Today, it’s a warmish (57°F/14°C), overcast, gray day, with a light breeze. In the next week or so, the unheated greenhouse is to be relocated, set up, and outfitted to house hardier seedlings. All things considered, right now is a fine time to start this season’s hardening off… In early afternoon, we set outside trays of onion, cauliflower and broccoli, preparing them to head out from the cosy shelter of the seedling room to the real world. They’ll stay out till early evening, then it’s back in for a few more hours under the lights, and more of the same for the next few days. These first acts and sights of spring on a tiny farm never fail to excite (I think it’s the gambler in all of us)…
Tools
Equipment for large-scale agriculture is too big or too expensive, and many home gardening tools don’t work efficiently on larger jobs or break easily. Tiny farming on plots up to two or three acres requires its own special gear…
1440 onions
I’m sure I’ve taken this photo before, but somehow, it’s still new—the first transplants of the season! This is the look of 1,440 onions, starting out. These are 72-cell plug sheets, and the plan is to multi-plant four onions in each spot. Do a little multiplication—5 trays, 72 cells, 4 onions per—and the results are clear. Whether things will turn out exactly like this, perfect bushels of Red Globe red and Utah sweet Spanish, is anybody’s guess, but I’m quite confident we will get…something! :)
All the usual tools and methods for this tiny farm are back for another run. There are still at least a couple of years left on the roll of donated food-grade plastic wrap that I use (and re-use for the season) to hold moisture and increase heat, just until the tiny seedlings emerge. To check temperatures in this new seedling room, on the lowest shelf of the light rack, where it’s coldest, is one of the minimum/maximum digital recording thermometers. And of course, there are the trusty, home-built light racks themselves, with an assortment of T-12 and T-8 fixtures and Cool White fluorescent tubes, providing the bare minimum of heat and light to get things started.
I’m always up for trying new approaches and new gear, but a lot of the time, if it gets the job done and you’re already having fun, what more could you need?!
In the beginning, again
There is really no one absolute moment when a new growing season begins, so I guess today is as good as many to make the call. All the familiar gear is in a new farm home (there’s a bit of backstory here, that I’ll eventually get to in the About…), and right now, we’re setting up the light racks and getting ready to seed. This will be my eighth season of tiny farming, and it should be an interesting one!
Winter storage
Snow’s here—it’s definitely overwinter storage time! Winter storage is a little different every year, as needs, facilities, and plans change. This time around, a fair bit of gear is in the 20’x32′ (~6×10 m) hoophouse, with its full sun exposure and fairly extreme temperature spread (from double-digit subzero at night, to 80-100°F/25-38°C on a sunny day!). Sooo, you don’t want to be storing just anything in there. Anything that’s damaged by freezing isn’t a good idea. And plastics that aren’t UV-resistant will break down, fading and weakening (really, most plastics not meant for constant outdoor use should probably be kept out of the sun whenever possible). Here, it’s mostly wood—extra rough cut cedar from a project a couple of years back, tomato stakes, tables, farmers’ market display trays—which is OK, and I’ll get the plastic items under cover. Except for checking the snow load on the hoophouse after big storms, that’s all she wrote until early spring. The outdoor part of veggie farming in our growing zone will now take a bit of a snooze…
Bigger gear…
Thanks to the comments on yesterday’s blog post, this piece of old farm gear, lying abandoned in the field for who knows how long, has been ID-ed as a sickle bar mower. Yet another in a long line of bigger equipment I’ve seen but not used in my tiny farming career. I suppose the main job of this mower was in making hay, something I’ve barely considered. Why? Because it belongs to “another scale” of farming. There’s small-scale—tiny farming, on one or two or three acres—and then there’s mid-size, and then, BIG.
This idea of SCALE has been on my mind quite a bit, lately. More and more people these days seem to want to get back to the land and start farming, and the farming they want to do is usually of the tiny variety. Like what’s pictured on this blog. Small-plot growing is understandable, accessible, hard work, economically tough, genuinely community-building, fun…all of that stuff. Big tractors and combines and other imposing (and EXPENSIVE) machinery don’t figure into the picture. In my few years of market gardening, I’ve only ever driven my Kubota compact tractor, and I know nothing practical about larger scale growing gear.
This is interesting for the simple reason that, if “we” (referring, at least, to Canada and the US) are going to change what we eat, where it comes from, on any sort of large scale, it’s difficult to imagine our part of the world, with its convenient supermarkets and complex food chain, suddenly fed mainly by hundreds of thousands or MILLIONS of postcard tiny farms. Gathering food for tens and hundreds of millions of people from all those tiny farms would be…complicated. So it seems to me, there’s tiny farming and mid-size farming, and figuring out how they fit together. Hmm…
Second snow, 2009
Around 8 am, just getting light, and it’s the second snow that’s sticking around for a while. Here, I’m standing in a weedy area right beside the barn, looking south-west over the south-facing slope, with the chickenhouse just out of sight to the right. (That’s a so-far unidentified piece of antique iron farm gear with wheels, sticking up on the left.)
Winter isn’t coming in as hard and early as it has in the last couple of years, the temperature is supposed to stay above zero for the next few days at least. We shall see!
Every year, the feeling on first seeing veggie production land disappearing under snow I find kinda cool and interesting. It’s not really sad or anything like that, but there’s definitely an “it’s really over now”, wiped-out thought-sensation-emotion thing going on. When you’re growing stuff, the snow and the cold really send a message. This is obvious, but still…worth noting. :)
Yes, carrots!
Just-rinsed carrots in the soft light of an overcast day: beautiful every time! Some veggies look particularly good without trying… These are freshly pulled Nelson, at a pretty fair size but not yet fully mature, from our fourth planting of the season. Every year so far, I’ve put in at least four, sometimes five plantings in succession, and we rarely see really fat, full-sized carrots. This has worked well for CSA and farmers’ market: our carrots are freshly harvested every week, never from storage, and at a versatile size, always perfect for eating raw and usually big enough for convenient cooking as well. Today’s haul, bundled and laid out for rinsing on the long screen table, will be heading into CSA share bags in just a minute, for pick-up this afternoon…