Thu, Feb 02, 2012 · Filed under Winter
[From Feb. 1, 2012] This isn’t really winter. No-one around here has seen anything like this weather before. February around here means knee-deep in snow drifts. Deep freeze. Instead, it’s been…raining. The strange, roughly weekly cycle continues: a few days of cold and snow, then up goes the temperature again. Can’t say it is having a huge effect on me, though, because I’ve been mostly holed up for the last month. Soul searching, re-examining my life in tiny farming. Trying to put things in perspective… Well, not exactly. :) I’d love to do all that stuff (although it also sounds a little depressing), but I’m not really wired that way. How do you search your soul, I mean…where IS IT? Been reading a lot, and…online. Splitting wood and building fires when it does get cold enough. Gearing up for the new growing season by chilling out a bit now. Watching the weather…
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Tue, Dec 06, 2011 · Filed under Autumn, Fieldwork
[From Dec. 5, 2011] It’s a wet December! After only a couple of days of rain, the ground is pretty well waterlogged, to the point where I can’t move the Kubota compact tractor without leaving deep furrows that’ll be totally compacted and eventually dry like concrete. So, before being rained out entirely three-quarters of the way through the job, it was slogging on 100′ round trips through boot-sucking muck, one forkload of hay at a time, to mulch garlic—not a big deal, there’s only a 100′ bed and a half to cover, but the EASIER plan was to use the tractor to push the big round bale to the garlic bed. Guess not. Lesson: Um, don’t wait! :)
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Thu, Oct 27, 2011 · Filed under Autumn
Suddenly, this morning, it’s cold! For this time of year, that’s a forecast of 4°C (39°F) all day, and -6°C (21°F) overnight. Brrrr… Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t even notice the leaves turning in their usual intense explosion of reds and yellows, this time around, the trees kinda just went bare with a minimum of flash, and here we are! Round about now, this is as good a day as any to pick as the end of the old season, start of the new farming year!
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Wed, Oct 05, 2011 · Filed under Fieldwork, Summer, Tools, Veggies
[Fri, Sep 16, 2011] First frost wasn’t too bad at all, a patchy frost that hit the field lightly, and in some areas, hardly at all. Still, the row cover, over some beans, peppers, eggplant, and a couple of beds of cherry tomato, worked out well, the exposed plants in those areas did get mildly to quite well…toasted. In the pic, we have Dusky eggplant, under its thin layer of salvation. Raising the floating row cover with a few non-pointy sticks, so it’s not pressing on the leaves, is a good idea—moisture often collects where the leaves touch the cover, freezes, and can deliver some pretty severe leaf burn. But for mature plants at this point in the season, I usually don’t worry about that—it’s different with seedlngs at the other end—and just float on the cover and leave it at that!
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Tue, Oct 04, 2011 · Filed under Autumn, Fieldwork, Veggies
Checking in on the fairly massive time investment we made in thinning 800′ of late-planted Touchon carrots—and it’s paying off! Not that there was any doubt that thinning works, it’s just so…tedious. After laying down carrot seed thick (in other words, after using the Earthway seeder), we spent hours removing thousands of extra seedlings. Because these guys went in so late, I wanted to give ‘em every shot at making the best of good weather and sizing up while they could. Now, the effect of 1″ (2.5 cm) spacing really shows. We still kept them pretty tight, thinning a few short stretches to 2″ (5 cm) for comparison, but mostly did them like this, aiming/hoping for a big yield of fairly slender full-size carrots towards the end of October. You can see, second from right, a little one that escaped. It may seem obvious, I’ve found appropriate spacing is easy to overlook or downplay. When you’ve actually seen the massive difference it usually makes, it’s hard to ignore! Think better seeder. :)
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Tue, Sep 27, 2011 · Filed under Autumn, Harvest, Veggies
Red and orange peppers! It’d be nice if this was a normal sight, but with our short season and often as not inconsistent heat and sun—peppers love decent heat—peppers that fully turn color are fairly unusual in this market garden. Because they’re more uncertain, I’ve tended to give them lower priority, often transplanting them at the end of the queue, which doesn’t improve their chances. I also usually don’t mulch—peppers appreciate decent mulch of any sort (plastic especially, it’s so…efficient), the heated earth seems to really help them grow.
This year, we lucked out with the weather—unfortunately, we also planted the smallest amount of peppers ever. Oh, well, that’s how the garden gambling goes! Here we have Gypsy, a tapered hybrid that has a rather quick 65-day maturity, but takes longer to go from its pretty yellow-lime green starting color to…sweet red. I’ve grown this for a while, it always comes through, a tasty, prolific, all-purpose pepper that’s nice even when it’s not red. And then there’s the open-pollinated, heirloom Orange Sun, from seed I’ve had for years, a blocky bell pepper that needs a full 80 to 90 days, that I’ve seldom seen beyond its dark green initial color, now in a satisfyingly deep, rich orange. Taste changes with color, smoothing and sweetening—these guys are delicious!
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