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

[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)