The blog is back; Crew review; Presprouting peas for planting; new tool of the week – the potato plow; Brian and his 29 tomato varieties; Dahlia disaster; Hints of things past and things to come.
It is now three months since my last entry here. There’s a lot to catch up on. As the weeks passed I’ve been more and more daunted by the idea of catching up all at once. Here’s the official break with that idea – I’ll try to jam in a bit of retrospective in each entry going forward, but I’m not going to try to put it all down in one document.
So, what’s new?
We are working towards our opening week. Our first farmstand day will be Wednesday, June 13. Our opening weekend will be Fathers' Day weekend, June 16 & 17. We plan to celebrate with a tractor parade at noon each day. We'll have our four tractors, the John Deere 4710, little Kubota, the Ford 8N, and the Allis Chalmers G. We'll also have Rob's Oliver 88 and Brian's Fordson. The tractors range in age from 3 to 60 years old.
We're calling our opening weekend "First Harvest 2007: Return of the Living Vegetables."
Our main field crew remains the same as last year. Enrique, Jaime, Juan, and Luis all have been working hard to get the farm ready for another season. Rob has been training them more on equipment maintenance; Jaime & Juan have taken particularly well to that.
Luis and Juan planting peas. This year we are trying heavy twine for the pea trellis. In the last few years we used metal mesh, a lot sturdier, but also very time consuming to put up and take down.
Planting presprouted peas. Our cold wet Spring ground keeps us out of the fields until much later than we would like for planting peas. We help things along by presprouting the peas – layering them in damp seedling mix for about a week before planting out in the field. These peas were timed just right. There is a good root and the leaves are just starting to show. Even with just the root on the peas you still have to be careful and gentle – more like setting transplants than planting seeds, but the tradeoff is worthwhile. One of our renters, Famai, actually transplants 2- or 3-inch tall pea plants, so he will have a couple of weeks head start over us.
I hired Evert back to run the starts greenhouse and focus on the tomatoes, root crops, and more, to help me reduce the number of different things demanding my constant attention, which gets spread pretty thin at times.
Evert watering vegetable starts. Evert joined the farmstand crew last fall. He also gave many of the weekend hayrides. If you visited the farm in October, chances are high that you saw him there.
Danielle has become another familiar face at the farmstand, where she started mid-summer 2004. On a number of occasions Danielle has stepped forward to help out in other farm tasks. This year she has started helping out in the starts greenhouse as the tempo builds. She has been transplanting the tiny tomato, eggplant, and pepper seedlings into larger containers where they will grow for a couple more weeks before we plant them out into the field.
As the starts greenhouses fill up we are also ramping up planting in the field. In the last couple of weeks we planted out peas, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choi, Napa cabbage, lettuce, spinach, potatoes and our first herbs and flowers.
Farmer-Chef Brian Scheehser is expanding his farming efforts to support his new position as Executive Chef at the newly established restaurant, Trellis. Opening date is now set at July 15. We are growing a number of his vegetable starts this year, including two dozen each of 29 (wow!) different tomato varieties.
This year Brian used his bottom plow to dig furrows for potato planting. I agreed it was a slick idea when Brian toured me around his field. For our potato planting we have been using a furrowing attachment with our walk-behind BCS tiller, which has worked well enough, but it takes a while. The following day Bill, the Herbfarm Restaurant farmer, showed me his new potato plow, basically a large-scale furrowing attachment for the 3-point hitch of a standard tractor. I don’t have a decent photo, but if you do a search online you will find photos.
On Friday I borrowed Bill’s potato plow to plant our potatoes. Now I want one of my own. The ground preparation was much faster than we needed in years past. We cut at least of couple of hours of the overall planting time for the crew of four. Right there that’s a third of the cost of a good quality potato plow.
Here Luis, Enrique, & Jaime are cutting potatoes for planting. Looks like they are cutting the German Butterball variety - one of my favorites. Juan was on the tractor preparing the furrows for planting.
Thursday I dug up a few dahlias for the first time. This year again we lost most of the tubers during prolonged wet season. I dug up about eight plants and found that only a few little finger-sized new tubers survived. The dahlia tubers came through winter just great our first three years. Last year was the first year with major losses. At that time I figured that one out of four years was good odds compared with the cost of digging the tubers each fall and storing them over winter. Now I’m thinking that three good years in five pushes me towards decided we have to invest the time each fall digging up the tubers and storing them over the winter. Any guesses as to our weather next winter?
I'm buying 250 new tubers from Duvall Dahlias, to be delivered on Wednesday. I haven’t decided yet if we can afford the time to dig up the few little tubers left in the ground.
Now all of a sudden I’m thinking if I just had a potato plow, we could use it in the fall to bring the dahlia tubers and sweet potatoes to the surface, saving lots of harvest time.
So what’s coming up?
One of next week’s big pushes will be to prepare for our first school tours coming up the second full week of May. We’ll be starting our Jack O’ Lanterns in the starts hoophouse. We’ll be planting out our first summer squash under low tunnels. We’ll be planting greens (lots of new varieties this year) and more herbs and flowers. I’m sure there is more that is not coming to mind right now.
So what did we miss hearing about? A sampling of a few of the topics I’ll try to cover later:
The garlic seems to have come through the winter wet & flooding ok. More later.
The raspberries and blackberries look to be coming along great this year.
We completed the covering of the new big hoophouse and have been using it for the majority of the transplants. We installed a big exhaust fan, but the soggy ground has kept us from digging the trench to bring electricity to the hoophouse. We did install roll-up sidewalls, which have worked great to keep the temperature under control. Of course, you do have to manually adjust them, so as summer heats up we will need the fan for when we aren’t around. I have some photos and more to say about the starts greenhouse.
We are moving the herb and flower gardens closer to the farmstand. I think they will attract more attention there. This also allows us to focus the herb garden more on culinary herbs and move the lavender and some of the herbs elsewhere.
Two new features this year will be our greens garden and our herbal tea garden.
What’s today’s CD? Linda Ronstadt – Mi Jardin Azul: Las Canciones Favoritas
(Today is Cinco de Mayo, after all.)