August 6th, 2023 Deep Summer

 It has been nearly perfect weather since my last post, and a lot got grown and done since then. So much has been done I really haven't had much time to write.  Summer has caused an explosion in growth here.. No-till gardening has solved nearly all of our soil fertility problems and the produce we are getting is exceptional. In the next week or two, once our produce is ripe and ready, we will be opening our little produce stand in an attempt at making a dollar. 

The stuff we have planted is roughly five times what we planted last year. But our much larger plan is still not quite large enough. We might be able to grow twice the amount we have in the ground next year, but we will need to plan for a much bigger grow. We put in seventy melon hills this year, where there were only fifteen last year, and the plants are doing quite well, but I think we could grow five hundred just as easily so that's the plan going forward. We put in five times the cucumber plants too, and a trellis to hold them all up. Next year I think we will need to tripple the cucumber grow and we certainly have the space for it. Our squash and pumpkin grow is also quite a bit larger, perhaps double last year, and the results are extraordinary. But I'm pretty sure I could still do five times the amount with little trouble.  And our corn crop is easily eight times the number of stalks we grew before, might be more, but we have space for double this number right now. 

Since all of this year's plan involved converting to no-till gardening and drip irrigation, planting is much easier, harvesting is half the work, and watering is a snap. Also, the sort of weeds we usually have are tough to handle. Thistles and berries are difficult to pull out of hard pan clay. But in a no-till scenario these sorts of weeds don't do very well and pull out of the ground easily. This is not to say that there are no weeds, crabgrass has really done well this year, but crabgrass and the other worts growing in the garden are relatively easy to chop off and when we let them rot in the ros they make a mighty good mulch which blocks sprouting. But there's other reasons why weeding isn't really so much of a problem now.

The drip-tape irrigation system I put in only waters the top of the rows, not the spaces between. So weeds don't get all the water they have in previous years and grow slowly. With far less growth potential we can work the spaces between rows quickly using a stirrup hoe knowing the weeds will not grow back quickly. Most of the weeds we have don't have energy storage, so most won't grow back at all. This new way of growing is half the work, or less, so our days aren't as long and there's plenty of time for other projects.

Our new house plan.

We are on the cusp of moving the tiny homes to space behind the Farmhouse. I had always envisioned moving them to the edge of the Farm, near the back fence line, but actually looking at the project seriously made us change the plan. While we prepare for the move I have upgraded our electrical power plan to include two generators and enough wire to service the two new outbuildings behind the Farmhouse. Each will have water and power and the stuff is already buried in the ground ad waiting for the move. My Brother, visiting while planning his retirement moves, has a large camp trailer which currently is placed near the tiny homes. When we move the tiny homes he will also be moved to a new place where I recently put in power and water connections. The only thing left to do is septic hook ups, but these have to wait until we actually move the buildings. And there's so much more to do than just this.

Our Farm is exploding in growth. Fruit is ripening and will soon need sold. So there's much to do. 

Our Produce Stand is in fine shape and the area where it will be accessible to the public is currently parking for all of our cars and trucks. So we will spend a few days shifting things around and cleaning places up to get ready for opening day. This year's plan is to tow the Produce Stand to the end of the road five days a week and sell produce down there. But the Stand will be parked outside of the fence where it was last year when it is not at the end of the road so some allowance must be made. We should be opening in a week or so. 

 I thought of another new thing to try. Our government has added some burdens to the Organic Farm movement and I have recently run into it while talking to food buyers about taking on some of our produce. 

Pirate Organic Farming

In order to call ours an organic farm we must become Certified. This involves a lengthy application process and about a thousand dollars in cost borne over and above the cost of actually growing things. What this does, and my central argument against it, is that what is expected is a loosely governed branding process where a farmer pays a certain amount to be able to say they grow food without the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides,  fertilizers, and seeds. These factors of producing food are already in place and we do these things, but applying for the certification has some other hoops to jump through and costs to be borne, not the least of which is a thousand dollar fee.  We are allowed to sell our produce without these hurdles, but we would not be allowed to use the term "Organic" in any form. Not just this, but grocery store buyers require the certificate, as do farmer's market administrators.  If you have read this BLOG I stated early on that these were just the sort of regulatory things we would not wish to participate in.  So we will not. And for some very good reasons.  So we are now going pirate organic.

We will no longer worry over using the term "organic", instead we will fly a flag I designed (above) and trust that our buyers will get what it is we are doing.  It might be a good conversation starter.  A sort of rebellion against being regulated.  This is the only change to how we have been doing things. We will still produce our fruits and veggies without chemical inputs, we will still be using very sustainable farming practices, and our produce will still be of the highest quality we can grow at this scale of production. But we won't even try to call it "organic". 

In other news, we delivered all of our puppies to their new homes since the last journal entry and brought what may be our last puppy home. Lemonhead Lucy is a wonderful little "lemon" Basset female. She is full of life and has become central tour tangle of seven hounds. We have always planned to be out of the dog breeding business in under ten years to make room for the wedding business. So Lucy will likely be the last breeding female in our kennel.  This year we have had a bit of trouble with fleas where we have never had this sort of trouble before.  So we do spend a lot of time washing dogs and vacuuming them in between washes.  It will take a bit of time, but we will get the problem licked before Fall. 

Life here has been very good for a long time now. Our house is spacious and comfortable. Once the tiny home's are all moved the way the Farm looks will change drastically. Our dogs will soon be moved to a place where they don't have much access to the people coming to the Produce Stand too. So much has happened here since we started. And there's a lot more that will.

June 11th, 2023 Summer Weather

The end of May brought a string of 90+ degree days, then things went back to our normal near eighty for a few weeks. The heat didn't really change much in what we had to do, planting the assorted crops, but the results have been a bit better than we expected. The plants are doing very well and outgrowing the weeds by just a bit.

The plans we made in January are nearly all in place. Our row building plan is almost four fifths complete. Dozens of neatly made rows of varying lengths, each oriented exactly from North to South to grab maximum light no matter the season. These will all be permanent rows, after this year the tiller on our tractor won't have too much use and I might just dismount it. In our no-till scheme what happens is addition of organic matter (leaf compost) directly on top of each row as we take plants out and put new plants in. This, along with loosening the soil with our heavy Broadfork, should keep out plants healthy and growing more vigorously every year. But there were three bigger plans for the Gardens.

We specifically designed the rows to keep our pest problems down by putting the right plants in the right places. Some plants discourage pests from crossing between rows. It is hard to prove these are working because the effect is nothing, but we are guess things are going along just fine since there hasn't been much animal predation of our starts and seeds. We had always planned to put Nematodes into the Gardens to keep larvae down and we did this two days ago. So far no new is good news, but the Flea Beatle population doesn't seem to have been effected much. The main target for the Flea Beatles has been the tomatoes so far and a little bit on the potatoes. We walk along the row the rows  and squish the little black specks a few times a day figuring the dead ones can't breed. And we hope the nematodes do the job down in the soil. If the Beatles get out of hand we have a few more tricks we can use.  Our only other pests are the few mammals we have seen.

Radishes

There have been a few Moles working the rows. They are easy enough to track, but the previous years of gopher tunnels gives them a super highway to whatever part of the Gardens they think are nice. So we are flooding their holes, ruining their tunnels, and hoping they will either go away or attract an owl. Either will do the job. Moles eat Worms, of which we have a great many, so they don't do much damage to the crops except for messing up the rows a bit, an easy to fix.  The few field rats we had seem to have either been killed off or have fled. but not before eating quite a few watermelon and bean starts. We planned for this and over planted starts so that we might replace them as quickly as we can. This doesn't replace the growth, but we have a lot of growth and most of the plants are unhurt by rodents. Aside from these few things it seems out pest plans are doing okay. 

The third part of our plan is crop rotation and bed flipping. We haven't moved far enough into the season to start thinking about this seriously, but there is some movement. The used forty gallon plastic stock tanks we bought have all been carefully filled with the right soil components and planted in Radishes, Carrots, and Bunching Onions.  The seed have germinated and we're hopeful of getting these things to grow quickly. The plan is to plant two new rows of these three every few weeks so that there will be a steady supply for the Produce Stand.  Fingers crossed. The rest of our rotation thing can be discussed later. 

The month of May was so much more cooperative this year than last. And the presence of  Ann and I in the Gardens nearly every day means things are slightly cleaner and quite a bit better laid in.  We are watering a bit less this year due to the thick compost mulch cover put on every row. So too the weeds are greatly decreased and easy to remove, but it's an uphill fight. There are still quite a few trouble areas for weeds, but I am burning and cutting a few times a week trying to stay on top of the weed problem. And there's still much to do that is not  digging and planting.

Pickler Cucumbers

We have a new irrigation thing happening soon. I invested a bit in a drip tape plan to directly water the plants at the dirt level. This is a big job but the parts are all here and once I get a minute to start putting it all in things will go along swiftly.  

My Brother, visiting in his first few months of retirement and looking for a job and permanent housing here, has spent a few weeks siding the Utility Shed. This was something that needed done before next Fall and today it is nearly complete. We will caulk and paint it in the next few weeks. 

Very soon I will need build build the parking lot area that will allow us to begin opening the Produce Stand. This is more to give the four cars here every day a place to stay and allow people to use the driveway outside of the Farm as they access the Stand. We're shooting for mid-July opening and things are looking good. 

Other than this a great many smaller things still need doing. We need to set up a backup power generation plan to make this place habitable when PGE turns off power to avoid wild fires. We need to put in the infrastructure to make the tiny home move immediately ready to use. I'll be looking for the parts in the coming few weeks. 

Jalapeño

If it seems we are really busy, we are. At our age we have a good five or six hour work day available, and this about four days a week. But the lack of the forty hour week doesn't seem to be holding up our plans. We just have to keep moving.