All About Things That We've Thought

One of my personal goals every season is to try to take a little time and reflect.  It is so easy to let the farm take over since there is certainly enough to do to keep us busy every waking moment (and even some sleeping moments).  But, I don't just want to do well and work hard on the farm.  I also want to give myself a chance to like what I do and enjoy some of the things that happen every day.  So, we try to make time to take pictures and write blog posts.  The pictures help us to remember certain events or things and the blog posts help us to appreciate the things we are given the opportunity to do.

Weather or Not

It may not capture the power of the storm, but the colors are cool!

Once again, the weather has been different.  It's been a bit colder than average, but not horribly so.  Otherwise, it has been pretty reasonable for us at the farm this year.  And, we're extremely grateful that this has been the case.  We are fully aware of the struggles some of our friends in southern Iowa are facing and difficult seasons on our own farm are not so far away that we can't relate to what they are going through.  They just keep getting rain.  And more rain.  In ridiculously plentiful amounts.  Ugh.

We, on the other hand, have gotten reasonable rain amounts.  Clouds, such as those shown above, have not graced us too often.  But, I will say that we had a very strange set of clouds out of the North.  We were too busy shutting things down to have the camera out until it had passed, so the picture above will have to do.  All I can say is that I've only witnessed a wall of clouds like this from the North/Northest two to three times in my life.  And, if was unnerving each time.  Two of those times had some pretty nasty storms.  This one decided to dump some very heavy rain just five miles east of us. 

Good Help

Every season, we have a group of people who come work on the farm.  Schedules differ for each person and time is usually limited to Summer.  This year, we have the good fortune of having a great group of people working for us.  The picture below was taken after everyone fought through planting the winter squash, despite less than ideal soil conditions. 

Anden, Elizabeth, Jamie and Andrew

Bloomers

Magic Fountain delphinium

If you've seen our blogs for a while, you know that flowers are something we both enjoy.  So, of course, we take pictures of them and spend some time trying to grow them along with veggies.  Right now, the day lilies are peaking - and I need to post some pictures of those in the near future.  But, since we are a bit behind - let's get some flowers out there that were peaking a week or two ago.

We finally moved delphinium to a new area of the farm where we can see them better.  "Delphs" are one of my favorite flowers, and I'd love to add more of them to our landscape.  Another flower I'd like to start spreading to 'wilder' areas of the farm is Queen of the Prairie.  The pollinators love these flowers and they really stand out!

Queen of the Prairie

News of the New
Many of you know we put up a new high tunnel building in June.  If you didn't know, now you do.  As with many of the things we do, not everything went according to plan.  But, when plans change, they become opportunities to learn and make something different happen that is worthwhile.

Our original plan was to have the high tunnel up at the end of April, beginning of May.  But, extra rain, delays in receiving materials and delays in getting the excavation work done resulted in a build in June.    That's just the way it goes when you have to get alot of people and things aligned with the weather in order to accomplish something.

The high tunnel is planted...sort of.

Potentially longer story being made less long...  The ground was severely compacted by the process.  It turned out that the ground inside the building is impossible to work with right now.  It took Rob over a half day to prepare the soil on the other section of ground as it was.  Soil conditions pretty much caused us to ditch the original planting plan and just put things where the soil would let us.  But, we were able to get plants in.  Now we have to move the building to cover the East position rather than the West position.  Then, we have the opportunity to do some remedial work on the soil in the West position of the new high tunnel.  Here's hoping.

Taters Preciousssss!

We targeted the potato crop as a critical crop this season.  Every year, we put a little more focus on certain crops in order to improve how we grow them.  That doesn't mean we don't concentrate on the others, it just means we are making some concerted efforts to address prior year issues in hopes to see improved yields.  The potatoes were one focus this year.

this picture is now a few weeks old - the nice crop of weeds are missing!

We are trying yet another spacing between the beans and potatoes in hopes that we could address some time/labor issues that have given us fits the last two years.  The main issue has had to do with early season cold and wet soil that prevents us from getting these plants in the ground in a timely fashion.  We got them in much easier this year, but now the spacing isn't close enough to provide much potato beetle control.  So, we've had to have the crew do periodic Potato Beetle Patrol trips to collect the larvae that eat the plants.  So far so good, but you know I'll be tying something else to get the spacing right and still accomplish what we need to.