"The calender doesn't lie,"

Yesterday when Farmer Hubby took advantage of the rain to run to Yoder's Produce Supply and pick up some rolls of plastic mulch, fertilizer (organic), and the last 250 pounds of our potatoes he happened to overhear a conversation.

From what he could gather the customer was a pretty new produce grower and seemed eager to plant everything NOW! Raymond Yoder (the owner of the business) looked at him and said, with great wisdom "The calender doesn't lie, it will be cold again."

Now I am looking out the window of my office at sleet pounding down. Exceptional warm year or not, it will be cold again when it is the first week of April and you live in Northern Ohio!

Today...

Ha ha! You said that you wanted me to blog more often, and for some reason you are reading it! You think I am going to talk about farming, but no, today's post is about the weather...

Really, in modern life most of us do not think about the weather often. Maybe if you are a construction worker or have a kid's soccer game or a weekend festival, but most of us never think about it. Well, I, and all farmers, do.

This morning I woke up to lightning and heavy rain. When I got in my car they started talking about heavy wind. I LOVE thunderstorms, but hate wind. Honestly, it scares me, and a little voice deep inside whispers scary things when heavy wind is around. When I was a little girl we lived in Hawaii and a tree fell down in a storm very close to me (in my memory just feet from me,) that fear has been with me my entire life.

But in any case, I think this morning's weather was punishment for me talking about summer yesterday! Yes, I know it is officially fall. I know there is a possibility of frost, already, on the long term forecast (Oct 10th).

I am thinking a lot about weather, this season has gone SO fast. Already I have people contacting us about next season, and I am still hopeing taht my garden will grow for anouther 3-4 weeks...

So is this a post about weather, farming, or are they basically the same?

Weekend tasks...

First let me say it was a beautiful weekend! The weather was SO nice, unfortunately, this farmer did not get to enjoy much of it. It is still to wet to get into the fields, and honestly, just a bit early to plant much. If the weather holds till the middle of next week we will put our first seeds in the ground on some hills left over from last year. We are eager to try our new seeder!

This weekend was dedicated to seed starting and transplanting, as the next couple will be as well. Hubby worked on building a new propagation rack so we can expand our space for seed starting from 2ft by 8 ft to 2 ft by 24 ft! At 360 plants on each 1 ft wide tray that means our capacity to start is expanded from 2880 seeds to 8640! That is HUGE when we are starting some things that take a while to germinate like our peppers and eggplants which were started last weekend and are just now popping (8 days).

Meanwhile I worked on starting seeds and transplanting seeds that we have already started including transplanting 288 basil plants, 30 Mexican sour gherkins, and 72 eggplants. We also started 144 lettuce plants, 144 cabbage plants, 360 broccoli, and 1,800 tomato plants. This coming week I will start more seeds as I am able to begin transplanting the 1,440 pepper plants, 600 eggplants, 360 cauliflower, and 300 celeriac seeds which were started last weekend.

We start our seed by using a soil block maker which compresses a fine mix into little 3/4"X 3/4" blocks, 20 at a time. We put these on cookie sheets and the cookie sheets on the heat mat to germinate. As soon as they pop (within one or two days) they need to be carefully moved to trays, so their roots have more room to grow. Using this method means an extra step, but space on our heat mat is so precious it is worth it for us. Doing this lets us start up to 2,880 seeds on one 2X8 ft mat instead of just 288, which is all the room you have using the trays they end up in.

When more stuff is up and transplanted I'll take some pictures. All of these are currently hanging out under a 1000watt grow light in our basement, where it will stay until our hoop house is up in a couple weeks. But that is why I spent much of this wonderful weekend in our basement, listening to my iPod and carefully putting seed in tiny little blocks!

Other weekend tasks included finally ordering our seed potatoes and onion starts, taking some time and evaluating our fields and space needs for this year, and some basic cleanup around the farm (which hubby did while I was planting tomatoes.)

Also, as some of you have asked, we think that our bee hives have survived this winter! At least their were bees working at our hives today and coming and going! On Tuesday, if the weather holds, hubby will open up the hives and check that the queen is their and the remaining bees are doing good.

Winter is coming...

I never though so much of my time would by spent thinking about weather. About rain, too little or too much? About the temperature, too low or too high? This fall our temperatures have been beautiful, but alas it is not fated to continue. This morning’s weather forecast check showed Saturday Oct 27, low 32 and Sunday Oct 28 a low of 29!

Time to start thinking about our frost protection! As we have discussed with our CSA members this coming week (Oct 21 and 24) will be our last “regular” pickup. After that we will be switching to Sunday only pickup and instead of having bags already packed for our members we will send out an email on Friday where we will indicate what we have available and the cost for each. This will be available for members only. Items will include winter squash, onions, kale, and honey. We also expect to be able to offer lettuce, radishes, turnips, beets, and maybe a few other late season items!
We hope we will have three or four of these pickups until we are done for the year!