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!

Lots going on

Every week there are a number of different things that happen at the farm. Every Monday and Friday we harvest for CSA and/or for market. Every Saturday we are at market. Growing a number of different crops means that any given week of the season we are most likely planting a new crop of something, tending to a growing crop, mowing down a finished crop and harvesting off of all the crops that are currently ready. Fitting other work into this schedule has proven to be a challenge so after over three years of needing to have our barn painted we are having it done for us. Currently the barn has been scraped clean and should be painted by this time next week. I also don't like climbing around on ladders and roofs so I am happy not to have to do this.


We should have cucumbers shortly. This is one crop that needs tending each week. In an effort to keep the cukes disease free we clip them to this trellis. Most of those little yellow flowers will be cucumbers in the next few weeks!









Our flower season is really beginning to take off. In her "studio" in the front room of the barn Emily turns our flowers into fresh, wonderful bouquets.














We had family in town this weekend, and we've been doing this long enough that our family knows that when they come visit they get to watch our son, Evan, while we take the opportunity to get a little more work done on the weekend. This weekend we planted lots (over 1000) of sunflowers, some strawflower and statice...















and we finished planting a squash field that we began on Friday afternoon.

At least we had a couple of dry days

After we had a couple of dry days in the second half of last week, we got rained on during the first couple of hours at the market. We really don't like being rained on during market, but this was especially frustrating because we had been planning to prepare some fields that afternoon. Fortunately it didn't rain too much (.2") and we were able to get some work done that afternoon. We continued working all day Sunday, and just (barely...) before the rain came on Monday we got some more space for squash to be planted.

Here are the freshly made beds after we got a half inch of rain Tuesday morning.




Of course we also got a half inch of rain on Monday. Fortunately we got up at 5:30 and got some beans and other direct seeded crops planted before it came!










We would have loved to have gotten all of this squash in the ground...




And we would have loved to have gotten the tomatoes weeded before the last couple of days of rain, but now we'll just have to wait for the next break in the weather.








At the same time the rain drove us into the greenhouse where we could tend tomatoes and plant some flowers (we like to plant flowers in the greenhouse because certain flowers' stems will become bent and unusable if they get blown over during a thunderstorm).








Other flowers are loving this rain. Look at all these sunflowers about to share their smiling faces with us!

A Wet Week

Surely, at some point this season we will pine for rain showers like we've gotten this week, but right now we could really use four or five days of sunshine.

When the fields are consistently wet we can't weed or plant. Simultaneously the rain seems to make the weeds grow nonstop. So those tomatoes we recently put in now look like this. In a day or two all those little green specks will be a carpet of weeds.

We could clean up those weeds pretty quickly with a tool called a wheel hoe, but with heavy, wet soil the wheel hoe just picks up dirt and quickly becomes useless.

So, we have to weed by hand. We are growing on some land that we haven't planted before and we have discovered that there are a lot of weed seeds that we'll have to take care of before we plant the fields again. Here are two beds of onions that we weeded by hand (you can see the remnants of the pulled grass in the path between the beds). To the left is a third onion bed that we've since been able to weed.

We like crops like peas, which manage to stay ahead of the weeds. Peas are also a favorite crop of ours because they are great to snack on while harvesting!


The only thing we may need to do differently with the peas next year is put up a taller trellis...

This week we finally got our tomatoes planted. Planting the tomato field is one of the more involved planting tasks. Tomatoes take a lot out of the soil so we like to put some organic soil amendments on the field at the same time as we plant the tomatoes.










We get the tomatoes in deep by digging a hole for each one. As you can see the plants have gotten pretty tall because the weather hasn't let us get them into the ground until now.






And here's the freshly planted tomato field before the skies opened up and watered the tomatoes in. The picture below was then taken about an hour later.


Finally we got to enjoy some interesting clouds before deciding what project we would tackle the next day.

This Week On The Farm

Because of fields being to wet we weren't able to plant things at the optimum time of the seedlings life. Here is an example of a flower that definitely should not be flowering still in its seedling tray! Below are very large Brandywine and Pruden's Purple waiting to be planted.So this week we have been playing catch-up. The fields were finally dry enough to prepare beds, which Ben did after market on Saturday. Here he is bed shaping at 9:30pm! The following day was a marathon planting day. We planted summer squash, zucchini, cucumbers, celery, celeriac, sunflowers, asters, celosia, snapdragons, scabiosa, and marigolds. Next up, tomatoes!

Meanwhile we have lots of crops in the ground that need our attention. Pictured below is our spring brassica planting (broccoli, turnips, bok choi, arugula, etc) under protective row cover.

Here is a nicely weeded bed of turnips and below that a desperately needing to be weeded bed of salad mix. See it in there?

A Winters Worth of Work

This winter we converted our corn crib into a living space so that we can have interns live and work here on the farm. It was full to the brim with ancient corn. We have no idea how old the corn was since we inherited it when we moved to the farm and hadn't dealt with it until now.


It took several truck loads to clear all the corn out. It was not the most pleasant job but the end result is really nice living quarters complete with hot water, electricity, insulation and windows!




Another big project this winter was getting our greenhouse ready to go for the spring. We had put the plastic up in the fall, but we still needed to install the end walls, sliding doors, and ventilation system. Here is a picture of the greenhouse from this week---full of tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, lettuce and flowers.