Weather

Hand-tended

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Hand-tending pumpkin transplant

“Hand-tended” is one of the phrases that usually gets popped into the occasional bit of promotional writing about this market garden. Sounds good! If asked (hasn’t happened so far), I’d explain that we don’t use many machines, most of the garden work is done with hand tools, or just hands, as in, hand-weeding, or plucking off bugs…by hand. And lots of time is spent through the season, crouching and crawling around, checking out what’s going on with particular plantings of this or that. Which all seems pretty cool. :)

Today, Tara and I hand-transplanted two beds of early-maturing Neon pumpkins (above), along with a few more Snack Jack (tiny pumpkins bred for producing lots of tasty seed). The Neons are 70-80-day hybrid, kinda freakishly quick to mature (pumpkins are mostly 100+ days).

At this point in the season here, it’s getting kinda late for winter squash and pumpkins, but there are a few beds still to fill in, so a bunch of 70-85-day varieties, coming up in pots in the greenhouse, will be heading out to the field over the next week. With anything but the worst in cold and cloudy weather over the next three months, they should size up just fine!

Disc action

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It’s steel in the field… Big machine work was the tiny farm highlight today, not the machinery itself but the intense and much-needed sod-busting action. Peter, a (certified organic) beef and grain farmer on the next two (much bigger) farms down the road,  dropped by just ahead of a bit of a rainstorm, to disc the fields he’d moldboarded in the fall. There was time for two passes on the south field, then the weather hit, bringing plowing to a sudden stop as the ground almost instantly got too slippery and soft.

My experience with big tractor work is limited. Maybe someday I’ll get more involved with heavy machinery—to watch, at least, big machines are fascinating and…cool. Or perhaps I’ll go the other way, d/evolving all the way to Fukuoka-like farming with little more than an intricate method and a stick… Probably stay somewhere in between… :)

In any case, this is all one-time stuff. The double row of discs do some serious pizza-cutter work on the dense, moldboarded strips, so we’ll be able to rototill more easily and effectively, without tearing the little tiller apart. And then, the soil food web can rebuild.

Elsewhere, earlier, I direct seeded the first spinach, beets and radish. Following their progress in the new garden ground will be interesting…

Soil inspection

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A sunny, still chilly, fairly busy outdoor day. Did some test tilling this morning, with the Kubota compact tractor and 48″ rototiller. The solid ground hasn’t fully thawed out, but the plowed area is already nearly 50°F (10°C) at 6″ (15cm) deep. So I thought I’d have a go on a 30′ (9m) strip, to see how well it’d chop up with the Kubota.

The full plan is for disking—big plow, big tractor—by Peter down the road. That would break up the moldboarded strips, finishing up with the little (but mighty!) Kubota. But between the weather, and unexpected things happening, you never know when a date with off-farm machinery will fall through.

I want to get the early stuff—spinach, garlic (yes, have to try spring planting this year), onions and so forth—in as early as possible. So we’ll probably be prepping an area with just the Kubota.

In the afternoon, Andie (aka Andrea, aka Max) dropped by for the first time, to check things out. She’s finishing up school, and planning to spend a couple of days a week for the summer, learning about small-scale farming the hands-on way… We strolled around, Andie tried out some seed starting with a tray of arugula, and we chatted.

Everyone’s first visit to the farm is a bit different, and there are all kinds of reasons why people want to get out in the field. This time, a good deal of the conversation involved university, graduate studies and the like, along with…tiny farming. It’s good to have an idea of who you’ll be working with, both ways—a comfortable, interesting fit really makes a difference in the tiny farm experience!

This season, there’s a bit of a blog plan: to show a lot more of the people side of the market garden! Today, as often happens, I forgot to take photos while we were actually doing stuff, so right at the end of her visit, Andie checked out the freshly rototilled ground, and I snapped an official Her Day 1 pic. The soil looked good, it’s a clayey loam (pretty much like at the old farm), with the sod breaking up nicely, and Andie seemed happy with the prospects, so we should be checking in again with both real soon! :)

A brief return to winter

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It snowed fairly steadily yesterday and today, transforming everything with that pretty but kinda unwanted winter wonderland effect. Looks like around 4-6″ (10-15cm) so far… (I don’t keep track of snowfall the way I do rain!) This isn’t forecast to last, it should warm up and be all gone in 3-4 days, and then the temperature is supposed to jump. Drying out time…

That first day of being able to actually work the field is always so different each year, especially the last 4-5 crazy weather years. Two years ago, peas went in the first week of April. Last year, it went from too-wet-to-work, to needing irrigation, in one mid-April week. Who knows how it’ll go this time around.

With the new garden, extra steps like disking, rototilling, and waiting a bit for the grass to break down some more, not to mention, prepping the ground for and putting up the greenhouse,  make timing particularly critical. The farmers’ market officially starts in less than FOUR WEEKS. CSA shares begin second or third week of June. I can feel the adrenaline bubbling up just writing about it: timing and the WEATHER! :)

After the rain, again

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Outdoors: waiting! Today was a cold, dark, wet, oppressively gray day, and then, at the last minute, the sky cleared for a beautiful coppery-golden sunset. I headed outside to check out the light, and for the first time this season, caught that delicious summertime sun-comes-out-after-the-rain feeling. It’s especially sweet when you’re growing stuff because it means: A) it’s sunny again, and B) you got rain! Simple pleasures. What could be finer (with the Weather)? In the photo, the end of the moldboarded section of the south field—it’s all gently thawing out…

Onions in the sun

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Beautiful day: 50°F+ (10°C) in the shade, over 60 (15°C) in the glorious sun! Couldn’t resist putting SOMETHING outside, so out went the first three trays of Red Wing red onions. Set them out around 10 am for a couple of hours, on a stack of lumber (the plywood is for re-flooring the upper barn), just outside the seedling room door, facing east.

This isn’t regular hardening off, just a kinda day trip, because I’m not sure when the greenhouse will be up. Normally, the plan is to get the hardy seedlings ready for moving out there sometime in April, but depending on the weather, they may stay indoors longer than usual. So, I dunno if back and forth between full-on SUN and WIND, and then the pale, fan-stirred world of the fluorescents, will freak ’em out a bit, but I don’t think so. It hasn’t done in the past! And I’ll keep putting them out every nice day from here on in…

This is the inquisitive, kinda impatient gardener at work, more than any sort of pro market grower on a rigorous production schedule (dunno if I even really have one of those anymore)—I like seeing indoor-started seedlings get outdoors, meet the real world, even for a minute, even if it’s arugula in the snow… Fun with tiny farming!

Snow off, snow on

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From delicious warm weather to snow, to mini-melt-off, to more cold and snow… The weather is yo-yo-ing, changing every couple of days. Seems unusual, but what isn’t with Our Weather of the Last Few Years? At this point, the only way I could keep track of all the weird weather configurations is with a detailed daily weather journal, constantly updating the stats. Somehow, that doesn’t particularly appeal to me! In the pic, the overnight snow makes a pretty topping for the useful wood scraps, ends of 2×6’s, conveniently piled just outside the new seedling room door…


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