Not the Best June

I really need to post here more often but I seem to be doing most of my farm writing and photo posting over at Facebook.

A lot has been going on bad weather. Too much rain but I think that has stopped for now. This month we have had well over 10 inches of rain and it caused us to bring in the garlic early in order to keep the entire crop from rotting in the soil. Some was so wet and muddy when it came out of the ground that we washed it with water, something they say never to do but I figured they are already soaking wet what will a bit more water do other than remove the soil? So far this seems to be a good thing but we won't know for sure for another 4 weeks or so when the curing process is finished. I will say the garlic is huge and the 90% that did not rot away seems to be of high quality. probably due to the fact we applied fertilizer this year so they were well fed garlics.

Broken equipment (the 14 hp BCS does not want to work reliably but Eugene keeps nursing it and can get it to work for up to an hour at a time). He jury rigged a new air filter and changed the gas that seemed to work for a couple of days. I do wonder if the machine got damaged in the flash flood we had earlier in the month that filled the basement of the barn with 2 feet of water(where the BCS and a lot of other equiment lives). Actually I wonder if the gas got water in it. He has mentioned that there was dirty gas in a fuel line. On the plus side we have not had many days in June when the soil could be tilled safely so the tiller being out of service has not been a huge issue

Betty has been Hell on various farm related things like the roses on the watering cans, bagged apples on the two youngest apple trees. Eugene spent hours fashioning bags than putting them over very young pommes in order to keep pests and diseases off of them so that we will have big perfect apples without spraying a lot of toxic chemicals several times a week through the growing season. Betty has found that bagged apples on the tree are a great thing to jump up and grab and take down. the other morning she managed to get 8 or 9 off the tree and that get her repremanded big time and since that morning she has left the apples alone. Now she is into wrestling with Nate in the aisle ways between garden beds (which is a no no but she tests this rule out many times a day and always gets yelled at. I will say she quits after the first "Betty, NO! Out of the garden"). She also likes to go after rodents in overgrown beds, which is not too bad but it does mean she is in the garden which is against the rules around here.

Oh and did I mention the heat? Pretty much all of June has been 10 degrees above normal for around here and very very humid to boot. It's like it is August. This has made it hard to work when it is not raining and it has set up the stage for bad fungal diseases, most of which love hot humid conditions. the good news here is we bought and used a product called Root Shield and it seems to be working as I have seen very little evidence of disease on any crops that have been treated. I did find a cucumber covered in white mold a couple of weeks ago but once that was removed no more problems in the early cukes. And the tomatoes are showing no signs of any diseases (knock wood). Usually by this point the leaves are getting blighted and we know that the plants will likely produce but will die before the first frost. It looks like this year that will not be the case all because we treated their soil that we start the seeds in with the stuff. Time will tell, but I do know late blight has been seen in our county and so far we have zero signs of any disease on the maters (or peppers and eggplant which were also treated but usually they do not have blight issues).

There are 5 more days left in the month and it looks like they will be less humid, cooler and very little rain-Yay!

It's Pruning Time

Things are heating up here at the farm. The snow is gone and, at least today, the weather is warm and that means we are getting busy pruning trees and raspberries. Pruning is amazingly important, without proper pruning trees and brambles cannot produce as well as they do when pruned. Pruning gets rid of dead and diseased material as well as branches that cross each other and opens up the plants to sunlight and air. After we are done pruning than we will spray dormant oil on everything to kill scale, aphids, mealybugs and other pests. Than lime sulfur is sprayed on the trees to control various fungi. After that we quit spraying and wait for the trees to flower and the bees to come and pollinate the flowers. Than we hang sticky traps which we make from orange plastic sleeves our in which daily newspaper is delivered covered with this waterproof sticky stuff called Tangle Foot. These sticky traps catch coddling moths, curculios and other fruit pests (we also use them for keeping arugula and eggplant free of flea beetles). they also will catch beneficial insects such as bees which is why we wait until after the flowers are gone to hang them. We even will bag some of the fruit (Martha Stewart had a segment on bagging fruit). It is the most effective organic way to keep everything off of the apples but it is also amazingly labor intensive so we never do more than about 5%. We simply do not have the time to bag several thousand pommes and pears and plant 3 acres in produce in the spring. And since apples are not our main crop, by any means, we get a bit slack with the bagging.

Eugene does most of the tree pruning. I have a fear of heights so will not climb way up into the trees (and we have 2 old apples that are 30'+ tall) and because i am not a man and do not have the upper body strength of one I cannot use the saw and cutters on the long extension for more than 10 minutes at a time. Nor can I control the extension well so it takes me several minutes to make a single cut. in that same time Eugene will make about 10 cuts.

So I get bramble duty. I started in on the red raspberries today and got about 30% done before my hand got too sore and stiff to use the pruners. I have applied arnica and heat and by Friday I should be able to continue my task. I would continue tomorrow except we have a big vet appointment in the morning that should take a few hours (3 dogs and a cat all going to the vet) and it is supposed to rain all day on top of that. I think I will need the time to heal my hand.

We grow two kinds of red raspberries, Latham, a summer bearing plant and Heritage, an everbearing type that we make into a fall bearing crop by cutting down all the canes in late winter. The Latham are a bit more complex to prune but by no means rocket science. What I am doing with the Latham berries is first going in and taking out all the dead canes and any live canes that have crept too far out of their bed. If I leave these in they will by summer grow into the aisle way making raspberry harvest difficult as well as making it difficult to deal with the crop in the beds immediately to the east of the raspberries (4 of them). I cut the canes as close to flush with the ground as I can with a pair of anvil pruners (I do not like the offset kind as much). After I get the dead stuff out, I look at the canes and remove any that are not straight and any that are crossing other canes. The goal is to leave 5 to 7 canes per foot. The cut canes are removed from the area and either will be composted or burned. We are leaning towards burning now that we have found mealy bugs and some sort of white scale on some of the canes.

Once the raspberry canes have been cleaned out we will go back and take out any small, misshapened or crossing canes we missed before and also cut about 10% off of the top of the canes (between 4" and 7" depending on the size of the cane) as this allows the plants to make larger fruit. After that they will be sprayed with dormant oil and mulched with cedar chips (these are acidic and raspberries like an acid soil) and either straw (expensive) or grass clippings (free). than we wait for the canes to leaf out, bloom and than make berries. Last year we had an incredible bumper crop and were when the season was over for the Latham we had harvested over 26 gallons, one 1/2 pint at a time. I really doubt we will have such a great crop this year, but you never know.

So for the next couple of weeks we will be pruning trees and brambles. Than it will be about time to start transplanting onions and leeks which is pretty much like planting several thousand blades of grass one blade at a time. It's a pretty Zen job if you have your head in the right place.