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…

Tiny Farm Bookshelf, Part 1

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Books on farming
Books on farming

This is about a quarter of my farming bookshelf. I get a ton of info from the Web, particularly in winter when I have more time to cruise around online, but books I’m still most fond of. Let’s see what we have…

For one-stop shopping, you could take Rodale’s Garden Problem Solver and a bunch of seeds and that’s all you’d need to get started. This book wasn’t an early acquisition, I think I got somewhere into my first year, but it’s turned out able to answer just about every organic production question I’ve had, from cultivation to irrigation. It’s a little sun-bleached from trips to the field. And then, The New Organic Grower is probably required reading if you’re selling what you grow: practical and also kinda inspiring on the microfarm marketing side.

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Seed starts here…

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Seed chest

This is where everything but the bulky seed goes, and the season starts here. It’s just a big plastic tool chest, with a ziploc bag full of seed packets for each crop. But it’s REALLY the heart and soul of the entire farm, and more so, because there are dozens of small packets of “gotta try this sometime” varieties and specialty crops on top of staple varieties in larger quantities. There’s a whole lotta seed in there. Bigger seed, like corn, beans, peas, and bulk stuff, like buckwheat and clover, have their own plastic jugs.

Inside the Milkhouse revealed

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Expanded Milkhouse interior

Written and posted 3 Nov 2023: A couple days into the new year, and the structural part of the Milkhouse expansion is done. Time to finish up the inside. The photo shows a bit more than half of the overall depth and most of the width, facing the original Milkhouse area. The walls and ceiling were finished with plywood, with the joins plastered over (you can see in the bit of unpainted wall and ceiling).

It’s amazing how much a photo helps along the old memory. Writing from 16 years later, most things are familiar, some I’m reminded of, and a couple I don’t recall. In that last category, that speaker: I have no idea where that’s from, complete blank. Wow, maybe it’ll come back to me. It must be a pair, I think I see the other one against the back wall, behind the partially painted post on the left. Come to think of it, I don’t remember what the speakers were attached to, either: an stereo system, receiver, something like that? Hmmm…

To the greenhouse

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Tomato, eggplant and pepper seedlings heading out from the Milkhouse (seedling room) to the unheated hoophouse for some real sunlight and a taste of the harsher field conditions, before transplant time in a couple of weeks. The small riding mower does double duty, mowing the paths and ferrying around seedlings, tools, harvests.

Compost tea

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Here’s something easy that could come as a kit: a compost tea maker. One 55-gallon barrel, one strong, porous bag (this one’s a woven plastic grain sack) full of compost, some heavy twine, a strong stick, and water. Tie the sack to the stick, place the stick across the top of the barrel so that the sack is suspended, and add water. In a couple of days, a natural, healthy snack for selected seedlings. Apply by watering can.


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