no weeds!!

Fall clean-up is moving along bit by bit between the weather. Half the field is cleared, fertilized, and tilled or about to be. The rest is mostly covered by oats and a little rye. The Kubota compact tractor is ready to take up where it was stopped yesterday by the broken rototiller chain. At this point, I have an hour or so before the rain…

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!

Tilling in the monster oats green manure/cover crop is a task where the Kubota compact tractor sure comes in handy. The oats is tall, dense and seemingly unstoppable by cold. It took a double mowing to get it down to a manageable state, and even then, it’s a slow till. The walking rototiller could’ve gotten the job done as well, but it would’ve taken several passes and a couple of tanks of gas, so I was happy to be at the wheel for this one. Originally, the plan was to let the oats winter kill, and work it in in the spring, but there’s just so much of it, I decided to take it out now rather than lose an extra week or two next year, waiting for it to break down. Decisions!

Home for next year’s garlic, carved out of the oats yesterday, is looking good! Mow the oats (the riding mower got a good workout and did a reasonable job), spread aged cow manure from the barnyard, and rototill in with the Kubota compact tractor—simple! What sight is sweeter than a rich, freshly turned new garden plot, ready for another round?! :)

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.)