Heat, Drought, Vegetables, and Ice Cream

Farmers are always subject to the whims of the weather-- it dictates our schedules, our moods, our livelihoods.  We work outside.  With the joys of the job comes also the sweat and the toil.

 We are going on 3 weeks without any rain to speak of... and no foreseeable rain for the next week or so either.  The temperature has been over eighty, sometimes over ninety, degrees almost every single day.  This equals stressed out vegetables and stressed out farmers.   The corn in our neighbor's fields is starting to curl at the leaves.  They are saying the word "drought".

Here at Mud Creek Farm, we are lucky enough to have access to irrigation water, but it sure does take time out of the day.  We lay out 200 foot drip lines, repair leaks, and change valves every few hours.  We are trying to keep the last few spring crops, like the broccoli and cabbages, from their urge to flower and go to seed.  And we are trying to keep the newly planted tiny lettuce seedlings from frying.  The soil burns your feet to walk barefoot on it, and reminds me of the sahara desert.

We've been getting up REALLY early to harvest and generally get things done before the real heat sets in.  Around 3pm if you're out in the middle of the field, it feels like you're under a giant magnifying glass -- then add tough manual labor to the mix, and you have a dangerous recipe for dehydration and heat exhaustion.

So we've been on siesta schedule for the past 3 or 4 weeks.  That means 6am-12pm, then 4-8pm.  During 12-4pm we take naps in the shade, or sit in an air-conditioned coffee shop checking our emails.  It works out fine, and we get the harvest in before the heat gets too bad.  But we are all pretty sleep deprived and physically exhausted.  I'm ready for this heat to end so we can go back to a normal 7am-5pm schedule.

But we just can't do the harvest in this heat.  Imagine picking greens in 90 degree heat!  They would turn into grilled lettuce or kale chips before they even made it to the walk-in cooler!  We are always picking fast, even at 7am the sweat runs off my face, as the sun creeps over the treeline.   We rush to get the greens in tubs of cold water quickly.









But the vegetables sure are beautiful to look at.  And delicious!

 

And the flower garden is bursting.      

Yesterday a CSA member had a wedding and used all Mud Creek Farm flowers!

 

 Other things going on at the farm:  tomato trellising up the wazoo!  They are growing in leaps and bounds.  Soon enough we will have a TON of cherry tomatoes.

 Equipment is breaking down, and getting fixed.  Happens.  Just when you need it, usually.

 
 Deanna learned to drive the Cub tractor, and hilled the potatoes.

We are washing harvest bins.  Oh, bins. 

 
 The carrots are on their way!  I can't wait.
 
 We harvested a thousand pounds of chinese cabbage for Small World Bakery to turn into kim-chi, a fermented vegetable condiment similar to sauerkraut.  Each cabbage was about five pounds!

 We did a fire-line, tossing cabbages to eachother and into a bin at the edge of the field.  It was fun!

The next day we sowed the fall chinese cabbages in greenhouse trays.  It's amazing how this tiny little seed becomes such a huge cabbage-- just add soil and water and sun.  And a little sweat.

And today we dug garlic!  About 6,000 heads of it.  It was absolutely beautiful. 
 THANKS SO MUCH to all the volunteers who came out to help us get it done!

Hanging garlic in Jack's barn.

Mike's truck became the hauling vehicle

Joanna, our newest full-time farmhand!

And of course, we couldn't do any of this without a little ice cream... or a lot of ice cream.

Yep, farming has its rewards.  Eating limitless quantities of ice cream is just one of them.

Spinach!!!

First Harvest 2012!

 We started off the week weeding.... we've been blessed to have just enough rain that we don't need to be irrigating.  Above, baby cucumber plants!  Below:  weeding wild mustard flowers out of the onion field, a seemingly unending chore, but with lots of hands it is somewhat bearable!

 The farm is about to be taken over by swiss chard, I'm almost certain of it.

 Ramona the dog enjoys a stroll through the garlic field.  This is my favorite picture EVER, I think.

 The storm clouds have been amazing -- some storms bless us with rain, some pass us by with only a few distant thunders.  Any relief from the heat and humidity is welcome!

 I woke at 4:30am to get the first harvest started on Monday.

 The lettuce is looking great.

 And the bok choi is bountiful!  Hooray for the greens -- enjoy salads and stirfries this week!

Photos from the past 2 weeks!

The fields are starting to glow with an amazing miraculous beauty.  It always happens around the beginning of June, when we've been frantically planting for weeks on end... not to mention laying out drip irrigation lines, weeding, thinning, cultivating, and all sorts of farmwork. 

  

I get so busy that I hardly look around me, just keep my head down, sticking transplants in the ground as fast as humanly possible.

Then one evening (we sometimes work in the evenings) as the sun is setting, it casts a golden light across the rows of colored lettuce, and I almost want to cry it's so beautiful.

And then at a certain point I realize, I'm sitting in the middle of a field, surrounded by FOOD!  What a truly nourishing experience.

June has come.

 The month of May blessed us with lots and lots of HEAT.  Things grew well, as long as we irrigated them.  And we did irrigate them.  We now have access to a water hydrant that the town has let us use (we pay for the water), and we have so much pressure we can water about an acre of crops with our water-conserving 200 foot long lines of drip tape.  In times of a drought (we almost had this in May-- 3 weeks without a drop of rain), this is like an IV for the plants, keeping them alive and healthy.

 The heat, combined with the mild winter and early spring, has brought on an army of millions of BUGS.  Not all bugs are bad, and we have our share of ladybugs, fireflies, and monarch butterflies, but we also have the ones that love eating our hard-earned vegetables. 

 

So we cover much of what we plant with giant sheets of fabric called "row cover" until the plants are large enough they can defend themselves from their insect attackers.  This is our primary pest control technique, and many farms choose to obliterate the bugs with sprays.  We choose to just prevent them from making our vegetables into their all-you-can-eat salad bar.

 

This bok choi was a victim of flea beetles, because it didn't get covered properly by the row cover.

The weeds are loving the heat too, and now with this rain they are going to GO CRAZY.  We have a multiple attack strategy for combating weeds.  It starts with preparing the fields years in advance of planting the crops.  In the above photo, apprentice Mike is learning to use the spring-tooth harrow.  Every few weeks we drag this old rusty comb across the fallow fields to wipe out weeds trying to reclaim the open ground.  It's easier to do this than to take the weeds out once the broccoli is there.

The 1948 Farmall Cub tractor is our tool for cultivating, which is basically a fancy word for weeding, with larger tools and horsepower.  We steer (very carefully) shovel points mounted under the tractor down the rows, obliterating the weeds, and hopefully not plowing under the broccoli.

Then there is always hand hoeing and hand weeding, which does happen quite a bit, but this is always the last resort, as it takes so much time!

 Here we are thinning beets with a few smiling volunteers.  A 200 foot row is quite long, but with good conversation, and a zen mind for a very focused, meditative task, it goes by agreeably.

 

I'm back into the swing of making about 3 lists a day, prioritizing and re-prioritizing, as the weather changes.  We have so much to do.  There is no way it will all get done-- my task is to figure out what has to get done NOW, and what could wait until later.

 The greenhouse is still pumping out transplants,  and in a week the fall brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, etc.) get seeded in there.  We'll need lots of volunteers for that.  These watermelons are ready to go.

 Tomatoes, so many tomatoes.  What are we ever going to do with them all?  Sauce, sauce, sauce.

  We got a crazy storm a week ago, that broke the 3-week stretch without rain.  It pounded us with an inch of rain in 20 minutes, not to mention small hail, lightning, and gale-force winds that almost blew over the greenhouse.   The tender spinach leaves have holes from the hail.  A small sacrifice, it could have been a lot worse.

 The sugar snap peas in the Pick-Your-Own garden are looking great, despite being a little too hot for what they prefer.

 They are starting to make pods, and they should be on the Pick-Your-Own list the first week or so of pick-up.

 I got a surprise visit in the back field where I was hilling the potatoes, from my mentor Elizabeth Henderson.  She is recently retired from 30 years of farming for Rochester-area CSA members (GVOCSA) and finds it hopeful that another young woman has taken up the plow.  She even helped squish the evil Colorado Potato Beetles that had found our potatoes already.

And we might have a new mascot... his name is Chief and he's really friendly!  Belongs to apprentice Deanna.  Maybe you'll see him at distribution in a few weeks.

Birds!

Watch baby blue herons LIVE while you eat your breakfast:

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/page.aspx?pid=2433

Play in the dirt!

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/mood-boosting-bacteria-found-dirt-213800904.html

Spuds go in!

Planting 3/4 of an acre of potatoes is a job for lots of hands!

 First, we cut up all the seed potatoes....

 Then we lay them out to dry a bit...

Then we bring them out to our far field across the street...

 And drop them into trenches 400 feet long!  Boy, is that a long row.  When you're carrying a bucket of potatoes.

 As dark rain clouds threatened on the horizon, we just barely got the last of them dropped in!  It was almost too dark to see anything, as I plowed along in high gear on the tractor, throwing dirt back over the potatoes, burying them just enough.  We had a crew of all-star helpers who stayed until 8:30pm, our interns Mike & Jon working their first 11-hour farm day!  Troopers, I knew it.

And it rained nicely overnight.  Wake up, little spuds, it's time to start growing!