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!

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!

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.