August 07, 2007
Trouble in the pigpen! Wow it seems like Aliyah is having all the
dubious luck with the animals. She went into the barn to feed the
little piggies and ended up stepping on a nail! Of all the places
to get an injury, much less step on a nail, a pigsty really is the top
of the list. Off to the hospital for a tetanus booster we
went. Now Aliyah is hobbling around like our like guinea hen
Stumpy who only has one foot.
This is the week’s harvest: lettuce, tomatoes, komatsuna, carrots, cilantro, scallions, cukes, squash, and melons.
Hope you all enjoyed the corn last week. Lots of folks don’t
realize that you can grow sweet corn without using pesticides and
herbicides. Like most of our other crops we transplant the
corn. This gives it a huge head start over the weeds. A
couple of hoeings is all it needs after that. Transplanting also
ensures perfect spacing in the beds and 100% germination. I
remember years back direct seeding corn only to have crows follow right
behind us eating the seed. Because corn takes up so much land, we
really can’t afford to have any gaps in our planting. This year we have
3 plantings of corn so we hope to have at least a couple more rounds
for everyone.
We’ve been opening up more land this summer. Each year it seems
we open up another field. Is this so we can plant more and more
veggies and get bigger and bigger? No. We actually are at a
very comfortable size in terms of numbers of CSA shares and how many
people work for us. Our goal is not to get bigger and bigger each
year but become more efficient. Right now too much of our cultivated
land is in vegetable production. Ideally, we’d like to have half
in cover crops and half in veggies. Once our new field is put
into rotation we can rest some of the other land that has been in
veggies for the past few seasons.
It’s quite a process to turn a field into a sea of veggies. First
I guess I should explain what I mean by “opening up” land. Our
farm is just less than 50 acres, but it isn’t all in vegetable
production. About 30 acres are cut for hay. There are about
another 10 acres that used to be hay, but the quality of the hay isn’t
that good anymore, so either it needs to be reseeded or turned over
into vegetables. The new field is about 3 acres of this old hay
land. When we open it up, we plow it and break down the
sod. It usually takes a few plowings until the grasses are dead
and the sod is broken up.
Dan is getting ready to take soil samples to find out what shape this
new field is in. We’ll send the samples into a lab and get back a
fairly detailed profile of the soil that includes ph, organic matter,
basic nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous & potassium as well as
trace elements like boron, copper & zinc. Dan usually has an
idea of what to expect by looking at what was growing in the field
before he plowed it. Plants such as dandelion, wild carrot,
lamb’s quarters, and milkweed are all common in the fields and can
indicate nutrient imbalances, soil compaction or low organic
matter. Most of the fields have been pretty out of balance and
we’ve had to take a lot of corrective measures.
More on this next week…..
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