The Winter this year was pretty mild, right up until the beginning of February.
The Groundhog (if it were at the Farm) would have seen his shadow and foretold of six more weeks of Winter. And it would have been right too. The Winter since Groundhog's Day has been horrible. (Stupid Groundhog should have stayed in bed.) Six more weeks of Winter was the Groundhog's forecast, let us all hope so.
Since then there have been many nights of heavy rain, some of it more than three inches. The days following are usually nice, but the mud can be a bit much. The cold mornings bring frost, but the frost melts and makes the mud a bit worse. We put a bunch of hay down to make for a firm footing on the paths, but the hay has slowly sunk into the mud. It is still better than it was without the hay.
We had snow one night, sufficient to collapse the hoop-house roofs. We repaired them easily, but it has snowed twice since then and this is a worry. We have to spend the snowy nights paying vigilant attention to keeping the weight of snow off them. We get little sleep on snow nights, but it is pretty out there when the snow falls. Last night is threatened snow all night long, but the stuff didn't show up until around six this morning. As I write this snow is falling and it is very pretty out. But we are melting the snow off of the hoop-house roofs about once every hour just in case.
Yesterday we had winds. Not really fast moving but very heavy and cold, spilling out of the Gorge. We spent the morning in the greenhouse planting seed for succession crops and sorting strawberries into buckets for replanting. The wind made the job worse, but we got another bunch done. The wind continued all day and all night long, and some of it was pretty scary. The house shook at times during the night but the hoop-houses took it all in stride.
While sorting the frozen berry plants we discussed the problem of re-planting the berries. This problem is more about having a good place for them to go than having plants to go there. So we spent the sorting time talking about how we could distribute the good soil we made (last year) without making a mess or causing future trouble. The soil is very wet, so making a mess is pretty easy to do, and the weight of it makes moving it around a bit of a problem too.
While I was picking plants out of the freezing clay and mud I thought up an idea for a new tractor implement. So after lunch we went into the cold and windy workshop and built it out of scrap wood. The idea was to take the dirt which comes out of the tractor's 48 inch roto-tiller and focus it into a six inch deep and thirty inch wide berm suitable for planting. After we got the thing built, we had to figure a way to get it to trail behind the tractor, and then make a few adjustments to make it to work properly. Eventually the thing worked pretty good.
We moved the good soil out into the feild and just dropped it in piles, then roto-tilled the ground in an east to west direction until it was mixed fluffy and even. Then we put the new tool behind the roto-tilller and ran it in a straight lines in a north to south direction. Following the tire track from the previous run the rows came out wonderfully straight and look great. Each new row is about six inches deep and very well formed. This new tool will easily give us the 750 row feet we will need to put 4500 strawberry plants into the ground, in a meaningful way, before the growing season begins. But the weather simply must calm down a bit before we get out there to plant.
The forecast is for cold and dry all weekend, so we are hopeful. There are still a bunch of plants to sort out and planting in the rain sounds pretty horrible.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Sunday, February 24, 2019
February 24, 2019 Seeds Sprouting
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| One of the new chain sign designs |
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| It may be that we will never have enough eggs to hang this one. |
Carrots usually take seven to ten days, same for radishes, so this is a vast improvement. Others might take a bit longer. Tomatoes usually take abut two weeks, in last year's chamber it took ten days to sprout a tomato and we couldn't keep the flats cool enough when the sun came out. The tables can simply be left uncovered in full sunlight.
Things are definitely growing. And to that end we are beginning to work on the produce stand as we continue to sort out strawberry plants and all the rest of it.
Today I did the graphics design for twenty-four placard signs, each for a different crop. These signs have to be seen and recognized from a half a mile away by a driver, enough time that the driver can make a decision to take a closer look and make a decision. Since the signs will be relatively small they graphic elements have to be familiar to them. So I kept to simple elements and few words.
We will buy pre-painted wood trim boards at the Home Depot, cut them into two foot lengths, then paint the graphics on each board using my art projector to keep things neat. These individual signs will hang in a chain to make a bigger sign and to tell people what we have available.
The produce stand itself will primarily be a trailer which we will re-purpose for the job. Again, the thing must look like a produce stand to those seeing it from a long away. The colors and shapes have to remind the driver of a produce stand the moment it comes into view. We have a good design but describing it in text would be tedious, so I'll put up pictures as soon as we have it under way.
Ann is signing herself up for a Thursday farmer's market at Tuality Hospital. She has quite a following there and we expect it will be a good "warm" market for our produce. We will also put the stand out on the highway as the Summer gets nearer too. Probably just on Saturdays this year. The rest of the time the stand will be by our front gate where we hope to attract people to come off of the Banks-Vernonia Trail.
Thursday, February 21, 2019
February 21, 2018 Strawberry Update
It was really nice out on the Farm this morning. Sunny and cool, around 25 degrees. But it climbed to maybe fifty-five by lunch time. So we tore into the long and tedious job of removing last year's strawberry plants from our Market Garden for replanting into our Strawberry field.
The field itself isn't ready to plant, with the exception of the one vertical Strawberry tower. The septic system drain field went in under where the strawberry field is going to be, so right now we have about four inches of wet clay. Not a good thing to put plants into unless you like root rot. But we have a plan . . .
Since we haven't built the entire vertical garden, and probably won't this year, we are going to plant our berries in low berms of pretty good soil placed on top of the clay. The berms will be about three feet wide and about six inches deep. This will allow our plants to get into production this year, just as they did last year, but much earlier. We will need to put out a whole lot of berms because we have a whole lot of plants.
I took our little tractor and shaved last year's strawberries off of the dirt where they were planted in last year, each load takes up about eight square feet and this comes up like a sheet off of the clay layer. Then we carried them over to the workshop, where we make dirt, and separate the plants from the soil, then sorted them for size. Some of our plants are three years old, but most are the result of our letting the 284 three year old plants run crazy last year. Strawberry plants make babies by seed and by runner. If you let the runners go crazy the fruits are greatly diminished. Each runner can make one new plant right away, but often the runners will continue on and make even more. We got a lot more because we didn't hope for much of a fruit crop last year. What we needed was to propagate our 284 plants into something more scaled up to farm needs.
Each tractor scoop held about eight square feet of plants and dirt. Each square foot held about ten plants. We sorted eight scoops this morning and got about 480 plants for the effort. Most were small because they were only a few seasons old. Some were very large, about the size a commercial grower would want. But this morning was just the start of it.
All totaled we have something like 450 square feet of strawberry plants to scrape up, sort out, and re-plant,. So we'll be planting as many as 4500 plants this year. This is quite a lot more than we ever dreamed of when we put them in late last Spring. Each new plant will take about one quarter of a square foot of dirt to grow properly. This is a bit closer than some think ought to be because when fungus gets loose you can lose a whole bunch of plants. But if we keep up on the mulch we probably won't have too much trouble.
So the whole new batch of plantings will take about 750 row feet of space, three feet wide, about 2500 square feet. Our strawberry field is about 10,000 square feet, so we would still need to propagate or buy more plants if we wanted them to stay in the ground, but we don't. Right now we are leaning towards buying new pants because we may wish to opt for some more specific outcomes. But the mixed berries we now have may do the trick. I think people won't mind picking strawberries and probably won't know the difference in breed. But growing in the dirt, as does everyone else, is not where we wish to go.
In-ground strawberry production is very problematic. You have to do a heck of a lot of bending, a ton of watering, and some degree of feeding or medicating if the soil changes. Then there's the problem of picking which is best left to those who bend easier than we do or are more motivated by less money than most are. It may be that if we tried to operate the field as a Upick the people would come, but all would leave with soiled knees and most will not likely return. The current strawberry Upicks are more about family recreation and not about a good substitution for supplying needs.
So we plan to put them all up in vertical towers, like the one we built to prove it might be done. This would make Upick more about fun.
Our single eight foot test tower holds about 86 plants and uses up only nine linear (or square feet) of space. The same number of conventionally panted strawberries would take up around ten row feet of space (six feet wide), so this is better if it works. Space is better, but the extra good stuff is that the tower system uses about half the water, none of the fertilizer, and almost no bending over. Operating the towers as a Upick would keep customers happier, off of the ground, and picking fruit would take half the time and half of the effort.
Only time will tell if the dream of our strawberry farm pans out, but I'll keep you all informed.
The field itself isn't ready to plant, with the exception of the one vertical Strawberry tower. The septic system drain field went in under where the strawberry field is going to be, so right now we have about four inches of wet clay. Not a good thing to put plants into unless you like root rot. But we have a plan . . .
Since we haven't built the entire vertical garden, and probably won't this year, we are going to plant our berries in low berms of pretty good soil placed on top of the clay. The berms will be about three feet wide and about six inches deep. This will allow our plants to get into production this year, just as they did last year, but much earlier. We will need to put out a whole lot of berms because we have a whole lot of plants.
I took our little tractor and shaved last year's strawberries off of the dirt where they were planted in last year, each load takes up about eight square feet and this comes up like a sheet off of the clay layer. Then we carried them over to the workshop, where we make dirt, and separate the plants from the soil, then sorted them for size. Some of our plants are three years old, but most are the result of our letting the 284 three year old plants run crazy last year. Strawberry plants make babies by seed and by runner. If you let the runners go crazy the fruits are greatly diminished. Each runner can make one new plant right away, but often the runners will continue on and make even more. We got a lot more because we didn't hope for much of a fruit crop last year. What we needed was to propagate our 284 plants into something more scaled up to farm needs.
Each tractor scoop held about eight square feet of plants and dirt. Each square foot held about ten plants. We sorted eight scoops this morning and got about 480 plants for the effort. Most were small because they were only a few seasons old. Some were very large, about the size a commercial grower would want. But this morning was just the start of it.
All totaled we have something like 450 square feet of strawberry plants to scrape up, sort out, and re-plant,. So we'll be planting as many as 4500 plants this year. This is quite a lot more than we ever dreamed of when we put them in late last Spring. Each new plant will take about one quarter of a square foot of dirt to grow properly. This is a bit closer than some think ought to be because when fungus gets loose you can lose a whole bunch of plants. But if we keep up on the mulch we probably won't have too much trouble.
So the whole new batch of plantings will take about 750 row feet of space, three feet wide, about 2500 square feet. Our strawberry field is about 10,000 square feet, so we would still need to propagate or buy more plants if we wanted them to stay in the ground, but we don't. Right now we are leaning towards buying new pants because we may wish to opt for some more specific outcomes. But the mixed berries we now have may do the trick. I think people won't mind picking strawberries and probably won't know the difference in breed. But growing in the dirt, as does everyone else, is not where we wish to go.
In-ground strawberry production is very problematic. You have to do a heck of a lot of bending, a ton of watering, and some degree of feeding or medicating if the soil changes. Then there's the problem of picking which is best left to those who bend easier than we do or are more motivated by less money than most are. It may be that if we tried to operate the field as a Upick the people would come, but all would leave with soiled knees and most will not likely return. The current strawberry Upicks are more about family recreation and not about a good substitution for supplying needs.
So we plan to put them all up in vertical towers, like the one we built to prove it might be done. This would make Upick more about fun.
Our single eight foot test tower holds about 86 plants and uses up only nine linear (or square feet) of space. The same number of conventionally panted strawberries would take up around ten row feet of space (six feet wide), so this is better if it works. Space is better, but the extra good stuff is that the tower system uses about half the water, none of the fertilizer, and almost no bending over. Operating the towers as a Upick would keep customers happier, off of the ground, and picking fruit would take half the time and half of the effort.
Only time will tell if the dream of our strawberry farm pans out, but I'll keep you all informed.
Monday, February 18, 2019
February 18, 2019 Greenhouse Update
Last week was scheduled to be spent planting succession crops in the Market Garden greenhouse. Instead we spent the time repairing snow damage.
But we're back on track as of today with romaine and buttercrunch lettuce started in flats, a long with rosemary and marigolds. We also put in the first flights of carrot and radish too. These will be planted in big pots this time but will go straight into the ground on a four week repetition schedule. We have garlic and onion wintering over outside, but I may pull them and replant them into the greenhouse.
It's a full moon, so we're planting out of phase. But the greenhouse is holding sixty degrees with the door open, near eighty with it closed. The weather is 40/25 and partly cloudy.
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
February 2, 2018 The Aftermath of Snow-ma-geddon at Creekside Farm
We had a pretty good Winter's plan going. I was working on the framing plan for the new house, we had already completed the planting plan and had been making dirt for beginning the Greenhouse winter planting. Everything was moving along slowly, but smoothly. Then came the fairly minor snow event the people on the news were calling Snowmageddon.
The weather service had warned of up to sixteen inches of snow and possible lows in the low teens. The grocery stores and gas stations were wildly busy with people planning on hibernation for at least a week. If we had day jobs, we would have been receiving warnings about staying home despite the fact that most everyone would not be going out of doors for anything and work would turn into a snow party. But the storm, though wet and cold for sure, was something of a dud, we got about two inches (if that). But this isn't to say that we escaped un-harmed. The snow came in at about one in the morning, so we were asleep when the bulk of it came down along with the roofs of the Greenhouse and workshop.
I woke up at about three to see that the roof of the Greenhouse had come down and was a bit surprised by the collapse since the Greenhouse had come through high winds and heavy rain for nearly a year. I was also surprised to see that the workshop roof had not collapsed, at that point in time, because I had built it with less structure at the end walls. It too had come through heavy winds and loads of rain, but heavy, wet, sticky, snow eventually took it down too. I hear it fall at about four in the morning and it sounded like a truck dragging a trailer that was upside down.
We had put our new Runner Ducks (I haven't told anyone about these until now) in the Greenhouse to get them used to the new place and until we could finish their new home. (More about this when later.) They came through the collapse just fine, but always have a surprised look on their faces anyway so it's hard to tell. The snow on the rook of the greenhouse had pooled in the middle of the collapse and this was going to make this a hard thing to fix. The walls had all stayed up straight so it looked like an above ground swimming pool. The ducks could run around the edges of the Greenhouse, near the walls, so they we plenty happy. It was Ann who had to go in to feed them, she was less happy. The Greenhouse will have to be rebuilt, but some of it is salvageable: the walls, the ends, the plastic. We will have to figure a new roof, but all is not lost and I built it to be replaced cheaply. The workshop roof is also going to need replaced, but it was lighter and smaller and has less damage to the plastic so things will work out there too, after a bit of repair.
The rest of the snowy night deposited a bunch of ice and snow on the roof of the tiny home cabin and the lean-to tractor shed where the dogs have their well heated house. The following morning we went out in the snow to wash the ice off and apply some salt so that ice wouldn't build up, but it didn't snow much more than it did on that first night and hasn't done much since. This was two nights ago.
Last night it rained buckets. The weather radar we have on our phones told us of a completely unusual wind pattern which was funneling (not kidding here in the least way) and focusing the rain right over our heads. The result was about five inches of rain in one night and the pool in the Greenhouse filled up a lot more. We worried over the amounts of rain and the weather people were forecasting stormy doom upon us all, but it didn't turn out to be much more than a bunch of rain. By morning the rain slacked off and the weather was cool but wasn't too bad.
We rain geared up and ventured out to see what we could do to keep things from breaking down until the weather clears and we can begin re-building. So we went out and pumped it all out, then tried to figure a way to raise up enough roof to keep the pool from re-filling, the same for the workshop. We pumped out the swimming pool and shored up the Greenhouse roof (poorly) so that we could move around in there. Then we figured a way to keep the workshop from taking on a lot of water, but didn't even try to raise the roof back up. It slopes downward enough that water shouldn't pool up there any more and we can get to tools.
All in all the damage wasn't really huge, just sort of inconvenient. But at least it happened in the slow season.
The weather service had warned of up to sixteen inches of snow and possible lows in the low teens. The grocery stores and gas stations were wildly busy with people planning on hibernation for at least a week. If we had day jobs, we would have been receiving warnings about staying home despite the fact that most everyone would not be going out of doors for anything and work would turn into a snow party. But the storm, though wet and cold for sure, was something of a dud, we got about two inches (if that). But this isn't to say that we escaped un-harmed. The snow came in at about one in the morning, so we were asleep when the bulk of it came down along with the roofs of the Greenhouse and workshop.
I woke up at about three to see that the roof of the Greenhouse had come down and was a bit surprised by the collapse since the Greenhouse had come through high winds and heavy rain for nearly a year. I was also surprised to see that the workshop roof had not collapsed, at that point in time, because I had built it with less structure at the end walls. It too had come through heavy winds and loads of rain, but heavy, wet, sticky, snow eventually took it down too. I hear it fall at about four in the morning and it sounded like a truck dragging a trailer that was upside down.
We had put our new Runner Ducks (I haven't told anyone about these until now) in the Greenhouse to get them used to the new place and until we could finish their new home. (More about this when later.) They came through the collapse just fine, but always have a surprised look on their faces anyway so it's hard to tell. The snow on the rook of the greenhouse had pooled in the middle of the collapse and this was going to make this a hard thing to fix. The walls had all stayed up straight so it looked like an above ground swimming pool. The ducks could run around the edges of the Greenhouse, near the walls, so they we plenty happy. It was Ann who had to go in to feed them, she was less happy. The Greenhouse will have to be rebuilt, but some of it is salvageable: the walls, the ends, the plastic. We will have to figure a new roof, but all is not lost and I built it to be replaced cheaply. The workshop roof is also going to need replaced, but it was lighter and smaller and has less damage to the plastic so things will work out there too, after a bit of repair.
The rest of the snowy night deposited a bunch of ice and snow on the roof of the tiny home cabin and the lean-to tractor shed where the dogs have their well heated house. The following morning we went out in the snow to wash the ice off and apply some salt so that ice wouldn't build up, but it didn't snow much more than it did on that first night and hasn't done much since. This was two nights ago.
Last night it rained buckets. The weather radar we have on our phones told us of a completely unusual wind pattern which was funneling (not kidding here in the least way) and focusing the rain right over our heads. The result was about five inches of rain in one night and the pool in the Greenhouse filled up a lot more. We worried over the amounts of rain and the weather people were forecasting stormy doom upon us all, but it didn't turn out to be much more than a bunch of rain. By morning the rain slacked off and the weather was cool but wasn't too bad.
We rain geared up and ventured out to see what we could do to keep things from breaking down until the weather clears and we can begin re-building. So we went out and pumped it all out, then tried to figure a way to raise up enough roof to keep the pool from re-filling, the same for the workshop. We pumped out the swimming pool and shored up the Greenhouse roof (poorly) so that we could move around in there. Then we figured a way to keep the workshop from taking on a lot of water, but didn't even try to raise the roof back up. It slopes downward enough that water shouldn't pool up there any more and we can get to tools.
All in all the damage wasn't really huge, just sort of inconvenient. But at least it happened in the slow season.
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