Resting and Regrouping!

After a busy fall on the farm, we've been silent on the blog for a few weeks as we work on re-tooling the website and regrouping from the season.  We are working to get the 2013 CSA sign-up material up (hopefully this week)... it's held up as we decide which additional farmers market to add for 2013, since we try to space out market and CSA harvest days!

Folks have been asking what happens on the farm in the winter, and our answer is, "A lot!"  First, we do relax a bit, sleep in (well, farmer sleeping in, which means until 6 or so!), and eat a lot more farm food (since we have more time to cook).

We do still have a few things going on in the field.  This week's warm spell will likely be our last harvest window to get in the final turnips, radishes, carrots, and beets.  After these crops all come into the walk-in cooler (which now doubles as a root cellar), we will roll up all our protective row cover and call the vegetable fields done for the season!

Wood is a big winter project--right now we are bringing in the wood cut late last winter to split and dry further in the greenhouse.  We need wood for our house, for our greenhouse (we are switching from propane heat to a wood/oil boiler this winter), and for boiling down maple syrup.  Right now, we are just cutting wood at the south edges of the fields (which will reduce shade in the edges of the growing area) and in a section where some of the trees have lots of galls.  As the maples grow larger, we will start doing more selective thinning to improve the sugar maple stand (but that's a few years off!).

Out of the woods, we are working on a few building projects, including a permanent wash stand and storage area, a new hoophouse, a better potting area and propagation chamber for the greenhouse, and a slew of smaller construction activities.

The most important work we are focusing on now is in the office!  Besides working to revamp and improve the website, we are assessing how things went this past season to see where we can improve things for next year.  After this assessment is done, we start working on our crop planning.  This is a huge task since it essentially entails figuring out the timing of every planting of each variety of crop we grow--which for some crops is up to 20 plantings and 15 varieties!  We need to complete this by early January in order to get our seed orders in.

We'll get some more winter pictures of the fields up soon!

Hop Planting!

Between harvesting and dragging hoses everywhere around the farm, we haven't had many chances to blog... so we will try to catch up over the next few days with posting pictures showing everything that's been going on around the farm, starting with our first hops getting in the ground! Here's Matt working on the bed (the white stuff to the left are broccoli plants under row cover insect protection).

We bought virus free plants from Madison County AED, and hope to propagate out 120 to 200 hills next year from the 60 plants we are putting in this season.  The virus indexed plants were more expensive than standard rhizomes, but since we are going to attempt growing these organically, we thought it would make sense in the long run to try to minimize potential problems from the start (hops have some challenging disease issues in the northeast).  We didn't get them in last week due to the hot and dry weather, and we learned during this time that hops do not coexist well in close confines with their neighbors (this mat of hops took a half hour to untangle!)

We planted them into a nursery bed, which is just a temporary bed for them to grow in this first season.  Next spring, we will dig them up, divide the clumps of roots and rhizomes into 2 or 3 plants, and replant them at wider spacing in the hop yard.

Right after planting, we trained them up on their temporary trellis (which is only six foot posts).  In a real hop yard, the plants can grow 20 or more feet high, so the trellis is a lot more serious (think telephone poles).  We are starting small so we have time to save up for the trellising costs!

We laid our drip tape the low tech way today (rather than using the bed maker implement).  Matt just used one of his carpentry clamps, which anchors the roll on pretty much anything.

Here's looking back to the near complete nursery bed over the south field's fall crops.

Hopefully the weather continues to cooperate and we get good plant establishment this season so that we have more plants for next season!

More pictures and posts from the field will follow in the next few days!

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!

Lots of Post 4th Pics!

The theme of the month continues to be dry... as we head into the 6th week of only 3/4 inch of rain... total.  Looking on the bright side, weeds aren't really a problem, since they need water to grow.  On the challenging side is getting enough of that water to our crops! We wrote a blog for the National Young Farmers Coalition's Bootstraps Bloggers about our water and irrigation solutions (and challenges)... you can see that (and a ton of awesome posts from other Bootstrap Bloggers and from the NYFC) here.  For more pictures of this week, check out below!