Some field stuff rambling
Jun. 26th, 2019 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unicorndukeThings are going well, which is super interesting!
I had my first harvest of things for me and my second harvest total. First harvest was last time, and it was the garlic scapes, which are the flower buds that form from the center of the garlic plant. You have to pop them off so the plant focuses on putting energy into the blub. They are all loop-de-loops
My parents opened that day for strawberry picking so I put most of these out for $4 per quart and sold a bunch, which was nice.
This time, the bush shell peas were ready! I had one 60 foot row for myself, which I harvest half of for freezing. The other half will be for seed for next year. I also had planted a row for the strawberry pickers and they stripped all the plants in a day.
I ate a lot fresh right out the shell and then blanched and froze the rest.
This fancy picture was for the farm facebook page. Those bowls are really nice. I got about eight of them and two giant ones for $20 at a yard sale.
In general, the weeds are not out of control in my field. It's pretty wild to be honest. I've been making great use of the cultivating tractor and I can get it all cultivated in about an hour. The biggest issue I have is that a bunch of the rows I planted with the earthway seeder aren't straight (I can't do anything straight) despite my best efforts and some things are small and hard to see while cultivating.
Not the greatest picture but it shows tomatoes to the right, then a row of probably cowpeas and such, then a row of something else, then a big gap because I gave my melons and squashes two rows, so there's a weird uncultivated section. But you can see how good of a job it does. I have to do a tiny bit of hand weeding but generally, it is awesome. I got my stuff done saturday morning and spent the rest of the day cultivating my parents' new strawberry plantings.
It took me five hours to do three acres of berries with drive time between farms included. Dad has a lot of issues with ragweed. His herbicide program doesn't take them out, so it really is back to old fashioned methods to get rid of them. I'm still tinkering with the heights on the cultivator shanks to see how shallow I can go. Shallow is better, because it uproots the weeds and a hot sunny day will bake the roots and kill them. The smaller the better.
Some of my peppers have flower buds already.
I figured out how to keep my pictures straight. I printed out little cardstock ids and I hold them in the photo. So I can track a planting through the season. It takes me an hour to take the pictures but I really like having them so it's worth it to me.
Pole peas are a little further behind than the bush peas. This is actually a dry pea variety called Wild Pea of Umbria. This is the flower and also a frustrated bee who couldn't get in it.
Just so dang pretty.
My small grains are all heading out with an interesting variety of head types.
*
Some of the grains have fusarium, which is too bad, but given how wet it is, I'm not surprised. I'll just hand harvest the stuff without it. It's easy to tell, it's bright orange.
My oats are headed out and due to start flowering. They might be ready to harvest in a month, maybe a month and a half.
I had a bunch of melons and watermelons not germinate well. Not sure if it was seed or moisture or critters. Either way, I just started a bunch this evening to put out next time I head down.
I planted my sweet potatoes, which I made the ridge using the hilling disks on the cultivating tractor. Worked very well. Then I just made a hole with a pipe and dropped the slips in. I'm going to plant carrots on the ridge too at some point because it should work super well.
I also used my corn sheller for the first time. It worked even better than I thought.
I bought an electric grain mill and ground some of it last night. It is a flint corn and some of the germ was too hard to actually grind in the mill. It made it stop spinning. So I ground what I could and then sifted it out, which is still faster and easier than the hand grinder I was using. The larger bits are going to make a nice polenta I think.
Here's an overview of the field.
There are a ton of summer weeds in the small grains, which is fine because I think I'm harvesting next visit and then I can till them under. It'll be before most go to seed. That's the darkest band in the picture. The lighter green band is my spring grains: oats, flax, barley, wheat. Some of the spring barley is heading already. So you can kinda see where the rows are in the left two thirds of the field vaguely based on how I cultivated. The right third is where the cover crop had been. Dad plowed it under and disked it for me. I planted (hand broadcast) forage soybeans for the final cover crops. That will be my grains section next year and I wanted a crop that was easy to disk or till in fall and spring. The forage soybeans will put on biomass and fix nitrogen and then winter kill hopefully before setting seed. It was hand broadcast because I was going to use the drill but it had fallen off its cinderblock and I couldn't figure out how to lift it back up to hook onto the hitch so I skipped it. Dad later told me I could have lifted it with a chain and a tractor arm but oh well. I'm going to pick it up and clean it out next time I'm there. After hand broadcasting I ran the cultipacker over it. It took maybe an hour total for everything which was just as fast as the drill to be honest.
Here's a drone video. It was maybe 15 feet in the air, which was as low as I could trust it not to hit the trellis.
And the mountain. You know, just casually absolutely beautiful.
I had my first harvest of things for me and my second harvest total. First harvest was last time, and it was the garlic scapes, which are the flower buds that form from the center of the garlic plant. You have to pop them off so the plant focuses on putting energy into the blub. They are all loop-de-loops
My parents opened that day for strawberry picking so I put most of these out for $4 per quart and sold a bunch, which was nice.
This time, the bush shell peas were ready! I had one 60 foot row for myself, which I harvest half of for freezing. The other half will be for seed for next year. I also had planted a row for the strawberry pickers and they stripped all the plants in a day.
I ate a lot fresh right out the shell and then blanched and froze the rest.
This fancy picture was for the farm facebook page. Those bowls are really nice. I got about eight of them and two giant ones for $20 at a yard sale.
In general, the weeds are not out of control in my field. It's pretty wild to be honest. I've been making great use of the cultivating tractor and I can get it all cultivated in about an hour. The biggest issue I have is that a bunch of the rows I planted with the earthway seeder aren't straight (I can't do anything straight) despite my best efforts and some things are small and hard to see while cultivating.
Not the greatest picture but it shows tomatoes to the right, then a row of probably cowpeas and such, then a row of something else, then a big gap because I gave my melons and squashes two rows, so there's a weird uncultivated section. But you can see how good of a job it does. I have to do a tiny bit of hand weeding but generally, it is awesome. I got my stuff done saturday morning and spent the rest of the day cultivating my parents' new strawberry plantings.
It took me five hours to do three acres of berries with drive time between farms included. Dad has a lot of issues with ragweed. His herbicide program doesn't take them out, so it really is back to old fashioned methods to get rid of them. I'm still tinkering with the heights on the cultivator shanks to see how shallow I can go. Shallow is better, because it uproots the weeds and a hot sunny day will bake the roots and kill them. The smaller the better.
Some of my peppers have flower buds already.
I figured out how to keep my pictures straight. I printed out little cardstock ids and I hold them in the photo. So I can track a planting through the season. It takes me an hour to take the pictures but I really like having them so it's worth it to me.
Pole peas are a little further behind than the bush peas. This is actually a dry pea variety called Wild Pea of Umbria. This is the flower and also a frustrated bee who couldn't get in it.
Just so dang pretty.
My small grains are all heading out with an interesting variety of head types.
*
Some of the grains have fusarium, which is too bad, but given how wet it is, I'm not surprised. I'll just hand harvest the stuff without it. It's easy to tell, it's bright orange.
My oats are headed out and due to start flowering. They might be ready to harvest in a month, maybe a month and a half.
I had a bunch of melons and watermelons not germinate well. Not sure if it was seed or moisture or critters. Either way, I just started a bunch this evening to put out next time I head down.
I planted my sweet potatoes, which I made the ridge using the hilling disks on the cultivating tractor. Worked very well. Then I just made a hole with a pipe and dropped the slips in. I'm going to plant carrots on the ridge too at some point because it should work super well.
I also used my corn sheller for the first time. It worked even better than I thought.
I bought an electric grain mill and ground some of it last night. It is a flint corn and some of the germ was too hard to actually grind in the mill. It made it stop spinning. So I ground what I could and then sifted it out, which is still faster and easier than the hand grinder I was using. The larger bits are going to make a nice polenta I think.
Here's an overview of the field.
There are a ton of summer weeds in the small grains, which is fine because I think I'm harvesting next visit and then I can till them under. It'll be before most go to seed. That's the darkest band in the picture. The lighter green band is my spring grains: oats, flax, barley, wheat. Some of the spring barley is heading already. So you can kinda see where the rows are in the left two thirds of the field vaguely based on how I cultivated. The right third is where the cover crop had been. Dad plowed it under and disked it for me. I planted (hand broadcast) forage soybeans for the final cover crops. That will be my grains section next year and I wanted a crop that was easy to disk or till in fall and spring. The forage soybeans will put on biomass and fix nitrogen and then winter kill hopefully before setting seed. It was hand broadcast because I was going to use the drill but it had fallen off its cinderblock and I couldn't figure out how to lift it back up to hook onto the hitch so I skipped it. Dad later told me I could have lifted it with a chain and a tractor arm but oh well. I'm going to pick it up and clean it out next time I'm there. After hand broadcasting I ran the cultipacker over it. It took maybe an hour total for everything which was just as fast as the drill to be honest.
Here's a drone video. It was maybe 15 feet in the air, which was as low as I could trust it not to hit the trellis.
And the mountain. You know, just casually absolutely beautiful.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-27 02:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-27 08:03 pm (UTC)Garlic scapes sound delicious, too. I've never heard of them before now, but I looked it up that it described it as having a grassier flavor than bulb garlic, which reminds me a lot of the time I had real wasabi fresh out of the ground.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-27 09:48 pm (UTC)I really enjoyed them. I froze a bunch to use later, but usually they are a direct-from-farmer-only and only for a couple of weeks because of the fact that they are from flowering garlic. And it only flowers once.