Gloomy, overcast, a typical rainy day…and it actually rained! A couple of heavy downpours and a few gentler extended falls added up to a satisfying full inch (25mm) over a few hours. This is great timing for the second planting of summer squash, which is just starting to produce heavily, and for, well, everything else! Even the pond filled up nicely. It’s too late to make up for nearly three months of near zero rainfall, calculating that effect is best left to the quieter late fall and winter months, when the lessons of the season are reviewed and new year plans get firmed up. Right now, it’s all forward looking, week to week, harvest to harvest. Any decent rain is excellent!
Summer
Japan to the field!
On her last day of a week that flew by, Mami, WWOOFing from Japan, works to rejuvenate a bed of Swiss chard battered by the drought. Despite a fairly formidable language barrier, there was much conversation and laughter about life, times, Hollywood movies, smoking laser printers, the apparently grave state of the world…the usual field chatting fare! For no one reason I can put a finger on, it was an energizing bit of cultural exchange, and a lot of extra fieldwork got done as well. Through this blog, tiny farming has become for me kinda…transnational, and Mami’s visit made that feeling even more real (the ClustrMap comes alive!). It’s really all about People in the Field!!
Roofing the stand
Finally got around to putting the roof on the farm stand. We recycled the old galvanized steel roofing that was replaced during the Milkhouse extension last fall. In the end, a quick job, three hours or so of matching pieces, handing them up one by one (watch the wind), and screwing ’em down. Luckily, there was very little cutting to do, sheets of old metal can be a real nightmare for slicing and gashing (working without gloves, I nicked a finger only once—every so often, it’s good to see a little bit of your own blood running red and true :). In the pic, I’m screwing things down while Bob selects sections. The farm stand is definitely not on course for the ambitious plans of earlier this season, but in good tiny farming fashion, it’s moving along! (Guest photo by Mami.)
New view of the field
A new view of the far end of the field, taken from on top of the soon-to-be-roofed farm stand. The garden looks shockingly half-empty to me, but in fact that’s only due to being more on top of cleaning up finished sections than in years past. Also, most of the current crops happen by this year’s rotation to be way at the top: squash, corn, tomatoes, brassicas, and the last two plantings of carrots and beets are off in the distance. I’m broadcasting oats into the empty sections and hoping for WATER to fall like manna from heaven so there’ll be a decent amount of fall growth. Lots of clouds but still no rain…
Pigweed piled high
A vast repository of uprooted pigweed is collecting by the wagon load in the southwest corner of the field. It’s crazy the amount of effort that’s been put into pigweed pulling this year, that in addition to hoeing and tilling in younger specimens. The pigweed pile has already achieved almost surreal dimensions and a fascination all its own. I stop and gaze at it on the way by… What can I say? PIGWEED!!!!! Guest photo by Mami.
More from the Market
Today’s wares set up behind the stand at the farmers’ market. First thing in the morning (that’s around 7 am), we open and arrange all of the crates and use them to stock the stand and assemble CSA shares. Here, we’re partway into the morning—as the day progresses, crates get stacked. Visible in the pic, an assortment of mainly heirloom tomatoes, carrots, assorted sweet peppers (we picked a lot of ’em green before turning to red rather than let them shrivel in the near-drought conditions), various beets, garlic, and green and yellow beans pre-packed for the CSA. As for the traffic, the day was on the quiet side, despite great weather—it seems the fresh, local, organic trend so pumped in the media this year, and apparently somewhat sweeping the cities, is taking its time hitting the countryside. All in all, though, a decent Saturday!
Harvest board
At some point on Thursday evening or Friday morning, I print out the harvest list on, of all things, a dry erase whiteboard! The last time I saw these things in action, they were lining walls floor to ceiling in trendily makeshift loft-style offices in big cities during the original dotcom frenzy. Then, they were covered with all kinds of wild brainstorming notes and diagrams for generally harebrained Web schemes. Now, it turns out they’re also perfect for listing veggies ready to be harvested. They’re fun to write on, quite impervious to a little runaway rinse water, and when it’s all over, easy to wipe clean with a damp cloth and start again! On busy harvest Fridays this year, the harvest board’s been the main way to stay on track, a step larger than the index card in an overall pocket that I used to use when harvesting on my own. Without a list of some sort, it’s amazing how you can forget an entire crop when racing against sundown. And there’s a little markup system: X in the box means harvested (half an X means maybe need more), a strikethrough line means fully sorted, rinsed, bunched or bagged, and counted. A simple and effective tiny farming tool, although a classic chalkboard would do as well!