Spring is a time of hopefulness for most.
For me, a mix of hope and trepidation. Can I pull off the juggling act again?
Because of the mice and other rodents in the barn, I use metal garbage cans for storing just about everything edible to rodents such as row covers, field crop seed bags, and anything else that can be chewed, gnawed, eaten, turned into nesting material or just plain sullied.
I had a free one available and used it initially as a rain barrel (I can't use rain barrels made of PVC plastic in the organic field). Today, the can is being used as a very quick way to fill watering cans.
Although a lot of the watering of crops is done with irrigation, transplants need to be watered in by hand - the irrigation is too slow for this detail. The metal can helps warm up the cold well water, which in turn reduces the shock the plants would experience.
Those of you who visited the farm in the previous two years might not recognize this picture - it is the section of field i have been rehabilitating from my "novice's mistake" back in the first season. It is slowly taking shape and almost ready for the first round of potatoes and the mid summer green beans.
These crops help clean the beds of the weed material. The beds are too fresh and full of weed seed to allow the growing of leaf or root crops. So some beds will get a ground cover of either oats or buckwheat to suppress weeds and start the fertility building process.
To contrast, here are some of my best beds and a path with a rich ground cover of perennial rye.
I wrote a lot in the past couple of years about the co-linear hoe as indispensable for gardening and this style of farming.
This is the 'sister tool'. I call it the bandit.
It does the same thing as the hoe, but used when a little more deftness is required.
For example, taking out weed sprouts around the base of plants or in between rows of closely spaced crops.
This chard bed will be cleaned using the hoe.
In a couple of weeks, the chard will be too big to hoe around, so that is when the bandit will be used.
If I leave the weeds much longer, they will have to be pulled individually, taking away soil and fertility from the bed.
When disturbed by the hoe or bandit, the weeds wither and die in the bed, decomposing and leaving the fertility available for the crop.
Weeding takes about three times longer than hoeing, and is much less ergonomic.
Inter planting - how to get two acres of food out of one acre of land.
These are celtuce, and green onions inter planted among tomatoes.
The smaller crops will be harvested before the tomato plants engulf the beds.
I like to scoop a little trench around the base of the water loving tom plants, just to conserve some of the moisture.
After the next round of hoeing/banditing, a layer of straw goes down at the base of the plant to hold moisture more and to foil the cut worms.
Speaking of trenches, here is another trick I am trying this year.
I am always struggling to get a decent 'hill' around my potatoes and beans.
So this season, I dug a small trench to place the kidney bean seeds in. As the plants grow, the trench will get pushed in by the hoe and the plants will remain upright.
One can leave the beans un-hilled, but they will fall over and it will take much longer to harvest.
Also, they will not get much air circulation and may suffer some mold problems. More work now means less work later!
Same goes for staking pea plants. I use the method known as 'basket weave'.
The straw here is incidental, it escaped from a garlic bed next door.. Fine by me, the peas will appreciate the moisture retention and maybe the lighter colored straw will reflect some heat away from this crop that like to maintain it's cool.
Our garlic is doing great.
I thought I was the first to emerge garlic around here, but when I was at Fly Creek farm a couple of weeks back, I see that Brandy has me beat by about two weeks.
She either doesn't know why hers is so far ahead or she's not telling me!
These are the first two lettuces for this season - Winter Density and Outredgous.
Guess which one is which!
You might be interested to know that Outredgous is being grown on the international space station. Quite a feat for a humble little plant.
I never knew I liked lettuce until I started farming. Then again, I'm not sure I ever ate lettuce until I started farming.
Leaves are where the plant handles single oxygen molecules. For those of you with a passing knowledge of chemistry (or oxy-acetylene torches), handling oxygen is a tricky business.
Within a cell, oxygen can run amok and tear molecules apart in an effort to stabilize.
This would destroy the plants chromosomes, so plants create an array of chemicals called anti-oxidants to contain the oxygen before it does any damage.
Leaves are where the antioxidants are!
Here's more spinach. I've had a splendid year of germinating spinach, makes the early start worth it.
More inter planting. Arugula and pak choi. The spaces in between clumps of choi are set aside for squash transplants.
Flea beetles will savage these young leaves, so any work in here must be done swiftly and the row cover replaced.
Closer to a long awaited goal. Rhubarb in its second season.
When drafting my production plan last winter, I never dreamed of starting a new set of beds.With such a thick growth of hay grass sod and some weeds, heavy horsepower is required.
The next step is to rake off the quack grass roots and start laying out the beds.
As I have to document the development of these new beds, I will use it as an instructional moment and display the step by step procedure in the "Curious Food" page in the coming days.
Preparing to hill beans. First, a little trench is hoed in the centre of the bed. Then the sharp edge is turned away from the plants and the soil is scooped up against the plant.
The co-linear hoe is my favorite tool on the farm, it is so versatile - hoing, hilling, edging beds.
Unlike the common "dutch hoe" which is more familiar to all of us, the co-linear hoe is very ergonomic to use.
These green beans are a variety called 'Provider'. I plant them first as they are bred to germinate in cool soils, unlike a lot of green beans.
They are also the first beans to shut down from heat exhaustion, so are not very reliable in mid summer.
Another reason to hope that our temperature moderates a little over the next few weeks.
Did we get spring this year?
Here is a before and after shot of the bean beds.
To the left, hilled beans, to the right un-hilled.
The hilling of beans disturbs weed growth. Between that activitiy and the leafy canopy that the mature plants create, weeds have very little opportunity to establish themselves.
That is why some growers refer to beans as a cleaning crop.
One of the pleasures of organic farming is watching how the field you are working with and seeing how it responds to your activity.The rock garden has filled in the cracks in the paths with some kind of flowering mint, which was covered in honey and bumble bees today.
Another curious reaction in our field I have noticed is how the edging and mowing routine has controlled all grasses except for a grass that is 'hinged' on the stem. When the mower rolls over it, it lays flat and does not get cut.
It does not seem to be a problematic grass, but it does ruin the nice uniform look of the rye grass paths.
Swiftly becoming enemy number three on this farm.Eater of oat seeds, which are planted for the pigs forage crop.
I have tried sowing at night, raking the seeds under the soil, using a seeding disk, covering the forage area with expensive row cover.
Finally, out of desperation, I used the plastic IRT mulch, hoping that like peas, oats might germinate without sunlight. They did.
But instead of running out to buy an acre of plastic, I purchased a big bale of straw from Dick, and covered the oat seeds that way.
By the way, I was attacked by one of these three years ago when a young male decided that the south end of my field looked like a cattail marsh and claimed it as a territory. Very unnerving when an animal repeatedly tries to circle behind you and attack the back of your head.
The large numbers of territorial birds feeding in and around my field is a symptom of a lack of top predators. So long as there are herbicides, etc moving up the food chain, herbivores will continue to dominate. So I must get used to mice, moles, squirrels, rats, rabbits, and black birds.
Time to clean up and leave. The shadows are long, the mourning dove is squawking, and I am tiring out. Gather all the tools, replace the row covers, shut the barn, check the nursery for water levels, turn off the well, double check the electric fence, close the gates and get out...
