Pen and Pepper Farm

Today, I picked up a car full of our seedling order from Natick Community Farm.  Now we need to harden them off and get them in the ground.  We have many varieties of peppers and tomatoes and tomatillos.  I can’t wait to get them planted and growing!

a subaru full of seedlings

On Monday, I caught a break between stretches of rain and put in a day on the field before the next batch of rain.  I planted beet seeds, about 400 chard and kale seedlings, put up row cover over those seedlings, and staked the snow peas.  Quite a workout.

The peas are on the left, ready to climb. Then we've got rows of black plastic, and the new row cover.

I've also been doing some work indoors, trying to nurse along more kale seedlings, plus basil and lettuce.  The lettuce is pretty much ready to go out, though we've had three days of rain, so the field won't be dry enough until Saturday or Sunday.  (I might need to get up very, very early, so I can get stuff in the field and not impinge on Mother's Day.)

Here are some shots of the seedlings.  They look really good.  We're growing four kinds of kale, including a rainbow lacinato variety that has me pretty excited. (Who doesn't get excited about dinosaur kale?)

basil seedlings, still have a ways to go

The lettuce is itching to get in the ground.

This is the regular lacinato kale, plus red russian in the background.

These days, most of our time at the farm is being spent on field prep.  We’re getting pretty close to being fully ready.  We’ve spread organic fertilizer (we use Pro-Grow) on the field and worked it into the soil, as we’ve prepared raised beds (the amount we use is dictated by the soil testing we had done by UMass).  Matt with New Entry has plowed the fields a couple times now and will soon put in three beds covered with biotelo bio-degradable black plastic, where we’ll grow tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers.  The black plastic keeps the soil temperature up and keeps the weeds down.

Raking the soil into raised beds has been hard work–definitely no need to belong to a gym anymore.  But having the plants in beds will make it easier to keep the soil moisture levels right and easier to plant, harvest, and weed.

I got to use the skills from Thursday’s rototiller class on Sunday, with the BCS.  It’s a beast of a machine, and I’m only just starting to get the hang of it.  It was very helpful in churning up the top few inches of soil and made it much easier to put the beds together.

It hasn’t all been raking and hoeing.  I did manage to plant 60 feet of chard seeds.  The rain today will help a lot for their germination.  I hope it helps get my second planting of snow peas up and out of the ground, too.

Later this week, I’ll pick up our chard and kale seedlings from Natick Community Farm and try to get them in the ground.

My daughter Kira and I headed up to the plot today to get a little bit of work done, and to help skin the hoop houses at the two incubator sites.  (Which just means we helped put the plastic covering on them.)

Kira helping with the row of peas (at the plowed field)

The big surprise was that the new incubator farm coordinator, Matthew, had already plowed the field.  This is very good news, because now we can easily get in there with the BCS rototiller and set up some raised beds soon.  (I’ve got a class on using the BCS on Thursday.)

We checked the peas, and some of them are up now.  A little more rain would help the rest.  We’re supposed to get hot weather on Monday, and I hope that doesn’t cook them too much.  When I initially planted the peas, I ran out of time for making the small wire hoops to keep the rover cover off the seedlings, so today we added about fifty new hoops to the row.  (We also picked up a couple buckets full of rocks that the plow churned up.)

After that we joined some of the other incubator farmers at the other farm site (Ogonowski.  We farm at Smith.) to work on the hoop house.  The slight breeze  made us appreciate all the hands we had–besides me and Kira, there was JoAnn and Kamal and Kamal’s niece, Shanti, and Jeff and Erin, and DC.  A 60′x30′ plastic sheet can act like quite a sail when the wind grabs hold of it, but we managed to get it on.  At the Smith field, there was no wind, and the hardware was easier to attach, to it went on quicker (though Kira and I had to leave early, so hopefully the finishing steps weren’t too tough).

JoAnn helped organize today's work. This is the hoop house without the skin.

Working together with the other farmers was a valuable opportunity to get to know them better.  We’ll all be counting on each other a lot as the season progresses.  I’m the rookie, so I have a lot to learn from them.

Kira helped bolt on the end of the plastic sheeting to the hoops.

with everyone's help, we got the hoop house fully covered and ready to go.

Next week, it’ll be time to start kale and chard indoors, and plant a few beet seeds in the farm.  (I have a very detailed planting schedule written now.)  Can’t wait to get my hands on the rototiller.

It’s been a quiet week, in terms of the farm.  I went by the incubator plot yesterday, just to see if the peas were up.  No luck yet.  The weather has been cool and fairly dry, so it could easily take them two weeks or more to germinate.  The row cover is warming up the soil a little bit, and also drying it out a bit on the surface, which is probably fine.  No sign of voles.  In a few places, the wind had blown the cover off, but I found some bigger rocks to hold it down.

Here's what the field looked like on week 2.

I also went by Griffin Greenhouse Supplies in Tewkesbury, hoping to buy some 72-cell flats for starting some kale, but they only sell cases of 100.  I needed 5.  Johnnies will do the trick.  I did buy some field markers, for labeling rows and plants in the field, and that was a bargain, at 250 12″ markers for $45 or so.  (Much cheaper than Johnnies.)  In our garden, we usually just use plastic knives and spoons, but even Sharpie ink tends to wash off after a few months in the weather.  We need  a method that will last through the whole season.

The tough news this week is that we did not get in to the Acton-Boxborough Farmer’s Market.  We’d hoped to be there Sunday mornings, every other week.  But their slots filled up.  I’m trying to look at this as a mixed blessing.  Even though it’s a big hit to our projected revenue (I’d estimated we could early as much as $1,700 there, though those are numbers are half based on optimistic vapor), it simplifies our somewhat complicated lives to not have to try to get to a Sunday morning market, fairly far from home.  This gives us a lot more flexibility in our schedule, which is going to be a good thing.  (And will save a couple hundred bucks on gas).  We’ll have to try to make up some of the gap through sales to neighbors, and local markets.  (Maybe even a restaurant or two.)  Beginning farming is a lot about making adjustments.

A lot of my farm time right now is still being spent on spreadsheets, trying to put together a comprehensive task and planting schedule for the year.  Here’s a link to one of them.

Next week:  I’ll get to learn how to use the rototiller.  Can’t wait!