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

It’s summer again! At least, it’s suddenly a whole lot warmer than it’s been for a while, as any fly can tell you. I headed out to the greenhouse in the late morning to find flies all about, buzzing to get out, and basking on the plastic outside. It’s kinda creepy how they slow as it gets colder, like some sort of tiny machines winding down, eventually disappearing off somewhere to hibernate (I think that’s what they do), only to suddenly reanimate given a little heat. Anyhow, a few days of 60°F+ (15°C) and sunshine are in the forecast, and I believe it!

Well, Friday harvest is over…what to do? A few onions and a little winter squash you’re  set for ALL-TERRAIN ONION BOCCE. Libby used yellow cooking onions (Stuttgarter), Grant took a mild white (Superstar), I went red (Red Wing), four onions each. A stunted orange acorn squash (Table Gold) served as the target ball. Toss away!

The rules are simple: the player with the closest one or more onions to the squash scores a point apiece. The all-terrain part means the winner of a turn gets to toss the squash anywhere. We played up and down the gangway to the barn, through gravel, long grass, chicken hazards (roosters peck onions)… Good thing no-one got really competitive, ’cause onion bocce is pretty imprecise, what with eventually exploding onions (largest piece counts), and ragged edges that make down-to-the-millimeter measuring kinda futile. Still, we did get out the tape measure… Wholesome outdoor fun on the farm. With veggies. Must be a new age of innocence! :) (Guest measurement photo by Libby)

Every few days, at two dozen a day, along comes one very big egg. It’s hard to see with the chipped paint on the old egg scale, but these big guys take it right off the chart. Beyond measurement by this technology. Poor girls (I think, or maybe not). They’re too big to fit into extra-large egg cartons, they won’t let the cartons close, so I put ‘em aside and eat them. They’re pretty big, fat eggs!

About the last thing anyone is likely ever to see first-hand is the amazing root structure of plants! I’ve been fascinated by the massive size and complexity of ROOTS since I first saw a sketch of a full root system, and way more so after browsing the wealth of technical drawings of garden veggie roots in the fantastic and fully-online Root Development of Vegetable Crops. Root systems can be VAST, but they’re incredibly difficult to actually see since the mostly fine filaments that tunnel everywhere simply break off when you dig up a plant. Today’s parsnip harvest yielded a couple of unusual, still very partial root specimens that only begin to illustrate what’s going on down there. Who knows how just a few managed to come up with so much intact… For parsnips, according to RDoVC, after a season’s growth, “at the 8-foot level roots were common and a maximum penetration of 9 feet was determined.” In the top 10″ (25cm) of the soil, lateral roots extended up to 3′ (90cm). Pretty cool, huh?! (Thanks to hand-and-arm model Lynn.)

A bit of unusual activity in the field today, a mini-video interview! Raechelle and Lynn brought their friend David, who brought some video gear. The whole thing was casual, the video being mainly to record our impressions of tiny farming for a possible magazine article. Still, with the tripod and the boom mic, a certain “we’re on TV!” flavor hit the field for a couple of hours. We each did a sit-down interview (it was fun watching Lynn rustle up sound bites to describe the simple pleasures of…fieldwork), then David taped some atmosphere: digging carrots, chasing chickens,… And we had cake! Earlier this season, we had our own, self-styled, TFE version of a photo shoot for a newspaper article. Now, this! Are we becoming increasingly…media-friendly?! ;)

After rinsing harvest bins for the regular Friday harvest, instead of spreading them around to dry as usual, I stacked ‘em high to represent the house-of-cards global economy—I was trying to illustrate a point! What on Earth? Well, a few days ago, I became sadly hooked on the US presidential election action, especially on the endlessly fascinating PALIN. I slipped off the wagon and started obsessively sneaking in quick peeks at CNN through the day, and actually WATCHING in the late evening. This is so not in sync with the natural flow of…tiny farming. It’s been a couple of years now since I actively stopped consuming news: no TV, newspapers, Web, radio, just no news, except what came by word-of-mouth. (No-news really does wonders for your head…) Suddenly, I was back in, in an intense but luckily limited-to-presidential-politics way. Or so I thought. Earlier this week—overnight, it seemed—the ENTIRE U.S. ECONOMY STARTED TO MELT DOWN, and now the election thing has gotten SO MUCH CRAZIER. Wow. Anyhow, after I’d stacked the bins, Lynn and Libby tried to rapidly destabilize the economy by throwing potatoes at it—guess my model wasn’t too realistic, ’cause it wasn’t easy to knock down… We went on to a great harvest day, beautiful fall weather, a fine time to be in the field!

This isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the question of variety on TFB, but the consideration recurs, so here’s another take… It would seem to be all around easier to grow just one variety of each veg crop, but that wouldn’t be any fun! One round, red beet, one big, round, red tomato, one shell pea, and so on. That’s the standard approach for most of the other full market garden growers at our small farmers’ market. There is SOME variation: green and yellow snap beans, maybe French Breakfast (red and white) radishes along with the standard round red ones, a few types of winter squash… Which is cool. Why bother growing three or more types of orange carrot, let alone orange (Nelson), purple (Purple Haze), and white (White Satin, for the first time this year)? I dunno. By growing several varieties of each veg crop, I’ve learned a bit, like the performance difference between hybrid and open pollinated varieties (in general, the OP tend to do better when field conditions get a little extreme, but that’s not a….scientific conclusion!). It’s not to be a novelty act, the guy at the market with the purple carrots, golden beets and round, yellow cucumbers. Or the round Eightball zucchini (below). If efficient tiny farming was the sole goal, I don’t have a really compelling…justification for all of the complicating seed ordering, transplant organizing, and extra direct seeding work it takes to grow as many different crops as I can, and numerous varieties of each. On the other hand, growing and offering variety, choice, and the non-standard make tiny farming so much fun. Which sounds good to me! It seemed like the thing to do from when I first pored over a seed catalog six years ago, and nothing’s changed my mind since! :)

Not a typical farm day in the field, instead, a fairly extended supply run to town: chicken feed, groceries, diesel…ice cream… Moving through the last half of summer, the workload eases up a bit, and you can afford to get a little leisurely. So, three of us headed in…an UNTHINKABLE use of people power any time earlier in the season. Above, at the gas bar across from our local strip of box stores, I’m actually having fun squeegeeing the windshield, just like in the movies (I’m a non-driver, hardly used a gas pump, and maybe never washed a windshield before…). Below, Lynn and Raechelle pose with the wooden horse in front of the feed store. If you look closely down the side of the building, you can see a Mennonite horse and buggy loading up beside a car. Everybody needs feed! Curiously, today was one of those trips to town where I really felt the fine line between being a “new farmer” and…not. As long as you’re surrounded by the garden and a lot of WORK, it’s easy to see a clear course. But when you’re away from your field, you can see how precarious tiny farming really is (at least, for now, in North America). We’re still so reliant on the existing system, for gas, machinery, supplies, even a lot of our year-round food, on taken-for-granted “utilities” like electricity, phone, Internet, and, of course, on a reasonably functional economy that allows others to drive to the farmers’ market or farm to buy our produce. Hmmm… It makes me wonder, how much of my tiny farming simply comes from what I do every day, and how much is a fundamentally changed outlook from my city days, a new state of mind? What would I be now, if I stopped doing this? What a puzzle! ;) Anyhow, as for the weather, it was all beautiful sunshine for this  laid-back day… (Windshield photo by Raechelle)