Fieldwork

Bed prep: Step 1

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Overgrown garden bed after a first pass with the wheel hoe

Here’s a chunk of this year’s tiny veg garden, looking particularly rough in the harshly slanted evening sunlight. As unlike seeing for yourself as this photo may be, it does accurately capture the wild and not ready look of it all. Lush dandelion, prickly thistle and grass already starting to soar, mixed about with the dry dead stems of last fall’s overgrown then winter-killed weeds—that’s step 1 of hand-prepping the bed, completed. It’s not at all like what the rototiller on the tractor would’ve done.

For this first pass, I used the up-for-anything Valley Oak wheel hoe. It’s probably not intended for hacking through this sort of cover, even so, it does the job amazingly well, moving forward and pulling back, using both sides of the blade to slice through tough spots. The green, intact-looking plants have actually been cut off just below the soil level—a day in the sun and they’ll all be fairly dried out, shrunken and browned. Next step, raking it clear, then, another pass with the wheel hoe. Tomorrow!

Garlic revealed

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Garlic mid-May

For the first time after years and years of growing garlic, they’ve been under row cover since planting in fall, protection from a repeat of last year’s surprise invasion of the leek moth. No longer the one crop that every garden pest, from deer-sized to flea beetle, seemed to studiously ignore. I covered them right after planting so I wouldn’t have to muck about in the marshy field in April before it dried out, and loosened it up earlier this month.

Today, a full day of unfiltered sun. Leek moths are out and about at night, so the garlic should be safe even if the moths are in the neighborhood. The plants look fine, healthy and growing quite fast, though the leaves were a bit bent at first by pushing up against the cover. Cover went back on late in the afternoon. Better that than be bored (by leek moths).

Burying Gold

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Planting Yukon Gold seed potatoes in a trench

Yukon Gold seed potatoes, placed in a trench, covered with a layer of on-farm compost made from cow manure, and carefully tended—watered and weeded, and hilled up with earth as the potatoes form upwards. In seven or eight weeks, scrabbling around in the dirt underneath the plants is rewarded by the first golf ball-sized new potatoes. So delicious. Yukon Golds were the first potatoes I planted—I almost remember reading about them and thinking of them as a kind of super-potato. “All-purpose” was the magical attribute. Starchy enough for fluffiness when fried, roasted or mashed, yet still with the firmness to hold up quite well in potato salad or a stew. These guys are spaced a foot apart, close enough to commune with their tribe, not so close they start to eat each other’s dinner. With decent weather, this batch will be a mouth-watering harvest just down the line!

Gushing is good!

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A gushing water hose—nothing more normal and mundane wherever electricity for pressurized pumping, and of course WATER, are in plentiful supply. This tiny farm is in such a place, yet the gushing hose signals something much happier, an elevated event, because it’s proof positive that the dug well that irrigates the field is back in action once again after another frozen winter.

Priming the pump is usually a mid-May thing, when freezing is over. The operation is simple enough: slowly pour a couple of gallons of water into the pump so it backfills the pipe that goes into the well, turn on the pump, and wait for it to catch. It may take two or three top-ups and retries. When water gushes, the pump is primed for the season! It’s not foolproof, though, the pipe could’ve gotten hopeless clogged, or the well-used and dilapidated pump and tank could decide to give up a seal or conk out entirely. Then the simple would likely become costly repairs or replacement. But not this time!

Details! If the irrigation fittings look small, they are indeed. I’ve seen photos of irrigation set-ups on big farms that are full scale waterworks, orderly grids of giant pipes. Here, the setup is a 1″ plastic pipe that snakes above-ground out into the field—it’s the disconnected part on the left. The pipe can be this small because it’s only meant for low-pressure drip irrigation, hand watering by hose, or a few sprinklers at a time: not every day, all crops, all the time. Also, a dug well like the one here doesn’t have an endless water supply, you don’t want to get ahead of its reservoir size and replenishment rate. Finally, the longer the pipe, the lower the pressure the closer you get to the end. Here there’s about 400′ of it, and you can notice the pressure difference at each of the taps spaced along it. It’s not geared to intense large-scale production, instead, a low cost way to connect a fairly distant water source to a thirsty veggie plot when there’s the need!

A big little fix

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Wheel hoe as tool carrier

Today, a tiny farming breakthrough—I found I could securely balance multiple tools on the wheel hoe, and easily wheel the whole setup between the tool shed and the field! When the tiny farm was operating at a larger scale, I’d hitch the flatbed trailer to the John Deere riding mower, load up with everything we could possibly need for a job, and drive on out. That was deluxe! But for a couple of hand tools—here, a hay fork, leaf rake, shovel—plus the wheel hoe, driving is just overkill. It’s not that far a walk. Still…guiding a wheel hoe while carrying tools is a bit of a balancing act, and I usually make two trips. This new way, using the wheel hoe as a tool carrier, flips it from irksome to fun! I figured out how to quickly insert tools so they brace each other and don’t slip out the bottom, and that was it…upgrade complete. (Yes, I could just pick up the not so heavy wheel hoe, but then, that’s what wheels are for! :)

Grow the whole bulb!

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A left-behind garlic bulb from last year has set out on its own, with six cloves all making their way. Decided to leave it to see how things turn out. Not the greatest experimental venture into the unknown: in this quite heavy soil, when things are multi-planted, when it’s veg that grows in the ground in one spot, they tend to crowd and even flatten the sides of each other where they press together. This I know from experience. So expect small, maybe partly flattened new garlic in a couple of months!

Best lettuce!

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Mezquite variety of romaine lettuce

Just watered heads of Mezquite lettuce, doing well given all the heat they’ve had to deal with over the last weeks. This is a great, fast-maturing romaine lettuce. It’s sweet and crunchy, even in full summer heat that makes most lettuces strong flavored, with a slightly bitter edge.

I grew up with mild lettuce, the standard supermarket fare that’s sourced from wherever the crop grows most abundantly. Here in the mixed veg world of the tiny market garden, no crop can expect its own perfect conditions. That doesn’t mean inferior vegetables, instead, you get a full range of tastes. Grown in summer heat, lettuce often develops a full-bodied flavor and a pleasing hint of bitterness—with a little oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, or in a sandwich, it’s a whole new, elevated taste bud experience!

Anyhow, this Mezquite variety combines full flavor with sweetness, holds up well in all conditions, matures a week or two faster than most other romaines, and is even open-pollinated so you can save the seed. As long as a roving critter doesn’t breach the defenses, like the row cover these guys spend much of their time under, they’re a treat in the making! I harvested a couple today for early tasting purposes…


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