Blink of An Eye

One of the most difficult things about June is that so much happens on the farm in one day that it is pretty difficult to actually believe that it WAS ONLY ONE day.  I was just looking at some of our 'most recent' pictures and I'm realizing they no longer accurately depict the current status of our farm.  Many of those pictures were taken... today.  Even harder to believe are pictures that were taken a little less than a week ago.  At least that's what the calendar tells me.  I don't really believe it - I suspect someone is pulling a fast one on us and it really is still May 15, 2006.... or something like that.

 It seems like just yesterday that the first iris were blooming on the farm and now we're looking at the tail end of the bloom.  There are more out there than one might think, of course, but we are clearly past the peak bloom.  Nonetheless, we have a nice bouquet in the kitchen area and there are still some nice blooms in the field.

Speaking of which, I did see some honey bees on iris flowers yesterday, so I'll call that a win from the perspective that iris are not usually known as a big attraction for pollinators.

We do regret that we don't have much time to just look at the iris and we wish we had the previous number of flowers we had ten or so years ago at the farm.  But, we remain grateful for what we are blessed with.


 We were honored with a visit from Torger last week and he helped us with some drywall in the kitchen.  Why?  Well, when you can reach the ceiling without a ladder, you could be handy when the sheetrock has to go on the ceiling.

 And I asked Torger, would you like to build a tongue for this cart?  And he said... ok.

As far as we can tell, Torger enjoyed his time at the farm - even if we did go to the 99 cent theater and watched a movie we all 'generously' gave 2 1/2 stars out of five.  It feels like Torger just got here - but he's now been gone since last Saturday.   How does a week go by that fast?

We are glad that some of the crops we pushed when the soil was still too wet to work are doing something.  But, clearly, they haven't loved life until the last week or so.  The cucumbers in this plot have been in there long enough that they should be much more visible in the picture.  They still live and they are starting to show signs of healthy growth, but they might have done just as well waiting in trays until this week.  Then, I went out later in the day AFTER the picture had been taken and the cucumbers were showing much more healthy growth.  Well, at least many of them did.  Some still look a little rough.

The sky decided to put on some of its bluest clothing, so I decided to show it off with a picture of... a portable chicken building?  Ok, not the best choice - but it's what I have for the blog.  We made a quick adjustment a few days ago and moved the henlets because we lost several birds in 48 hours.  The culprit?  Buffalo gnats.  The area was too sheltered and not enough sheltered all at once.  Too sheltered because the breeze couldn't get in there to knock the gnats down and not enough sheltered because gnats don't tend to cause problems inside of buildings.  A bit more breeze and different orientation for the portable building and things settled down for the henlets after that.

We executed this move early in the morning and we both looked at each other at 4pm today and asked ourselves, "When did we move that again? Was that today?"  Is it a good thing or a bad thing when your list of things you have done is long enough that you think the early morning stuff must have happened earlier in the week?  We'll get back to you on that when we figure it out.

The broilers, on the other hand, have their building moved every other day.  And, they are beginning to anticipate their trip to "the Park!"  June 24!  The countdown begins.  But, we aren't likely to get the countdown done because we can't keep track of which day of the week it is...  Heck, we can't even remember that moving the henlet building happened THIS morning.  Well, ok.  We CAN remember - it just feels like it's been longer, or shorter, or something different than it actually is.

Field prep and planting has been all-consuming for the past week since the soil has finally reached a stage where we can work it without causing more problems later (see the cucumbers for an example).  Part of the issue with cramming it all into a shorter time frame is that we have to figure out how to move resources around so they can be used and we don't bottleneck the work effort.  For example, on Friday we had four people available to do work.  You don't want any of them just standing around when time is of the essence, so you have to figure out how to keep people moving.  Sometimes, that leads to decisions that might not be what you would expect. 

Do you see the plants at the left of the picture above?  That is basil.  Why is the basil in before the tomatoes or the peppers?  Well, we needed our workers to be working and the tomatoes and peppers were going to be put on paper mulch.  We don't mulch the basil because our workers typically LOVE to weed it.

Speaking of paper mulch (we were? Oh, yes, we were!), we have decided to go with more row feet of paper mulch this year to cut down our in row weeding efforts.  Paper mulch also helps keep seedlings from drying out if the soil is rough - which is a good thing this year. 

Unfortunately, we have to pay for the benefits with more work on the front end.  Each bed has to be prepped so that the soil is loose enough to allow the disks on the mulch layer to cover the edges without pulling up huge chunks of dirt that make life difficult.  We also want the soil under the paper to be soft enough that we can plant through the paper and into the soil.  Once the soil is prepped, we lay the paper.  After the paper is down, we put drip tape down, using ground staples to help hold it in place.  Our drip tape has water emitters every 6 inches which allows a person to easily see how far apart to punch holes for the transplant.  THEN, we put the plants in the ground.

We're telling ourselves the extra effort will be worth it.

Meanwhile, the onions are starting to show a little more quality.  Here's a nice bed that has recently been visited by the flex tine cultivator.  It looks nice now!  But, we have a couple of rows that have some crab grass that the cultivator couldn't get with soil being too wet and 'rocky.'

The areas between our onion beds will be cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage.  Where are they?  Well, did we tell you about the Dred Pirate Woodchuck Chucky McChuckface?  I am pretty sure we did.  Well, that irritating creature took out our first two successions of those plants.  The third batch is looking good and will go in this week if the weather allows us to do so.

The final picture is another example of how quickly things have changed.  Here is a hayrack with about 60% of our squash seedlings.  They were probably some of the best looking squash plants we've put in at transplant time - so we did something right this year!  By the end of the day on Friday - that cart was empty. 

Here's hoping for a great squash crop in 2019.