Too much water!

 Boy, has it been wet! We got more rain in the past week (over six inches) than we did during most of last summer.

 

 

Even though most of our fields are really well-drained, there is standing water in many areas after the most recent deluge.

The current joke that I've heard too many times is "Growin' rice this year?"

 

Our irrigation lines lay useless in the swampy muck, waiting for perhaps a late summer drought?  I continue to hold on to the hope that the sun will come out tomorrow.  The rain is great.  Just a bit less please.

At least we have designed our fields to be surrounded with grass strips, that keep that good soil from washing away.  Plant roots are key to helping control erosion.  Sometimes you'll see farms where they've plowed "fence-row to fence-row"... and this quickly turns creeks very muddy.  Along with good soil, storm runoff from agricultural fields includes whatever yucky pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers that have been applied to the fields.  And those creeks that take the runoff eventually flow into our drinking water sources.  Something to think about next time it pours and the muddy creeks rise.

 Soil is like a sponge, with lots of air pockets that help plant roots and earthworms breathe. The roots of the plants require oxygen to help them take up other nutrients from the soil. The ground was already pretty saturated before this last storm, and now it's submerged! Imagine taking a tractor onto a soaked sponge: you would just flatten it. But unlike a sponge, it wouldn't bounce back into shape, but stay compacted.

 

So we are a bit behind on the things requiring a tractor:  cultivation (weeding), planting, plowing.

But we can still harvest!  What a first harvest week it's been.

CROP REPORT:

The greens are growing so fast you can almost watch them grow. Lots of lettuce, spinach, chard, and cabbages!

Spring broccoli is hit-and-miss, some of it looks like it will come in really well, some is making irregular heads due to the crazy cold/heat/wet/dry conditions we've had this spring. It's so picky.

Peppers, tomatoes, summer squash, melons, and cucumbers, are growing really slowly due to the lack of sun and heat. There may be smaller shares as the spring greens end and before the summer crops come in.

The onions and potatoes (on really sandy ground) are really happy! Let's hope these staples pull through for us this year.

Our winter squash field is half under water. We will try to plant again when the soil dries out, but that squash will come in really late. We may have a small harvest this year, sadly!

Some carrots, beets, and lettuce are really soggy, and we'll see if they're tough enough to push through.

The garlic is bulbing up, faster now that we just removed the "scapes" (flower buds), and looks like it will be another great crop!  Harvest starts in July.

We are late on a bunch of succession plantings (squash, lettuce, carrots, beets, beans), so there may be a gap in the harvest.

The U-Pick garden looks great. Herbs and flowers are coming in quickly.

I just saw a Mexican bean beetle on the green beans, which is bad news for green beans. I will try planting some of the later U-Pick green bean successions across the street, to get away from the beetles.

Wild field greens are doing great with all this rain! These are the more nutritious “weeds” that grow on the edges of the fields... I prefer these to any of our cultivated greens actually. Purslane, lambsquarter, dandelion. These are packed with minerals and nutrients, and purslane is high in omega-3s. I added chopped dandelion to egg salad last week, with a garlic scape added in for some zest!

Besides the vegetables, most of which will make it through this crazy weather alright, our parking lot has really taken a beating. We had to distribute bags of vegetables on the road on Thursday! Hopefully after a week or two of sun, we can start using our grass parking lot again. Someday (hopefully soon!) when we are on more permanent land, we can invest in a nice gravel lot. We are looking for a spot off-site to distribute when the lot is too muddy.

It's a big bummer for me to have to bag up people's shares and hand them out off-site, because I think picking up on the farm is so much a part of the experience. The U-Pick fields are very muddy right now.

Coming soon to U-Pick: the first flowers!

Getting ready for lots of guests…

Hi folks, Farmer Ruth here with another guest blog post.  We asked for rain, and boy did we get it!  Its been raining enough that we haven’t turned on any irrigation for over two weeks.  

All the sweet corn was seeded before the first big rain, and its already up!  And on Wednesday, we pulled the first 11.5 hour day and got all of the winter squash seed in the ground, and covered.  We are a little short on row cover, so we spent quite some time stretching what we had over as many beds as we could (there are 24 beds of squash).  We did have one more piece of row cover that we didn’t use, because that mourning dove is still nesting on it.  She has 2 chicks who are about old enough to fledge.  This is her third brood of the year, so once they fly off, I think we’ll probably evict her.

All this effort just to keep those pesky cucumber beetles off the squash!

The other thing we were able to get in before the rain was 7 beds of cherry, heirloom, and paste tomatoes in the pick-your-own section, as well as half a bed of tomatillos and half a bed of ground cherries.  And after planting them all, we laid down irrigation lines (for later!) and then mulched them with hay.  Mulching is always a sticky, itchy job, but it was a lot more pleasant in this cool weather, as opposed to mulching last week in the 80 degree mugginess.

 Things are looking very lush and green at the farm, and it’s nice to lift row cover and find that those tiny little plants you put in look like real food all of a sudden.  There’s always some moments of panic before the first share goes out, when you think “do we have enough food!?”  But then you walk around the farm, and all those crops you weeded and covered a while ago have magically grown huge and harvestable.

Broccoli is making little tiny heads already!

The panic was a little stronger this year because of the cool, wet spring we had.  Things didn’t get out as early as last year, and slowed down every time it got especially cold.  But then the crops grew like crazy during those few weeks of unusually hot weather, and they’ve almost caught up to make a normal sized first share. Our first share turns out to be a pretty nice bunch of stuff: Bok Choi, Lettuce, Swiss Chard, Kale, Hakurei Turnips, and Garlic Scapes, and then in the pick-your-own section there’s Garlic Chives, Oregano, Thyme, Sage, and the very first few Sugar Snap Peas, which it’s difficult not to snack on every time you walk by. 

lettuces

Bok Choi

Peas!

Garlic Chives

Redbor Kale

Turnips

The garlic is starting to make a bulb!

Speaking of things that have been growing like weeds, Petey the goat has been growing like crazy.  He has little tiny horns, and lots of energy.  He is pretty good at amusing himself, but he still loves company, so any time one of us comes into view from his pen, he jumps on top of his house and bleats for attention.  He’s in for a big treat, when lots of CSA members suddenly show up to visit him!

Summery weather finally!

What a spring it's been!  Compared with last year's hot and sticky weather, so far this season has been really nice and mild.  Good working weather.  Except for those cold nights, where we lost our peppers and our first batch of tomatoes, I can't complain.  We started irrigating in our plantings, and then it rained!  Last weekend we got a whole inch, which was AWESOME.  Got a half acre of sweet corn planted just in time to soak it all up.  Rain really eases a farmer's mind, especially when seeds are in the ground.

The cold and the rain did, however, set us back in some of the plantings.  The harvest might be a bit delayed this year.  Most of the tomatoes are still in the greenhouse, waiting for the soil to dry enough.  We managed to get three rows planted and mulched with straw before the storms pushed us out of the fields.  The reason we mulch tomatoes is mostly for disease prevention.  When the soil splashes up onto the leaves of the tomato plant, it brings with it fungus and bacteria that cause all sorts of spots.  Mulching prevents this!  It also prevents the weeds from coming up, keeps the moisture in really nicely, and makes an easy harvest surface to kneel on.  Hopefully we'll have some nice sunny weather to help these tomatoes grow fast!

Meanwhile, our cabbage-family crops (brassicas) are mostly still under their covers.  We just removed the broccoli, so it wouldn't get too hot.  In a week or two we'll take off the rest of the cloth.  One of our biggest tasks these days is dealing with the weeds underneath that seem to always grow faster than the crops.  We try to use the tractor to do most of the weeding, but sometimes we have to go down the beds on our hands and knees and weed with just the strength of our forearms and fingers.

 And in our dreamy potato field down the road, the potatoes are up!

 Josh and Ruth spent a sweltering afternoon cultivating the weeds out.  We have a Cornell researcher collecting insect samples again in the potato field.  She sets up these little yellow sticky cards and sugar-water bins, and then I guess identifies the unlucky bugs.  She is looking not only for pests, but beneficial insects as well.  We love supporting organic farming research in our fields!

Can't wait for the first CSA member pick-up to start!  The farm is starting to look really amazing, and I want to share it.

An unfortunate pepper incident

We've been busy.

First, working up the ground with our plows and disks, then planting.

Then irrigating because it hasn't rained much this spring.

Now we are cultivating!  That's just a fancy word for getting the weeds out, with a tractor.

Meet Princess Rose III, our 1948 Farmall Cub!  She prances around the farm, going over nearly every 200 foot bed of growing vegetables at least two or three times in the spring, delicately scraping out the "bad plants" and leaving in the "good plants"...  She is especially designed for maximum visibility, so hopefully the driver can make this distinction.  It's tricky.

If you've driven by the farm lately, you might have noticed the big field by the road is covered with a white cloth, weighed down with black sandbags.  That's called "Row Cover" -- we use it mostly for pest control on our farm.  It works by excluding the bad bugs, instead of killing them, like spraying would do.  The broccoli-family plants attract flea beetles something awful, and so we use it for them.  Cucumber-family plants need protection from cucumber beetles.  We take the covers off when the plants are large enough to withstand a bit of nibbling.  These tiny bugs really can do a lot of damage!  We feel that using row cover is more sustainable than spraying something.

The other benefit that row cover has, is it creates a little greenhouse environment out in the field, which the plants love.  The sun gets through, and the rain gets through, but not the bugs!  Moisture doesn't evaporate as readily, so our irrigation water goes further.  

And on cold nights, it can protect the crops from freezing (it's also called Frost Cloth).  Which is what happened last week, to our tender unsuspecting peppers, except it got just a little TOO cold!

 

We had these awesome pepper transplants, which we watered diligently for over two months in our greenhouse.  We had just planted about 3,000 of them out into the field, when the weather was great.  Then, the weather turned sour.  The temperature was under 50 degrees for several days, and one night it dipped down to about 25.  We had the heavy frost-grade cloth on them, and even then, they succumbed to the frost.  

A few days after "the event", we hesitatingly peeked under the cloth to look at the peppers, to find that all the growing points had shriveled, the plants just looked melted.  How depressing.  And ironically, we had just given away all our extra pepper plants to CSA members!

Luckily, the small organic CSA farmer circuit in New York State is extensive enough and generous enough, that I found another farmer with a few extra flats to spare, and we were able to purchase about 1,000 more sweet pepper plants.  Not as many as we were planning on, but so it goes-- mother nature throwing a wrench in our well-laid plans again.

But so it goes, the adventure of farming.

Meanwhile, daily life on the farm goes on.  

Plants get watered, farmworkers sweat, and baby animals get bigger.

We look forward to sharing our nest with you this summer, our little fields by the creek, bountiful and full by the sweat on our brows, the determination of our souls, and the financial support of our CSA members.  I look forward to that first bite of butterhead lettuce, fresh cilantro, delicate swiss chard, and crisp watery radishes.