Next year's field, ready to go

[unicornduke]

 Re-posted from another site, this post was made Sept 2, 2018

I got it plowed and disked today. I probably could have planted it but I want to wait two weeks and then disk again. Hopefully this will kill a decent amount of weeds in the white thread stage, where any soil disturbance will kill them. I think this will be a semi-permanant field for me. My dad said the east side of the field is pretty rocky so it ends up being 2/3 acre of really good land and 1/3 rocks. 

My plan is to split it into thirds with one third being cover cropped all year in 2019, one third in grains and one third in vegetables. 

Next time I'm here, I'm going to plant in the cover crops for each section and start prepping beds for the fall planted crops like garlic and a few other things that I'm experimenting with. 

Here's my crop plan so far. I designed the field how it appears in google earth, the picture above is taken from the north facing south so it's the opposite. 


 

I'm going to run my rows east/west because I'm going to have a large variety of different types of plants, so some things being trellised, some things needing wider spacing. So I'll have 150 foot rows east west and 280 feet north south to work with. 

In total it is an acre. It's pretty nice soil too. I'm excited!

Also I now have access to the drone so drone pictures are happening so much. 

Comments

[graydon]

That's impressive!

I hope it goes entirely well, too!

[unicornduke]

Thanks! This was back in September and it looks far different now haha.

[graydon]

Unchanging fields are a clear sign that you've gone and offended the Fair Folk, so I should hope it looks different now! :)

[unicornduke]

haha that is very true!

[tielan]

Ooh, that is a fairly large amount of land! I guess it is 'farming' since you've got whole fields dedicated to crops. It doesn't have to be commercial farming - I mean, a hundred plus years ago, most non-urban areas had farms that were largely for their own produce (with some exchange).

Would you consider, say, running animals across the rocky section? Chickens or maybe sheep/goats? I mean, it would require fencing, which is no small thing, and also daily management (which may not be something that you want to do). Just a thought for productivity on a section of land that can't necessarily be planted out.

I was tempted to get a drone a few weeks back (luckily for my bank account, I didn't) - they seem like quite a lot of fun, and great for seeing land like that!

[unicornduke]

This field is down at my parents place, which is a 4 hour drive. I get down there every other weekend in the summer with a few weekends in a row around planting time, so no animals. The section that is rockier goes alongside the hay field that's there so I can see if does okay with some cover cropping to build organic matter and all that. If not, it can just go back into hay.

This was taken back in September.

Dad bought the drone and it's super fun! It doesn't have a long battery, maybe 20 mins but it's pretty neat. I'll have to find the link to a video I did with it flying over the field later.

[tielan]

Cover cropping is a good idea for something that you want to 'set and forget' so to speak.

I'd love to see what it looks like now...

[unicornduke]

Most of the field is for next year's spring and summer planting so cover crops all over! It was kinda fun to just get it in the ground and not have to worry.

I'd also love to know what it looks like now haha. I went there for Thanksgiving and there was four inches of snow/ice on the ground so I wasn't able to get any pictures. I've got my fingers crossed that the snow holds off for another week so I can check things out...

[hlagol]

Looks great, and the drone photo is cool!

[unicornduke]

Thanks! I'm working on crossposting my pictures from this fall so I've got them here too.

[dragonlady7]

It took me a moment to understand the bit that it was reposted from September and i had a real moment where like, wait, who is plowing in December??? but.
(oh a shepherd came by the farm back in november to trade 3/4 of a lamb for a whole turkey and she was talking about her neighbors, who are "farmers", and the mom and daughter are nice and she loves them but the dad is like... nuts... and just goes out and plows the fields every other week or so and then doesn't plant anything, and also stationed the greenhouse in a wind-tunnel bit of property facing the wrong direction so that every six weeks or so the wind rips the plastic off and sends it onto the shepherd's property where it becomes entirely her problem to deal with, somehow... I don't know why i'm thinking of this now but plowing fields in december is probably what made me think of it. Also I didn't steal any of the lamb but I am going to make a deal with her for some elderly-ewe mutton because there's no other way to get that stuff in this country and I want to try real Kyrgyz-style cooking.)

What kind of drone is it! We sell drones at work but they're not our specialty, so we only have, like, either extremely expensive or extremely cheap ones, and I don't know where to start looking for my purposes which are probably slightly more than yours (I want video B-roll) but include yours too.

Your field looks beautiful. If you want to discuss What To Do With A Field That's All Rocks you should talk to Aaron, as that is where he lives in this world, but his advice is probably mostly "well you just kind of try to grow stuff there anyway" (also probably "spread a lot of compost on it" but not *that* much, guys, Cornell's soil tests have taught us that). The "garden" field of the farm is like 35% rocks, it's incredible. (Well, not surprising though, we're right downstream of an actual gravel mine, and there is also a section of the farm that has a literal gravel pit in it, so to say the soil has some rocks is like... to acknowledge mostly what the soil in that area is actually used for and sold as. But it sounds like a bad joke.)

[unicornduke]

lmao hobby farmers are baffling. Some people do a fall plow and leave it sit until spring, for some folks it works. Usually not on hills though.

The drone is a Phantom 3 standard, which does work well for us. My parents got it to take pretty pictures of the mountains. Actually they got it to take pictures of the corn maze in the fall but honestly, mostly pretty pictures.
I took this video october 15 https://vimeo.com/295289329

I honestly looked at it and just stuck the small grains in the ground anyway. I figure they can handle it probably. I think it's mostly rye at that end....

It's funny how there's just a couple of swales of rocks in the field. beautiful soil otherwise.

[dragonlady7]

Oh the juicy part is that they're not hobby farmers, they're the "farm" part of a "farm to table" joint, and sometimes they have on-farm dinners and the shepherd neighbor is all cringing like "omg don't let them see this mess!", but. I've discovered farmers tend to be a lot more self-conscious about their own fields. For a while I only was taking photos of the slaughterhouse stuff, because Annie was so self-conscious about the weeds in their veggie fields. Even still sometimes I'll take a gorgeous, I think, shot, and she'll be like LOLLLLL look at how bad that looks! and I'm like... it's... got dew sparkling... on it... I thought it was a nice shot! and she's like oh people probably think it will but I know [FarmingMentor] will judge me when they see it.

The farmer who worked the fields behind my house when i was a kid mostly was sensible but there were a couple of years when whoever he had managing it decided that plowing it in the fall and leaving it fallow was a fantastic idea, and that was how the field shrank by like, more than an acre, as huge chunks of it washed out. What a fucking idiot. (That was when we had horses and would regularly ride them around the perimeters of the fields, and a bunch of our nice trails suddenly had gullies in them, whoops.)

I mean-- if you ever look at a floodplain, though, you can see how sometimes the rocks just do get laid down in a swipe, kinda, and the rest is lovely silt. Unfortunately my sister's farm is basically just all the swipe of rocks and none of the silt.

[unicornduke]

Oh geez. I know some farm to table people are really good but also some of them are really bad. How many times can you lose greenhouse plastic before you get a clue?

I gave up on nice looking things for my own pictures ages ago. It's the farm reality. But I do post nice ones for my parents.



Let's see if that image upload worked. I think dad had cover crop in there when google satellite came through, but you can see the lighter areas that are rocky. It's a pretty flat field but I think that section got deposits from floods in the past. There's a creek that runs through the woods to the south and it used to run down through the field to the left in ye olden days (not that long ago)

[oracne]

Coooooooool.