Rain! Rain! Rain! (and lots of May pictures...)

For the past three weeks, we've been having scary flashbacks to last summer's drought.  At the farm, only a half inch of rain fell during all of May... until this week, when two inches pounded down.  While the rain was a bit rougher on the baby crops than ideal, we are not going to complain!  It's supposed to be tapering off today and tomorrow, and then we hope for some good drying weather so we can get back in the fields, where our crops, cover crops, and pastures are growing like crazy!

The rain brought us a real feeling of relief.  We have the capacity to water all our fields, but it takes a long time--irrigation after a three week dry spell runs to 3 or 4 hours of extra work a day.  This recent rain will basically give us the time equivalent of having an extra person in the field!  Even with irrigation, the crops don't seem to grow quite as well as they do from real, actual rain.  We can already see a jump in growth out of the peas, greens, and broccoli!

We've been laughing a bit because the weather for much of May has been poster child weather for days that you shouldn't transplant crops--dry, hot, and with battering winds.  Yet when plants need to go into the ground, sometimes you have to put them in on these terrible days!  We shifted our schedule to start transplanting around 3 or 4pm many days, and stayed out there to water crops in by flashlight as late as midnight.  Starting late means the plants will get the cool evening to settle into their new homes (and it's often less windy here at night), and watering each newly planted crop heavily helps get the roots to make good contact with the soil (and gives each plant a supply of water for its first few days).  It also leads to groggy farmers in the morning...

So far, all of the 2014 strawberry crop is planted, the potatoes are in, and all the spring crops are seeded.  We did lose a couple beds to poor germination (and one to the row cover blowing off one windy afternoon and our nemesis the flea beetles invading the arugula... but more on them next week), but all the transplants that went in under May's non-ideal conditions seem to be doing great!

Chilling Out...

... in our new walk-in! Things have been busy at the farm with harvesting and flipping beds from spring to fall crops (not to mention the endless hours each day spent on irrigation).  But we (well actually, just Matt) finally did the big push on installing our walk-in cooler!  We haven't finished off the exterior yet, but so far, it's working great!

We use recycled 2 to 4 inch foam panels to insulate an 8x10 framed box (we did floor, ceiling, and walls).  There is a plywood floor.  Matt hung 2 layers of panels in opposite directions (so there are no gaps for cold air to escape) and used spray foam insulation to fill in any gaps.

We bought the panels from a place in Oneonta that recycles material from cold storage facilities (like apple storage warehouses).

They were pretty easy to work with.  It took Matt about three full days to build the insulated box, install the door, and set up the AC.

We just used a standard exterior door since it was easier to work with than a real walk-in cooler door.

For refrigeration, we used an air conditioner and a Cool Bot (check out their website here).  It's basically a little box that tricks the AC unit to go really low (like down to 32 degrees).  We went this route over a standard refrigerator largely for cost reasons.  First, the Cool Bot is much cheaper than a compressor (like a quarter to a tenth of the cost, depending on the compressor).  Second, it's cheaper to operate since you are essentially just running an AC unit rather than a whole large compressor.

So far, everything is working great.  We are excited at how much more efficient this should make our harvesting (and it will help us bring even higher quality produce to market!).  Plus, in the winter time, we can reverse the whole process and use the space as a root cellar so we can extent the CSA season!

Early June

We are all over the place now!  This time of year, it's all about keeping as many balls up into the air at one time as you can.  For example, this week we:  direct seeded, ordered more seed, transplanted, started more transplants, blended more potting soil, weeded by hoe, weeded by tractor, changed around the tractor, roto-tilled, laid out beds, rock-picked, harvested, and... ...well a whole lot more.  Hence, the somewhat random photo montage of today's blog!

This weekend will see us at the Cazenovia market with a whole bunch of crops, and next week are our FIRST CSA distributions!!!

Click on any pictures below if you want to see them close up...

End of May Work Photo Gallery

We've been rushing between storms, heat days, and projects to get the bulk of the summer plants in the ground.  Here are some pics for the last few weeks... we will have the remaining transplanting pictures up next week! Included are pictures on:  pea trellising, irrigation, rock picking, pepper planting, clay, and more!  Click on the thumbnails if you want to see the picture in a larger scale.