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.

Seeding the Pastures

As usual for spring, it's been a busy few weeks.  With Memorial Day bearing down on us, we are prepping the fields (and ourselves) for the big summer planting push.  Peppers, eggplants, squash, cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes are all almost ready to go in the fields.  Irrigation systems are up, and the warmer nights mean crops are starting to grow faster! The big news, though, is that we *finally* seeded the 30 acres of future pasture.  We were a little overwhelmed by it after we realized how EXPENSIVE field seed is (like about the cost of a tractor!), and we went back and forth trying to figure out how best to do it.

In the end we hired a neighbor who has a no till drill to plant over the corn stubble.  For this first year, that means we will just have to mow it (or graze it if we get a good stand and some animals), but after it establishes, we can mow, graze, or hay it.  We've both help graze and maintain other farms' pastures and fields, but to be honest, neither of us realized how costly establishing a hay or grazing field is.

We are relieved now that the field is in, and anxiously watching for germination (which should happen any day now).  But what we really took away from the experience is that it is INCREDIBLY important to maintain your fields by grazing or mowing, because re-seeding them is an expensive proposition (and one that we hope to not have to do again for a long, long time!)...

Check out the gallery of pictures below from seeding day of Kevin's awesome (15' wide) seed drill.  It's a really amazing machine... if you click on the pictures, it will show you a close up of the different parts of the drill.

We have water!

Hooray!  Our irrigation system is underway.  We started putting it into action yesterday and today to water in brassica transplants. Here's our old fashioned and new fashioned systems (actually, the watering can is just for priming the pump).

It's a gas powered 6hp trash pump, and is actually *new* which means it's one of the few things on the farm that turns on without any little tricks involved.  The bigger gas tank on top means it can run for a pretty long stretch, if needed.

It draws from the pond.  Matt sunk an anchor down with a float on top, so the inlet is suspended mid-way from the surface and the bottom.  There is a filter on the end (so we don't suck up any fish).  (There is also a secondary filter that will go on for the drip system, but we don't need that until later this month.)

For the past two days, we have just used it to water in seedlings.  That's when you drench the seedlings right after transplanting, which helps their roots make good contact with the surrounding soil so they take better to their new surroundings.  One of the hose bib connections is below.

Right now, our pump and water pressure is total overkill (we had to dial everything way down to not blast the plants with the hose), but as we start seeding again early next week, we will be hooking up our overhead irrigation (the "big gun") which waters 1/3 an acre at a time, and will need all the water pressure we can get!

So far, we are very happy with how the soil in the fields handles water.  It's a loam, but a bit on the silty side, so it holds a lot more water than the sandy loams we are used to working with.  The surface dries out pretty quickly (and it drains well enough to work within a day or two after rain), but when you water the ground, it stays wet for a couple of days.  However, with the 10 day outlook pretty sketchy on rain, we are happy knowing that we now have water in the fields should the plants need it.

Odds and Ends: Germination, Spring, Supplies, and a Mulch Layer!