May

Phew. *wipes sweat from brow* That was one amazing month. For nearly three straight weeks it was warm and dry. The weather was so nice that when rain started falling last week it felt like a relief. It’s watering in all our seeds and transplants. It’s giving us time to regroup.

While our neighbors were making real hay in the sun, we made proverbial hay…

The farm from the air

We have been doing (or paying for) a lot of infrastructure improvements out here. During every dry-ish spell from January through mid-May we’ve been getting truckloads of fill delivered to build a farm pad.

Hill of fill… it took about 500 dump truck loads to build our pad.

What’s a farm pad? Our farm is in a flood plain and every so often, we get a flood. A farm pad is essentially a man-made hill that’s higher than the peak of a 100-year flood. Now, ours looks like this:

Top of the pad. 5000 square feet, raised up 4 feet.

While the excavation guys were here with their heavy equipment, we had them dig us a trench to bury some irrigation line.

Now we don’t have to disconnect the hose crossing the driveway every time we leave the farm.

Watching all the heavy machinery doing grading and leveling work got us thinking… Despite the wonderfully dry weather, we have a field on our farm that still hasn’t dried out enough to work. It’s lower than all the rest, it’s where about half our farm drains to, and its drainage is blocked by the driveway. Even after those three weeks of warmth, there was still standing water in parts of this field. We had hoped it would be dry enough to use this year, and it should be by mid-June. But we’ve decided to let it sit another year. Instead, we are going to hire the contractor who built our pad to grade it and improve the drainage so it’s usable earlier and more consistently…. we are hoping that happens sometime in June.

Because we’ve decided to take this area out of production this year, we needed to find more ground. We talked to our neighbor, and he let us plow an acre of his property. Until a few weeks ago, we’d always hired someone to do plowing for us. It’s something that’s difficult to do well, and when it’s not done well, can cause you lots of trouble down the line. But, a different neighbor happened to have an old two-bottom plow lying around and I wanted to try it out.

Learning to plow

Now, the way a plow works is by inverting ribbons of soil. The grass (or whatever was growing there before) is killed or set back by being turned upside-down and deprived of light. A bad plow job doesn’t invert the soil completely, resulting in strips of grass that keep living. Our 1-acre plowing experiment went fairly well, but it was far from perfect. We’ll be planting easy-to-cultivate zucchini and winter squash there, so hopefully we’ll be able to stay on top of the grass.

Speaking of cultivating, we’ve had the opportunity to do a bunch in the warm weather. The thing about killing weeds, whether by hand, with a hoe, or using tractors is that it doesn’t work nearly as well when the soil is wet. Hoes and cultivators don’t move through wet soil well, and even if they did, uprooted weeds reroot easily when there’s moisture available to them.

We have been using the Farmall Cub with a set of 4″ sweeps to cultivate bigger plants that don’t mind having soil thrown around them.

Siri using the Farmall Cub to cultivate brassicas

We also went up to Farmers Equipment in Burlington and bought a set of shanks, clamps, and beet knives for the Kubota 245H. Beet knives work well for smaller plants that you want to keep clean because the knives only throw soil in one direction.

Beet knives

The other new cultivator tool we invested in this year is a tine weeder. The tine weeder is neat because it tickles the whole bed, including the crops we planted, with it’s tines. The tines uproot weeds when they are at what’s referred to the “white thread stage” but it doesn’t harm (much) the plants we planted.

Tine weeder

So far, we haven’t used the tine weeder enough to say whether it was worth the investment. For some reason, it hangs from the 3-point frame by chains. This made it hard to adjust properly. Next time I have a free minute, I’m going to drill holes in the frame and bolt the tine weeder to it.

Of course, we’ve also been spending tons of hours seeding and transplanting.

Seeding

We now have over 3 acres planted, and have already started turning in our first few succession plantings of salad mix ingredients, turnips, and radishes.

Lastly, a quick update about our bed shaper – it’s awesome and has saved us countless hours so far. Not only do we get a tilled and marked bed in one pass, but the increased uniformity of our beds has made cultivation way easier. If anyone out there is interested in having Gary build you one, I recommend giving him a call – 206-900-9362. He hasn’t figured out a price yet, but my guess is that it’ll be somewhere in the $1000 range.

I had a few requests to post more pictures. So here they are:

Shaping & marking beds

Bed shaper disconnected from the tiller. It takes less than 5 minutes to take it off/put it on.

Beds freshly tilled & seeded into

Well, that’s probably all we have time for today. There are still thousands of little plants in the greenhouse asking to be transplanted, and millions of weeds in the field needing to be attended to… Happy spring!