photos from wednesday...

Here are some pictures I took after the evening rainstorm.  We weeded this entire onion/leek field on Wednesday, with wheel hoes, hands, & tractors.

  

The farm sparkles after a rain.  All the colors come out in full saturation, and the golden rays of the setting sun catch droplets on the grass.

  

  

mulching tomatoes

We planted 2 more 400' rows of tomatoes, next to the row I planted a few weeks ago, and then threw a 4" layer of straw on top of the beds.

The purposes of this:

 a. moisture retention (less watering needed) b. weed control  and finally c. more organic matter incorporated into the soil for future seasons' crops.   Oh, also it makes it easier (& more pleasant) to pick the tomatoes-- no rocks under the knees, or dirt getting on the bottom fruits.

Because the hay was kind of moldy, we had to wear dust masks, which was kind of sweaty & uncomfortable.  It wasn't a really hot day, but hot enough to sweat under a mask.

But the  tomatoes look pretty happy now with their bright blanket of straw.

weeding the watermelons

Thursday afternoon & it's time to peel back the Reemay protecting our cucurbit crops (melons, squash, cukes) from insect damage.  It's time to tackle the weeds.

And there sure are a lot of them.  But look at those watermelon vines starting to crawl!

Farmer Dave hooked up some "sweeps" (shovel-type blades positioned under the tractor) on the Cub & he zoomed through the rows, wiping out about 80 percent of the weeds.

The other 20 percent, the most threatening ones growing right next to the plants, need to be scratched out by hand.  Oh, the daily crawl.   The moisture was pretty perfect though, after last night's rain, and it's satisfying work.

For instance, before:

And after:

(Those were watermelon plants)

I also used the basket-weeder on the other Cub tractor to cultivate a few rows of carrots, beans, herbs, lettuce, & leeks.

photos

After harvest we till under the crop residue.  This first field we've been harvesting from is almost halfway done!  Soon we'll start spending most of our days picking from the other fields.

This is the bounteous share we gave out on Tuesday:

Look how large the potato plants are already!  Farmer Dave is worried about leafhoppers.  A large infestation could seriously damage the crop & limit the amount of potatoes we'll be able to harvest.  Most growers spray something for them.  We are considering an organic spray.  Another option is to cover the rows with Reemay.  It's a huge area though, half an acre.  We noticed a little bit of leafhopper damage already, brown edges on some leaves. 

Last week we had some great volunteers helping us out:

We tackled field "Y" which has lots of young plants at the critical moment of being overcome by weeds if we don't get them right now!

The worst row was the carrots. On the right is after weeding (you can barely see the carrot seedlings), on the left is before weeding.  The weeds are mostly purslane. (Which is, ironically, one of my favorite edible weeds-- crunchy, full of vitamin C & omega-3s, but unfortunately I couldn't convince Dave to leave the bed for a purslane crop!)  I do like carrots too.  We used harvest knives & our fingers to carve out room around the little vulnerable seedlings & flick away the weeds.  It was like delicate surgery, and we moved steadily down the 200 foot long row.

Another strategy for battling weeds is to torch the heck out of them.

It's actually called "Flame Weeding"  and involves a portable propane tank. 

The thing about flame weeding is you have to do it at the exact right window of time, after the weeds are up but the seeds you planted (carrots & beans in this case) aren't up yet.  There were a few beans popping through, but we sacrificed them for the best of the row.  Hopefully we killed thousands of weeds that would have taken hours and hours to hand-weed (like the carrot row we weeded in field Y).

We had some awesome volunteers come out to harvest the surplus spinach for local food banks!  Thank you!  We also donated a bunch of lettuce & broccoli we had picked earlier.  It's a feel-good thing to do, to think about folks getting fresh, healthy, organic food who normally couldn't afford it.  

Another satisfying day of working hard and loving it.

rain: its blessings and its curses

Monday mornings are always a good time to take a walk around the farm & take an inventory of all the work we've got to do.  Our list was huge--- planting, weeding, tilling, harvesting...  what to do first?

Our winter squash seedlings are starting to pop up out of the ground!  (You can't see them too well yet in this picture, but if you looked close...)

And our zucchini & summer squash are ready to harvest!  Actually, they were ready on Saturday, so I went out Saturday afternoon & picked a big box of them.  Dave says we have to harvest them every 2 days or else they get too huge!  What a productive plant.  I have to work on my zucchini recipes.

And he said our garlic is a few weeks away from harvest!  How exciting.  The leaves were starting to turn yellow at the top, and I was worried they maybe weren't getting enough water or something, but he says it's natural for them to do that, it means the bulb is maturing & the yellow leaves tell you it's almost ready to pick!  Yum.

Over the weekend I had some extra energy (well, really the soil moisture was perfect & there were tiny weeds surfacing everywhere) so I cultivated the 3 Sisters garden.  

I used the small cultivating rake, and then the 4-prong cultivator (looks like this: ) I scratched all those weeds out, and in the process, raked the clumps of grass into little hills in between the corn.  Then, I made a little depressions in the middle of the mounds & planted squash seeds, the second sister!  There are pumpkins, butternuts, acorn squash, gourds, and even melons & sweet potatoes in there.  

Also I had time to blanch & freeze some greens-- spinach (since soon it will be gone from the fields!), and some wild greens (lambsquarters & pigweed).  Now I can have my spring greens during the heat of summer, or the cold of winter!

Monday night there was a wicked storm.  Nick and I had to hide out in the basement of the pumphouse for a little while.  We climbed out after about 20 minutes, relieved to find the farm untouched by the tornado that was sighted nearby.  That was kind of scary.  There is now a small lake in front of the barn, and everything looks drenched.  We got an inch and a half of rain in about an hour.  

harvesting and weeding... again!

We harvested the rest of the share for this week-- the most exciting of which was broccoli.  In our efficient 3-person broccoli-picking operation, 2 of us wielded large sharp knives and sliced off the stems of the broccoli with one big swipe, then pulled off the leaves in two grabbing motions.  We then tossed them a few rows over to the third person, waiting with the harvest cart full of plastic harvest boxes (dragging it along as we moved down the row), who caught them with skill and dexterity & placed them neatly in the boxes.  It was quite a sport.

We also weeded a whole lot of things.  We had several great volunteers helping us do one of the most painstaking chores on the farm: weeding carrot seedlings.  In this particular case the weeds greatly outnumbered the actual carrot seedlings, and it was a test of patience.  But with many hands, we got quite a large amount of the row done. 

I have learned now the lesson of choosing wisely where to plant your carrots-- not planting into a spot that was very weedy the years before, where weeds may have flowered & thrown seeds into the soil.  Carrots are particularly hard, because they have these delicate little leaves that don't shade out weeds at all, and you ideally want about 20 carrots per foot.  No room for a hoe between those plants.

a gorgeous day

Today was sunny again, but the breeze was incredible, and the temperature in the bearable 80s.

This morning we harvested spinach, bok choi, & lettuce.  

With the help of volunteer Judy, in the greenhouse I seeded 10 trays of lettuce, 3 trays of scallions, 8 trays of broccoli, 6 trays of cabbage, and 4 trays of fennel.  We got a lot done!

Dave & Nick set up drip irrigation on everything we planted in the fields yesterday, and we spread Reemay on the winter squash field.  

Dave showed me the first ripe zucchini, and I knew we were on our way to summer already.