04.28.10
Posted in Projects at 5:49 pm by Farmer
Last week was another productive week on the farm as we seeded 500 pounds of potatoes! Readers, you might wonder why a small farm such as ours plants so many potatoes and alliums? The answer is because those are the only two crops the deer don’t eat, not to mention that we have more farmland outside our deer fence than in it, so we have taken to specializing in crops the deer don’t eat.
After we were done planting potatoes, we transplanted our second succession of greens to the field and are now covering them with floating row cover so we don’t have to spray the flea beetles in preventing them from destroying our crops. It takes a lot of labor to cover these crops but I think that time spent covering is offset by the labor and expense of spraying. We think it might be worth covering because we hope to have better looking (not necessarily quality) produce for the CSA and market customers. Only time will tell if this is the right approach to prevent bug damage.
We also potted up tomatoes, peppers and basil for our upcoming plant sale the Saturday prior to Mothers day. We are starting fewer plants this year because we are planting earlier greenhouse food crops so we are out of space in the greenhouse for our plant starts. Our market sales of plants have been down the last couple of years so that is why we are prioritizing earlier food crops rather than plant starts.
A close-up of our drag setter that is probably the best $40 ever spent as far as time savings! Noah and Sabrina are on the setter with a couple bushels of potatoes. The setter creates a trench, then Noah and Sabrina place the potatoes in the ground, after which the packing wheels push dirt over the potatoes.
A close-up of the packing wheels on our Drag Setter. The packing wheels are angled out so the plant foliage doesn't get smooched while the roots are packed underneath the soil.
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04.20.10
Posted in Veggies at 4:30 pm by Farmer
We used our transplanter that plants 2 rows at once which required 4 people: a tractor driver, two people sitting on the transplanter putting plants in the carousel, and one walking behind fixing plants and carrying additional trays to the tractor. Although it went much faster than transplanting by hand, we were required to fix quite a few plants that didn’t get set properly This is normal for onions using our transplanter. I think if we had a water wheel transplanter it would be fine because one is placing the plants in the dirt with your hand; however, our transplanter drops the plant down from the carousel into the dirt. It uses gravity for dropping the plant down to the ground with us hoping if falls upright meaning that the roots fall into the dirt and the foliage remains above the dirt. Onions don’t have much weight in the form of roots or top growth for the plants to drop down upright which is why we had to fix so many!
After planting each 300 foot bed, all of us walk through the field fixing any plants that were burried alive by the transplanter, or not burried deep enough that the roots are still visible, and filling in spaces where plants are missing. All the while fixing plants, talking of the gorgeous onions harvested in years gone by, making it a mouth watering experience! A few years ago the average weight for each of our “Candy” onions was 1.5 lbs! They were beautiful and we hope to once again harvest onions of that size. Last year we had a crop failure because of too much rain while they were maturing.
Who knows what this season will bring as far as our onion yield. That is the thing with farming; you plant something then hope for the best, never knowing how it will turn out until the end. We are once again praying to harvest some good tasty “Candy” onions and they don’t necessarily need an average weight of 1.5 lbs for us to be happy!
A truck load of onion transplants ready to be out of the greenhouse and into the fields! We transplanted a few truckloads of onioins!
Look closely and you will see a few "Candy" onions transplanted! Perhaps Sabrina will share one of her photos wtih me because mine just isn't that great.
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04.14.10
Posted in Projects at 6:49 am by Farmer
It is very important that we keep our small farms in business. Please call your senators today and urge them to either amend or oppose S. 510. Clicking on the link will provide you with good talking points when calling your senators!
An example letter sent to my senators:
RE: S. 510 – FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.
I am writing to urge you to either oppose S. 510 or pass S. 510 with the proposed Tester Amendment to exclude small facilities and direct marketing farms from the most burdensome provisions of the bill. I am very concerned about the affect of S. 510 on our small NC Family farms should the bill pass as it is written.
Supporting S. 510 with the Tester Amendment can accomplish the following two objectives: (a) Assuring the American people that their food is safe (b) Continuing to make local food available while keeping our small NC farms in business.
Both you and I know that our government does not have the financial resources to inspect all of our small farms nor do our small farms have the financial resources to pay for these types of inspections. In supporting the Tester Amendment our NC Small Farms can continue competing with large agricultural companies. Our American Small Family Farms have not contributed to food contamination outbreaks to warrant such inspections and undo burdens on these businesses.
I trust you will be supporting the Tester Amendment because I know that you are concerned about our NC Small Family Farms since they are a big part of our local economy!
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Posted in Projects at 5:56 am by Farmer
Last week we had an inch of rain which was just perfect timing for our first succession of transplants to get the much needed water required for them to flourish.
During that rain storm, which lasted the entire day last Thursday, we worked in our tomato greenhouse driving T-Posts, with a little help from Arnold, whom we named our air powered T-Post Driver. Arnold drove 72 T-Posts in just a little over a half day with little complaints! (That is why we named him after Arnold Schwarzenegger who we think of as a strong, smart feller.) You would think it easy to drive these posts in our greenhouse but we even have rocks in the greenhouse. After each two T-Posts, we secured the cattle panel to the T-Post with wire, then on Friday we transplanted roughly 330 tomato plants into the nicely tilled greenhouse dirt. We grow our tomatoes in the dirt, it may be done using hydroponics; however, using that growing practice would violate our strong beliefs that our food should be grown as naturally as possible. We feed the soil by cover cropping, and this past season we used mostly mustards, and periodically we add compost hoping to build the biological life in the soil which we believe aids in healthier and happier plants, thus providing us with better nutrition. There are not many studies proving this (there are some), which I think is because agri-business funds studies, so why would they want to fund a study such as this?
Look at the 72 T-Posts, 30 Cattle Panels and roughly 320 Tomatoes. We have had about a 10% loss in our crop after transplanting which is unusally high for us and we are not sure why!
The cattle panels are used for trellising our tomatoes. We have found no easy way for trellising tomatoes but by trellising using cattle panels is much more forgiving when one gets behind on suckering and tying the tomato vines to the cattle panels. We are notorious for missing a week or two of suckering/trellising during May when we are trying to get all of our peppers and winter squash transplanted out to the field. Perhaps if tomatoes were our main crop we would trellis differently but for now this method works great for us.
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04.07.10
Posted in Projects at 6:27 am by Farmer
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It is suddenly dry and warm, which is what we have been praying for, and that allowed us to work up some ground and transplant the first succession of greens out to the field. Last Friday after transplanting just two beds we became a little worried about our little babies because they wilted so bad they looked as though they keeled over and died. We haven’t seen them wilt so bad in previous years so we got a little nervous and decided to hold off on transplanting the remaining spring starts that were ready to go outdoors. The crops transplanted did perk up overnight so we continued transplanting a few more beds yesterday.
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 Noah and Sabrina on the transplanter. This tool saves us so much time because it plants 2 rows of crops at once and all the while doing so it waters the babies in! Since the rows are spaced evenly apart we can then use our cultivator (named Heidi Hoe) to weed the crops. |
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Some folks ‘harden off” their transplants by moving them to a staging area where they can still baby the plants a little but also do things like withhold water or expose the plants to lower/higher temperatures more like the outdoors than greenhouse temperatures that are maintained a specific temperatures. We haven’t adopted this strategy because our plants seem to always do fine and we just don’t have the time.
So our plants went from the ideal temperatures in the greenhouse to the suddenly 90 degrees outside and they just freaked out. Before last week our highs were in the fifties so not only are our plants a little stunned from this rapid change but we humans are as well.
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On Friday after transplanting just two beds we set up irrigation thinking we might need to irrigate to save these babies. We have not had one week without precipitation in the form of snow or rain since last December and here we are setting up irrigation - doesn’t that seem amazing that we want to water – we just want to give our transplants a little bit of moisture to keep them happy.
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 Noah found Kaiser on craigslist for a good price so we are training him to protect our chickens! Noah is from South Carolina and has had a passion for local food and found that in his freshman year of college he was reading books about sustainable agriculture so he is trying out the apprenticeship to see if it is something he should pursue in college! Noah has done some catering jobs so has gained some fabulous cooking skills so the farm is once again fortunate with an amazing cook!
 Sabrina and Kaiser. Sabrina is from Georgia and has a passion for fresh, local food so is trying out the apprenticeship to see if she would like to combine growing food with a restaurant/events on the farm featuring local food! She already knows a lot about the taste of the many veggies we grow and is also a fabulous cook! |
We used to free range our chickens but since Harvey died (our livestock guardian) we lost about 80 layers to predators so have been keeping the 9 layers left in the coop. Here in the mountains we have a lot of predators so we have decided that we can’t sell eggs because it is just too expensive to raise chicks until they begin laying eggs only to have them eaten by coyotes, bobcats, opossums, raccoons or whatever else likes chicken. This week Noah found us a dog on craigslist who is only 3 months old. Noah named him Kaiser and Kaiser is a cross between a Great Pyrenees and Kangal. Kaiser is very cute with such soft fur just like a teddy bear you want to cuddle with. We hope he grows into a big tough guardian dog!
We have been keeping Kaiser locked in the barn with the goats so Sunday we let the goats and Kaiser out of the barn and were pleasantly surprised that Kaiser was hanging out with the goats in the pasture. (That is until the goats escaped their fence.) We are having issues containing our goats since they went “rouge” when late last summer Bailey the husky scared them away for a few months.
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