Month: May 2007

Potatoes and people

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Finishing off the potato planting. Sherry is a second year CSA member, Brian a regular customer at the farmers’ market. They both approached me to get into the field for a bit, and it fit with the People Year on this tiny farm. It’s fun and it’s tricky. Each little step away from the ultra simple model of just me and the field brings on more considerations along with whatever the improvement—in this case, the basic pleasure of sharing work that’s fun to do!

For the main fieldwork jobs, I want to provide compensation. Of course, with cheap supermarket produce prices setting the standard, farm work is…real low paying. I’ve given it some thought in the last few weeks, and it doesn’t make sense to me to run a small farm based mainly on volunteer work, it doesn’t sound all that…sustainable. Still, volunteering is common with small organic farms (and I signed up for WWOOF this year). Anyhow, my plan so far is to divide work into the absolutely necessary and the not so critical. For example, maintaining the herb and flower beds in pristine condition is not something I’d do, basic care is what I have time for, but it’d be great to have volunteers do that. Things like timely seeding, cultivation and harvest are…central. These, I really want to pay for if I can’t do it myself. I’m working it out. How it unfolds this year will be interesting!! (I guess that’s what BIG farm families were for! :)

Carrots like burlap!

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The carrot germination experiment worked like a…charm! They were coming up pretty good three days ago, conditions looked great under there (moist, airy, seedlings nice and green), so I left the burlap on a while longer to push the germination rate a bit more, and that worked as well. This bed just had a 10-minute clean-up of some grass and dandelion, and I test cultivated a few feet at this end for smaller weeds getting started. With the moist soil, it’s all easy. Now it’s off with the rest of the covers and time for a little irrigated rain (since Ma Nature is presently not obliging). Excellent!

Flea beetles

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All of the brassicas, except for radishes, start out under floating row cover. It’s the only way they’ll survive the flea beetles. Around here, the FBs are a clear and present menace to the cabbage family. They chew little holes in tender baby leaves until nothing but stems and dried out leaf skeletons remain. It’s awful. I could use organic sprays, like rotenone or pyrethrin, but although they’re “approved” and from natural sources (other plants), it seems to me a slippery slope, or at least habit-forming. I haven’t sprayed so far. I did try a garlic blender concoction as a repellent once, but it was like cooking for the FBs, they hopped off and hopped back on once the spraying stopped: salad dressing! Anyhow, this is bok choi (pak choi). FBs eventually managed to get under the edges and do a bit of damage, but that’ll be outgrown, bok choi grows fast (as do radishes). Once the leaves get a bit more substantial, the FBs can’t as easily chomp on ’em. Cauliflower and broccoli, under this same 14′ wide sheet of row cover, are untouched. FBs REALLY like bok choi!

Sorting

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Tools sorted out

Tiny farming requires lots of bits and pieces, gear inevitably gets jumbled and misplaced, and the whole show can start to slow down as things get in your way and you spend time searching for this or that. Sorting things out is an on ongoing, neverending process. Last year, it seemed like a fine idea to stick all the hand tools in a 55-gallon barrel, so that nothing would be leaning against the hoophouse plastic. What a bad idea. Everything got tangled up, I began leaning my most used stuff against the barrel, and this year, when other people also started using the tools, it got completely out of control. Today, I screwed a couple of boards across the studs in the end wall—instant (if temporary) relief, and it got the barrel out of there, making it easier to move around the seedling tables. A place for everything and everything in its place—here, that often annoying recommendation does make sense!

First day at the farmers’ market!

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Up at 5 am, in the greenhouse at 5:30 to harvest more early lettuce and arugula. On the road by 6:30. Set up right at the 7 am opening. The photo is OK, though I find farmers’ market snapshots tend to look so stark and literal, they usually don’t capture the FEELING. Markets are fun because of the goods, you don’t expect a slick and snappy shopping mall presentation, your focus is on the food and crafts, and chatting with people. In pics, you see the mish-mash of basic tabletop presentation, but you don’t get the…experience. This one is a small market, 7 am-1 pm Saturdays, around 25 vendors, a dozen with fresh veggies, and usually about three hours of fairly packed traffic during the summer. Not like a big city market. I’m the only “certified organic” guy, and only one other stand has salad greens and a good selection of veggies beyond the standards. My stand is first on the right of the pic, with the newly repainted chalkboard and sharp new collapsing metal sawhorses debuting this season. I like the really basic display and circus-on-the-road feeling of setting up at 7, gone by 1:30. It was a good day, I was there mainly to show up, with only about 30lbs of the five-lettuce-and-arugula mix to sell (the first field crops won’t be ready for another couple of weeks). It was quiet, the cloudy, chilly weather didn’t help. Chatted with lots of regular customers, handed out some CSA flyers, and sold out by around 11… Fun!

Gardens within gardens

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Garden within a garden

One part of this year’s plan is to expand the herb area from a few beds into a real little herb garden AND to create a home veggie garden. Here is the starting point (along with my shadow). At the bottom of the photo in the overgrowth are sections of sage, oregano and thyme, all doing fine after overwintering with no cover whatsoever, other than the snow. They need to be cleaned up and I’m going to move some. Next, I finally transplanted the parsley from plug sheets started in February, two varieties, Plain Italian flat leaf and Green River curly. The open area is waiting for warmer nights—over the next couple of weeks, I’ll transplant dill, basil, and see if cilantro can survive the jump from tray to field, and direct seed a bunch of others. I haven’t quite figured out where cutting flowers will go, maybe some here as well. And then, in the top corner, marked by 6′ stakes for trellis netting, I’m doing a home veggie garden, 20’x25′, with a little bit of everything, a tinier version of the big garden… It’s a little crazy as far as making work, but the idea is to have a demo for farm stand customers who want to start their own gardens. The more veggie gardens the merrier! :)

More seedlings to the greenhouse

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More seedlings to the greenhouse

The spring seedling starting days are rapidly winding up. Moved about half of the remaining trays from the Milkhouse to the greenhouse, including most of the experimentally late-started tomatoes. Based on the marginally useful long-range weather forecast, I’m aiming to begin the main field transplants around the end of this week…


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