Rain rain, go away...

This time last year we were irrigating our spring crops. This year, we are waiting to get into the fields! It has rained 3.4 inches so far this month, according to Accuweather. They are forecasting another 4 inches this month! Every day, but one, this month they recorded at least a trace of rain, and at least some is expected every day for the next 10 days! That is 40 days people!

Let me tell you, if we have over 7" of rain in April, it will take a solid week (at least) of warm, windy and DRY days before we can get on ANY of our land. We currently have a greenhouse full of starts, a few hundred feet of peas, 1600+ feet of potatoes, and our garlic in the ground. That is it.

We have room in our back high tunnel for more lettuce, greens, scallions, radishes, and some other items like those, but in general we need it to STOP raining. We have 500 pounds of potatoes , 3 cases of onion starts (1800 plants each), 50 pounds of onion sets (6000 or so sets), and that is not to mention the starts!

Thankfully, I am not worried about our CSA, with a mid-June start week we should be fine (assuming it stops raining at some point! We will keep starting plants, and soon will start potting huge amounts up into bigger containers. That way items we would like to be planting soon (like the cabbages), will be able to keep growing. This will make it a bit harder when it comes time to plant them in the field, but they will be big healthy plants! We will probably max out our greenhouse soon if we pot plants up. One tray of 72 cabbage starts becomes 5 or 6 trays of 4 inch pots. You can imagine this type of exponential growth is hard to manage in confined areas, so we will need to look at alternatives, like some quick fabricated low tunnels.

All and all, a wet season is better then a droughty one for us. We just want to be able to get plants in the ground. So please just hope that we do not see 40 days and 40 nights of rain in May...

Onion planting started...

There will still be lots to do tomorrow for onion planting day, so join us 10-4 if you would like to help, but today farmer hubby and I got started and got about 1900 feet of onions planted (about 20% of what we have to do, so still lots that needs help!)

Here is a video of us watering them in. You cannot see the onions in this video, but they are there, 4 rows per bed and spaced about 4 inches apart...

Onion Planting Day!

There are TONS of onions to plant, so please stop by and help if you have a chance. We will be starting in the morning and going until we are done (or until it gets dark, depending.) Onion planting is a pretty easy task, and would be appropriate for older children, please use your judgement or ask if you have questions, my thoughts would be children over 10, in general.

We want to get them all in before the rains start Sunday, so we will be getting some planting done in advance of Saturday, but there should still be lots to do! If we run out of onions, there are other things to help with if you would like to. This will be our first "farm help day" of the year. If we hold others will depend on the intrest we get for this one.

Park in the Armington Pond lot, turn off Quick Rd. across from the Humane Society and email us with any questions.

Strange year....

April 6th and 100% plowed!

With luck and some hard work within a week all 500 pounds of potatoes will be in the ground! Also, the bushel of onions we are trying as sets. That is only a couple thousand onions, but not to worry, our 5 cases of starts (about 2000 each and how we normally grow onions) are due to be delivered sometime next week. Between onions, leeks, and garlic we have about 1/4 acre so everyone should have their fill!

Cabbage and lettuce should soon follow, and than step by step through the spring planting season until the eggplants and peppers are put in after all threat of frost has passed!

There have been years when we are pushing to be 100% plowed by this week in May! I will take this weather (warm and dry) but I really hope that the summer does not prove this dry or we will be testing our irrigation capacity!

More leeks and the first hotdogs...

All I can say is WOW, are there a lot of leeks in a case! A case is 32 bunches, and a bunch is supposed to have 60 leeks, however, many have many more, even after I thinned out all the really thin ones!

Last night hubby repaired my car (my oil sender went bad - whatever that is!) and I was late getting home. So it was about 6:30 before we were ready to go to the field.

It looked like the sky would open up at any moment and it was occasionally spitting as hubby laid under my car in the driveway. (Hoophouse pieces are taking up our garage!)
The sky was so dark and the wind was picking up.

But as we went into the field it cleared and we got 8 more bunches of leeks in (which were not all our leeks, but all those that had been thinned.) So I sat down by the field and started thinning more leek bunches when hubby went up to the house to get some water and something for us to eat.

I got 4 more bunches done before he got back, bearing hot dogs... I wanted to laugh, hot dogs seem to be our standard "can't stop now!" and "gotta get more done" meal for dinner time in the field. For lunch it is fruit and a wrap with hummus and lettuce... But this was the first time last year for hot dogs in the field, but defiantly not the last!

He said it was after 8, we marveled at the beautiful evening, ate our dinner and then put in the 4 bunches I'd sorted... We were inside by 8:40 or so...

And we are not done with our leeks yet! we still have 6 more bunches if you can believe it!

Let me say that it does make it seem like a pretty long day when you work 9.5 hours and then come home and don't stop until almost bedtime, but it is so worth it and honestly, does not feel like "work." If you did not love farming and enjoy being outside there is no way you could do it!

(This photo is not ours, I just wanted to show everyone what a leek start looks like! Thinning them before not only gets rid of the small ones, but lets you pull the roots apart and separate the plants when you are not bent over in the field!)

Weekend tasks..

Saturday was beautiful... We were working by 8 and managed to get quite a bit done. I was playing with our transplants in the basement, and starting more seeds. When I did that hubby was discing and tilling. When he was ready we hilled the rows we needed. We were waiting for rain and needed to move fast! Our hiller is a little lite to work well, so I get to stand on the back of it as we lay hills to help make better hills!

We got about 1000 feet of hills done and then started planting! The forecast was saying it could rain at any time and the sky looked like it! So first we used our new Jang Seeder to put in some turnips, beets, radishes, green onions, and other pretty frost tolerant crops, aiming for the May 31rst farmers market. Oh, and our new seeder works like a dream! We only got 1/2 ounce of one of the turnip seeds as it was so expensive, I expected to be able to do 25 - 30 feet of row with it. But we set up the seeder for turnips and changed the gearing to put them down at about 2" apart, and I got 150 feet in and still have about half my seed left! The seeder was worth the $500+ it cost!

After we got all the seeds in that we really needed to we sighed in relief, because the rest could be done in light rain... So we started transplanting our onion starts. We got all 1800 onions in the ground! Then came the slightly harder work of putting the leeks in (the onions just go in an inch, the leeks go in so only an inch of the leafs are above ground so 3-4 inches deep). We got about 1000 leeks in before the sky opened up around 5:30. But that was OK as we were going to a friends surprise 50th birthday party and needed to shower and get there by 7:45. So it was a pretty long day, but we got a huge amount done.

On Sunday it was rainy most of the day, so we stayed inside did some bookkeeping stuff, ran some errands, did research on asparagus (which we need to order soon!) and played with our transplants and starts (go another 700 plants started and transplanted that many on to bigger containers.)

There is still so much to do, but we are making progress. This week we will hope for it to be sunny for most of it (looking good) and work on our hoop house while hoping we can put in more hills on Friday or Saturday... We have 800 feet of potatoes coming this week we hope...

And the best news of all, even though we were bent over planting onions for hundreds and hundreds of feet we did not wake up sore as we were expecting!

This weeks big purchases include the post hole digger, a potato plow, and the bees (if they come.) It feels good to not be behind in late April...