Farm Blog
What's happened most recently? This will have more pictures of dirt than is really reasonable.
Flowers now, fruit to come:
Big hibiscus-looking okra blossom; corn silk wafting in the breeze waiting for pollen; closeup of a pole bean flowerbud.
New potato harvest
The green plants at the top of the picture, connected to a mass of very fine roots with potatoes connected to the occasional fat white root; the pitchfork that pries all these up at the lower right.
More corn and beans
Second succession of corn, third kind of beans, more beds of squash in the middle distance.
My idea with pole beans around an end of my plot was that keeping the vines picked is the labor-intensive part, and if they're at the edge where I can walk around without stepping on adjacent crops that would be easier. OTOH the deer have better access too. OTOOH better the *deer* don't step on adjacent crops. We'll see.
You'll be eating plenty of beans after the peas, and when I can fit in cover crop mixes those are likely to include beans. I like peas and beans, and also plant as many as I can because they are so good for the soil. I can feel and see the difference from last year in adjacent beds I'm broadforking this year. The beds that grew beans last year are darker, softer but still cohesive, wormier... good tilth.
Tomatoes getting going
Green tomatoes starting!
Summer crops finally getting in
Near to far: string trellis for pole beans; recently heavily weeded corn bed; corn; lots of tarped beds; first squash plants; and the edge of the hoophouse.
Potato blossoms
About two weeks after they bloom is the earliest you can dig for new potatoes.
Some of the blossoms are setting seed, but (a) if you dig up the plant for potatoes, it won't have time for seed, (b) potatoes do not come true from seed so only an experimentalist saves them. I'm tempted, I just don't have the space.
Twining tomatoes
Some tomatoes will grow up a string, if you twine them around it (and prune a bit to help). The strings are tied to a wire overhead and an end buried under each tomato. This uses much less covered space than letting them do their natural sprawl.
Woven tomatoes
Other tomatoes are shrubby not vining. To keep them from breaking stems and dropping the fruit on the ground, they get steel posts down the row and are "basket woven" with each other and the posts as they get taller.
Wet spring
Remember the big rainstorm in late May? I spent the Sunday digging all my ditches deeper and there was *still* standing water even in my hoophouse days later. The tomatoes in the soggy patch are Not Happy. (I have extras, that's why the propagation table picture below.)
The row cover -- that's the white gauzy stuff -- did keep some of the tiniest plants from getting beaten down. That's it's job!
Propagation house
A shared hoophouse with mesh tables to start our seedlings on. Potted seedlings make a head start for plants that need a longer warm season than we have in the ground (basil, tomatoes, squashes). Even for cool-happy crops, letting them get a few inches tall while protected and then transplanting them lets them outcompete weeds and slugs, so we get more crops without herbicides and pesticides.
Some things dislike being transplanted -- root crops especially -- though there are people who do it successfully anyway. And some things I can't get going in pots but are okay seeded directly into the ground; spinach for me, though lots of people transplant it.
In cold weather each table gets a second cover of nonwoven fabric, draped over wires. I bent mine to shape to allow the tallest seedlings down the center under the standard width of fabric. This may have been overkill, but you know, I only had to do it once...
Whirlwind
Amazingly, we had a dust devil in Woodinville a few weeks ago. Wrecked half my neighbor's hoophouse, I lost a couple of pots (picked more of them out of neighboring fields), and it scared me to heck. Mostly after the fact, when I realized how much rebar got thrown around when the hoophouse tiedowns popped loose.
I was kneeling, concentrating on planting tiny plants, and wondering what the chugging sound was -- did someone have a new tiller attachment? Then I looked up and thought, has my far neighbor caught their hoophouse plastic in their tiller? Then I looked UP and there was a fifty foot silage tarp dancing in the sky, turning its white side and its black, and I realized the rhythmic noise was ... a small whirlwind. Coming straight for me and not a hundred feet away, spiraling seed flats and small tables into the clear blue sky.
I was surrounded by trip hazards and not sure which way it would go, so I lay flat behind the only solid post on my plot. Readers, it TUGGED ON MY CLOTHES. And when I stood up my near neighbor's hoophouse was as you see above.
Spent the next hour finding everybody's lost stuff in everybody else's plots and being amazed.
Whirlwind
Silage tarp -- very heavy, with dangling tiedowns -- thrown across several farms and dropped across the river
Getting ready for 2024
It's still pretty darn wet in the field, but all the beds are at least partly above water. (It's a wet site!) The first few rows are under giant breathable tarps to kill weeds and dry out the soil; I'm looking forward to blooming dandelions because I like making jelly from them; and it's seed starting time under cover.