April 19, 2019 Battling the Gopher

A shot of the Farm from the South-west corner.
(Click on it for the larger picture.)
The chicken run has a Prayer flag pavilion.

This week the biggest thing to write about was that the gophers all woke and started in repairing the extensive tunnel system they had been working on for decades. I bought some gopher traps last year out of the misguided notion that I wanted to kill them and, so far, I have set these traps a few times. But it seems that I am as good a trapper as I was a fisherman, so the gophers are pretty safe with me setting the traps. I had tried incendiary smoke bombs last year a few times, but these too failed to deter the furry little varmints. This year I saw a Youtube video of a guy using road flares in place of the smoke bombs, so I tried it. The flares last maybe twenty times longer and put out a tremendous smoky mess of sulfur dioxide so I figured the smell might get the wee beasties to move on down the road. So far I've spent forty dollars on flares, with little luck.

The field mice also became visible this week. They are very cute, but they can create a bunch of trouble in the greenhouse. I built a better mouse trap out of a five gallon bucket but the thing isn't catching. But this isn't new, or news.

The weather is the biggest story on Creekside Farm this past week. Early in the week we had rain nearly every night but the days were dry. Toward the end of the week the rain finally quit and we were able to finish up a few projects that had to wait for drier days.  The rain stops building plans, but accelerates growing things too.

These Strawberries are planted in the
Strawberry Tower we invented.

The potatoes started showing leaf. We put four varieties in the ground this year: Kennebec (the best masher), Pontiac (little red), German Butterball (the best all around spud), and Viking Purple (a new variety we are trying which has purple skin, but is white fleshed). The first three went into the ground in late March, the Vikings came late from Gurneys due to the first lot being damaged (so these planted this week between the rain showers). We will begin harvesting baby sizes of all of these after they flower, then finish harvesting the larger potatoes once the foliage dies off. We took a large amount of seed potato when we harvested last year and we're hoping to market seed potatoes beginning next Spring. This would make potatoes a year around crop for sale. We will definitely eat well in the coming year.

The Strawberries we put into rows last month are all up and doing very well, as are the plants we put into our Strawberry Tower invention. Ann spent a few days weeding the rows and they look great. But weeding is a lot of work.

The idea of these towers is to take much of the hard labor out of Strawberry production. All the bending and kneeling is hard on older bodies and the knees of pants. If the tower allows the same production then we hope to use these as the basis of an consumer uPick strawberry farm. If the one we have does well we will begin putting towers up and taking row planted berries out next Winter.

The plants in the Tower are doing very well.

The Tower is one of the things we have thought up to work around projects where time and labor is in high demand. Solving problems requires some measure of creativity and allows us to pinch pennies well. The Farm is an expensive proposition and money must be well managed if we are to succeed in this.

These were the rows we made
using the row tool we invented.

Another tool we dreamed up and built was a simple tool to drag behind the tractor and tiller. It takes the soils directly from the tiller and directs it into neat rows for planting. Our previous rows were all made using rakes and shovels to pull the freshly tilled soil into shape. The labor of involved in making each row was hard and had to be re-done every year.. This new tool does large areas quickly and easily. Since all of our planting goes into rows where it can be managed easily, this row making tool will save us many hours of back-breaking labor every year.  Saving cash, time, and labor, is important if we are to survive and thrive in farming. Many of the things we need to do are difficult physically tough , but the scale of our farm doesn't allow for buying expensive tools  from off-site vendors.

The weather is improving, the days getting longer. It won't be long before we have plants up and produce for sale. We can't wait.