Finally, this year’s field-planted all-lettuce mesclun and spinach were ready for harvest, and that’s all I brought in to the farmers’ market, but in decent quantity. Unfortunately, I still underestimated and was sold out by 10:30 (the market runs 7:00am-1pm). It kinda looks good, being sold out, but really, if you’re doing things right at the market, you want to go home with a very little bit left over. That means you’ve brought enough for everyone who comes by, and have enough to display more than the last one or two of each veggie—it’s a pretty tried-and-true rule that selling the last of anything is harder, one of the few rules that seem useful to me. Overall, I don’t give much thought to sales tactics: with really fresh, high quality veggies, clean presentation, and a (genuinely) cheerful, helpful presence, word of mouth should do the rest. But making the food look attractive I think is a pretty basic part of food enjoyment and…celebration, and having enough for an inviting display right till the market ends is part of that. Of course, selling all you can is another part…the farm may be tiny, but there are still things to buy and normal-sized bills to pay! ;)
Carrots: burlap rules
Germinating carrots under a double layer of untreated burlap is the standard now, after last season’s successful trials. Here, a 50′ (15m) bed of Nelson turns out fine. And the burlap is holding up! It originally cost around $30US per bed, which is kinda real expensive if it disintegrated too quickly. But here it is, on the fourth or fifth planting with lots of life left in it. Anywhere under $10 a bed, and it’s way more cost-efficient than the extra watering and weeding that’d have to happen without it. Instead of rolling it up as I’d been doing, I folded this time, in half, and half again, and so on until it was in a neat, compact stack. Easier to handle, and easier to fold out next time around! And a weather note: Overnight, we suddenly slammed into some pretty intense heat. It was already warm and muggy when I stepped outside at 6:30am, and it shot up to around 30°C (90°F) during the day. Not nearly the hottest it can get around here, but with the humidity, it’s quite the shocking change from recent cooler weather. More of the same forecast for the next few days…
Chickens, bull, fence…
The chickens have been loose by day for a couple weeks in a small, temporarily-fenced run in one of pens just off the barn. Today, the cows were let in to the pen to graze down the long grass. The rough plan was to let the chickens free-range around the whole area, which is about half an acre, and the cows would act as bodyguards, keeping out…predators. Dunno, sounds like good plan, livestock’s all pretty new to me… Consensus was the cows would not respect the chickenwire, so I went to take it down, just as Monty the Young Bull discovered it. I couldn’t help watch, kinda fascinated by the slow motion, low key destruction, as he methodically butted down the posts…scratching.
From one post to the next…
…and now, the chickens, at least, the Frey’s Dual Purpose and the couple of White Rocks that follow them outside…are free as they wanna be!
Shifting gears for summer…
The spring rush is over, and fieldwork is shifting into summer mode, from mainly planting to mainly weeding and watering, and then, HARVESTING. Seedlings for the most important crops and varieties are in, although there’s still quite a lot to transplant.
Here, we’ve just finishing another 100 or so tomatoes, with Lynn watering them in (the Redhead water breaker is GREAT, delivers as much water as you’ve got pressure, while softening the flow so that you’re not smashing or burying the seedlings). Creating a little basin around each seedling makes the most of hand watering in.
In my continuing experiment with shortening seedling production time, these are the youngest toms to go out ever, a third set started at the beginning of May, with their first true leaves now just coming in!
There are also more squash, melons, and a few more toms to transplant—in years past, I’d’ve been concerned about the date, but I’m learning to adapt the season’s resources (time, people, irrigation capacity,…) to the WEATHER.
Keep the workflow balanced is my new first mantra, so we also spent a few hours weeding today (Ryan dropped by to help for a few hours, he’s a new CSA-er this year who is also about to move his family to their own tiny farm at the end June!), instead of rushing on the last transplants.
It’s hard to measure, but for this type of small, diverse market gardening, in this time of extreme weather, things quite often don’t work out as they traditionally should. For example, the recent rain and cold, and now, more heat, have created a situation where the dominant weeds—pigweed, mallow, and lamb’s quarters—are seemingly slow, but are in fact about to explode. Weeding now will probably save way more time and deliver more harvest than putting off weeding just to transplant a few more beds a few days earlier.
I dunno, I’m figuring this out as I go, but I think traditonal garden rules and timing have to be increasingly bent as the weather gets crazier… I guess you could say: EXCITING TIMES! :)
Farewell to the Colonel!
After a full day of seeding and weeding in quite glorious sunshine, with pet chicken Colonel Saunders in attendance, Shannon took her leave this evening, heading on to other interning adventures. She’d worked just about every day of the last month. Our daily chats were…interesting! For my part, it was a really great chance to articulate lots of stuff that’d been bubbling around in my head. Tiny farming can be quite the mental trip, as well as a lot of work—having the chance to bounce ideas and thoughts off someone both completely new and cool to talk to, who’d also been on many other small farms (I’ve STILL to really visit another market garden), was a definite treat. I also at times argued against the market garden practicality of some of her well-thought-through ideas about gardening in a more holistic, permaculture vein, but in the end, they brought useful thoughts to the forefront. And of course, the spring planting and a bunch of other stuff got done. I guess it’s clear: Shannon was a cool person to meet in the field! I hope the…immersive Tiny Farm Experience was equally good for her, that she learned stuff and had fun as well! As I’m discovering, more than anything else, tiny farming is about people… (Guest photo by Shannon.)
Ah, the Home Garden…
After quite a bit of talking about it, and last year’s false start, a Home Garden is suddenly in place in one corner of the field. The idea is to have a small demonstration veggie plot, to encourage people to grow at least some of their own stuff in whatever space they have. Why? Well, it seemed like fun. Located by the farm stand, it would be an extra little attraction to farm visitors… Just a thing worth doing… Anyhow, last year, I staked out a section, but didn’t get too far in planting anything in it, a couple of tomatoes and a few potatoes… This time around, I’d been chatting with Shannon, who has a lot of permaculture-based ideas, from reading and interning, so I asked her to plan it out. The final design was done really quickly earlier today (it was a busy month…), it’s more a freeform, jumbled garden with a permaculture flavor: all annual veggies, no rows, lots of interplanting, a herb spiral on a mound (a mix of annuals and perennials), an anti-pest barrier of alliums (onions and garlic chives) around the perimeter, and three little keyholes, which are dugouts that you can kneel in to garden within reach around you, as an alternative to working from paths. At about 10’x20′ (3x6m), it’s fairly small. One cool thing: the home garden layout is entirely unlike the rest of the market garden, which is all flat, linear and grid-like, lots of rectangles and squares and straight paths. Now, we have a deliberate elevation and CIRCLES! To make the mound, I dumped a few buckets of compost using the Kubota compact tractor, and raked it into shape. We then added stones for the spiral, and Erin and Mike dropped in and helped plant it out, using odds and ends of transplants and also seed, with Shannon directing. The rough plan is to have Lynn and Raechelle develop and tend it over the season (Shannon leaves tomorrow after a solid month in the field).
At just over two acres of veggies, the tiny farm is really small by most any modern agricultural standard, and starting up a MUCH TINIER space is its own private…thrill for me. It’s so…opposite! ;) It’ll be interesting to see how Home Garden 1 turns out as the season rolls along! Any way you can, getting your hands dirty is what it’s all about… (Guest photos: top by Shannon, below by Erin.)
Veggie Outpost 2
Last year, a little experiment with veggie sales in a town 12 miles (19km) away didn’t go so well. I guess you could sum it up as No Quality Control. This year, in line with the tiny farming trick of thinking SMALLER, I had the sudden idea to put some veggies in at the convenience store three minutes down the road in the village. This is now the only store for quite a ways around, and it has the post office where everyone in the village picks up their mail. Since I’m always meaning to get the farm stand fully open, putting veggies out a couple of minutes away hadn’t quite made sense, but the way it came to mind now was a little different. If I could get a single shelf in one of the coolers, this would be an interesting, easy way to learn about veggies and refrigeration, and even be able to watch a mini version of the supermarket, convenience-shopping experience, by seeing what sells, the effects of labels and pricing, and…whatnot. All on the most casual level. Refrigeration is, of course, yet another of those many worrisome topics that come up along with Peak Oil and the generally somewhat alarming state of the world, BUT, fridges will likely be around as long as any number of other taken-for-granted things, I figure, so whatever’s learned from a little, low-impact experiment like this should be worth it. It’s an extremely simple set-up, with a small sign taped to the inside of the cooler door, hand-labeled bags, and an honor-system account book for inventory. I also like the idea of super-fresh garden veggies popping up in this most unlikely place, just below the shelf where a few supermarket-purchased veggies are kept for resale. Outpost 2, the Shelf, has been open for around three weeks now, stocked with ones and twos of mesclun and spinach, a few radishes, some herbs. I’m by there every day anyway, so I check the veggie condition often…and things are selling… Interesting enough…!