(Cross posted from PF, 9/15/18) So I got shit done this weekend

[unicornduke]

turns out the thing I broke on the grain drill was only important if I needed to lift the planters up and with a little extra seed, I didn't need to do that! Dad forgot to tell me to be super duper uber careful with lifting the hydraulics :/

That'll be a good project to weld this winter.

So this weekend (I hope this made it under the cut)

It's gotten to the point in the year where the last hour of my drive is at dusk and in dark. It's fine but it just means that I get stuck behind more trucks. For some reason, the natural gas trucks all decide to run last fridays nights. But this time I got stuck behind a long bed trailer hauling a backhoe so that was exciting. There's about a mile hill descending into the nearest town and the driver rode their jake breaks the whole way. I had to shut my windows it was so loud.

Also my older brother was in with some friends and they were camping down in the woods. But like, still coming up to the house occasionally and wandering through. It was very odd and funny. At 10 pm, two or three people just wandered in to use the bathroom and shuffled around and then left again. they did it for most of yesterday and today too. Very weird and funny.

I got potatoes dug, although I didn't take pictures of most of them. I finished digging my first planting and I got a total of 150 pounds of potatoes. I planted 15 pounds so that's a really good ratio! If you do lots of care for potatoes, you can get a higher yield per pound planted but potatoes are a low maintenance crop for me so I'm happy. For potatoes, I do four things with them: plant them, hill once, cut vines and harvest. I don't weed them, I don't do anything because they produce a lot of potatoes with little effort.

Here are the potatoes I dug out of the second planting. This is a mixed planting of all the random potatoes left from work's variety trials so there's a bunch of weird stuff. I thought the blue fingerlings were really weird rocks at first.


 

The reds were a deep magenta red, it is awesome

I harvested beans of various sorts, mainly cowpeas, adzukis, and mung beans. The black gram beans I thought were never going to flower did have one plant produce a few tiny pods. I think the variety I got is day length sensitive so I'll see if the rest of the plants yield anything before the frosts. I doubt it. 

I also got seed winnowed! The easiest way is to set up a box fan and pour the grain from one container to the other. I also ran them through the seeds screens. 







 

That's amaranth I cleaned. This cleaned super easily and the tan to the right is all the chaff that came from the seed heads. I also mostly cleaned flax seed and the sorghum although they didn't really winnow clean. I'm aiming for mostly clean. I've got a full half pound of flax seed which is very exciting considering I started with just a packet. I've got two pounds of amaranth and a pound and a half of sorghum with more to thresh from that variety. 

I harvested tomatoes again and thank goodness it's going to be cooler this week because I've got SO many tomatoes to deal with. I need to actually can stuff instead of freezing because I'm out of freezer space. 

I'm going to make tomato paste again because it uses a ton of tomatoes and makes only a tiny amount so less to can. 

 

The decision I made on tomatoes is that I'm not going to grow the variety in the second picture again because while it produces a ton of small meaty tomatoes, it produces a ton of small tomatoes. It takes a lot longer to prep them for sauce than the big ones, which are three to four times their size. I mean, I'm just cutting the tops off in one go, but it does make a difference. The other thing is that it is determinate so it produces a fuckton of tomatoes all at once. I think it'll have it's last harvest soon. The indeterminates produce over a longer season so I won't get overwhelmed with tomatoes like I am right now. In theory. 

I harvested my squash, and stuck them in a pile in the field. I brought two back with my to make pies with this week. Or next week idek. I need to make some freezer space or just use them up because they're not the best storing squash, maybe a couple of months. I'll probably pick up some of the long long storage squash from my parents since they always grow a few hubbards and such. 

That one big one is a cross between what should have been an amish pie squash and something else that happened before I bought the seeds. I don't know what to do with it but it probably won't be super good eating. 

my dog drank out of poddles

I sat around outside with Mara for a bit yesterday afternoon because I felt like it. Probably should have gotten more stuff done but ehhh, it was nice to relax. The only probably was that I had deliberately not brought books because last time I hadn't touched the books I brought. 

Today I got up as early as I could manage and ran down the road to the west farm where my new field is. There was a good crop of weeds growing and it looked like the deer were having parties in it. I disked it again so I just shallowly tilled all those weeds in. 

Then I attempted to plant my cover crop. I broke the metal piece where the hydraulic link attaches, which raises and lowers the planting disks. 

I just snapped the darn thing right off. So I went back for lunch to contemplate things and dad was texting me so I told him and he said I could probably just manually move the lever. It just wouldn't be able to be raised up. Okay. I also grabbed a rachet strap so I could pull the piece up and secure it so it wouldn't get caught on anything. 

The grain drill we have is a little older and about a third of the opening disks were either missing or the tubes didn't attach to the disks so they just dropped the seed on the ground. It also normally would have chains to drag on the ground and cover the seeds with dirt but it doesn't have any of those so I attached the culipacker to the back to press the seeds in. It also made a very nice looking field.

Then I planted my cover crops! 

Here's my field, pictures taken with the drone because I can. 

The whole field has cover crop except for a strip 16 feet wide which is where my fall planted crops are going. I'm planting them in two weeks when I'm in PA next. 

The sections outlined in green are the sections that will be planted in the summer and they have a rye/vetch cover crop that will hopefully put some nitrogen into the field. I will plow them about two weeks before I plant in May. The sections in blue are my spring crops, they get a pea/oat mix that will winter kill so in theory I only need to disk it in the spring, which makes it much easier to get crops in. In between the blue is my fall planted crops, half grains, half vegetables approximately. The red section is in cover crops for the winter and will be in cover crops with some bare fallow work all next year. I planted that with a huge bunch of mixes that I got free from work. It was from a trial two years ago and it was like two pounds of one mix, four pounds of another. So I dumped them all in a bin and put them in the grain bin. It'll be funny to see what happens with that. 

The reason that the sections are separated is because I'm actually rotating the field in three sections, one with cover crop, one with grains (generally grasses) and one with vegetables. This will give me two full years in between having similar crops in a field. 

A more confusing diagram below

The left third of the field outlined in pink is my vegetables. The middle section in yellow is my grains and the red is cover crops. This is for 2019. In 2020, the grains will be planted in the red section, the vegetables in the yellow section and cover crops in the pink section. And it will rotate on from there since dad said I can just have the field. He wasn't planning to do anything with it anyway, maybe just hay. 

I also have a video here where I flew over the field and thought I was going to run into a tree

I unhooked the equipment, packed up my stuff and now I'm in NY with a metric fuckton of tomatoes to process. 

I'm also very tired and going to sleep soon

Comments

[graydon]

You sound like someone who needs another freezer.

Those are some really spiffy potatoes!

I'm looking forward to how your landrace potatoes and amaranth go in the fullness of time. :)

[unicornduke]

I really did need another freezer haha. I finally caved and bought one three weeks ago to hold the venison from hunting. It's a big chest freezer and it's living at the farm.

Thanks I really love potatoes!!!

[hlagol]

This is very cool to read about, especially with your annotated drone pictures!

[unicornduke]

Thanks! I enjoy writing about what I'm doing with the field and the drone makes it really easy to get good pictures. Google earth is fine but it gets blurry when you zoom in too much. Not very helpful.