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

Finally, today, no more potatoes in the ground! After a near-pristine potato patch for much of the season, field priorities got switched around and pigweed had its turn with the taters. Eradicating the weeds before digging up the last 50′x50′ section seemed to take forever (but was actually a few hours spread over the last couple of weeks). Anyhow, this last haul is about 200 lbs (91 kg). It’s not much when you can buy a 50lb (22 kg) bag of great, unsprayed, unwashed potatoes for $14CDN at the farmers’ market. But in my crop mix, it makes sense. We harvested somewhere around 1,000 lbs (454 kg) this year. In the usual 1-2 lb bags, some sold at a single pound (not bulk!) price, and the majority used for CSA shares, that works out just fine… Of the Yukon Gold, Norland and Gold Rush, YG performed the best, from small, early, supertasty new potatoes to a good amount of nicely big mature ones—they’re not for storage, but who stores a pound!

With more people in the field this year, end-of-season clean-up is already well underway. Here, Midori, visiting after moving to France a couple of years back, removes weeds that’ve gone to seed from three older beds of mesclun. Ideally, finished beds would be promptly mowed down, spread with compost, tilled in, and then seeded with a new veggie or cover crop a week or two later. Things aren’t usually that efficient, finished beds sometimes sit for weeks, weeds pop up in the interim, and if they go to seed, have to be removed before tilling… Lying around: the green plastic garden totes are quite useful once the handles have been properly reinforced with rivets; the old builder’s wheelbarrow comes in handy for rocks, fallen tomatoes and the like. The grass in front, in need of mowing, is part of a wide path on one side of the greenhouse, the grass beyond is the magnificent oats! Oh, no frost last night, as you can see from the happy peppers at the top of the pic!

What better to do on a pleasantly cool and misty day in the market garden than some leisurely rock picking? It’s a relaxing if neverending task, often put off during the busier days of spring and summer, performed here by Heike. In the field, fist-size rocks push up every winter, get raked from the beds to the paths in spring, then get in the way of weeding all summer long. They’re a growing season harvest all their own, and picking is ongoing. The biggest, 10lb (4.5kg) and up, and quite rare, are set aside for anchoring row cover. The rest are collected in buckets, and taken by tiny tractor to a spot along a fence where I’m gathering quite a pile. Been thinking of building a low rock wall, but haven’t decided on a perfect spot—get it wrong, and it’d be kinda hard to move.

A vast repository of uprooted pigweed is collecting by the wagon load in the southwest corner of the field. It’s crazy the amount of effort that’s been put into pigweed pulling this year, that in addition to hoeing and tilling in younger specimens. The pigweed pile has already achieved almost surreal dimensions and a fascination all its own. I stop and gaze at it on the way by… What can I say? PIGWEED!!!!! Guest photo by Mami.

In the foreground, a pigweeding throwdown with the crew of the day: Eoghan and Alison (trying out a little tiny farming for the first time), Jo, Mami (our second WWOOFer, also from Japan), Conall. Everyone pull! (The most alarming giant pigweed specimens had already been ERADICATED by the time this photo was taken!) In the background, a house on the subdivision to the east of the garden field (it was severed from the farm years ago), home of our nearest CSA member. Their veggie farm for the season is literally a stone’s throw away—local food doesn’t get closer than that!

The First Shift—today, it’s Sherry and Andrea—picks Indy Gold beans in the early afternoon (Conall’s pulling weeds). On Fridays, everyone comes at different overlapping times, usually from the mid-morning on. Most Fridays so far have been sunny and hot, so I try to fit in greens in the later afternoon, anything but cutting them in high noon heat. So, it’s beans on a hot summer’s day. The Fridays have been getting smoother and more efficient every week, and so far, we haven’t been nearly shorthanded. Still, the lessons of the year of People in the Field are becoming plain, nothing startling, but made unavoidably obvious when seen first hand. The main one is, you have to maintain an equal balance of people doing general fieldwork or the weekly crop availability won’t keep up with the…harvest capacity! More on all of that later in the Fall… Today, only a bushel or so of first pick beans as we get caught been plantings, plus mesclun, carrots, beets, arugula, potatoes, chives, beet greens, a bit of kale, squash and cucumbers, and the first bushels of mixed tomatoes, along with onions and garlic from storage.

There’s no exaggerating the amount of pigweed in some sections of the field. Here, where the last seedings of spinach and peas failed—really poor germination in the heat—pigweed happily took over in no time. I mowed it down, and now I’m going in with the 48″ rototiller, prepping for fall spinach. Ideally, I’d keep the rototilling and any heavy gear off the garden beds, but this is practically an emergency. I apply the in-moderation rule here… It’s growing on me that round about next year, much of the pigweed seed, deposited three years ago in two-year-old manure, is due to expire… Right now, though, the seed seems pretty healthy to me.

The one dark secret of this organic field—something you couldn’t really tell from selected photos—is the prevalence of pigweed (amaranth, mostly or all Amaranthus retroflexus). About two-thirds of the garden seems to be completely saturated with pigweed seed. Weeding two or three times for all-new outbreaks is common. In some spots, it’s literally as if some kind soul is broadcasting new seed, thickly, every couple of weeks. And when it’s a closely space crop like the all-lettuce mesclun mix in the pic, this means painstaking fingertip weeding. Here, Andrea and I spent about two and half hours clearing 200′ of 5-row beds, the entire latest succession planting. Luckily, conversation made the time transparent (thinking about all of the extra labor devoted just to depigweeding is a little painful). As best as I can figure, the pigweed came along with the two-year-old, not-fully-composted cow manure that we spread in the fall of Year 2 (three years ago). We put down around 100 tons on just over an acre—the ground was positively springy!—which was great. Except for the pigweed seed. Eventually, the vast store will be depleted (the seed is viable for five years). Until then, it’s a lot of extra work… The question I’d now ask: “What has that cow been eating?!”

Andrea and Conall harvest Cioggia beet greens in the hot mid-afternoon sun. In tiny farming, it seems that every action has several different effects and offsets, some good, some not so, and a balance, hopefully leaning to the positive side, is struck each time. Here, harvesting greens in the heat is not the greatest for the freshly pulled leaves or the plants that remain, but this is the time we had (a cloudy afternoon with a mild, refreshing breeze every harvest day would be nice!). A quick bath in cold well water instantly refreshes the harvest, and the plants will recover overnight. This particular bed of beets had gotten quite weedy, so weeding while harvesting slowed things down. But, the fairly dense piles of pulled weeds, spread between rows, dries into a decent mulch that’ll help retain moisture and prevent more weeds from germinating. And, the harvest is also a thinning session, giving the remaining plants the space to fill out into proper beets. It all works out…!!