A bit of unusual activity in the field today, a mini-video interview! Raechelle and Lynn brought their friend David, who brought some video gear. The whole thing was casual, the video being mainly to record our impressions of tiny farming for a possible magazine article. Still, with the tripod and the boom mic, a certain “we’re on TV!” flavor hit the field for a couple of hours. We each did a sit-down interview (it was fun watching Lynn rustle up sound bites to describe the simple pleasures of…fieldwork), then David taped some atmosphere: digging carrots, chasing chickens,… And we had cake! Earlier this season, we had our own, self-styled, TFE version of a photo shoot for a newspaper article. Now, this! Are we becoming increasingly…media-friendly?! ;)
unusual
Fun with harvest bins
After rinsing harvest bins for the regular Friday harvest, instead of spreading them around to dry as usual, I stacked ’em high to represent the house-of-cards global economy—I was trying to illustrate a point! What on Earth? Well, a few days ago, I became sadly hooked on the US presidential election action, especially on the endlessly fascinating PALIN. I slipped off the wagon and started obsessively sneaking in quick peeks at CNN through the day, and actually WATCHING in the late evening. This is so not in sync with the natural flow of…tiny farming. It’s been a couple of years now since I actively stopped consuming news: no TV, newspapers, Web, radio, just no news, except what came by word-of-mouth. (No-news really does wonders for your head…) Suddenly, I was back in, in an intense but luckily limited-to-presidential-politics way. Or so I thought. Earlier this week—overnight, it seemed—the ENTIRE U.S. ECONOMY STARTED TO MELT DOWN, and now the election thing has gotten SO MUCH CRAZIER. Wow. Anyhow, after I’d stacked the bins, Lynn and Libby tried to rapidly destabilize the economy by throwing potatoes at it—guess my model wasn’t too realistic, ’cause it wasn’t easy to knock down… We went on to a great harvest day, beautiful fall weather, a fine time to be in the field!
Veg variety
This isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the question of variety on TFB, but the consideration recurs, so here’s another take… It would seem to be all around easier to grow just one variety of each veg crop, but that wouldn’t be any fun! One round, red beet, one big, round, red tomato, one shell pea, and so on. That’s the standard approach for most of the other full market garden growers at our small farmers’ market. There is SOME variation: green and yellow snap beans, maybe French Breakfast (red and white) radishes along with the standard round red ones, a few types of winter squash… Which is cool. Why bother growing three or more types of orange carrot, let alone orange (Nelson), purple (Purple Haze), and white (White Satin, for the first time this year)? I dunno. By growing several varieties of each veg crop, I’ve learned a bit, like the performance difference between hybrid and open pollinated varieties (in general, the OP tend to do better when field conditions get a little extreme, but that’s not a….scientific conclusion!). It’s not to be a novelty act, the guy at the market with the purple carrots, golden beets and round, yellow cucumbers. Or the round Eightball zucchini (below). If efficient tiny farming was the sole goal, I don’t have a really compelling…justification for all of the complicating seed ordering, transplant organizing, and extra direct seeding work it takes to grow as many different crops as I can, and numerous varieties of each. On the other hand, growing and offering variety, choice, and the non-standard make tiny farming so much fun. Which sounds good to me! It seemed like the thing to do from when I first pored over a seed catalog six years ago, and nothing’s changed my mind since! :)
Supply run…
Not a typical farm day in the field, instead, a fairly extended supply run to town: chicken feed, groceries, diesel…ice cream… Moving through the last half of summer, the workload eases up a bit, and you can afford to get a little leisurely. So, three of us headed in…an UNTHINKABLE use of people power any time earlier in the season. Above, at the gas bar across from our local strip of box stores, I’m actually having fun squeegeeing the windshield, just like in the movies (I’m a non-driver, hardly used a gas pump, and maybe never washed a windshield before…). Below, Lynn and Raechelle pose with the wooden horse in front of the feed store. If you look closely down the side of the building, you can see a Mennonite horse and buggy loading up beside a car. Everybody needs feed! Curiously, today was one of those trips to town where I really felt the fine line between being a “new farmer” and…not. As long as you’re surrounded by the garden and a lot of WORK, it’s easy to see a clear course. But when you’re away from your field, you can see how precarious tiny farming really is (at least, for now, in North America). We’re still so reliant on the existing system, for gas, machinery, supplies, even a lot of our year-round food, on taken-for-granted “utilities” like electricity, phone, Internet, and, of course, on a reasonably functional economy that allows others to drive to the farmers’ market or farm to buy our produce. Hmmm… It makes me wonder, how much of my tiny farming simply comes from what I do every day, and how much is a fundamentally changed outlook from my city days, a new state of mind? What would I be now, if I stopped doing this? What a puzzle! ;) Anyhow, as for the weather, it was all beautiful sunshine for this laid-back day… (Windshield photo by Raechelle)
Hail damage reassessed
Three days after the nasty hail storm, and the full extent of the crop damage is more evident. It’s quite a bit worse than it first appeared. The plants will bounce back, but we’ve lost a lot of the fruit that were furthest along. Little nicks in maybe 70% of the toms and eggplant and peppers means that the first harvest of these veggies will be…small. Curiously, but not really suprisingly, I’m quite unfazed by this turn. I can really fret about setbacks that I could have avoided, like deciding not to overnight frost protect with row cover, then getting hit with frost, or not seeding a crop when it’s dry, then getting a week of rain and mucky, unworkable ground. But where it’s purely a Mother Nature play, I’m instantly in half-full mode, seeing the good side of things automatically: well, we’ll have SOME first-round tomatoes…and there are lots of other, undamaged crops… So I’m good. But even from my relatively small (and small-scale) experiences with losses due to weather, I can imagine how nerve-racking large-scale monoculture must be, especially in these crazy weather times, when you have dozens or hundreds or thousands of acres tied up in just one thing. That sounds like really bad stress…and mixed crop tiny farming seems by that measure alone, much…better.
Three minutes of mayhem
What at first seemed like a mild three-minute hail storm this afternoon did an impressive amount of crop damage right across the market garden. One of those sudden, short storms that’ve been popping up more or less several times a day built up, rain started to come down quite heavily, this time with a sharp wind, and after a couple of minutes, HAIL joined the action. I went out to check on the trays of seedlings sitting outside the Milkhouse: you could hardly feel the ice pellets on bare arms and the seedlings didn’t seem bothered by the brief pounding. The pellets were pea-sized, in two configurations: smooth, and jagged (the sample in the pic is from a few minutes after the storm ended, with the sharper edges on the rougher pieces already melted off). The hail soon stopped, a few minutes later the rain ended and…sunshine. Great! Not particularly concerned, I went out to inspect (we’ve had small hail a couple of times with absolutely no plant effect that I could notice). Well, SURPRISE!
Crops with fairly large leaves, the squash here and more mature beets, had leaf edges sliced and holes punched right through.
Snapped stems was the most surprising effect. Here, beets were pummeled…
…beans were also quite heavily hit, with severed tops of plants lying in the paths…
…and tomatoes took a good hit as well. I didn’t closely examine the developing fruit, like tomatoes, peppers and eggplant. It looks like there’s some bruising, but I’ll wait a couple of days when any damage will be easier to spot. Overall, not the end of the world, but a definite setback…not welcome.