Hello Everyone:

New post for May 27 below...






As of June 6th - I have sold 74% of the shares for this season.

Sales closed except for some returning customers who are still planning their summer.




New Post May 27:

 I saw a new bird for the farm yesterday...never seen one like this before.  If anyone has an idea as to what it might be, feel free to send me a note.

The size was about that of a jay.  There were three of them, mostly spending their time in and around the brush piles.

Their eyes are yellow, kind of like a pigeon.  Beak is slightly curved.  All three birds were fairly identical in marking and color.



(Update June 6 - It's a Brown Thrasher.  Great name.  Julia identified it and Mom, Dad, and Pam confirmed it).




I'll start this assessment of the field so far with a bit of pessimism, and then get on to the more optimistic news.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the late thaw has pushed back some of our crops.

The lettuce is quite small and I am not sure if it will be ready for the first harvest, even for a mini size head.

At this time of year, leaf growth increases exponentially, but I can't envision these being ready in time.

The first crops of lettuce I choose are typically romaines that may be grown as baby leaf crops or as full size heads.  With that in mind, I can hold these in the field an extra week or two if necessary to allow them to fill out without worrying about them going to seed.


I have similar reservations about the spinach, but at the very least, I am pleased with the germination results especially for the second round.


And now for the optimism...

The frisee endive is coming along nicely, I am anticipating having some of these for farm salads - another advantage of planting more than I need for the customer base.

These take a little longer and should be ready mid July.  I planted two rounds to ensure that anyone away for the first harvest can still have some when they return.

I anticipate doing another small round for the fall for those of you who really like it.





The garlic is doing quite well.

One unusual observation I made this year is the number of garlic's that have a delayed emergence.

Over eighty five per cent of the garlic's emerged a couple of weeks ago and are now about a foot in height, but about ten percent are just starting to emerge.

I have a couple of theories:  One is that some emerged under the straw back in late February when there was a temporary thaw (almost all of the field was snow free for about five days).  These plants may have emerged and then been nipped by the return of the cold a week later.  According to the resources I use, this will likely have a little effect on the bulb size, but otherwise should not pose any major difficulty.

Another theory is that mice have nibbled some of the bulbs and stunted them.  Only digging one of the late bulbs up will answer me that.

As for mice damage to the onions...so far only a few nibbles and a couple of missing plants.  Usually, the onions can take a snip off the top of the leaves without any noticeable impact - I do this in the nursery to keep the plants from falling over and getting caught on the neighboring trays when sliding the trays off the shelves.

However, at this young age and so soon after transplant, the mice sometimes pull the entire plant out.

I have been using the tomato stakes and some 3-4 inch logs to hold down the row covers to try and keep the mice out, and this seems to help (something I discovered last year).  Not perfect, and not enough stakes and logs to go around, but the results are better than in previous years.

In a couple of weeks, the plants will be mature enough (and tall enough) to be out of reach for the pesky critters.

By then, they will be on the hunt for my sprouting beans. 

I have heard recently that rodents can't stand the scent of castor oil.   One of the employees at 5-Span Feed and Seed in Packenham said this was a very old technique, and he uses it in his own garden.  So I am checking with my certifying agency to determine if I can use this on the organic crops.  I sure hope so as it would be satisfying to turn the tables on these pests...they have been an expensive and thankless visitor over the years!

Other crops that are arriving more or less on schedule and as expected are the fennel, celery, and radishes.




The past few days I have been transplanting as fast as I can, trying to make yup for the late transplanting due to the late ground freeze.


Last Sunday particularly, Julia was there to help by keeping a steady flow of seedling trays from the hardening off shelter tot he field, allowing me to work like a transplanting machine - left hand reach for the plant, right hand pull open the soil bed, left hand into the soil, right hand pat the root ball in...repeat...

Here are the kales coming out of the cell packs...


Meanwhile, Julia kept refilling the watering cans and placing them in the sun to warm up the well water, reducing some of the transplant shock for the crops; and making sure that the nursery was watered and fresh seed and seedling trays were prepared for the following rounds of lettuce, basil, etc...


Transplanting is best done on a cloudy day, giving the plants a little relief from the elements while they sort out their new surroundings.

I don't have time to wait for clouds, so I pull the row covers over them to offer a little protection.

These will come off in a few days and then it is up to the plants to do the rest.

These are the first green peppers to go intot he ground.







After transplanting, its time for more direct seeding.

(An old picture - I no longer grow Dakota Pearl variety potatoes, they were replaced by the fingerlings).

Another trick I use to save time with trasplnats and seed potatoes is to use a trowel to loosen the soil at at each planting point.  I then pour a little water in until the soil here is the consistency of a slurry, and then start inserting the plants or tubers.


After transplanting, I water the surface around the root ball to remove any air pockets around the roots.  This keeps the roots moist for several days longer than if I just watered in at the end of the process, affording me a little more time to get the irrigation tape in.



When that was done for the day, work immediately turned to maintaining what I have achieved so far.  Now that the first seed crops have been in for a week or more, it's time to start suppressing the weeds just as they start to germinate.

Look closely at the picture, you'll see the co-linear hoe, weed sprouts caught on the blade, and two lines in the soil surface indicating where the carrots were seeded.

The weeds have just started to sprout, and the weather is fairly dry, so I can drag the hoe blade along, disturbing the tender weed roots and exposing them to the dry air and sun.


Do this three times in a three week period (more often in rainy seasons) , and the seed beds remain fairly weed-free until I disturb the soil surface at harvest time.


It takes me about five minutes to clear a bed using this hoe, ten or more if their are seeds or freshly sprouting crops in the bed.

It takes about three times as much time to pull mature weeds, and the weeds root ball takes soil and nutrients away with each pull.



This is a great tool for those of you who love to garden but want to reduce your kneeling or squatting.  The hoe is available for the ridiculous price of fifty dollars (one five inch blade and an ash handle?) at a local gardening and tool supply store based here in Ottawa.  I have to admit that price has paid for itself over the years.



After surface cultivating beds with current crops and ready to receive crops, I turn to a few beds that will be needed in the coming weeks.

Here, I cultivate a little deeper, using either the curved tines or a stirrup  implement on my wheel hoe.

Another nifty tool that is very ergonomic and ingeniously engineered (the drawback being some of the components are cheaply made and tend to break - not what I would have expected of Swiss craftmanship.





Witht he curve tines on, I lean on the handles and let gravity do most of the work.

The tines pull out grass rhizomes under the soil (and stones, and deep tap roots, and the odd artifact).  They also break off clumps of grass from where the edge of the path has tried to grow into the bed.

This task also takes about five minutes per bed, maybe ten or fifteen if the bed has received very little attention in the past few weeks.




I mentioned deep tap roots above, though this season I have tended to leave these in the beds, opting instead to cut the heads off the plant repeatedly until the tap root starves - no green plant can live without sunlight.

This will eventually decay in the soil and thus add some more fertility and organic matter.

Once the root has shriveled up and decayed, the space becomes a reservoir for water, air, and hiding space for worms, toads, snake eggs, etc.



When all this is done, there is more work around the barn, tending the electric fence, and mowing or whipping the weeds along the main paths and around the work space...there are irrigation tapes to roll out, compost windrows to flip, and notes to take...no time to waste!

Bob

Update May 12th:

Just returned from our annual seed potato trip.  If you have tried to contact us, we were well out of internet service for several periods of time and too preoccupied learning some of the finer details of potato growing (and sampling home grown pumpkin pe, raw milk sour cream, and of course potatoes...)

I worried myself to sleep Thursday night over the recently transplanted onions and leeks, the germinating peas and spinach, and all of the plants in the nursery, but Dick did a splendid job looking after my row covers and keeping the nursery watered and warm.  We lost a couple of kale seedlings but everything else appears to be fine.









I have increased the number of deliveries for the season to 15 from the previous 12 indicated on the 2018 Basket details page.  The amount of produce will not significantly change, but this will add a little flexibility for customers who are spending time away in the summer and even out some of the larger weekly harvests.  Two extra delivery dates will probably wind up in August and September.

I also added a June 13 delivery.  As I peek ahead at long-term weather models, there is increasing chance of a warmer than usual mid to late spring.  (In spite of the dusting of snow on the ground today).  This may have a negative impact on  spinach, a crop that prefers cool weather, and one that I am hoping to improve upon this season.  So I have moved it's sowing date ahead by one week in hopes of getting the most out of early spring temperatures.

Harvesting the green garlic a week early will probably improve its quality as well.

See "This Week's Harvest" page for the June 13 anticipated delivery.


And now for the May 19th post....


I have always thrived on the intensity of a short period of deeply focused work - in high school it was the fall running season; in my early twenties when our music group was preparing for a recording session or a series of shows.  Later on, I used the same planning and coping skills while volunteering and later working on the CKCU funding drive and other project management jobs.

Looking after my sleeping and eating habits have been my strong points, though I tend to fight against the flow more so than other folks who do similar types of jobs.  The fact that I am dealing with a living field, under a ceiling of ever changing weather helps keep my perspective.  I'm a perfectionist, detail oriented person so I have to step back once in a while and remind myself that no-one scores 100 per cent in this sport.

Having said that, the farm is starting to take shape for the season - it's been a very busy pair of weeks here with several 12 hour days of bed preparation, seeding, transplanting, and setting up the irrigation system.  The three day trip up to Coe Hill was a pleasant break despite worrying over the onions and leeks on the cold nights.



Several of yesterdays photos did not turn out, so I will fill out the post over the course of the week, but here are a few previews...


Spinach germination has been a real challenge the past few years.  Each time it failed to appear, I considered another potential reason and corrected it for the next time - only to have another failure.

Last fall, I drilled into my notes and set out a chart of every year I sowed spinach and looked for a pattern that might explain the difficulty.

I eventually figured out that there were multiple factors.




I used to use row covers on the beds to keep the soil moist after watering.  However, I later learned that leaf crops require lots of sunlight, and the row covers typically reduce sunlight by about 15 per cent.  So I ceased using those and relied on the irrigation system to keep the beds moist on warm, windy days.  That did not work either; I assume the cold water from the well was probably rotting the seeds.

The last time the spinach germinated well was in a bed not serviced by the irrigation system, so that was another clue.

This season, I have watered by hand, sometimes up to four times a day (the breeze dries off the soil surface quite quickly) and the results appear to have paid off.  The germination is not as good as I would like, but I think we may have enuogh plants to serve everyone - assuming they continue to grow.  We'll know better in mid June how this works out.



Pictured here is the second round of spinach just as it breaks the surface.




The peas have germinated well, as usual.

These are about two weeks old.  In another week or two, I will be pounding in the stakes to trellis the vines to.

One of my most anticipated crops of the spring...the first few will be taste tested in my lunch farm salad, just to make sure they are good enough to send on to all of you...









Here is a crop that I have not planted for several years - endive.  Very closely related to lettuce, used as a salad.

I tranplanted these yesterday.  PLants are best tranplanted on cloudy days (better yet, with a gentle rain) but I can't always count on the weather, so I water them in and then place older (tattered) row covers over them to provide the shade while they get over transplant shock and adjust to the full strength sun, temperature swings of outdoors, and the soil.



To prevent damaging the young plants, I usually place the irrigation tape in the beds before transplant.

Lettuces and endive are two of the very few crops that like wet leaves (most crops suffer when their leaves are exposed to too much moisture) and so I prefer to water these by hand - I think it helps the texture of the final product as well.  However, I won't always have time to water by hand, so they will get some added moisture from the well.




The potatoes have started to go into the ground.  As of this writing, I have most of the spring white and fingerling potatoes in the ground.  I'll do a supplemental sowing in a month or two to make up for any losses.

I expect to be posting a photo of the potatoes emerging in about a week or so.

Look closely, and you can see where I have drawn the sowing lines for a bed of carrots just to the right - these were sown about ten minutes after this picture was taken.


The next three days will be a flurry of activity as peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, kale, chard, radish, beets, turnips, etc are sown...its a little later than I would have hoped owing to the ground being frozen a week later than I anticipated this season.  So no time to waste...

Talk to you soon,

Bob

(more to follow for this post...)


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