The Count... ah ah aaaaaaaah!

One of my favorite characters on Sesame Street was always THE COUNT!

One!  One (fill in the blank)!  Ah Ah ahhhhh!  (thunder/lightning follows this proclamation)

I LOVE to count!

In fact, I have been known to count the 'ringy dingies' of the phone while I'm waiting for someone to pick up my call.  And, I have been known to get caught in the middle of the "Ah ah aaaaaah" part when someone actually does answer.  This usually happens on days when I'm feeling ah countable...  (get it? No?  Never mind.)

So, Rob loves to count.  And, this is a good thing since counting is (amazingly) an important part of running the farm.  We count eggs so we can keep track of production trends and so we have an idea of what to expect to available eggs for sale.  We count our eggplant and peppers as we pick them.  We do this so we can be sure to have enough for each of our CSA customers each week and we do this so we can analyze our production and make changes to become more resilient in the face of changing conditions. We count so we can determine production cost and value.  And, if all of this is interesting to you, we have a very good post from 2010 that shows how we use these numbers for planning.

As you may have guessed - this leads us to a post about some of the past year's production.  Now, don't get too worried, I'll keep it mildly entertaining.  I hope...

Hey!  We CAN grow that!
Trying to grow as many vegetable types as we do can be very trying.  After all, it is not easy to learn all of the techniques for each vegetable for any kind of weather.  If weather were fairly consistent, then I suspect we could have success for most everything on a regular basis.  But, when conditions change dramatically from year to year, it is pretty difficult to adjust so that each and every crop succeeds.  When you add soil conditions, available tools and existing growing experience for a given crop together with the weather conditions, you will find that we are better prepared to handle some crops more than others.

A few crops that have given us more problems than success finally came through for us this year.

Ah, White Wing onions, how we love thee!

In particular, the onions were a big success for us this season.  It's not that we haven't had some onions in other seasons.  We have.  But, only in years where all of the conditions for weather and soil lined up.  But, even in those years, it was a near thing unless we spent alot of our labor resources on weeding.  So, if the year is less than perfect or the onions on the farm, the tendency is to move the labor to other crops that are doing better and will give a better return for the labor.

But, an Ailsa Craig onion on a grilled burger? Mmmmmmm!

So, this season, we pulled in just under 2300 bulb onions.  As you can see from the first picture, the quality of the White Wings was pretty consistent.  The quality of the Ailsa Craig, Yellow of Parma and Redwing onions were less consistent since they are longer season onions.  They would have liked to have been in the ground a bit sooner.  But, they certainly provided us with enough for the CSA and the Fall shares.

Efficiency in weeding onions, coming right up.

We targeted the purchase of a cultivating tool in 2013 and actually started using it more effectively in 2014 (every tool has a learning curve).  It is the initial weeding in June when so many weeds (especially grasses) are coming up in the onions that is critical.  After this cultivation was accomplished, we were able to easily hand weed when needed at a later point in time.  Unlike prior years, this weeding was ENJOYABLE rather than stressful.  Just ask Anden how stressful weeding onions was prior to this!

Other crops that made a strong appearance in 2014 that don't always do well for us include daikon radishes (538 up from 0),  melon (385 up from 153), radish (4083, up from 3035), watermelon (128, up from 37) and turnips (1333 up from 593).

Helios radish did well this Fall

 In many of these cases, such as the turnips, daikon and the radish, it had to do with planting timings being refined so that the Fall crop matured in time before things froze up.  But, another key part had to do with having better tools to reduce the preparation time for mid-season planting beds.  The new disk for our new tractor made much of this easier.  As a result, we could get more of our Fall plantings in during a time when our time is already full with harvest, weeding and deliveries.

Ancho/Pablano liked this season for some reason

 In other cases, it was a variety that hasn't been happy for us in the past.  For example, Ancho Gigantea has been on our grow list for a while because we liked the idea of them.  But, they don't typically do all that well for us.  We had a few seeds left, so we started a few (yes, just 3) plants and put them in the ground.  We've never had them size up like this before.  Apparently, they are a bit like a ball player on the "walk year" of their contract.  The impending 'free agency' encouraged them to perform.  I guess we'll give it another go next year and see if it was a fluke.

 We KNOW we can grow that.
There are many crops we are fairly confident in our ability to come up with decent yields.  Even in a down year, we can usually meet our minimum demands.  In fact, we tend to get more grumpy with these in a down year because we expect much more out of them.

While the lettuce harvest is not yet complete for the year, we are running at about 50% of last year's production for number of harvests (72 vs 141), number of heads harvested (1427 to 2490) and weight harvested (442 lbs to 1034 lbs).  Part of the discrepancy comes from a very cold Winter and early Spring.  We abandoned the idea of a Spring share in response to that problem.  Our over wintering lettuce died off and we just couldn't get a new crop into the high tunnel going.  We also backed off a bit on production in response to our CSA members leaving so many heads behind in our 2013 CSA.  The feedback we got told us they liked the lettuce - but maybe not so much of it.

Bunte Forellenschus - say that three times fast!

 On the other hand, we seem to be getting the hang of other crops and the production has continued to improve.  For example, our broccoli crop in 2014 was excellent.  Our CSA members didn't seem to tire of it and we didn't notice it getting left behind when we offered it.  The only time we left with lots of extra is when we didn't see a cooler full of broccoli and didn't know we should be offering more broccoli to our members than we were (that was NOT a happy discovery at the end of the distribution).  Our increase in broccoli production started in 2013 when we got many positive responses that more broccoli would be appreciated.  You will notice that we outlined our plan to meet this request.  For the most part, the plan has been followed and has worked.  Our production in 2013 showed us pulling in 517 pounds of broccoli.  This year, we harvested 674 pounds.  Excellent.  We hope to keep our broccoli numbers in the 600 to 700 pound range in the future.  We just have to remember that year was especially kind to broccoli, since it was cooler than normal.  Next target is cauliflower.

A cool year leads to lots of tasty broccoli.

Other crops that we typically expect success from include our tomatoes and our peppers.  This past season was cool, so it presented some problems to each.  Since the peppers resided in our best drained field, they handled adversity well, giving us production similar to 2012 (when we lost the entire crop due to spraying).  We pulled in over 2000 hot peppers and over 4400 sweet peppers (including bells).  And, the frost terminated a number of peppers that were on their way.

Two favorites: Golden Treasure and Black Krim

The tomatoes had some issues this year, but we still pulled in roughly a ton of tomatoes (1850 lbs).  One thing we need to remember is we actually reduced the number of plants in the field this season in an effort to make the number of plants fit our resources.  We love our heirloom tomatoes too much and tend to overplant them because we want to give all of the varieties a fair shake.  The result is that we can't always keep up with the caging, mulching and harvest.  So, we dropped 2 full rows of tomatoes off of the grow list.   It would figure that we would have a less than optimal growing year for them so we felt the reduction more than we thought  we should.  People in the CSA still did fairly well for themselves, but we really didn't have the outside sales we normally want for our tomatoes.  Rather than increase the plant numbers in 2015, we're going to make a few production changes in response to things we saw that were not going as well as they should.  We'd love to see a record production year in 2015.

Surely, we can grow this!

 Yes, we can.  And don't call me Shirley.
One example is the winter squash.  We've had success before and we'll have success again.  But, it just hasn't been in the cards for 2013 or 2014.  We only harvested 64 winter squash this year and 250 last season.  But, we have shown an ability to succeed with 1007 in 2009 and 1711 in 2007 (for example).  So, what is going wrong here?

Red Kuri showed some potential with a trial planting

It's a matter of seasonal variability more than anything.  Last year (2013) was the year we just could not get into the fields through most of May and early June.  It was too wet to do anything.  In the end, we planted only a fraction of the winter squash plants we started.  This year had a similar problem, but it had more to do with our insisting on planting them into a very wet field.  We were afraid of a repeat of 2013, but our response didn't help.  In fact, it was worse.  But, it had less to do with us and more to do with cooler than normal temperatures.  We DID get an alternate planting of butternut squash in at the right time and they just never got the heat to produce well.

We are developing a plan to respond to these issues starting in 2015.  If the weather is perfect, it won't matter.  But, if the weather bears any similarity to the past several, we'll be more prepared than we have been in the past.

Continual improvement as opposed to delayed perfection.  Here's to an even better year in 2015 after a decent 2014.