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!

Tilling a Bed

A short video of 1/2 of a bed being tilled. Cameo by Betty

Crunch Time

We are going into our crunch time so post will likely be few and far between until mid to late June. we have two markets going now, a store to open (and an electrical system to fix before that happens-but by the end of today most of that should be done.) thousands of seedlings to get into the ground by mid June (this means prepping 50 or so beds, setting up irrigation, laying ground cover/landscape fabric on those beds before anything is planted). Harvesting for all our markets pretty much daily. Maintaining the market garden beds (folier feeding, hoeing, hand weeding, mowing) and dealing with 150 chickens each and every day (feeding, watering, moving chicken tractors/fencing, etc..). It's a lot to do for two people with a bit of help-we do have Lauren coming out several half days a week and our buddy Wyatt has been helping out with our electrical issues and today will be bringing out his BCS tiller to help us get more beds ready to go.

And to top it all off my iMac seems to be nearing it's end, slowly. Or maybe it's just my browser (Mozilla) getting rilly funky, I dunno.

The keyboard has lost it's "T" so typing is slow and laborious. Hey if anyone has a keyboard I can use until I replace his 'puter it sure would help me out.

But it looks like the garden is gonna be very productive, the chickens are growing well and we are getting a lot of new customers, suddenly (nothing like a hundred scary food issues from the industrial food stream to get folks thinking about eating locally)

1st Harvest of 2007

Lettuce we use in our spring mix in a hoophouse

I just finished my first sorta big harvest of the year. I got in a pound of kale and 3 pounds of spring mix. Eugene is bringing in turnips. The kale and most of the spring mix is already called for by a long time faithful customer who was smart enough to email ahead and make an appointment to get her fresh greens.

You can too (if you live in SW Ohio)

The kale is looking pretty bad but the spring mix looks and tastes fantastic. After living all last winter with no greens from the garden it sure is nice to have them. Kroger's and Wal-mart do sell things like spring mix and kale but the stuff sure does not taste anything like what we grow. I can see why people are under the impression kale tastes bad. If you buy it from a big grocery store is more than likely will taste bad. Buy it from a farmer and it will more than likely taste wonderful.

The reason for a harvest with no real market is because winter is slated to makes its' arrival Monday and tomorrow we are getting day one of 4 days of rain. We have a farmers' market in 9 days (3rd Saturday of the month) that we will go to if it is above freezing and it seems that this evening and maybe tomorrow will be the only days to get things in. I do not like harvesting so far in advance of a market but kinda old veggies are better than frozen ruined veggies and that is what we are facing.

Other than getting ready for this farmers' market I have been finishing up garlic powder and have found I now have two broken dehydrators so I guess the garlic powder project is over for the year. Eugene got out the BCS with the plow on it and opened up 4 more beds as well as planted another bed of spring mix in one of the hoophouses for March harvest. He may have also planted radishes, I will have to check with him later on this evening about that.

Rainy Days on the farm

It's been cold and rainy for the past two days and it looks like it will continue to be cold and rainy for at least another 10 days. Seems we have a renegade low pressure system that has isolated itself from the jet stream and is just sitting over southern Michigan and send NW winds and rain down to SW Ohio (okay, all of Ohio).

Because of the nasty weather, instead of preparing for the Saturday farmers market, I ordered chickens and promotional produce banners (I got 7 of 'em with things like Organic, Fresh Produce, Fresh Sweet Corn!, etc., on them) Will put them up along the road to lure customers into buy fresh & local produce. Eugene has been working on the vehicles. He has already tuned up the van and replaced the wheels on the mower and about 15 minutes ago came in for a BCS manual so he must be working on a tiller box or the sickle bar mower attachment

I ordered 50 Cornish rock cross pullets for pastured rock Cornish hens. We pick them up sometime Sunday May 21. Will also do a trip to Jungle Jim's, simply the best grocery store in the Midwest, if not the entire USA. I have great need for good olive oil, good cheese, basmati rice, vanilla powder, maple syrup and a few other items.

It will be nice to have some livestock. Chicks are fun to raise. We will raise them on pasture for 5 to 7 weeks than take them to be butchered and sell the dressed, whole birds to the public. We are in a new place and don't know what the predator problems will be. Hopefully Arlo will make it clear to Nate that chicks are for guarding and not for eating and we will not lose any the first couple of nights they are out in their brooder tractors. once we can get them through the first week we should be alright for the rest of their short lives.

At some point this afternoon I will go up to the market garden and grab a crate of radishes and see about cutting spring mix and perhaps harvesting some cilantro and tarragon. Fortunately I cut the lettuce this past Tuesday and because we had such poor sales on Tuesday I have plenty for tomorrow. That said, I do not expect a great crowd to come out in this cool wet weather. But perhaps I will be surprised and we will do well tomorrow.

While we humans do not always appreciate cool wet weather the spring crops like spinach, lettuce, spring mix, broccoli, onions, peas, etc., love this kind of weather and should respond to a couple of weeks of cool wet weather with high quality, great tasting produce

Plowin' the Fields

We use a 14hp BCS walking tractor with an adjustable single bottom plow to open the beds. The plow is able to be flipped from side to side so the person plowing (Eugene pictured below) does not have to go in the same direction each pass. Instead they can alternate directions.

Here is a shot of the plow attachment (which is also a potato digger though the one time we used it for that purpose we stabbed a lot of spuds)

Here Eugene is digging into the soil with the plow, opening a new bed. He will make four passes to get a 4' wide bed opened up.

Post groundhog day Musings

It's post Super Bowl party season and that means getting back to the grindstone.

Winter has made an appearance this week. Winter came back Saturday morning with wind and a lot of heavy melting snow (it was falling on warm surfaces). To celebrate the return of cold weather we went to an auction to look at a tractor. The weather was miserable at the auction and the tractor went for a bit more than we wanted to pay so we left right after the tractor sold but before the corvette and horses sold.

Went home, ate lunch and took a nap and was awoken by a small dark colored truck leaving the driveway. It appears they did not stop at Kayler Rd and jumped 127 and landed on our land, drove south towards the driveway entry and left going north. Don't know what to make of it-either rilly bad driving due to slick conditions or someone wanted to put ruts in our grass. Either way they left their hubcap behind.

Eugene welcomes the colder weather (we still cannot call this cold when it is just around freezing and February) because he does not get overheated working. he has been cutting up brush and trees while it is cold. And we don't even have a wood stove, old habits die hard. he also has leveled out the dirt where a greenhouse will be going behind the barn. Small jobs but progress towards the sustainable produce farm we will have up and running someday.

I have been kicking around the web trying to find a place to buy business cards. I found a site that allowed me to design a really nice looking card but it will cost about $50 to get 1000 cards which seems high. Than again this will be a write off, the cards will look nice and more importantly will have the correct contact information on them and the cards I designed (using a stock graphic) look very nice and are probably worth the money.

Okay I ordered the cards and should have them in 3 to 5 business days which I will take as Friday.

We are up to 25 beds opened. Eugene attached a moldboard plow to the BCS walking (2 wheeled) tractor and ripped up some soil in 3 beds with it before deciding that hand digging with a shovel did a far nicer job and was not taking a lot longer to do.

Got some onions and leeks planted in the past 5 days. Planted about 150 seeds per 4" pot and did nine pots of red, yellow and white onions plus two kinds of leeks. IIRC I planted Copra and Prince yellow onions, Superstar white onions, Mars and Mercury red onions, Lincoln and Kind Richard Leeks. In the past I planted these things in seedling flats but found they would quit growing about 4 weeks into things. I figured out this was because the poor roots were running out of room and so would go kind of dormant until they were giving more room. this meant small spindly seedlings and this is something I would like to avoid. instead we want to plant stocky, healthy seedlings in a couple of months. And the pots ought to do the trick. Of course the seeds have to germinate before I can pass any judgment.

Digging Beds

It's a really nice day today. Sunny temps in the high 40's low 50's. So we spent part of the day opening up garden beds and broad forking one that was opened a couple of months ago but nothing else.

All I can say is my husband is in incredible physical shape. In the time it took me to get 75% of a 50' bed forked he'd opened a whole bed. It is far harder to cut into sod and turn the sod over with a shovel than it is to take a broad fork and loosen the soil in the bed. And yet he managed to open a bed, finish my forking task because I was not in good enough shape to finish the job. And than he went on to open up another bed by hand.

The forking did wipe me out. I have not done anything so physical in about months. It was an hour and a half of hard work jumping on the broad fork to get the tines 12" in the ground and than pulling down on the handle to pop the chunk of soil up. After 10 minutes of that I was sweating good and my heart was pumping hard. By the time I was done I was feeling like I had done some work.

If I can do this a few times a week I oughta be able to broad fork a couple of beds in an hour by the end of February.

By now you must be wondering if we are insane because we are doing a fairly big market garden by hand and we are in our 40's. Probably, but we do this for a reason, Soil is alive and machinery tends to damage the soil. We could buy a tractor or use one of the 2 wheeled BCS tractors we have but frankly the best beds are done by hand, not by machine. Eugene was trying to do this job with the tiller and the tiller did get through the sod but it was also whacking the soil and causing hard pan (a layer of soil that has been packed down so that it does not allow good drainage nor is it easy for roots to penetrate it.) And right now the soil is pretty damp so the machines would either get bogged down in the soil or, far worse, would start destroying the tilth or soil structure.

So we will be spending the next several months picking away at the garden beds and it looks like by spring we should have over 30 ready to go. We have 18 opened as of today