Another Farm Update

Things have gotten away from me again, so this will be another whirlwind update of what I have been doing on and around the farm.

Summer is always a hectic time around the farm, crops to plant, weed and harvest; animals to feed, water and move; etc. Every once in a while my real job also gets in the way. Late July I had to go out to Keystone Colorado to give a talk at a nanotechnology conference. Now that does not sound like a bad thing considering how beautiful Colorado is and all, but with CSA deliveries, Emily's birthday (more on that latter) and generally not wanting to be away from the kids for too long of a time, what could be an enjoyable trip turns into flying out Wednesday to talk on Thursday and flying back home Friday morning.


On the way back to the airport on Friday I took the scenic route over Loveland Pass and got these photos of the sun coming up over the continental divide.

Unfortunately, my original 10:20 am flight home from Denver is canceled and I am re-booked on a 7:30 pm flight. As you might imagine the prospects of hanging around the airport all day and getting in to Dulles airport after midnight are less than appealing. Luckily I am able to connect with the ticketing agent for the 12:10 pm flight and he pushes me up to the top of the waiting list. I physically got the last seat on that flight, last row window seat. This means that I get into Dulles at a much more manageable 6:30 pm and I am back at the farm sometime around 8 pm. The kids are happy since we get to do dinner together and I am happy to unwind.

This was particularly important since my oldest, Emily turned 11 in July and we had a pool party/BBQ for her the following day. Danielle roasted up a farm raised turkey from last year and I BBQed up a huge pork shoulder from one of our hogs. There were also deep fried potato chips from our Red Nordland potatoes made to order and great rolls brought down from New Jersey by my parents. All of the pork and at least half of the turkey went, and I think everyone would still be there eating the potato chips if I was willing to keep frying them.


Doesn't she look all grown up with her new haircut!
Happy Birthday Emily.









Bella (our Jersey cow) is doing well and has seemed to settle in to the routine here on the farm. I am still getting used to how much grass she eats and figuring out how and when to move her to new pasture. She is fairly easy to move in that she respects a single strand of electrified polywire at nose height, but the dance of rotating her with the sheep and the laying hens can get complex. We try to follow Bella with the hens so that they can scratch apart her cow patties and destroy the pathogen cycle. This works ok, but we have not figured out a good way to get her to the upper part of our large pasture and still have a convenient method of watering her. Considering how much water a cow drinks in a day having a close by water source is a must.

My other continual chore is constructing shelters for the animals. In the picture above you can see some poultry shelters fabricated from cattle panels and tarps as well as the store bought canopy Bella uses for shade. A commenter asked how sturdy the canopy is since her cows tend to rub against anything and everything. At the time I mentioned that it was holding up fine. Well two months later and Bella has broken the canopy and I am now in the planning stages for a permanent run in shelter. At first it will just provide shade but I will eventually put three sides on it to provide some shelter in the winter months.

The kids and I went to our first minor league baseball game. They were so excited to go, they even made a homemade t-shirt to support the Hagerstown Suns our local team. Once the hotdogs and ice cream were eaten and the other team got up 7 to nothing with little more than a hit by the home team the kids thought otherwise and decided they had had enough. This was the in the fourth inning mind you. The highlight of the night was that while walking through the parking lot back to our car a father and son who had been collecting the foul balls gave one to the kids to take home.

As I mentioned in a previous post our potatoes have done excellent this year. On top of the 470 lbs of Red Nordlands I harvested 82 lbs of Russian Banana Fingerlings. Corn, my other large crop has not fared as well. The plants themselves have grown tall and strong, however the ears are not getting fully pollinated. Another problem is that someone else is helping themselves to the corn. Lots of ears were pulled off the corn stalks and were lying on the ground after being eaten. The guilty party was trapped this past Sunday. We are in the process of preserving his pelt so that Julia can make something out of it. Originally she was going to make a coon-skin cap for Sam but I am not sure that is still the plan. While we are on the varmint front I was able to get another of the groundhogs who have been raiding our gardens. There is at least one more that I have seen -- shot at and missed in fact. Hopefully the trap or the .223 will take care of him soon enough.

Well that about sums up what I have been doing, except that somewhere during all this I managed to get shingles. For those of you that don't know, shingles is the chicken pox virus playing hide and seek in your spinal cord. As it turns out the virus never goes away but just lies dormant until it decides to come out along a nerve and create a skin rash and a large amount of pain. It is not fun but it seems that I have a rather mild case so that is good.

Even though at times it can be crazy, life on the farm is fun!

UPDATE:

Finally got the elusive third groundhog. She won't be eating any more pumpkins!

Farm Work Catch-Up Post

Spring has clearly sprung around here and so have all the farm chores. I am a sporadic blogger at best but like having this as a record so that I can look back to see where we were and to also have an idea of what worked and more importantly what did not.

Over the last few weeks I finished hard fencing the perimeter of our property. Now our entire ~4.75 acres of working land is enclosed by field fencing, with a hot wire running along the top. This lets us make better use of our electric netting since we can situate it against the field fence in a semi-circle and clip into the power at will. More importantly if any of our animals escape their individual paddocks (which the goats are particularly prone to do) they are still confined to our property. A final piece of fencing that needs to be accomplished is surrounding the market garden so that any aforementioned escapees do not gain access. I am going back and forth on what is the best way to accomplish this. Field fencing would be the strongest and most durable solution, but would make plowing and prepping the fields more difficult since the tractor would have restricted access. I am thinking about using some of the electric netting since it could be removed and installed as needed but it would be less of a barrier to the animals and would require that I maintain the fence line so that the charger does not short out due to long wet grass.

Speaking of plowing fields, last weekend I plowed up the newly expanded market garden as well as a new plot that will be planted with a variety of grains. I was able to borrow a plow from my neighbor and modify it to fit my tractor. I always enjoy being able to borrow farm tools, especially ones like a plow that you only need to use for one to two days in any given year. This past week I also ran the disc through both plots a number of times to break up the soil and get it ready for planting.


Finally on to this past weekend. Danielle cut up 50 lbs of seed potatoes this week so priority number one on Saturday was to get these in the ground as we were expecting rain on Sunday. Julia helped me place all the potatoes in the trenches and even covered one entire row. In all we planted 11 rows each 85 feet long. I still have 50 lbs of Yukon golds and 20 lbs of Russian fingerlings to get into the ground. The giant market garden is not looking so large anymore and the free area will continue to shrink as I get the other potatoes in.


Gratefully, the rains came as promised and so far we have received over an inch and a half of much needed precipitation. I know others are barely keeping there heads above water with all the rain this Spring (sorry Woody) but we really needed a good soaking. This will go a long way to help all the new young plants that have started to pop in the last few weeks as well as provide a good watering in for the potatoes and the 50 trees that Danielle planted this weekend. It also provided some time for us to rest aside from rinsing out some recycled water containers with the runoff from our gutters.

Market Garden -- Update #2

Here is how the market garden looked on Saturday. You will notice that the corn is continuing to come in and the sunflowers are also coming up. Unfortunately the Red Nordland potatoes are no where to be found and if you look at the surrounding pasture you can see what a toll the drought is taking on everything.



For comparison here are the photos from July 3^rd



and June 19^th



Best I can remember we haven't had a decent rain since Memorial Day.

Praying Mantis and Praying for Rain

Julia and I were going out to dig some potatoes when we noticed this Praying Mantis on one of our Hostas. I am having fun with the macro function of my digital camera and have been trying to find new things to take close up pictures of.

Unfortunately, the Praying Mantis was the highlight of the outing. I wanted to dig some Yukon Gold potatoes to distribute to our CSA members. We ended up harvesting more than a row of potato plants and did not completely fill up two 2 quart baskets. Last year this same amount of potato plants would have provided us with a trailer full of potatoes, but each plant only had one or two tubers on it.



The severe lack of rain has really taken a toll on our crop production and has been making it difficult to provide enough produce for our CSA members. As my wife and I were discussing over dinner last night, we have our pride and honor wrapped up it meeting our CSA commitments (although part of the CSA model is shared risk) but our financial situation is not affected by the venture. I can only imagine how stressful it would be to have your entire livelihood held hostage by the whims of the weather.

Market Garden -- Update #1

Here is the first of my promised market garden updates. The corn is doing surprisingly well given the little rain. The first planting has tasseled out and the other three plantings are all going strong. We have our first beans in with our corn and will likely need to start harvesting them this week. We have already harvested some zucchini and there are numerous yellow squash coming along. The yukon gold and fingerling potatoes are continuing to do well, but I am still waiting for the red nordlands that I re-planted to pop. I am hopeful that they will soon, otherwise we will have a diminished potato harvest this year. On Sunday I dug two more of the floundering rows from the upper plot. While the potatoes are still tasty, their yield leaves much to be desired.

Market Garden

Here is a picture of our market garden taken on Sunday (click on image for an expanded view). My wife and I (read my wife) are doing a CSA this year, and while a lot of the produce is planted up in our kitchen garden this large plot will provide much of the late season goodies. As you can see (or not see as the case may be) not all that I have listed is up yet, however as of Monday night all of it is at least in the ground.

Everything on the right hand side is Danielle's. My only contribution is plowing and tilling of the ground.

I planted four rounds of corn approximately each two weeks apart. The first corn should be ready in early July if the crazy weather hasn't effected it too much. Danielle is enamored with the native American method of co-planting corn, beans and squash the so called three sisters. The traditional way to do this is put all three seeds into a mound. She modified this by intermixing rows of the three crops. The brilliance of this planting system is that the beans fix nitrogen into the soil --which corn needs loads of-- the corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb, and the squash foliage shades the corn roots and crowds out weeds. This is our first year of trying this symbiotic planting so we will have to see how it works.

My other main crop is potatoes. We have three varieties planted in this plot. The Yukon Golds at the top were planted first and are thriving. I have hilled them up repeatedly and they are starting to flower. The Fingerlings were planted somewhat later but are coming up strong and have good looking foliage. The Red Nordlands are actually the result of a failed early crop in an upper field. Both the Yukons and Nordlands were grown from seed potatoes from last years harvest. I planted the Nordlands somewhat early and our cold wet early spring and hot dry late spring was not kind to them. The plants did come up but between the less than stellar weather conditions and the increased potato bug pressure --planted potatoes in the same plot two years in a row-- they were already dieing back. I thus took a gamble, harvested what I could and replanted the potatoes in the market garden. I just got them in the ground this weekend, much later than I would like to plant potatoes but I figured it was worth a shot.

I hope to take this same picture every couple weeks to really appreciate how the garden changes throughout the season.

Potatoes In

Over the last two days I put in our first round of potatoes. The seed stock are leftovers from last years crops. We have some fingerlings on order but for now I got in three rows of Red Nordlands and two rows of Yukon Golds. I still have more of each in the cellar, we plan on planting a couple different rounds to maximize our yield and storage ability. Last year we only did the one early planting and got an excellent crop, but over the last month or so the Yukon Golds were getting mighty soft. We had stopped eating the Nordlands in the early winter. The Nordlands will be harvested early as new potatoes, but we will let the Yukon's fully mature. After a long winter it felt good working the soil again and getting our first crop in.

Last of Potatoes Dug

Dug the last of the potatoes this weekend. All the foliage from the Yukon Golds had died back, so it seemed like time to dig them up. I dug the first row by hand with a pitch fork, just like I did all three rows of the Red Nordlands. Being that it was incredibly hot this weekend I needed to find a better way if was going to get them all done. Decided to try out the potato plow which I used to plow the trenches that the potatoes were planted in. I was originally concerned that the plow would damage the potatoes, hence the hand digging. I was surprised by how well the plow worked. It popped up most of the potatoes and completely loosened the ground so the rest were easy to uncover with my bare hands. Chalk this one up to being new to farming. From now on I will be plowing up the potatoes except for the times when I just want to grab a couple new potatoes out of the field.

Potato Storage

The kids and I dug/picked another row of potatoes this morning. This brought about the realization that we had a huge amount of potatoes and no where to store them. I had always planned on putting a potato box down in the storage closet of our basement. It is cool and dark, the closest thing we have to a root cellar. I used some scrap half-inch plywood I had left over from the chicken coop. The box is nominally 48" x 18" x 18", yielding a capacity of approx. 6.75 bushels. I have the box divided in half to provide space for both the red and yukon gold potatoes. As you can see with one row of red's still in the ground the space allotted to them is starting to fill up.

Red Potato Harvest

For the last week or so we have been picking some of our Nordland Red potatoes. At first I just grabbed a basket full to have for a couple of meals but this past weekend the kids helped me harvest one entire row of the potatoes. We seem to have a good crop (since this is my first time growing potatoes I don't have much to compare it to).

I got a deep fryer for Father's Day and we have been enjoying fresh thick cut potato chips. I need to build a storage box to keep the potatoes in the basement and finish harvesting the other two rows of red potatoes. It will be interesting to see how long the kids find harvesting fun.

The Yukon Golds still have a while to go, I don't think I will be digging them until September at the earliest.

Crop Report

Sweet Corn:

1st planting ~ 9 inches
2nd planting ~ 1 inch

Potatoes: Still doing well although obvious damage from potato beetles

Pop Corn: ~ 6 inches


Pumpkins:

Potatoes

When I got home from work today I needed to burn off some steam, so I went out to the potato field to hill up the Yukon Golds. The potatoes plants continue to grow well, but we did find some larval bugs on some of the potato plant leaves. Not sure if they are potato beetles or some other pest but I squashed all the ones I found and will keep an eye out for anymore.

Pulled up one of the Red Norlands to see how they were doing, and to my delight I had a hand full of approx. ping pong ball sized potatoes. I put the plan back in the ground after harvesting to see if it will continue to produce.

Cultivating

Used the neighbors tiller to cultivate between the potato rows. After loosing up the ground and chopping up the weeds and grasses I hilled the red potato plants which are growing like gang busters. The Yukon's are growing well also but are significantly smaller. They don't need to be hilled for another week or so. Things look much nicer now that all the weeds between the rows are gone, hopefully I will be able to keep it in shape now that the heavy stuff has been taken cared of.

The sweet corn and popcorn continues to come up. I need to put in some more rows in the next week so that our harvest will be spaced out nicely.

Potatoes Coming Up!

May 4, 2006

Took the kids for a trailer ride last night and noticed that the potatoes were just starting to poke through the surface. I was happy to see this since it has been extremely dry since I planted them.

Upon further inspection I realize that only the Red Nordlands have come up. The Yukon Golds have yet to break through.

100 lbs. of Potatoes?

April 16, 2006

This weekend I put in the first of my crops. 50 lbs. of Yukon Gold and 50 lbs. of Red Norland potatoes that my wife ordered from Johhny's Selected Seeds. I picked up a Middle Buster last week at Tractor Supply so it was quick work to lay off some rows for the potatoes with the tractor. The hard part was cutting the seed potatoes into pieces and spacing them out in the rows. After that I pulled some soil back over them with a hoe. All in all I have ~ 700 ft.rows of potatoes. If the weather cooperates and we get enough rain I should be looking at harvesting somewhere around 1000 lbs. of potatoes. Guess who has already been tasked with building a potato bin for the basement?