Darlin came to visit! Saturday was our plant day-- I took her on a big tour of the farm, we visited an old lady's herb shop out in the woods and hit up an exotic plants sale at a garden society overlooking the reservoir.
First things first. Darlin had her camera and took great pictures, so without more babbling:
(All photo credit goes to Darlin)
We arrived just as Viking was opening up the store. After chatting with her a bit (Darlin thanked her for the pot of Lemonbalm), we headed down to check out the greenhouse. (Unfortunately, my ugly mug is featured in a good number of these pictures-- brace yourself) Most of the seedlings have been planted in the fields these past weeks, all that remains are eggplants, basil and the coming rounds of lettuce and late season tomatoes.
A close up shot on the medium trays of seedlings. I want to say these hold 80-120 plants, the smaller sized tray holds 248 plants and the larger sized tray holds 32 plants.
The basil is coming along nicely. I'd say we have about 3000 plants total. Between the CSA and wholesale the world is crazy for fresh herbs. A few local restaurants swing by once a week over the summer to load up on basil, sage and thyme. The boss is a hard sell on expanding restaurant business-- he has no interest in delivering to them, just another chore for maybe $80 tops. So unless they're willing to come get it themselves (and they rarely are), the restaurants are fresh outta luck. As a quick aside, the boss highly recommends that young start-up farmers grow herb heavy. Dollar per lbs, they're worth a lot more than conventional veggies and require less space/ maintenance. The offset is that they require more hustling to unload the crop after harvest. Most people can find a use for 5lbs of tomatoes, 5lbs of basil is a harder sell.
Looking out from the inside. There's the farm store over yonder. Inside: to the right is a pile of hoes, trench shovels, spades, rakes, pry bars and the odd pole. To the left we keep tables covered in a mad jumble of wrenches, crowbars, hammers, grease guns, sockets, boxes of seed bags, fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide mix. In the door way is the work table covered over in crap-- underneath you can see the battery jumper the boss uses to get the old tractor started every morning.
The front loader of the old tractor heaping over with junk plants. Darlin thought it was a shame we tossed out maybe 200 extra seedlings worth of swiss chard-- no defense there, it was a shame. After I refilled the dead gaps in the chard field, there was still so much left over and no place to put 'em except the compost. We meant to rescue a handful or two of chard, but forgot.
I took Darlin down to the tomato fields first. This is a row of Rose tomatoes planted at the top of the slope, so erosion from the storm last week was minimal-- but you can see where the soil washed up on the plastic and ruined our tight laying. The rose is pretty hardy and has taken to the field perfectly, they've already started growing out.
Here we are at the bottom of the tomato fields, where the foreman and I wrapped 15 rows on friday-- then planted the cherry tomatoes. Bah's off camera to the left sinking in rows of Prudence Purple and some other leftover big tomato varieties. On these hot sunny days you always have to keep a bucket of water and can nearby to soak the seedlings from time to time-- can't let the roots dry out during transplanting.
The long tomato rows, farm store, barn and greenhouse.
We crossed the road over to the lower fields and checked in on the blueberry bushes. The flowers have passed onto berry-- I see red and the starts of some blue, not too many more weeks until harvest in late June/early July. Big bunches of big berries, its gonna be a good start to the summer season.
(At this point I touched the camera and accidentally switched on some crazy light setting. Consider this an artistic interlude.)
They got off to funky start when laying the pea seeds, leaving some pretty funky growth patterns in the rows.
Two sparse spinach rows, broccoli and rows of beets.
The strawberries have come! That's suppose to be a very red berry, not one that looks like ashes. The camera setting is pretty ridiculous. Darling and I had a sampling of the first strawberries-- thumbs up. Juicy with a tart zip, that's a good strawberry for you.
We walked all over the lower fields, swung by the boss's house and hiked up the slope to the berry/onion/herb rows bordering on a cow pasture. Again, it was a bright sunny day-- not a vision of post apocolyptia. Up in the foreground are blackberry bushes, then the onion rows. These cows were separated from the mother herd to keep track of ongoing calf deliveries. One mother in this group calved last week (the 6th calf)-- the little one tends to hide in the long grass on the other side of the hill.
I brought Darlin up close to see the herd, and--it's Rosy! She b-lined over to the barbed fence for a head scratch. I don't think Darlin had ever been so close to cows before as she was a little surprised at how big they are. Rosy is still youngish-- but the other full grown cows go up to my shoulders. We stood scratching Rosy until she tried to eat my shirt.
Picture from Rosy of the herbs, onion rows and beyond. The boss drove the van back from the fields and we hoofed it over to introduce Darlin. Before long he went on his way for lunch.
We sauntered once more through the tomato fields and took the hill path up to the (secret) forest field.
Here's the scope of it. Four rows of peppers on the left-- the Ace, Red Knight, Super Shepherd and Snapper. On the far left are the rows of summer squash and zucchini, then two rows of cucumber. The unplanted rows will be cantaloupe. It does pretty well in this climate. We planted some last year with a greater emphasis on watermelon-- of course, no one wanted the melon but customers went wild for the cantaloupe. This year we're flipping the numbers-- more 'loupe less melon.
It was my turn to be surprised. The zucchini/summer squash has already germinated and is shooting up. I didn't expect to see anything out of them for a long while.
We walked back to farm central along the road. Passed by the lower fields and all the corn has sprung up. That's a yellow sign for the record.
We walked passed the farm store and headed up hill to the peach orchard and hill top fields.
(Darlin stopped to look through the pictures and noticed my accidental artistic adjustments. Fortunately, she fixed it just in time for some great shots.)
Midway up the hill at the edge of a blackberry field. One of the white mares is out grazing. The woman who owns them was marching through the pastures, it was grooming time.
A day of endless surprises-- the peach blooms took! Zoom in or look close and you can see fuzzy peach balls are on their way. This could be the first peach harvest (albeit small) from the orchard.
Darlin calls this my pontificating pose-- and said it needed to be documented. So here we are in the orchard near the mowed down raspberry rows, chances are I'm babbling on about raspberry mating rituals or something of the like.
An updated, end of spring, picture from the orchard top.
We hiked over to the hilltop field where we planted the potatoes and a bunch of rows worth of sweet corn. Endless fields, it boggles my mind how we have time to fill them all.
(This picture won't rotate for some reason) Not all surprises are good ones. I was happy to see that the potatoes have sprung their leaves out of the ground, but while touring the rows we found these guys everywhere. The Colorado Potato Beetle is out in force. They are a scourge. I've mentioned them before, but they're the ones that breed very very quickly, adapting to pesticides through the course of a single season. They munch away and damage the crops, but worst of all are their larvae. They lay eggs on the plant and the young worms swell into fat little maggot like fellows-- easily devouring entire plants, and then entire rows, in the process.
Darlin caught 'em in the act. Little pains in the ass, and now exhibitionists too... the list of problems goes on.
Here's the mound of stones Bah, the foreman and I dragged out of the fields earlier this spring. (Taken from a distance, it'd be more impressive in person)
Some say blogs are snapshots of vanity. To them I say-- Fair enough. We walked all over the hilltop and visited another strawberry field-- we decided the berries up here tasted much better.
Darlin and I took a long stroll along the tractor roads through the eggplant fields-to-be, more raspberry fields and finally made our way back to the farm store. Rolling the dice, we ran across the street to the big cow pastures-- hoping to catch a glimpse of the calves. We had good luck that day-- here are four of the calves romping along the tractor road. The mamas were nearby and pissed off at the two people gawking-- so for the sake of peace we kept our distance.
(I didnt want to be wrestling spooked calves back into the fencing with Darlin there)
Zooming in.
We hung around with Viking at the store before going on our way.
It was a great day. Darlin dug through the herbalist's shop and picked up a few ounces of some plant or other. I bought a bag of tobacco seeds-- another project for this summer.
I'm hoping that later in the season Darlin will be up with her camera again-- as you can see, she take much better pictures. We planned on writing a joint post, but there is never enough time. There is always next visit.
And that was Saturday.
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Monday, June 6, 2011
Full sun all day, low flying clouds drifted along their way. Temperature stuck in the 80Fs, but it felt hotter in the fields.
Old Rudolpho is back for the season. He's the patriarch of a Guatemalan family that works on the farm throughout the summer-- in his late 60s he looks the part. When I pulled in this morning I caught sight of him walking up the road to the farm-- red long sleeve, ranchero hat and grey mustache, just like last year. He spends the winter home in Guatemala with family-- 4-5 of his sons and their wives eventually come join him on the farm. As per usual, he forgot english over the winter-- I'm picking up some spanish to fill the gaps.
Bah, Old Rudolpho and I stuck together all day. We started cutting holes in all the plastic wrapped rows and cut right through and after lunch. We started off on the eleven new rows squeezed between the tomato fields and greenhouse area, then we headed over and cut holes in the forest fields where the cantaloupe will be planted tomorrow.
Bah and Old Rudolpho are an interesting work pair. Even in his late 60s, the old Guatemalan has enough experience to make up for the lost vigor. Talking to Old Rudolpho, I understood enough to learn he'd worked on farms his entire life in both Guatemala and the US. Bah mostly works in silence, but this being his first day back, Old Rudolpho chatted monologues and cracked jokes between every hole. My spanish is very bad, but I became the defacto english translator between the old men, as neither one could understand the other's accent.
Bah whipped up a great hole cutting invention over the weekend-- rather than cut out the plastic with a knife, he got a short length of aluminum air duct pipe and serrated the edge of one side (attaching a small handle on the other). So while Old Rudolpho and I slowly sliced our way along, Bah punched out entire rows.
Old Rudolpho was apparently unimpressed with the size of my pocket knife, so he brought me a foot long gutting knife. The Freudian imagery was spoiled when he dropped his on the walk to the forest field and needed the borrowed knife back.
After lunch we finally finished the cantaloupe rows, then Bah and Old Rudolpho took a long break in the shade. They caught up on each others kids and chatted about the 90Fs weather coming later in the week. The hawks were out in force, screeching and circling above us.We sat watching them a while.
We slowly returned to the greenhouse and exchanged our knives for hoes-- then headed out to the lower fields to weed a long bed of beets. The boss and the foreman were rumbling by in tractors all day, tilling and planting the hilltop and lower fields. Late in the afternoon some of Old Rudolpho's kids and grandkids rolled up to the field in a sedan. They leaned on the horn and Old Rudolpho ambled over. He chatted and hugged the little kids for a while before turning back into the fields with me and Bah.
An hour before the day's end the boss brought a van load of lettuce for transplanting. We planted 4 rows of loose leaf and started 4 more of romaine before heading home.
Viking had today off, so Rhode Island was working the shop. All he had to say was-- I hope I don't have to work in the fields when I'm Old Rudolpho's age.
Grunt work all day, but more tomorrow and it's only supposed to get hotter.
Take it easy. Onward farm!
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