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What's growing on the farm

4/27/2015

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Spring is here! We've got sprouts sprouting and greens greening up! Here's a snapshot of what's growing these days.
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August update

8/11/2014

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It's August. We're halfway through summer CSA and in the busiest time at the farmers' market. Everything is busting at the seams – the crops, the weeds, the cooler, the van when we load up on Saturday. It can be a bit overwhelming! We're trying to make sure to take some breaks, get enough rest, and remember that there are a lot of months between us and the end of the winter market in December. At the same time, it's satisfying to be pulling in so much bounty – hundreds of ears of corn, hundreds of pounds of melons. The garlic are drying down in the barn, and we've got strawberry plants due to arrive in early September, so we're prepping beds for that. So far the disease and pest pressure hasn't been too bad (knock on wood!), and weeds are are biggest battle. We went from about 4.5 acres last year to about 6 this year; I'll write soon about some of the changes and investments we've made this year to streamline and improve our practices as we grow.
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Water, water

7/8/2014

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Jeremy and Sonora explore the pond
Tadpoles!
Frog in the pond
Trench and pipe for the tile drainage
Water, along with soil and sunshine, is one of the critical pieces of the farm mosiac. Plants need it, in the right amounts, at the right time. Too much can be as damaging as too little (which we learned dramatically after Irene), and, as a rule, it's easier to add water than to try and remove it. When we were searching for land, one of the challenges was to balance our needs – we wanted to avoid heavy clay soils, but many of the best soils in Addison county are river-bottom floodplain soils, and after our experience with Irene, we were pretty determined to avoid floodplains as well. We bought this land largely for the soil: a nice, sandy loam, not too gravelly or stony (though we've pulled out some good-sized boulders), enough reasonably flat to grow veggies on.

It's proven a good investment. The soil drains nicely, with the small exception of one little hollow in the upper field that bogs down in the spring. It has a good organic matter content, which we've been cultivating with compost and cover crops, and that helps it to hold moisture through dry times. For established crops, we've found that we rarely need to water, and up until this month, we just avoided the boggy section of the field.

But we know that things are changing, are likely to change more. Weather patterns are predicted to become more extreme – wetter in the wet times, drier when they're dry. In last year's spring, week upon week of rain, the boggy section spread over  much of the upper field, and springs like that may become the norm. We were grateful for our sandy soils then. Stretches of drought are likely as well, and our current irrigation set-up – a sap tank on the back of the pick-up with a hose, which we need especially for new seedlings in dry times – gets less reasonable each time we expand.

So, we're investing in some infrastructure in the name of resiliency and efficiency. Last year we began the process of putting in a pond, with the help of the NRCS. They finished it this spring, and we've been working on trenching and laying pipe to bring water to our lower field. From the pipehead, we'll lay drip tape or micro-emitters to distribute water to the plants when they need it. We've got a strong spring feeding the pond, and should have water enough for all our needs.

It's been a fun project with Sonora to watch the pond fill, then fill with life, this season. Within a week of water flowing in, the toads had arrived. Soon the pond was thick with toad eggs, then frogs. A few weeks ago the tadpoles began to hatch, and at our last visit they were beginning to grow legs. The tracks of various creatures lead to the water and away. The site is pretty raw still – because of the sandy soil, the pond is lined with black plastic, and we haven't done any landscaping or naturalizing yet – but we can see that in the future it will be a lovely focal point for the property.

On the other side, we've put in tile drainage under the boggy section of the upper field, and look forward to having a bit more good flat land to work with. It should help keep that field usable in wet years, and the pond should help us in dry ones. (Or, for that matter, in wet months and dry months, since the two can alternate drastically in a single season.)

In all, we hope it will make our farm better prepared for whatever climate awaits us in the future, and it will certainly be better than truck-watering!
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It's looking green in here!

4/22/2014

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Summer CSA - final week!

10/21/2013

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Huge thanks to all our Summer CSA members! We've had such a good year - we sure hope you've had a good one as well. Folks who are staying on or joining us for the Winter CSA, please note that it starts the first week of November - there is no CSA pick-up next week.
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Bean Time!

9/16/2013

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We've grown dry beans a few times, though never in much quantity, mostly just for our own family. They're a great crop in a number of ways - as a nitrogen-fixing legume they're good for the soil, they don't require a whole lot of work between planting and harvesting, and, once processed, they produce a great and somewhat unusual product that stores well and doesn't take up too much room. The tricky part is that little phrase, "once processed."

The bean plants need to be pulled and the pods dried down thoroughly so that the beans don't rot or sprout. Then the beans themselves need to be separated from their pods (known as threshing), cleaned of dirt and pieces of plant, and checked over for quality. On a household scale, we would just keep a bushel basket of pods handy and shell beans by hand whenever we watched movies or as we were sitting around the kitchen table after dinner. We mostly managed to keep up with our own bean usage that way, but it's not a particularly viable method on a commercial scale. Of course, there are plenty of machines one can buy to thresh and clean beans, but those are also typically not viable on the relatively small commercial scale at which we are operating.

There are a number of small-scale solutions, powered by bikes or made from modified wood chippers. There are also extremely low-tech solutions, like putting the beans in an old pillowcase and whacking it against a hard surface until the beans fall out of their shells, and then pouring it all in front of a fan a few times to blow away debris. That will probably be our solution for a few batches of beans until we figure out which kind of slightly higher-tech solution will work best for us.

Look for dry beans at the market in a few weeks and in CSA pretty soon!
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Mid-season on the farm

7/22/2013

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Growing Fast!

7/8/2012

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Click the images to view larger and see the date each was taken.
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Gratitude and Community

9/25/2011

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A few weeks ago we had a clean-up day to deal with the aftermath of the flooding. Honestly, we'd been pretty depressed about the whole thing - losing that field this year, plus the winter plantings we can't plant, plus the potential of having it happen again, plus the thought of all that food going to waste - and we took up the offer that Annie Harlow made to put our clean-up day out to the ACORN network because we figured if we got a few more hands, we could get it over with more quickly.

Well, we sure got some more hands.
Those hands included the entire Middlebury College men's soccer team, several of our CSA members, some friends, and a couple of folks hardly even know. It was humbling and gratifying to watch all the energy that these people brought to the work of tearing out plants, pulling up plastic, hauling potatoes, and making the biggest compost pile we've ever had.

It was also incredibly efficient - in literally an hour and a half, our team of 30+ people did what would have been at least two weeks of work for Jeremy and Brian. And it was almost fun! Such an amazing gift to receive from our community.

We've also been touched by all the people who stopped by our stand and the market to ask how we're doing and buy an extra squash or two.

As climate change makes big weather like Irene more likely and alters the patterns of the seasons, farmers are going to have to adapt in a lot of different ways. Perhaps that gorgeous river-bottom soil will have to be limited to orchards or pasture. Clearly diversification is going to be increasingly important - if we'd been growing only winter squash, we'd be totally screwed. And I think community is going to become more and more important as well - for work parties, for investment in new ideas, for moral support.

So the good thing about having lost our field was that we got to see our community in action. And that was pretty great.

(Thanks to Annie Harlow for the photos.)
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Baby at the market

5/20/2011

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From the last indoor winter market.
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We won't be at the market tomorrow (the 21st) because all the wet weather got us a bit behind & threw off the succession plantings. But we should be back next week with lots of goodies, and we're getting really excited for CSA!
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