CSA Countdown: Two Weeks

The big start to our harvest season is set to begin in two weeks. On July 9 we will be providing our first CSA share to 25 members here at the farm. This season’s plantings have been later than usual, given the “from scratch” field we have been working with. Early on we knew we needed to allow ourselves additional time to prepare the beds and planting areas, so we decided on a “peak season” CSA, which will feed 25 families for 12 weeks from July 9 to September 24. Thus, our plants are seemingly smaller than our neighbors’, yet they are right on schedule for our own distribution goals.

So here’s the update two weeks out: The non-stop rain of the last few weeks brought out the slugs and snails, which quickly slid on the opportunity to munch on our bean leaves. For protection from the slugs we use wood ash, which we gather from our fire pit and fireplace. Neatly scattered around the base of the plants, the slugs do not like the feeling on their slippery bodies, therefore avoiding them henceforth. The cloudy skies also seemed to slow down the growth of some things, but this week’s sun has perked everything back up, and sent the plants into photosynthesis once again. The tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers are smiling at the sun, which is helping this late-planting of solanaceous crops better establish itself. While we are not on hands and knees thinning or weeding, or walking behind our Earthway Seeder planting more greens, we have been working on a few tertiary projects.

The outdoor shower! With all this heat we practically can’t wait for this project to be completed. On an old deck that the previous owner built about 50 ft from the house, we have built up privacy walls, made from old fence posts and planks, and are erecting a solar-powered shower. Small in capacity, we will hoist a 15 gallon water barrel atop a platform, which sits directly in afternoon sunlight. This barrel will then be simply plumbed to a garden hose, and after filling, will heat in the sun. So after a long and dirty day’s work, we can rinse off in the cool shade of this breezy platform.

We also are completing the signs for our finished farm stand. Our friend and artist Aidan, who is staying with us a few days a week to help out on the farm, is painting signs advertising our farm and stand. By mid-July we hope to have our self-service farm stand stocked daily with abundant produce, and look for cut flowers by late summer.

Lastly, here’s the sneak preview of what’s to come in the first few weeks of our CSA. Turnips, radishes (2 types), beets (4 types), arugula, rainbow pac choy, lettuce mix, baby Red Russian kale, baby mustard greens, spinach, and possibly cilantro and endive.

Field Work

Carrots, Beets, Beans

Raddichio, Cabbage, Arugula

Tomatoes leading to Buckwheat

Our covercrop of buckwheat, used to out-compete weeds

Ben working on the outdoor shower

Transplanting and Seeding

Over the last few weeks seeding and weeding have been our game. We made the choice early on not to set up infrastructure, i.e. a greenhouse, to start seeds indoors before this season began, therefore we are planting most everything directly from seed into our newly shaped beds. The advantages of this are plenty: we did not need to start plants indoors in March and April, when we were busy upgrading our barn to function as a vegetable packing center. Nor did we have to spend more time “potting up” those tiny plants, placing them in larger trays to grow to the desired size. And then when it came time to put our seeds in the ground, we save time by passing a seeder down the row in just a few minutes, whereas transplanting requires digging and filling holes. Yet we have certainly found some disadvantages to this method, mainly something well-known to organic growers-weeds!

When you plant a seed rather than a small plant, that seed needs to compete with weed seeds, already residing in the soil. So for the entire early life of that vegetable seed, it faces pressure from nearby weeds. The challenge comes in differentiating the wanted baby plants, from the unwanted. We have found ourselves squinting on hands and knees to keep parsley plants in place, whilst ousting their enemies. But once established we have found it easy to hand hoe our beds in less than thirty minutes.

Yet some plants cannot be grown directly from seed in this climate, and that is where our friend and Ben’s former boss Todd Lighthouse was of great service to us this year. In his heated and well-maintained greenhouse he started peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes for us, our solanaceous friends that love sun and long hot summers. We then found transplanting to be a fun change of pace, for when we were done with a bed, we could actually see a plant, already in growth, neatly aligned down the beds’ centers. This provided a more immediate satisfaction for us and some sense of relief that we did not need to await germination to see the fruits of our labor appear.

This week we will be continuing to seed and transplant. We have herbs from Lighthouse Gardens waiting for a home in fresh soil, and we have radish seeds ready to roll on down the row. As I write, the chainsaw whizzes outside, for Ben is cutting down small saplings to use as posts for our bean trellises. We are modeling our trellising system after our neighbor Dennis’, and are using wood from our own property to build them rather than purchasing traditional green metal T-posts. Our fresh shelling beans will soon have a support on which to lean. But now as the chainsaw silences I know I am needed to dig post holes and help erect the trellis, work is ever-beckoning out here, but the results are immediately tangible, even if we have to wait with patience for seedlings to emerge.

Weeding

Finishing Laying Straw

Bean Trellis

Beans, Beets, Carrots

Tomato Seedlings

Planting in the Rain June 2013

A Look at What’s to Come

Although Spring brings a heavy workload for all farmers, this spring has been filled with what feels like more work than usual. After having plowed and tilled our fields in mid-April, we have been hand-forming each of our 46 raised beds. These beds constitute one half acre, the other half-acre within our fence line has been planted to buckwheat, a cover crop designed to tackle the immense weed pressure that has come forth after cultivating a fallow field full of perennial weeds and grasses. We have had great help from close friends and family in forming these beds, but nevertheless, each one takes us nearly an hour to weed, rake and clear. We allowed ourselves time for this large task however, and planned for a later than usual planting. That being said, we got many things in the ground in early May, planting into the beds we had shaped the day before, and the photos below detail just some of what we have currently emerging.

Given the work we have done already, the first appearance of a seedling in a bed brings a great deal of satisfaction to us. Since we have decided to plant most of our crops directly from seed this year, the growth is in fact quite simple. We lay our seeds with a number of different methods, by rolling the Earthway or Precision seeders, or by hand, placing one seed per hole as we move on down the bed. We water the seeds in, and then wait for sunlight and rain to do the work. Occasionally we have had to provide supplemental water to our beds prior to germination, but the rain has come often enough that this has been seldom.

Each seedling emerges in a different fashion. The beans themselves pop through the soil as the first sprout emerges through the broken seed. The sprout unfolds and then gives birth to green leaves, growing at a rate greater than most else we have in ground. The carrots come forth much more slowly, each tender plant is barely visible on its own, yet as you look down the bed you can see the silhouette of three rows, neatly laid and gathering density at its own pace.

This week we enjoyed our first “harvest”. As it came time to thin our beets, turnips, and swiss chard, we pulled tiny plants and saved our thinnings. On a large farm this may not be the most economical choice of thinning, for it requires a bit of sorting out the weeds from baby veggies along the way, but for us, we could not resist the temptation to eat these tender greens, and we could not stand to waste the plants that had each emerged from their own seed. We have since enjoyed sautéed beet greens with Lakestone Family Farm eggs, turnip greens with soba noodles and peanut sauce, and fresh beet greens on Lakestone chicken salad.

This week will be another large push for planting. We plan to form our final two beds this morning, then we will top them with compost in preparation for tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, grown for us by Lighthouse Gardens. We will be trellising our fresh shelling beans this week, and will be planting baby greens and radishes for our first CSA. We wake up every day and realize there is an eternal to-do list for the farm, yet we enjoy the pleasures of working and watching it all emerge, the fruits of our own labor indeed.

Ben using Precision Seeder

Emerging Cannellini Beans

Beets

Early Onions

Turnips before thinning

Field and Electric Fence