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…
5 CommentsMonth: March 2007
It’s around 8:30 in the morning and I’m about to uncover the early lettuce. Floating row cover is a very lightweight spunbonded polyester, light enough not to crush seedlings when laid down directly on top. It lets in water and sunlight, and also retains heat, to differing degrees depending on…
4 Comments
True leaves are starting to appear in the first trays of eggplant and peppers (that’s Dusky, and Vittoria behind, both eggplant). It’s around 20 days from seeding. Rapid growth is on the way!
1 Comment
My box of back issues finally arrived. Reading through it may cause my head to explode (so many things to try, so little time :), but I’ll take the chance! This is the entire collection, seven years worth, of a fantastic market gardeners’ monthly newsletter called Growing for Market. Tiny farming lies in a kind of information nowhere land between gardening and large-scale agriculture. Most of what I do is straight from gardening methods, but the scale is a little…bigger, with things to do and problems to solve that just don’t happen in even a very large personal garden. Meanwhile, commercial farming info is all about tractors and agrochemicals and acres of one crop at a time. All wrong. So where do you learn the best way to stake 500 tomato plants, or how to keep veggies fresh for half a day at a hot outdoor summer market?
4 Comments
Five weeks after seeding in plugsheets under lights, around 180 little lettuces are in the ground. Especially without a hardening off stage, they’ll have a bit of struggle in the greenhouse-hot days and subzero nights ahead, but that’s the gamble for extra early harvest. Luckily, lettuce has been good to…
2 Comments