It is a mystery

As always happens when I harvest potatoes, I think of this song.

This was all yesterday. I knew the piece of equipment that I needed to dig the potatoes but it had a bar mounted instead of the sweep it should have been so I texted dad about it. He was off helping set concrete so slow to get back to me. While I was waiting, I ran down to my field, picked up all the stuff, fencing, flags, plastic and set it off to the side. By then, dad texted me where the sweep was so I could get that all set.



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This past weekend I went to PA, and got some things done. I got there right around dark Friday night, so I wasn't able to do anything in my field.

Saturday morning, I disked and planted a field of rye that will be a winter cover > straw harvest in May > no till pumpkins. Really cool thing dad and I have been working on implementing for a while now. This year was the first for attempting no till pumpkins and it worked well, with no real difference between the no till and the conventional tilled. This is a good thing, because a conventional till needs a plowing and a disking, both operations that take a long time and tractor energy, and then planting. While no till is just an herbicide spray and planting (generally. In general, the conventional till also needs an herbicide spray so it evens out there). Plus, conventional tilled fields need to be a certain moisture level in order to have them work properly to prepare the soil. Too wet is the usual issue in the spring, although if it gets too dry, disking can make some dust clouds and that's bye bye top soil. So maintaining cover helps even out moisture levels and then we don't have to do those things at all!

One of the potential cons of no till is that the ground takes longer to warm up in the spring, the plant cover shades and keeps the soil cooler longer. I don't think that will be an issue for us, we generally plant pumpkins in June, when we are frost free and things have warmed up anyway. If we were planting in mid-May, I'd be concerned but we aren't.  

So the rye will grow over the winter and then we will cut it with the hay bine in may or so, when it's put on a lot of growth but before it has set seed. Small grains in our climate need a full summer, or most of a summer to mature a grain crop and we don't have quite enough ground for a good rotation to fit that in. Plus it will keep the straw from being full of rye seed since the straw will be used on our strawberries! 

Then no till plant pumpkins in, which dad did by modifying the planter to have a wavy coulter in front of the planting mechanism to open a little slit for the seeds. The main concern would be closing the slit, which some planters have issues with but the planter has rubber closing disks and they work well. And then we have pumpkins! 

So I did that field stuff. There was some shenanigans withe the drill, it was only planting half rate, which I discovered it had a half rate sprocket on it since the previous owner used it for soybeans so that mystery was solved. And then I got rained on, but only like, drizzle for ten minutes, just enough to make me damp. 

Then after that, I did some mowing cleanup near the fall selling area around the strawberry fields. Basically those fields are in their third year and so full of very large weeds. To make it look less bad, I just mowed off the tops of the weeds lol. 

Then sunday, I harvested all the things. It was my last harvest before a potential frost so I pulled all the stuff that would be hit by the cold, peppers, tomatoes, etc. I mean, there's a possibility I might get lucky but generally first frost is the first week of October. I had done some the night before after walking the dogs, and finished up in the morning. Didn't get everything I wanted but a lot of stuff. Five types of peppers, a bunch of tomatoes, cowpeas, beans, adzuki beans, watermelons, melons, rice, and other stuff that I can't think of right now. 

After, I cleaned my truck out, loaded up pumpkin bins and packed all my stuff up. The pumpkin bins were being returned to a grower up in NY, who dad bought pumpkins from last year and got a lower price if he returned the bins. We procrastinated a little. The bins are big, like four feet by six feet by three inches folded up and I had a stack of 20 or so. I had to play some tetris and I had only brought bulky things I was fine leaving behind, but I got all my harvest and stuff fit up against my cab and the bins behind it and thoroughly strapped down

I got the bins dropped off and the grower tried to pay me for them. Which wasn't really fair, because I was returning bins that he'd already given us a discount for. So I said, no payment. And then he insisted on giving me something for it. I agreed, so he gave me three and a half giant sacks of sweet corn and a couple of melons. 

Then I drove to the apartment, unloaded my truck and processed two of the bags that night, being at least 70 ears of sweet corn. Got them cooked, kernels cut off and into the freezer. I didn't get the others done and now I need to get rid of them because they are way too starchy now, but I'm pleased because I have three and a half gallons of sweet corn in my freezer now. 

I hit my limit for processing vegetables, and I actually won't be doing anything with my tomatoes either because I'm just tired. Work has also been contributing to this, with grape/strawberry trial harvests on monday, butternut trial harvest tuesday, kobocha squash trial harvest today, and apple trial harvest tomorrow. 

Me and Jade are going on a trip this weekend too (taking friday off work), so all in all, I have very bad timing but I'm pretty proud of everything I got done. 

I was going to try and upload pictures but flickr pooped itself and won't upload anything.

 I have never regretted trusting the internet more than when I bit into a pepper earlier, that the internet called mild. 

It was not mild. 

Well.

It was probably hotter than a jalapeno. Which I would consider a mild pepper, but it was hotter. 

anyway. 

I ate a cucumber in the middle of a field in the hopes it would help and it did. 

 I looked over my laser scarecrow and after some fiddling, determined that I had indeed burned out the pan motor. So I did some ordering and I have two more of the whole set on the way. The issue is that there is no documentation about that specific motor in the pan-tilt kit it came in, so I had to order more kits. They are $60 which is chump change according to dad. I also adjusted my programming a little, the pan will only move from 10 to 350 to keep it from hitting the edges of it's mechanics and I also inserted a statement that if it gets dark both servos will return to 0. That way, it won't be stuck halfway, which is what I think caused the issue. I also bought a new buck converter but I need to test it, it didn't seem to be working earlier but that could have been a bad connection. 

One thing I found while I was out ordering a new arduino board (because once the new motor comes through, I'm pretty sure I'll be good to build the next version), is an arduino board with built in wifi! At this point, I've figured out that I don't actually need my arduino uno to be the board because my actual board hookups are very simple, I'm looking at the nano as well as the wifi one. The wifi one I think will be what I build my potential timer into. If the board runs on a timer, it will be set up to run the laser from first dawn until 8am, then shut off from 8am to 1pm, back on until 5pm, then on again at 8, turn off at dark. Those hours are when my parents are open for blueberry picking. But hours change! So they would need some way to reprogram it without having to pull it down and physically wire into it. ~wifi~ But that will be version 2 for next year. Currently on version 0.95. I'd have to run it on an independent battery maybe incase of disconnect from the main battery but who knows yet. 

Other than laser stuff, I cultivated strawberries for a couple of hours and then cleaned the garlic so mom can sell it. About 170 cloves, which isn't too bad. Some were small and had insect marks which was disappointing but whatever, they're $1 each and people will buy it. 



Yesterday I harvested a bunch of stuff while I was out looking at my patch. I've just decided to lean into the doing things instead of just looking. My jalapenos are producing fruit. They are tam jalapenos which are mild for non-spicy people (me). A bunch of green beans for dad. Some zucchini. I also harvested my second bunch of garbanzo beans.  I might get more than I planted! My flax is all ready and I'm hoping to harvest some tomorrow along with spring small grains. Most of my flax ended up being short, which is probably lack of fertility. Running theme this year. I didn't apply anything since I haven't seen the soil samples. I just ran and dug them up from dad's computer and a lack of potash is likely it (potassium). They didn't pay for an organic matter test so who knows what that is. 



My cowpeas have recovered from the lack of nodulation although they haven't actually developed any new ones. They are all rapidly growing and a nice dark green so okay I guess. Still a mystery although lack of nodules is the answer to why my legumes all look like crap. Don't know why there's no nodules. I had a beautiful cover crop of vetch/rye (although I didn't dig any up to see nodules) and I tilled that section in at least two weeks before I planted. The only thing I can think is that the vetch generated too much nitrogen but if that was the case, I wouldn't be seeing these issues so quickly in the legumes. 

This is from the beginning of may and the tiny stuff that looks like saws is the vetch leaves. 



I've got melons and squash running all over into the weeds I need to rototill. Oh yeah. I broke the rototiller twice. Once was a pin sheared in the PTO shaft, easy fix. The other was the bracket for the rototiller blades that came off the rotating bar which will need to be welded back on. I didn't even hit a rock and I didn't complete two full rows. 

I've got a ton of tomatoes and peppers just waiting to turn. The heat and not much rain is delaying things but I'm not too worried. I'll have a billion of everything very shortly I'm sure. 

It was an odd weekend when I went to PA. It was so hot, and I left in the morning instead of the evening and just. so hot. I didn't feel like I got a ton done necessarily and the weekend went very quickly.

I started by just walking through my plot and just looking at things, marking down how everything looked. I have small fruit on some peppers and most tomatoes and flowering on the others.

My beans, mung beans, cowpeas have something really wrong with them. Some are about six inches tall, very sad and flowering. I suspect fusarium to be the problem, I saw it on some of my small grains but I'm astounded that it's in the soil already. It's very possible it got picked up through seed saving at some point, whether it was because last year was so wet or something else. But I got seed through a huge variety of sources and it is happening across all legumes in the field. I'm worried that my rye cover crop did it since it doesn't seem to be affecting the peas, but I have no idea. I need to dig up some plants when I'm down there next to look at the roots.

My fall small grains are just about there. I harvested four or fives plots, which was barley that managed to survive the winter somehow. They were in soft to hard dough and the rest will be ready to harvest in two weeks.


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 I was going to make a post about fieldwork but I need to get around for my dentist appointment (ugh) and get ready for work after. And also figure out what I'm baking tonight :)

So I leave you with this drone video from two weeks ago (it was too windy to fly this weekend)

 Today was a day where I got things done that needed to be done but everything took longer than expected and didn't quite work the way I wanted. 

I got up early, walked the dogs. Then I grabbed the cultivating tractor, made some adjustments to the height of the shovels because they dragged on the ground really badly. I couldn't raise them super high because then the innermost ones would dig in too far (There was a part of the arm in the way that meant I couldn't raise those ones more) and then I cultivated. Much easier the second time. Dad ordered the hilling disks for it, so I can cover my potatoes when I get to planting them. 

Then dad was finished with the little orange tractor, so I put the rototiller on. It has the ability to be offset from the three point hitch and in true farming fashion, the way it is prevented from moving sideways while using it, is a chunk of wood holding it one way and a chain holding it the other. Last time I was using it, the chunk of wood had popped off and so it had drifted sideways until I was rototilling not in the center of where I was driving. So I had to put that back into place. Then I got rototilling and one section went well at a faster speed but I had to slow back down for the other section. 

After that I put up the netting fence in the hopes that I could keep Mara with me while I do stuff. It needed to be brought down off the back hill first so I did that and the final set of fencing had to be carried far enough and was heavy enough that my arms cramped up after I got it in the truck. 

At that point, I watered the transplants to keep them happy. 

I got the fencing set up but it took a while because it's netting fencing and tiny sticks get stuck in it and you can't pull it. They claim they are easy to set up but I have yet to ever put one up and not have a terrible time. 

Ate lunch at like, 2 and rewatered my transplants (some ended up dry despite this and being under cover. How?!?!)

Then I took Mara down to the field with me. Not my smartest idea because it was boiling hot and she was expecting a walk. I walked her around the perimeter and then let her wander. She stuck close to me for about five minutes and then made an immediate beeline for the far corner from me and shoved her face right through the fence, as though she could walk right through it. 

So that was a failed attempt. I'm going to try again tomorrow morning after our walk and when it's cooler. 

By the time I walked the dogs, fed them and got back down to the field, it was around 5 and I had to measure out my rows. So I got that done and then I transplanted until about 8 and got 2/3 of my plants in the ground. I was hoping to get all of them because we've got a storm coming in tonight so it would rain them in. I don't have irrigation set up yet because that's a lot of effort. It's on the list but a lower priority than planting. Same thing with mulching. 

Then I packed up, got back to the house, showered and threw my laundry in because we're going to a graduation party/get together tomorrow afternoon. I'll have monday as well but I still need to drive back to NY. In total I got like three rows planted of 28. I really need to get moving tomorrow. 

I'm super tired so I'll be sleeping shortly

 I forgot to post that I seeded my second round of seeds the other day. It's the tomatoes (new ones that I didn't have the A Farm grow for me), sesame, and some random things to space things out. So two of my sesames are up fast and so is my basil. We'll see when the tomatoes get going. 

One of the issues I'm having with my first set of transplants growing is that my room is too cool. I keep my windows open at night because the downstairs apartment heats my room super well and I overheat very easily at night. The plants are growing right by the windows to take advantage of the sunlight it gets. So I suspect they get cold at night and don't like it much because most things aren't getting any more growth than their cotyledons, although they could just be going very slowly. Although now that I think about it, last years tomatoes only had one or two sets of leaves other than cotyledons. 

Maybe next year I'll get some heat mats. I still need to start the rice, although that will be in at least a week. They are going in tiny plug trays and will be planted out within three weeks. 

 I got everything but the potatoes completely planted, which I'm very happy about! Honestly, I probably shouldn't be putting the potatoes in the ground yet, but eh why not. I will plant the rest in the next two weeks or so, so if there is a late frost, I don't risk all of them. I did put in about 90 feet so that was good. I've also got about 45 row feet where I don't have anything planned in the grains section so I'm probably going to throw cover crop in. 

The flax I ended up doing half broadcast and half with the seeder just so I can do a comparison. One thing I noticed is that the seeder didn't seem to plant a ton of the seed. I might need to switch out the seed plate or something, or just broadcast the flax forever. 

I could have gotten more stuff done, like plant more potatoes or some other assorted projects but 1. there's a storm rolling in that looks about an hour out and 2. IIHF gold medal game is happening now.

I'm video chatting with a friend around 4 as well, which will be nice. dnd tonight too. I'll try and post pictures at some point, but it might be after I go back to NY

I just overnighted a bunch of apple leaves through UPS so that was an exciting start to my morning

The rest of my day is going to be boring. I have to mail some newsletters but I get to watch hockey while doing it (IIHF WW Division 1A) so not all bad.

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