Busy, busy, busy

We've been falling behind in our blog posting as the season heats up, but we promise to keep up now!  This week marks the third week of the CSA and our sixth week of farmers market.  We are starting to get in the groove and balance out the farm work, harvesting, and off-farm work, but it still seems like a lot of balls to keep up in the air at one time! What's been complicating things is the near complete lack of rain.  For May and June, our fields received about 2 inches of rain.  Total.  There's been storms around, they just aren't reaching us.  On the plus side, we can totally justify the irrigation system investment the farm made this spring.  On the down side, we spend a couple hours a day just managing water (which takes us away from other tasks we'd rather be doing).

So far the plants are holding out fine, but you will notice a lot of dry ground in today's pictures!  Spring harvests went well... spinach and lettuce mix are wrapping up this week, but peas (and more rounds of head lettuce) are just starting and would love a good overhead soaking:

Beyond harvesting, we are still getting later rounds of plants into the ground.  Today we are finishing up seed starting for 130 flats of fall crops (things like late leeks, broccoli, cabbage, herbs, and more).  Other plants (melons and lettuce) are waiting for a good transplanting day:

As frustrating as the droughtiness has been, there is one distinct upside, especially in crops that we use drip irrigation on:  a near complete lack of weeds!  We are trellising tomatoes this week, and you can see below that our cultivation pass almost isn't even needed!

Fortunately, there was enough soil moisture to germinate and grow all of the more sensitive pasture grasses, but in the field, we are turning to the drought hardy buckwheat for a summer cover crop.  Here it is starting growth in our first planting of lettuce mix (already tilled in).  This is 5 days after seeding, and you can see how bone dry the ground is.  After we harvest for the markets, we will get some water on this section to help things out!

More news and pics to follow... until later, please everyone start doing a rain dance.  So far the irrigation pond is holding out and the crops are fine, but we'd prefer not to challenge it too much!

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.

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.