A rather warm (28°C) and sunny Sunday, feels more like late spring than the early days of autumn. The field is looking oddly full, thanks to the sections of oats, and quite orderly. Specks in the distance, Heike from Germany (the red dot), our third WWOOFer of the season, weeds spinach, and to her right, Conall waters in another fall seeding of salad mix and spinach. A laid-back day on the farm…
Month: September 2007
A spot of tea…
Steeping compost in water is all it takes to come up with a healthy batch of…compost tea. Here we’ve taken some composted cow manure and let it sit in a 55-gallon barrel of water for a few days. There are different methods, ingredients, and all kinds of other details about preparing this stuff, but I’m still in the broad strokes experimental stage: I make it up somewhat differently every time. This time, three barrels are going around the field, strategically placed next to mesclun beds and spinach. Hopefully the small amount of nitrogen, assorted micronutrients, and other possibly unidentified good things will give these late season plantings an extra growing boost! They’re used diluted maybe by half, applied with good ol’ watering cans, then soaked in hours later with a solid hose watering. Veggies don’t get more hand-tended than that! :)
(NOTE: There are different types of “compost teas,” different ways of making and using them, and lots of different opinions about all of this. If you’re thinking about making your own compost tea, a couple of good places to get some quick, general info are Wikipedia’s Compost tea article, and ATTRA’s Notes on Compost Teas.)
Tossing rocks
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.
Return of spinach
Fall spinach is finally ready to pick! The first five beds are pretty sparse—really poor germination in the dry heat of August—but what’s there is looking…succulent. The scattered new plantings of spinach, radish, mesclun and spicy brassica greens make parts of the field look like a whole new season…
Trying fall rye
With the oats experiment going good all around the field, it’s time for experimental green manure-cover crop #2, fall rye (starts and grows well in cool weather). Reading about cover crops online, I found one apparently popular method for seeding ’em is…”airplane”. I use the more down-to-earth Earthway broadcast seeder, which works like one of those hand-held lawn seeders, except there’s a big zippered bag and shoulder strap instead of the handgrip and little funnel. You fill up the bag, sling it over your shoulder, and then, in one smooth movement—limbs, synchronize!—turn the crank with your right hand, slide open the seed hole (with a little spring-loaded lever) with your left, and start walking (I go forward). The seed streams out of the aperture at the bottom of the bag, onto a rotating plate with dividers that flings the seed a little over 180° in front of you. The combination of seed hole size (determined by how far back you pull the lever), and the cranking and walking speeds determine the coverage. Seed is spread maybe 5′-7′ (1.5-2.1m) on either side. Open the seed hole aperture too much and you’ll drain the bag in no time at all—heavy coverage. It’s not at all difficult, you can be broadcasting seed in minutes, but still, a little bit of a trick!
Screen table
The new screen table was this year’s big addition to the washing up section of our little post-harvest processing area. Building it earlier this year was quick work: some 2×6 and 1×2 lumber, screwed together, with 1/2″ hardware cloth sandwiched in as tight as I could get it. Hardware cloth is the mesh of choice because it’s welded where the wires cross, so leaves and the like don’t get snagged the way they would in plain woven screen, like chicken wire. Positioned on sawhorses close to the washing machine and tubs makes it easy to pluck crops out of the water and onto the rack to drain. Simple, inexpensive, and one of my favorite bits of harvest gear… The last couple of harvest Fridays have been more work for fewer people, as part of the summer crew left at the beginning of September. With the days getting shorter as well, it’s the first time this year we’ve been finishing up the sorting and packing after dark! This week: mesclun, beet, carrot, spinach, radish, kale, tomato, potato, a few cauliflower and broccoli, squash, hot and sweet peppers, and onions and garlic from storage…
Row cover decision
After a chilly and only reasonably busy day at the farmers’ market, it was a bit of afternoon nap time, and then on to making the first frost decision—to cover or not to cover—of the fall season. I “consult” four different online weather services, in general trust none to be very accurate, but when it comes to more dire predictions, like super high and low temperatures and mighty gusting winds, a certain one out the four usually stands apart and is…quite accurate. True to the norm, today three services forecast overnight lows of around 5-7°C (40-44°F), while the dire one calls for plus 1°C with “risk of frost”. So, a couple of hours before sunset, we started assembling floating row cover kits near tender crop sections. The cover, 14′ wide and cut to 50′, is kept loosely rolled on 4′ lengths of 2×2. Heavy rocks, 10lbs and up, are gathered and kept track of over the season. And that’s all you need: row cover and rocks! Unlike for insect protection, where edges of the cover should be buried, or at least, anchored firmly every few feet, frost protection only needs draping over top, and tacking down at the corners and a couple of additional spots. Anyhow, in the end, I considered the breeze, the slight cloud cover, and my…um, instinct (?!), and decided not to cover…