Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The tomatoes are almost here.

We've learned that one shouldn't make prognostications when farming, but I'll go out on a limb and say that we're looking forward to a good tomato season on the farm. You can see that they are starting to go from green to red.


We've been harvesting sungold cherry tomatoes and Juliette saladette tomatoes (the smaller tomatoes are usually the first to ripen). They are definitely a treat at this point in the season and the sungold tomatoes are so fragile (shortly after a rain I've watched them split while carrying them up to the barn!) that you probably won't find them anyplace except directly from a farmer who grows them.







As you can see we've been busy tying up the tomatoes to keep their vines off the ground in an attempt to keep the plants healthy. Pretty soon though we're going to run out of stake to tie up the plants.

Meanwhile the chickens keep laying their eggs though they definitely don't like the hot weather. Egg production will drop a bit in hot weather (since we don't have an air conditioned coop) because the chickens don't like to eat as much when it is hot outside. In this picture our very helpful intern Ali is carrying the eggs from the coop to the barn where we will box them up and put them in the fridge.






In the flower field Lisianthus is just beginning to bloom. This delicate flower is enjoyed by Emily and the bees alike.



The barn is also finished being painted. We've had the barn fixed (there were some rotten timbers that resulted from a missing ro0f), a new roof put on, and had the barn painted by Jim Wilson. He's a carpenter who specializes in historic preservation and timber frame buildings, and we certainly like what he's done with the barn. Every farm needs a good barn and now we're happy to show off ours.



Finally, the sun sets and moon rises on another week at Mile Creek Farm.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

It's not a dry heat.

I spent eight years of my childhood in Arizona where the temperature on a July day was normally well over 100 degrees, but as they say at least it was a dry heat. This year in Ohio it is definitely a wet heat. So, though we're used to working outside in all kinds of weather we've found this summer to be particularly uncomfortable. Additionally there are a lot of things that haven't worked out as we'd planned on the farm this year so we're usually pretty tired when we come inside and fortunately being greeted by the following scene helps us forget for a bit all the work there is to do.



Some of that work that we've gotten done this past week includes weeding the newly planted corn. Being primarily a farmer and secondarily a blogger I didn't think to take a before and after picture, but if you replace all the dirt that you can see with little green weeds then you'll have an idea of what the field looked like before I went through it with the wheel hoe.




Our very helpful crew of dedicated workers cleaned up these bean beds this morning. These are "fancy" French filet beans. They are long, slender and a real treat even though their smaller size makes the harvest take longer than it does with other beans.






Even though it went in much later than it should have the winter squash is starting to fill in its beds. Another couple of weeks and it will hopefully have most of the field covered with vines and little baby squash.



The zinnias are finally starting to bloom. Emily is very committed to cutting her flowers at the ideal time so fast-opening flowers like zinnias and sunflowers need to be cut every day. Add it to the to-do list!



We've found that most people either love okra or really dislike it, but even if you don't like the wonderfully slimy vegetable, maybe you can appreciate the flowering plant!

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

















Last Thursday was our CSA member fieldwalk. Fortunately the thunderstorm that blew through minutes before everyone arrived did not dump much rain on us. And we were rewarded with this view of a rainbow.






With cooperative weather the last couple of weeks we've run through a lot of our planting that had been piling up.


Now the greenhouse is pretty much done for the year. Of course we do still have fall broccoli to plant.



In the fields the peppers are just beginning to grow. Within a month we'll have to stake and tie up these guys because they get so heavy with peppers that they will fall over in a thunderstorm. At the same time as the peppers, tomatoes and eggplants are just beginning to produce, we are also seeding fall crops.


Under the white fabric row cover we've got a type of rutabaga that we're trying this year. We also seeded some sweet corn in this field. I know that everyone around here probably will think we are crazy for seeding it so late, but we just haven't been able to work up enough of the fields until now to get it planted. We'll put it on drip irrigation and we should have corn in mid-September.We haven't really grown much sweet corn the last couple of years because we really don't have the space to grow enough of it for the CSA and/or market, but we were determined to get some planted this year.

Finally after all of the harvest and CSA preparation was done yesterday I looked in the cooler at our air conditioner that we've modified to cool our homemade walk-in cooler down into the thirties (here's a link for more info on the coolbot that allows us to do this) and it was completely frozen over!



This is a nightmare situation for us because it means that suddenly the cooler won't get any colder than 65 degrees which is much too warm. After a couple of hours of manually defrosting the air conditioner every twenty minutes with the fan and/or a blow drier, I finally found the loose connection and was able to get it fixed in time to get to bed before midnight!

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

It's hot!

Hopefully everyone is staying cool in this weather. I went out to run irrigation at 6 this morning and was surprised by how comfortable it was. I got inside to eat breakfast around 7 and got back outside at 7:30. Suddenly it was a lot warmer and you could really tell that it was going to be hot! Of course hot weather is great for a lot of our crops. We harvested carrots this week, which means that we had to wash carrots too. Not surprisingly, carrots come out nice and dirty and require a good amount of washing to get them clean. We pull the carrots and put them in buckets. Then we let them sit in water in the cooler until we wash them later that day.





At the end of the day we have dirty buckets and clean carrots!





















This week we've also been setting up irrigation. The tomato field got irrigation first.


You can see the black driptape lines running at the base of the plants. (Also notice that the tomato field has a lot less weeds than it had in the last picture that we took.)

Driptape drips out water literally one drop at a time. One advantage is that only the soil gets wet which helps our plants stay disease free (since most plant diseases flourish in a wet environment). The other advantage is that we can water a large squash field all at once using the least amount of water.



We've also started planting our fall crops. This morning we got cabbage and cauliflower planted. You can see our super high tech drip tape dispenser!