Slowing down for the holidays, storm damage recap, end of year catch up, end of farmstand review, frost on the cornstalks, November rains, Winter Luxury Pie is worthy of the hype, the corn maze with no cornstalks, dreaming up plans for the new year.
We have pretty much recovered from the storm damage and have taken off some time for Christmas. In this entry I bring you up to date as of the big storm and then go back in time to review a couple of weeks at the end of the farm season. Later on I’ll fill in the remaining gap covering most of November and the first half of December.
Our power was restored on Tuesday – what a relief! My daughter flew in for her college vacation Tuesday evening = very happy to come home to a warm house. In looking over the farm weather station records from the storm, I found that the wind peaked at 46 mph at about 10 pm Thursday evening and again at about 12:30. The winds stayed above 20 mph from 10 pm to 4 am the next day. Most of the rain came earlier. At about 5 pm on Thursday the rain gauge measured a rate of rainfall of 7.2 inches per hour! The total rainfall for Thursday was 2.1 inches.
While the crew worked on repairing the big hoophouse on Tuesday, I was able to complete and print out the paychecks. Ruth and I have been working on getting the records into shape so I can better plan for 2007. I’m still brainstorming and gathering information about new crops & projects. I’m still getting several seed catalogs a week. Thus far I’ve resisted spending a lot of time with the catalogs – saving them for January. I’m signed up for the Western Washington Horticultural Association meeting in January – a small fruit session and one on soil nutrients.
The crew did find and repair significant wind damage in our other hoophouses – nothing major, just enough smaller damage to take up most of a day in repair. Otherwise the crew finished up tidying up in the raspberries and have started pruning the Marionberries.
Rob and the crew are off for the week between Christmas and New Year. Ruth took off last mid-week and got back into the office today to push on finishing the end of year bookkeeping. I pretty much took it easy Sat through Monday, except for feeding the critters and keeping up with email.
Here we pick up the farm story from the end of October: Most of this text was written a month or so ago.
We finally reached the end of the farmstand season. All in all 2006 was a good year at the farm. As usual, some things turned out better than we had anticipated; others were disappointing. Although we still have a lot of work to do to get ready for winter, I find that I am already referring to 2006 as “last year” and the 2007 season as “this year.” I’m still in the early stages of pulling together the details of what and how we did in 2006 and organizing my thoughts on a coherent plan and budget for 2007.
Overall the weather was very kind to the farmstand this fall. No weekends were rained out. We did have a few weekend days with rain in the morning and more-or-less ok weather in the afternoon. The rainy days were weekdays. The weather can change dramatically over the space of a few miles. We are south of the rain convergence zone often discussed on the TV weather. I’m often on the phone with someone to the north of us or in Seattle and find that they are getting a downpour while we have misty skies. It can be frustrating to have people staying home due to the view out their window while we are enjoying sunny skies at the farm. Maybe one day I can get a Farm Cam set up so people can check us out at our website before deciding on their destination for the day.
One headline in the news today (Thursday, Nov. 16) is that we have already accumulated a record amount of rainfall for the month of November. Our farm weather station reports just over 7 inches of rain for November, significantly less than the official total of 11.6 from the official Seattle station at SeaTac Airport. On the other hand our September and October totals were a bit higher than the official Seattle totals. I did find some other weather station reports online that were comparable to ours, so our results would seem to be valid and not due to a faulty rain gauge.
The rains have now pretty much caught up with the ability of the soil to move the water away, so we’re seeing the usual wet areas on the farm. Even so, we do have some areas we can still work.
Rob did have to pull a pickup truck out of the Herbfarm field yesterday. We came down to the farm in the morning and found the truck stuck in the mud. The fellow left a note that he was looking for a shortcut – we suspect he was probably too drunk to figure out a more plausible excuse. His wife came to recover the truck – she said he was looking for a place to pull off and take a nap, which still doesn’t explain why he decided to try to drive through a recently tilled and planted field.
Here are a few of the highlights from October 20 to November 7:
October 26 to 31
In the last week of October the weather stayed reasonably nice until the last few days, when the winds howled and the temperatures plummeted. Friday and Saturday nights were popular Flashlight Nights at the corn maze, the temperature was still above 47 at closing on both nights. The pumpkin patch would have been mostly cleaned out on Sunday but for the rain in the morning and the high winds and dropping temperatures in the afternoon.
We kept the farmstand open on Monday and Tuesday for the pumpkin procrastinators. By Halloween (Tuesday) the pumpkin patch was pretty barren. Early Monday morning the temperature dropped to 26. Monday night the temperature dropped to 23.
Frost on the corn. An up-close view of a corn leaf covered with ice crystals. The wide vertical streak is the central vein of the leaf.
Tuesday, October 31 (Halloween) was our last farmstand day of the year. We had one last Flashlight Night in the corn maze. As we approached Tuesday we received lots of interest and phone calls, but when the evening finally came around the temperature was plunging down, passing below freezing by 7:30 pm. This was one night when few folks just hung out at the farm after finishing the maze. I understand that Trick or Treating in the neighborhoods was also significantly shortened this year.
We had been getting in numerous very favorable reports for our new choice in pie pumpkins, the Winter Luxury Pie. I finally had a chance to try it for myself, and it does make a very good pie.
Winter Luxury Pie pumpkins on display at the farmstand.
This week the crew was still pulling the weed plastic out of the fields. Enrique has been spading. On Monday the field crew worked an extra day to keep up the winter preparation momentum. We shifted the field crew from the Wednesday-Sunday schedule they follow during corn maze season to a Tuesday-Saturday schedule for one week on the way to our wintertime Monday-Friday schedule.
Nov 1 –7
October 31 was the end of the year for the seasonal plots in the P-Patch, but we did have a few stragglers who hadn’t prepared their plots for tilling, but we were able to get the plots tilled by the end of the week.
Cindi, Nancy, & I had a meeting to talk about the group farm tour and the Farm Tots programs. I’ll be discussing this more as we develop our plans and starting putting the new results in place.
As I discussed in earlier entries, our main issues with the Farm Tots program is to deal gracefully with the overwhelming attendance. On most of our really big days the high attendance was due to one or more playgroups or daycares attending. A number of the daycares and other formal groups attended Farm Tots when they found that our group farm tour schedule was filled to capacity.
On November 1 we started taking down the corn maze and the farmstand. It takes a while to take out all the signs, posts, gates, and tape from the corn maze so we can start mowing. By Friday we had the farm tent emptied and down, most of the farmstand area stuff put away, the maze mowed and were started on spading the maze. We had already moved the animals back to the Ranch at dusk on October 31. By the end of the week the farmstand area was looking pretty barren.
A corn maze path remains after the corn is mowed down. The first week in November is always a time of mixed emotions. There is a certain feeling of melancholy at watching the mowing of the corn maze – the dismantling of a tremendous amount of work and creativity. This melancholy is tempered with a definite feeling of relief that the year and its work is finally coming to an end and the anticipation of the beginning of dreaming up plans for the next year.
I’ll be working on soon posting a review covering Nov. 8 to mid December.
What's playing in the Jeep CD player today? Bob Dylan– Modern Times