Feed on
Posts
Comments

Enjoying a rainy day inside.

May 15th, 2012 by

I am greatly appreciating a rainy day inside. The ducklings enjoyed it outside.  They are incredible bug eaters. I did a quick video of them. With two hoophouses, I could stay busy in them for several rainy days, but in addition to piles of papers around the computer, I had a very long inside To Do list.

One thing was updating the Wholeshare Buying Club.  Maybe instead of updating I should say “figuring out”.  Learned a couple tricks.  It seems to default to showing “Recently Added” products first, so it is hard to compare prices and know what is available. Just above the list of products is a “Sort By” box that let’s us choose “Name” for an alphabetical listing. It does not let others join “splits” or otherwise recognize your order until you put credit card info in. I am learning the schedule on the other end also, so we will take orders until next Monday at 10, then figure out what to do about splits.  I expect to have the order here for our first CSA distribution. I can see having this buying club is going to be expensive for me – I ordered lots of things I normally walk by. And when I resisted temptation then saw someone else had opened a split on figs, so ordered some with them. If someone opens a split crystallized ginger I’m in trouble.  Love the stuff (please do). Reminder, if you want to sign up for the Wholeshare Buying Club, go to www.wholeshare.com/join/1202 .

I do need to know how many of you would like our free-range broilers this summer and fall please.  So many other farmers at the markets are adding them this year that we are cutting way back.

It’s been a good week.  I have a LOT of plants to get in the ground, some of them getting really potbound (the chard and flowers). We have been planting onions.  Lots and lots of onions.  Stopped and transplanted an insane amount of Swiss chard. I know from how much we used last year I have too much, but it can be a profitable crop so hope to sell a lot at the farmers market. I am sorting and planting by color so we can easily make gorgeous, colorful bunches. Three rows to the bed. Center row yellow.  One row reds and oranges.  Other rows 1 white + 4 red and orange or yellow.

Speaking of farmers markets, I have taken the big step and dropped out of the Saranac Lake Village Farmers Market.  The CSA has grown this year.  Not enough to equal a farmers market (= about 40 full shares on a decent summer or early fall day), but I’m at the in-between point and want to move more toward the CSA.  To make up the difference, we are continuing to accept CSA members, and I plan to park the truck somewhere once a week with our excess. I am looking for a spot on Route 9 in the Cliff Haven area in the hopes that folks will get to know us from the truck and become members in the future. The truck thing will be more laid back, quicker to set up, and less travel time. We still are doing the Wednesday Lake Placid Farmers Market, and offering to deliver shares along our route anywhere there are at least 5 full members.  A natural foods store/restaurant stopped by the other day and would like to purchase from us.They will equal 4 or 5 full share members. So things are looking good.

The tomatoes in the hoophouse have taken off nicely, as have the cucumbers in the old hoophouse. Got lots of things seeded in the ground – carrots, spinach, beets, dill and cilantro, lettucy mix, Asian greens mix.

 

The potatoes I was worried had been killed are coming up really nicely.  Still have about a third of the seed potatoes to plant. Had hoped/planned they would grow quickly enough that I could weed from the tractor seat, but had to do a quick hoeing yesterday.

The warm, late fall kept the onions I seeded growing.  About a quarter of them so far were large enough going through winter that they are bolting. We have pulled them while they are still tender for scallions.

If you are close to us, I can harvest very nice lettucy salad mix, radishes, baby chard, and baby beets for you.  Email a day ahead so I read it.

Have a great week.

Posted in Chickens, ducks, geese, CSA, Vegetables | Comments Off

Spring has sprung!

May 9th, 2012 by

Spring fever has a different connotation on the farm. It relates to a feverish pace, not to taking it easy. I planned to move the newsletter to Sunday or Monday but am now getting to it Tuesday evening only because of the drizzle.

Mostly things are moving along wonderfully.  We do have a couple hickups that will affect the first distribution.  Waiting to plant tomatoes until that big frost threat was over pushed us back on seeding radishes, salad turnips, etc,, and I tilled in the spinach planned for the first couple of weeks because it  had very very few plants.  Better to start over with another seeding, but the spinach will be later.  Arugula, Asian greens, and lettucy mix are in and coming up nicely.  I do have a couple surprises in my back pocket for the first couple weeks to offset the loss of the crunchies.

I am using an iPhone on a prepaid plan. It fits in my pants pocket so is handy. I am trying to keep our field records, to do lists, time logs, etc on it. Since it is handy I have been taking photos, so this newsletter has lots of photos. If you follow us on Facebook you have seem some of these, but not all.

I held off planting the tomatoes until after the big freeze since it was easier to protect them concentrated in their pots and trays than planted out.  We took every available bucket, barrel, jug, harvest bin, etc down, surrounded the tomatoes as much as we could, filled the containers with water, and then draped 4 or 5 layers of row cover over all to hold the warmth from the water in.  Barely made it through the first night because the day had been cloudy and the water didn’t heat up much. Second day was sunny and the temp under the row cover only went down to 46. This weekend it got scary again, and the plants were already planted.  We spread the barrels again and around and filled them with water. Color does make a difference – the water in the black recycling containers and rust barrels heated up much more than the water in the white buckets did. On the sunny days even the soil, particularly if moist, absorbs heat that it releases back at night. We wet the soil down because the days were sunny. It worked.

Getting tomatoes planted at a younger stage is much better.  Only one variety showed any sign of becoming at all rootbound, and even its roots weren’t “circling” yet.  But look at the new root growth just 36 hours after being taken out of the pot and planted in the ground.  This was Bobcat, the varity closest to rootbound, and you can see the old roots lower left that were at the edge of the 4″ pots. We had hauled in buckets of compost for the planned tomato rows earlier, except for the center row, north half.  That gorgeous spinach some of you had been eating was there.  We finally took that out and I planted a few plants to get them out of their pots, expecting to haul in buckets of compost to spread around them.  Then the lightbulb went off that maybe the tractor with its front bucket would fit in the north door.  It just squeezed through, and made much quicker work of bringing compost in, but I hurriedly rescued the 9 tomato plants I had planted there – hence the opportunity for this photo.,

By far the most economical organic fertilizer we can get is Giroux Poultry compost. (Well, no. Their uncomposted manure would be an even better deal, but since we have poultry I want the compost that has been heated to 140 or better for disease control.) They compost it to meet OMRI organic standards. For $800 I got approximately 1000 lbs of nitrogen, 1500 lbs of phosphorus, and 1000 lbs of potassium.  The truck spreads it for me. The downside is that that’s the only ratio of nutrients I get.  Vegetables use lots of nitrogen and potassium but not much phosphorus, and we don’t want excess phosphorus moving into our waters.  Fortunately my soil is pretty “heavy” and has a very high capacity to hold onto nutrients, and we don’t see runoff off our fields.  After an unusually heavy rain (even after Irene) we will have a couple spots just off our lane that gets a maybe 4″ deep gully because the water runs down the lane and then off into the field, but then the land flattens out and gully ends out, and if soil does get to the bottom of the field it gets held in the grass strip.  But, remember that’s 3500 lbs of major nutrients plus a lot of minor nutrients, spread, for $800. This is what the field looked like in one of the spots with the most compost after the the compost was spread. The dark is the compost, the light is soil peeking through. The nutrients are not “readily available” like chemical fertilizers are.  We have to wait for warm soil and active microorganisms to see the benefit, but that is the case with most other “organic” fertilizers too.

Now, remember how happy I was to get organically approved fertilizers through NOFA-VT’s bulk order at discounted prices?  For fertilizer that I will have to spread, I paid $1385 for 208 lbs of nitrogen, 37 pounds of phosphorus, and 27 pounds of potassium. I don’t have a good way to apply the fertilizer – I can put an attachment on my little push seeder and walk the rows and it will make a little furrow if the ground is really soft and drop the fertilizer, but adjusting it to apply the right amount will be a major effort, and will change with each of the 4 types of fertilizer I got. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get the compost this year because they were booked solid when I called to order, but thankfully they did squeeze me in. May try to save the fertilizer for next year, but some of it is peanut meal so might attract mice if I try to store it. Anyone have a defunct chest freezer they want to get rid of that I can use for mouse-proof storage?

Here is our first row with the new bed shaper/mulch layer. It came unassembled with minor instructions so Tony spent a couple days pouring over photos and tightening and loosening lots of bolts. We made several practice runs with just the bed shaper to get that part working well, and then it took very little adjusting to get the plastic stretched and covered. We made a couple sacrifice runs of about 100 feet, made minor adjustments and then went with this full length bed. The beds are just over 30″ wide across the top. The field does slope, which complicates settings, so we got it working well going south to north and just drove around and went in that direction for each row.  We are delighted! I have 5 beds laid for onions. I’d like to not use plastic, but it allows us to plant more closely to make use of space, and controls weeds, and warms the soil for faster spring growth.  In a couple of years we will hopefully have kept weeds under control enough we can switch to the new corn-based biodegradable “plastic” mulch. It starts breaking down in early August though, and we still have weeds germinating at that time. The photo is looking back from the tractor seat.  The rolls in the bottom corners are the drip tape for irrigation.  This beaut lays the drip tape about 2 inches deep, in pretty uniform lines, so we “should” be able to miss the tape when planting. Still, I’m not using a sharp pointed knife to make my holes for plants. The green plants at the right are garlic. Between the plastic and garlic is a row of just getting the bed shaped without plastic.

I was really getting worried about the potatoes I so proudly got planted early.  Of course, after happily planting them in our unusually warm, dry weather, I then read an admonition to not plant too early or they would rot in the cool soil.  We still have at least half to plant, on trays “chitting” in the hoophouse.  Those that are in contact with the soil have sprouted and are about a foot tall.  No sign of any of the plants in the field, though I barely covered them.  Finally today Tony noticed them breaking through.  Whew!  I planted all the red and blue ones, and knew you’d be disappointed if I’d lost them. Still have some fingerlings, a couple oddballs, and all the Rehoboth Golds to plant.

A week ago this was mostly spinach and braising greens.  The light green strip is baby carrots since I know ya’ll get anxious for our carrots.  The larger plants are cucumbers.  Between the cucumbers is the Asian greens salad mix.  I have since covered them with row cover to keep those dratted flea beatles out.  I am hoping by planting them up in the hoophouse I will be able to keep the row cover down and intact better than in the field. And except for volunteer tomatoes, I have good weed control in the old hoophouse.

Now for some fun/cutes.  We moved the hens down onto the triticale cover crop. The ducklings are starting to hatch up by the house and the hens and geese pester the ducks and lure the ducklngs away from momma and into trouble.  The geese lured one duckling out at night, and we only saved it because the geese were making such a fuss and racket over it.  And we needed to get the hens onto fresh ground after winter. Ducks and geese herd surprisingly easily, but only where they are comfortable.  The geese hadn’t been away from the house area.  We cornered them in the winter henshed, tossed sheets over them and wrapped them in the sheets, carried them down the hill, and put them in with their friends, the hens. The ducks are still up by the house and delighted to have the area to themselves.

When the ducks settle down into serious nesting, they pull down and feathers out to line hay/etc they have made the nest of.  This one went a bit overboard.  Never seen such a white/fluffy nest.

And here is our first hatch of the year. Two mommas a couple days apart – first one 9, second one 10.  That is about 50% hatch, which is very low for them, but the eggs went through some really cold nights before the hens seriously set.

The bees are doing well.  Bringing in tan, yellow, and orange pollen.  You can pretty well tell how the bees are doing by just watching them come and go.  Their behavior says the queen is laying and they are happy.  I do want to open it up very soon and be sure they aren’t getting crowded, which would cause them to swarm.  In swarming at least half of them leave, which sets the whole process back several months while they build up numbers and a new queen. We have been feeding them a cane sugar syrup because they are building comb on new frames.  One way to keep diseases down is to change out the old wax comb every few years, five at the most. I’ve read that bees fly the equivalent of more than twice around the world to make a pound of honey, and it takes 8 lbs of honey to make a pound of wax, so we are making sure they have they have “nectar” easily available. The feeder is on top of their hive, a styrofoam box with an open channel on one end that the bees can come up through, then over the top and down the other side to the sugar syrup. A piece of clear plastic keeps them from getting out into the box proper and drowning in the syrup.

Now serious business:  I have gotten excellent feedback on the Wholeshare buying club.  A couple expressed the same concerns I had – that it is less “local” though mostly New York, and in some ways “too much” selection.  My interest is primarily in the organic grains, non-homogenized and goat milk, etc.  I do have the ability to block some products, categories, and brands. But, you also can really narrow what you see by first selecting a category across the top (Produce, Meat, Dairy, Pantry), and then down the left for Categories such as flour or grains, Dietary Preference such as organic or gluten free, and by Brand. Before I decide to block products, let’s see if this makes the selection less overwhelming. Let’s take a week, and put our orders in by May 16th.  Then we’ll see if we have enough, see what is needed for split cases, etc. That will give us over a week to finalize things this first time.  The link to join is http://www.wholeshare.com/join/1202 . After you have joined, just go to http://www.wholeshare.com/ to login. You do have to enter a credit card before starting your order, but it won’t be charged until the order is finalized and ready for delivery. The credit card info is kept by Wholeshare – I will not see it.

We are still accepting CSA memberships.  I have made the decision to drop the Saranac Lake Village Farmers Market.  We don’t really have enough CSA to justify it, but do have enough to make me wonder if I will have enough extra to make going to that market worthwhile.  A summer farmers market sales should be at least the equivalent of 20 full shares. I really want to redirect the time we spend on that market into doing a better job here. With the truck we can park somewhere Saturday morning, maybe south Plattsburgh to get folks familiar with us for future years. That would not be as high pressure (very agressively competitive vendors) and we’d save about three hours in driving and setup time (as well as $445 in booth fees). Our CSA options are: pickup at the farm, pickup on Draper Ave in Plattsburgh, pickup at Lake Placid Farmers Market, or we will delivery to sites along our route from the farm to Lake Placid if we have at least five full share memberships there. We have been steadily getting new members, several from references from ya’ll.  We really appreciate it, thank you. Brochures/membership forms are available on our website:
Peru and Plattsburgh
Lake Placid

Have a great week!

Posted in Bees, Chickens, ducks, geese, CSA, Vegetables | Comments Off

April 25 update

Apr 26th, 2012 by

Lots of good news, at least from our end.  First, we are at the same level of membership as we had last year, and are continuing to get interest.  We are within a couple hundred dollars of having the CSA contribute $30,000 to our sales this year (which is why we have to sell at farmers market also). Two more last minute CSA options are opening up for us.  CVPH is open to having a CSA onsite.  I will be there Tuesday over noon with a display. We have taken a few CSA shares to the Lake Placid Farmers Market in the past, but with the truck I can keep things fresh, so we are looking for folks along a route from Peru to Lake Placid who would like to have CSA shares dropped off for them. Each drop-off site needs to have at least 5 full size shares (or 10 small shares or combo). We are also considering parking the truck somewhere in Plattsburgh a few hours a week for folks to buy our extras (and hopefully learn enough about us to become CSA members next year).

Now, for you: In the past we have pointed members toward sources of pork, beef, etc when they asked.  This year we will be more formal about it.  We are working with other local farmers to either provide you paper order forms or an online order system so you can get pastured pork, grass-fed beef and lamb, farmstead cheeses, etc from local farmers we trust.  We will also have our eggs and chicken for you to purchase.  And we are going to offer you a buying club for more New York foods. Regional Access is a central New York based, farmer-started, distribution system of mostly organic, mostly New York food.  They deliver up here weekly. They have developed an online system for buying clubs to get products at almost wholesale pricing, each member using their own credit card.  Some things are in case lots, and the system facilitates folks sharing a case lot. Some things, like non-homogenized milk, can be ordered by the single bottle or a case. In their experience it takes 4 to 6 weeks for a buying club to put their first order together, so lets start now and see whether this is something you want to do.  We need a $350 minimum order, so I am aiming for a monthly order. You would get your purchases when you pick up your CSA share. You may go to www.wholeshare.com/join/1202 to sign up. You can hold off on giving credit card info until we are close to our first delivery date.  I will also send an email with this link directly to you.

Now to our progress on your summer veggies – things are looking great.  We needed the rain, and I have a week’s worth of inside (hoophouse, house, garage) work if it stays rainy.  I held off seeding carrots outside because they are slow germinators at best, and slower with these cold nights, and I knew that when we got rain the weeds would spurt up ahead of the carrots.  We can now “stale seedbed” them – I prepped the beds before the rain, now I can seed and the quick weeds will come up and I can burn them off with a propane flame thrower before the carrots come up.  By burning I won’t disturb the soil and bring any more seeds to the surface to germinate.  There will be more weeds – each planting of carrots typically gets weeded five times, but by giving them a headstart with the flaming we can at least see the carrots to weed around them.

The rain suspended potato planting.  I went down to cover any that the rain had settled the dirt off of, to protect them from forecast cold night temperatures.  Someone dug some up. I did not see any hoof prints, or prints of any kind. Earthworms have been seen pulling newly planted garlic and onions sets out, but can earthworms move potatoes?  In the photo the yellow circle is where the potato was planted, and the potato is the thing lower right. It hadn’t happened to many, less than 100. Just enough that I had to walk all the rows checking, which made for heavy (muddy) shoes. But it was nice to see the soil looking so good.

We made a pass with the new, $3600, raised bed/mulch layer, without the plastic mulch, so I could get rootbound cabbage, pac choi, etc in the ground before the rain.  We held off doing more because we want the soil damp when we lay the mulch – it is really hard to get enough water under the plastic if it starts out dry.  I don’t have anything ready that needs to go on plastic so the only rush is to work out the kinks in the new equipment.  The carrots, beets, radishes, salad mix, etc go on bare soil (so have to be weeded). We can use the bed shaper part without laying the plastic mulch, which will give an even surface that is easier to weed. Maybe a photo next week.

Chuck Arthur is here with his excavator.  Tuesday and Wednesday he graded south of the old hoophouse to make a place for a washing/packing shelter and make the area drain. Thursday he will pull stumps to make a place for grapes, asparagus, rhubarb, raspberries, perennial flowers, and fruit trees. I have to mark it out in the morning, and suspect there won’t be room for everything.  I’d like to have all the perennials off in their own spot so we don’t have to work around them when doing field work. Don’t have a bill yet, but it will be big. Several years ago it was $65/hour.  I don’t know what it is now. But it will be SOOO nice to have a place out of the sun/rain/wind to wash and pack, and a place to store things. I had hoped to make it big enough to store field equipment in, but there isn’t enough space with lot line clearances.

April 15 has been my tomato planting target in the old double-walled hoophouse. Planting in the new single-walled hoophouse has had me nervous, so I have held off.  The plants are ready, and a couple looked rootbound last weekend which prompted me to move them down in preparation for planting.  The forecast 24 degree this Friday night has caused me to hold off on planting them, and debating whether to bring them back up or not.  All the ones I checked Tuesday can stay in their pots a few more days.  If the forecast improves to the upper twenties, I will leave them down there in their pots, bunched together with jugs of water for warmth and I can cover them with several layers of row cover and plastic to keep that warmth in.  If I plant them I’ll have to do a lot more protection because they’ll be spread out. If it is cloudy and still forecast lower 20s Friday, I’ll probably bring them back up to the other hoophouse which not only is tighter but has electricity so we can heat a “tent” for the tomatoes and other cold sensitive plants. The problem with bringing them back up is not only can the stems break, but they’ll end up with the varieties mixed again and I have them nicely sorted not. The strawberries are also starting to bloom so I’ll need to spread the row cover back over them several nights.  The flowers, which become strawberries, are destroyed by freezing.

Our last Plattsburgh’s Winter Farmers Market is this Thursday, so harvested and pulled things out to make way for the tomatoes, peppers, and salad mixes for the CSA. Some things I wish I had already planted. Others I need to wait another week or two or they’ll go by before the CSA starts. We’ll have gorgeous spinach, kale, baby arugula, lettucy salad mix, swiss chard, beet greens, etc.  I’ll do an online order/home delivery to Plattsburgh in a couple weeks probably since we have salads that will be ready then.

I spent most of Monday “bumping up” seedlings into larger pots since moving the tomatoes down the hill had made space in the old hoophouse.  Tuesday turned primarily into a “town” and paperwork day.  Wednesday harvest. Friday will be seeding. Saturday is get my volunteer time in at the co-op, and a farmer shindig Saturday evening.  Sunday more of a weekend “young” farmer get together. Monday lmaybe plant the tomatoes. Tuesday CVPH CSA promo and plant tomatoes for sure if Monday night was too cold. Wednesday I’ll be able to do farmwork rather than harvesting and washing!!!! Weather doesn’t matter – with the hoophouses there is always something that can be done. I would like a warm, rainy day to clean the garage.  I did “pick-up” in it Monday, but have lots of totes to wash and need to go through the shelves, etc since it is so crowded in the winter that things don’t get put away properly on the shelves (have climb around/through the golf cart and snow blower, over an air compressor, past some wallboard, etc to get to the shelves).

I hope you are enjoying this spring as much as I am.  Thanks for your support.  Check out the buying club, and encourage any interested friends to join the CSA.  Thank you.

Copyright © 2012 Rehoboth Homestead, All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is:
info@rhomestead.com
To read previous newsletters. go to our website .

Posted in General | Comments Off

April 18th Update

Apr 18th, 2012 by

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that it doesn’t belong in a fruit salad.” I don’t know the origin of this statement.  I got it off another farmer’s email.

It’s been a busy week, though it doesn’t sound like much.  I have about half the potatoes planted.  My goal, which I have met so far but will probably miss Thursday, is to plant 100 lbs/day. I have chiseled the field with the ancient Fordson toolbar we got last year (this is its first use) and then disked it.  The chiseling certainly helped loosen the soil,to a little deeper depth, and with the dryness it is in the nicest planting condition I think we’ve ever had.  And I didn’t have to rototill.  The chiseling lifted and shattered, and the disk then broke it up. I actually did the chiseling a couple weeks ago, and then disked today to get weeds that were growing.

Many of the tomatoes need to planted in the hoophouse. I have been hesitant since I will put them in the new hoophouse this year and it is not as “tight” and warm as the old hoophouse. I am hoping Monday’s cold night forecast is the last.

I spent most of Saturday tucking the edges of the plastic mulch in for the strawberries.  With the wind at least 80% of it had come loose. If the plastic is not pulled tight the wind gets in through the holes around the plants (and any place along the edge that the soil doesn’t have covered, and puffs and tugs.  It eventually can lift it out of the soil, and if not that bad can get above the plants and then cover them. It was calm enough that I could take the row cover off and work.  It wasn’t really all that hard, but Saturday night my hands and forearms were really sore. I don’t remember ever having muscles that sore. I was pleasantly surprised how much they had calmed down by Sunday morning. The strawberry plants have really taken off.  You can see the older leaves have the brown on the edges and the new leaves are large and a beautiful vibrant green.

The garlic is looking great. It is several weeks ahead of usual.

We have been pulling the older/larger greens out of the hoophouses to make room for new plantings – more greens, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc. The peppers and cukes aren’t ready to transplanting yet so there are some bare spots. This has been a great opportunity to spread some Vermont Compost that I’ve had several years. This clears the way to use the new Vermont Compost I got this year for containers. There are still literally “spots” of plants that are good – the kales, was the napa cabbages but when I went to harvest a lot of them had bolted.  So what’s wrong with bolting?  Nothing is “wrong” – it is how they reproduce.  But in sending up a flower stalk, they develop a tough inner stem that you probably don’t want to work around.

We moved the hens down onto the triticale cover crop.  They can eat it down and I think it will regrow.  Meanwhile they will get lots of bug goodies in foliage.  They were a bit intimidated by the taller grass, acting almost like they do when they first see snow.

The ducks are REALLY glad the hens have moved.,  Since some of the ducks are setting on eggs, we left them be.  The yard is much calmer, I went out this morning and saw several of them in this “pose” I don’t remember seeing before.  They were sunning!  The first one I noticed was in a corner of the house and bilco door, and I wondered if something was wrong or if she was setting on an egg.  Then I noticed several others with similar posture, and decided they were sunning.

Have a great week!  I am looking forward to bumping up a LOT of seedlings, seeding carrots outside, finishing planting potatoes, and transplanting onions.  Our new raised bed shaper/mulch layer came today, and we have it almost set up. Photos next week, with the onions.

Posted in Chickens, ducks, geese, CSA, General, Vegetables | Comments Off

April 11 update

Apr 12th, 2012 by

can understand why cultures have worshiped the sun. As long as the sun was out today it was very comfortable washing greens and totes outside.  Have a cloud cover the sun and the cold wet hands chilled the whole body.  Sun come back out and comfy again.

The onions I seeded last fall for early onions are looking great.  They need thinning.  The thinnings will probably become scallions.  I’d like to transplant them for more early onions, but am afraid they are too large to do successfully.

 

 

 

 

 

The first set of snap and snow peas are in the ground.  I started them in plugs in the hoophouse to give them a jump start.  The second succession is in the hoophouse germinating now. If you drive by, those two are the rows of things near Route 9, to the south of the hoophouse.  Behind where the distribution “tents” were are the strawberries.

We have lots of plants started for transplanting.  Some of the tomatoes could be transplanted now but I am nervous about the weather.  They are not potbound yet so the only hurry is making space for other plants, including the second planting of tomatoes. Most of the beds in the old hoophouse have been cleaned out and I am spreading compost on them in preparation for cucumbers, peppers, and salad greens.  The birds have loved the greens I am pulling out.

Tony fixed the back door of the truck today (the bolts on the upper track had rusted out, and it was hanging by one roller instead of two) and wired in the 220 power cord.  We turned it on and it works! And the door slides easily now.

I checked the bees today.  This was a thorough check, not just a glance. Activity at the hive entrance had gone from very active last week to nonexistent this week.  They had not acted like they were getting ready to swarm, but I was afraid maybe they had.  I think it was just the cooler cloudy weather that kept them in. I opened each box and took each frame out and checked for brood.  There was some but not as much as I expected.  No queen cells (which would have indicated they were swarming).  The bottom box (of three) just had a little honey but was otherwise empty so I moved it to the top since bees generally work their way up. I think they have enough space that I should not need to bother them again for a month.  They have been eating sugar syrup but did not have much honey stored in cells, so I do need to keep feeding them. It is a nice, populous hive.

For those of you coming to the farmers market, we have really nice mild and tangy salad mixes, wonderful kale, swiss chard, arugula, braising greens, freshly dug leeks, sweet potatoes, nd white/yellow potatoes (I don’t know which the are until I cut them open, and at this point in the year they are mixed together). and other stuff I am not remembering at the moment.  Making ciabatti and mostly whole wheat bread for market.

Recipe of the Week:

Spinach Salad with Bacon Dressing
This is a fairly well-known salad, but I got this specific version from High Mowing Seeds newsletter:

This is a classic salad that is hearty enough for a meal! Add some crumbled blue cheese if you like. Soup and bread complement this nicely.

Spinach Salad

  • 1- 1 1/2 lbs washed spinach, either baby leaf or mature (if using mature leaves, rip up into smaller pieces)
  • 8-12 pieces of bacon
  • One small red onion, sliced thinly
  • 4-6 hardboiled eggs, peeled and chopped or quartered

Warm Bacon Dressing

  • 5 tablespoons reserved bacon fat (or use olive oil if you feel weird about bacon fat)
  • 5 tablespoons red wine vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon honey or maple syrup
  • 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
  • salt and black pepper, to taste

Cook bacon until very crisp in a skillet, in batches if necessary. Drain bacon pieces on a paper towel, and add 5 tablespoons of bacon fat to a small saucepan. Add the rest of the dressing ingredients, mix well, and warm over low heat.

Place the spinach in a large bowl with bacon and onion. Just before eating, add the warm dressing and toss to evenly coat spinach. Divide onto 4 plates and top with chopped eggs and blue cheese, if using.

Photos around the farm:
Easter Dinner Salad:  Violas volunteer in the hoophouse.  I enjoy them so much when they start blooming in February or March, that I carefully transplant them to the edge of the hoophouse rather than just ripping them out of the beds.  They are edible.  I topped the salad with the violas – no the salad was not mostly violas with a little greens.  Other way around.

Heard a commotion the other day while I was working in the hoophouse. With the noise of chicken wings fleeing and chickens squawking I thought it was a hawk attack (we have amazingly few hawk attacks).  Went out and found our cat Ryngi on the hoophouse roof.  Not good.  She has very very long, sharp claws.  We leave them untrimmed because she is outside so much and needs to be able to climb out of harm’s way. Decided it best to let her come down leisurely rather than chase her down, with hopes she would keep the claws in.

The dining room plant stand is in full use and a germinating chamber.  We drape it with a huge white plastic bag which keeps heat from the flourescent lights in (yes, flourescent lights do put out heat). As soon as they germinate they go out to the hoophouse for better light and daytime warmth. Middle right is second planting of tomatoes, mostly ready to be potted up.

 

 

 

 

 

We start small seeds in “seedling trays”, twenty sections.  Warm space for germination is scarce and this helps make good use of that space.

Hope you have a great week. The earliness is giving me time to spread things out.  It is relaxing to get things off the “to do” list now instead of having to do everything in May and early June.

Posted in Bees, CSA, Vegetables | Comments Off

April 4 update

Apr 4th, 2012 by

Sunshine is nice.

Growing plants is a solar activity.  The hoophouses really are incredible solar collectors.  Even on overcast days the hoophouse will get 10 to 20 degrees warmer than outside. (In the summer we roll the sides up and with a nice breeze it is cooler inside than outside.) It has been too warm in the hoophouses for fleece pants and top.  Geting to and from the hoophouses is a different matter with the breeze. I had wet sleeves today and actually put on the down parka to go down the hill and move the sprinklers in the new hoophouse.

Here is a glance in the new hoophouse.  Frustratingly, the flea beetles have already emerged and discovered the greens in the new hoophouse.  I am keeping them row covered (the white stuff along the right side) because the flea beetles have a harder time moving around if they have to crawl instead of hopping. But if you see little holes in your salad mix, it is from the flea beetles. We are about caught up on bed prep in new hoophouse, and spreading the seeding out so you’ll have things multiple weeks.  The ground is on more of a slope than I realized, so we are making terraces with the beds.

I am taking most of the plants that overwintered in the old hoophouse out.  They are thinking it is time to “bolt”, or go to flower.  We will have napini next week! The birds are fully enjoying the greens I am pulling out (VIDEO). I planted three beds of carrots in that nice sandy soil so we’ll hopefully have a treat of early baby carrots.

The wind is raising havoc with the strawberries. We stretched black plastic mulch (for warmth and weed control) across raised beds, pushed soil against the sides, punched holes in it and planted the strawberries in the holes.  The wind gets in those holes and jiggles the plastic until the sides come loose. I have the heavy row cover stretched over it to keep the plastic mulch from blowing off.  Where it has pulled up, the strawberry plants are now under black plastic instead of in the holes.  I hope they haven’t cooked.  It is too windy to rebury the edges. I tried crawling under the row cover with a shovel to work on it this morning, but there isn’t enough room.

Amyone know a good dowser?

Time to get the new irrigation well drilled. I had a name of a dowser, but haven’t been able to track him down.  Anyone know of a good dowser? For irrigation we need a higher flow well than just a household well, and water is spotty in this area, so I’d like to stack the deck in favor of a good siting before drilling.

Tony took got the tractors out and started getting them ready.  The small Kubota has had a bad front tire, but after winter it didn’t hold air at all, so we have two new tires (over $100 each).  We have a 60+ year old Allis Chalmers G, which is a wonderful cultivating tractor.  We converted it from a finicky gas engine to electric.  The tires on it were shot when we got it and we bought two new ones at over $1000 each.  One of them has never held air. Tony assumed he was just doing something wrong since he hasn’t mounted a lot of tires. He would do the soapy water thing and no leaks, but put weight on it and it leaked.  So he took it along to Warren Tire when he got the other tires and they couldn’t find anything wrong either, but had the same results.  Guess we’ll just pump it up each time I want to use it. We’ve had them too many years (and not used the G those years because of the bad tire) to get a replacement.

I wrote a pretty big check this week, but will wait until it is here and I have photos to fill you in on that one. I watch the checkbook go down and about the time I’m gulping, CSA payments come in and I breathe easy again.  Thank you.  Which reminds me, for those who haven’t paid in full yet, please do by the end of the month.

We can take SNAP (Food Stamps)!

Which also reminds me, I got approval today to accept SNAP (food stamps) for the CSA. If you know someone who tries to eat really healthily and uses SNAP, please let them know. I will also be able to accept them for eggs, chicken, and non-CSA sales.

I harvested a few napa cabbages for market. These are a very different type than I was growing last year. -I was trying for a smaller head since a small “Bilko” that I grew last year was 5 lbs. but these are whole different type of leaf – much smoother, more like an overgrown pac choi.  They’ll be good and crunchy though.

It is getting late and tomorrow is an early morning for bread making, so I hope I’ve remembered everything remotely interesting. Have a good week!

Posted in CSA, General, Vegetables | Comments Off

March 28, 2012 update

Mar 30th, 2012 by

First Mussie is setting.

Our first mussie is firmly setting. Another is keeping eggs warm at night and getting ready to set firm.  How can I tell?  For one thing, she stays in the nest.  They do need to get out once or twice a day, but anytime I look, she’s on the nest.  I have actually pulled them off the nests at least once a day in the past to be sure the ducks get filled and emptied. Second, when I walk by the nest she chirps at me   – “Stay away!” We have been taking reasonably clean eggs from all the mussies and loading them into those two nests.  We have had mussies hatch 16, so that is our upper limit of how many eggs we put in a nest.

The truck makes a good warm room.

I’m making good use of the insulated box on the truck as cold night protection for tomatoes, etc.  We have a small electric heater inside keeping it about 50. We put them in Monday hoping to take them out Wednesday, but the forecast for Thursday is for little to no heat gain during the day and low twenties at might. There are forty flats of tomatoes, plus peppers, cukes (haven’t germinated yet but in the aqua and brown pots at the front), flower seedlings, etc. It took about 45 minutes to load.  I am thinking that the big growers get plants shipped to them, and it must take several days to get them, so I am checking them daily but hoping to leave them in the warm dark until Friday.  Friday forecast is sunny enough that hopefully the hoophouse soil will hold enough heat to keep them safe after that. The double layer plastic plus row cover gives at least 5 degrees protection, but sometimes the forecast is off by 5 degrees so I want to play safe with the tomatoes. If I remember correctly, tomatoes do most of their growing at night, so maybe they’ll take good advantage of a three day night.

 Greens.

This is pac choi week.  The white stemmed (small plants) are seriously bolting so will be pulled out after tomorrow, and the green stemmed mid-sized are perfect but threatening to bolt so I picked them all.  The napa cabbage is growing nicely so I may harvest a few at an early stage in a couple weeks. The spinach is gorgeous.  Some of it is bolting and being pulled out to make room for June CSA crops, but we have plenty of really nice spinach. Monday night was very hard on the green romaine salad mix lettuce. I ended up just pulling the lettuce mix out and feeding it to the chickens. I made a video of them feasting.

Prep

We have one full bed of the new hoophouse ready and a second very close to ready. We dug trenches along the sides of the beds and filled them with compost for the tomato plants to come.  We are planting salads and other quick/short greens, radishes, and beets on the beds between the tomato rows. I should have taken a photo of the salad greens before I harvested – they were lush looking. I was in a hurry though because I have my first workers compensation audit Thursday before market, so need to clean house for the auditor who will be at my computer and looking through my records. Not that the auditor is so special, but the house really does need a good vacuum and mopping. I will need to be by him to answer questions so that will put a crimp in my morning preparations.  I am suddenly a little behind on seedings – went to the Adirondack Chicken Summit Sunday and to a Winter Greens workshop Tuesday, so lost some production time. Really needed and used the couple of “nasty” days to catch up on book work, ordering things, government reporting, etc.Machinery.

Machinery

Our truck is a 1999 model.  There is some damage on one side of the box, and some serious rust under the back of the box, but the cab etc is pristine and it is in great shape.  The back bumper is really heavy duty and was pristine until I backed the truck up to the hoophouse to put the tomatoes in.  You really cannot see behind you from the drivers seat.  I carefully missed the sand pile and the ditch and the electric service box but came up hard against a tree. One side of the bumper now sags about 6″.  I ordered our raised bed shaper today, $3300. It will save a tremendous amount of time, the 4 inch rise will help in wet weather, and it will give a smooth seedbed so that my flame weeder will work well.  The cultivation equipment, whether the simple sweeps we’ll use this year or the basket weeders I may get in the future, work best on a smooth seedbed so this purchase is a step forward in several ways in our weed control efforts. It also will pack the seedbed so seeders will work better. Hopefully we will be able to focus more on planting, harvesting, and washing and less on weeding.

Recipe of the Week:

Basic Pac Choi

pac choi
garlic
olive oil
salt and pepper

If bunched pac choi, you can probably just rinse and slice to desired length.  Medium to large pac choi need to have the stems separated and rinsed to clean out soil. Then slice to desired size.
Place oil and garlic in a skillet, and saute until the garlic begins to soften.  Add the pac choi, salt, and pepper and cook just until the pac choi changes translucency, so it is both tender and crisp.

You may add a nice vinegar or soy sauce for variety.  Or use pac choi in place of asparagus for Eggs Benedict.

Posted in Chickens, ducks, geese, CSA, General, Recipes, Vegetables | Comments Off

Resources for Adirondack Chicken Summit

Mar 24th, 2012 by

Premier Fencing – electric poultry netting to keep 4-legged predators out, waterers, etc

American Pastured Poultry Producers Association – for free-range chicken raising

The Small Scale Poultry Flock - new book for “natural” or “organic” chicken raising. Also a lot of info at his site.

Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens – good standard book

Backyard Poultry magazine – many articles are online

NEPPA Hatchery – New York hatchery. I have used with great satisfaction.

AJ Farms Domani Ranch near Seneca Falls. Don’t know anyone who has gotten their birds, but someone I respect has met with them and thinks they are raising their birds well.  They are using organic feed, and will raise chicks for you.  Website did not have prices, but does have phone number prominent.  Also, if you list me (Beth Spaugh) as having referred you I can get $5 off one order.

Moyers Hatchery – Pennsylania, good  for broilers, limited selection layers

Hoovers Hatchery – Iowa, good for broilers, good selection of layers

Welp Hatchery – Iowa – good for broilers, good selection layers

Sandhills Preservation Center - order by mail only, heritage & rare breeds & genetic preservation

We use Poulin Grain feed from Ward Lumber in Jay, and they deliver it to us.  They also can get Green Mountain Organic feed. Order deadline for chicks/ducklings/goslings/turkey/guinea is April 3.  They have a scalder and a plucker they will rent out.  Ask for Shannon Bombard.

Google “poultry ark” or “chicken coop” for ideas for housing.  Add “U.K.” to the search for some nice ones.

Posted in Chickens, ducks, geese | Comments Off

March 21, update – bees are doing great!

Mar 21st, 2012 by

The row cover worked well

I laid a 30 x 100 foot sheet of heavy duty row cover over the strawberries last fall as a protective mulch.  Using straw provides actual insulation while row cover provides wind protection and keeps a little soil heat in and can trap a little heat in sunny weather – maybe 4 degrees.  We couldn’t get straw at all last fall, much less weed-free straw.  So I just spread the row cover over the plants.  I think we have 99% survival.  Since with sunny weather it can be warmer under the row cover (usually a desirable effect) I pulled the row cover off because I really don’t want to hurry the strawberries into bloom and then have a freeze destroy the blossoms.

I used the same type row cover over the garlic, which already was about 6 inches tall last fall.  I peaked under and it looks good.  I will replace that with lighter row cover, but I don’t care if the garlic gets more warmth and grows faster because of the row cover.  In fact, I’d like it.  There is a new pest of the onion family in the area, and I may end up putting lightweight row cover over all the onion family to exclude the leek moth.  We have not had it yet but it has been in Plattsburgh. I also took row cover (about six layers of lightweight row cover) off the overwintered leeks (photo).  We’ll have freshly dug leeks at market this week! They were not in the online list because I wasn’t sure of their quality. Fortunately I also didn’t list the radishes and salad turnips I thought we’d have because when I pulled them this afternoon they were ugly.  We will have freshly dug parsnips.  They are on the small to tiny size because last summers dry spell really set them back.  But after a winter’s cold they are sweet.

We are experimenting with overwintering onion seedlings.  Two advantages – we can direct seed into warm fall soil and can have earlier onions for market.  The trick is finding varieties that will survive cold and figuring out when to plant them.  If we plant too late they will be too small, and if we plant too early they will get large enough to think they are in their second year and go to seed instead of forming bulbs.  These are larger than I expected but the size is perfect for spring sown transplants..

 

There is pollen out there!

I stood by the bees a while Saturday and watched to see if they were finding any pollen.  I saw one with what I thought was bright yellow pollen on her rear legs, but only one.  So I did a couple chores and got the camera hoping the others had found her source.  It is hard to count bees and know who is just milling around and who is a new one on the landing board, but I’d guess 5 to 20% of the bees were coming in with light tan pollen. Pollen is important for feeding brood (larvae) so this bodes well for a population explosion in three weeks or so. A good guess would be it is mostly soft maple pollen, but driving back from Malone today (Wednesday) getting seed potatoes there were lots of trees budding out. I tried to get you a better photo Sunday but those with pollen were very intent on getting it into the hive.  Usually they land on the landing board and walk in but they were flying right into the hive entrance and then landing Sunday.  I put more syrup on Tuesday, and took the jar of old honey out.  They hadn’t finished it yet but were obviously enjoying it.  I put it out where they can still salvage it.

The upper part of the field looks good too.

My focus has been on the new hoophouse and plantings by the road when I have been down in the field. Saturday I checked overwintered flower plants which looked good, then noticed the raspberries hadn’t been thinned yet so spent several hours thinning and pruning raspberries.  You can see the difference it makes.  I thinned more than usual because I take out the scrawny ones that won’t support the weight of berries, and there were lots of scrawny ones this year. My guess is that is a result of last summer’s long dry spell, or maybe I didn’t thin them enough last spring and they were crowded. It could use a little more thinning but they are budding out, so food that was stored in their roots over winter is being translocated up into the stalk.  I would have liked to prune them before they started doing that so we wouldn’t waste any of their food reservoir in the trimmings.  They just were not on my radar screen, and when we have had nice days its been really muddy so I have concentrated on the hoophouses. The row cover you see through the raspberries is on garlic, but I took it off this evening.  Some of the garlic is probably 12 inches tall.  Will water them tomorrow.

Wilted Spinach Salad

From Rock Spring Farm’s newsletter

1/2 lb fresh spinach
4 Tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, peeled and pressed
1/2 cup coarsely chopped hazelnuts- or almonds
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
salt
freshly ground pepper

Heat the oil in a small skillet. Add the nuts and cook over low heat for about five minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the garlic near the end. Pour over the spinach, scraping in as much of the oil as possible. Toss until spinach is coated and the nuts are well distributed. Sprinkle in the vinegar and salt and pepper, toss again, and serve.

Posted in Bees, CSA, Vegetables | Comments Off

March 14 Newsletter – we got a truck!

Mar 14th, 2012 by

March 14, 2012

New Truck!! Tuesdays should be calmer.

Last week I listed major investments we still have to make this spring. First on the list was a market vehicle. Bruce Kennedy had a nice looking AWD regular van on his lot last fall we would probably have bought but it was for one of his family members so not for sale (just sitting out their tantalizingly). Then I narrowed it down to a Ford Transit or Dodge Sprinter. The Transit gets good gas mileage and is very easy to load and unload, but the longest table/wood it will hold is 6 feet and it can’t take much weight. It would have been great for farmers market but we need something that will carry more weight and larger things sometimes. The Sprinter was a little larger than I thought we needed, but is diesel and would take 8 foot things and carry a fairly heavy load. I had a lead on a Sprinter in southern Vermont at a very good price, but it had problems so I passed. I asked for advice about the Transit and Sprinter on our farming email list and a farmer in New Jersey offered his 1999 Isuzu with 14 foot refrigerated box. He was using it as an on-farm cooler at this point since no longer needed his own refrigerated truck. It is WAY bigger than I need, but it gets the same gas (diesel) mileage as regular vans and pickup trucks and was priced less than used Transits and Sprinters. I can use a second cooler (keep one really cold and one cool in the summer, keep one moist and one dry in the winter) and this will plug into 220. It is a flat plate cooler so instead of taking heat (and moisture) out of the air, it blows air over a frozen plate and doesn’t dehydrate veggies. It will make setting up Tuesday distributions much easier/faster. And I’ll keep things like bags, signs, and tables in it. So, we got it Thursday (I didn’t mention it last week since we weren’t sure we’d get it until Tony and friend looked at it), licensed it Friday, and drove it over to Vermont Saturday to pick up 2+ tons of organic fertilizer and cover crop seed. It passed NY inspection Tuesday (whew!). Anyone have a lead on one of those ramps that slides under the body? Or a section of roller table?

Would love hindsight on the future.

The weather is deceptive. Do we trust it and start things that will go outside soon, or wait so they will be prime transplant size when it should be safe? Last year we could have started now. I did take advantage of at least ten days safe forecast and moved tomato seedlings out to the hoophouse and potted them up from the little 1″ squares they were in into larger pots. They will grow much stockier with the better light. I also transplanted the onion seedlings into. the ground in the hoophouse to grow into transplants for the field. I should have thrown out the poor potbound salad mix, pac choi, and broccoli raab seedlings but I finally got them planted in the new hoophouse.I had been planting salad mix bit by bit as I got compost down and beds prepped.

The bees are taking advantage of the warm weather. They have definitely come out of winter mode. Four weeks ago I put a pint of sugar syrup on their top feeder. Last week when I took 2 quarts out I threw out most of the first pint they hadn’t eaten. Tuesday we peeked and the feeder was dry. That’s a pretty big change in activity. Last night I made up a gallon and let it cool overnight and put it in this morning. As soon as it gets sunny I need to open the hive up and take that bottle of honey out and replace it with frames before they fill that empty area with a mass of wax.

Salads are looking scrumptious!

The spinach and salad mix in the new hoophouse are beautiful and ready for harvest. The stands aren’t very dense since I transplanted them and have been over-correcting my tendency to plant too closely together. Seems like you can either buy inexpensive salad and slather it with expensive salad dressings, or buy good salad and use less expensive and simpler salad dressings, so this week’s recipe will be salad dressing.

Plattburgh’s Winter Farmers Market is plugging along. Clover Mead Farm will be there this week with their cheeses letting you taste before you buy. Caton Acres has lamb and pork. Hid-in-Pines has a full lineup of wines. Asgaard Farm offers goat cheeses (feta and Tomme), goat milk soap, and grass-fed beef if you order ahead, and I have fresh salad and spinach as well as carrots, celeriac, sweet potatoes, fingerling potatoes, and freshly made whole wheat breads. We’d love to see you, Thursday afternoons, 3 to 6, at the Plattsburgh City Gym.

Just some tidbits you might find interesting: I went to an organic small grains meeting at CCE-Westport yesterday, hoping a farmer from Vermont had gotten my email and would bring me wheat berries since I am running low. I had heard his Red Fife wheat was absolutely the best tasting, but he has sold out. But there was discussion of wheat that related to bread baking. Years ago when I baked bread I was told to get the highest protein wheat I could, so it would have lots of gluten and rise well. Then recently I read that most of the European breads folks love are made with relatively low protein wheat, because low protein wheat grows in Europe. There is a group in New York and New England working to bring back good heritage wheats adapted to the area, and even cross-breeding them with some modern wheats to get the best of both. In their travels/training they learned about “falling number”. The falling number is the time it takes for a probe to fall through a dough. The longer it takes the stronger the gluten. Sam Sherman of Champlain Valley Milling said he had worked with a lot of wheat last year that looked terrible on paper (low protein, etc), but made great bread. The gluten was strong. The other interesting things I noted were that there is a huge range in flavor among wheats (one of the best yielders in their tests tasted horrible) and that back when folks harvested by hand and made shocks, they cut it less ripe than folks do now since now they want it dry for the combines. Leaving it to dry exposes it more to molds and other degradation. So when I do grow my little bits of wheat/spelt/etc I will harvest it early and take it in somewhere to finish drying.

Basic Salad Dressing

from Nourishing Traditions

1 tsp Dijon-type mustard, smooth or grainy
2 T plus 1 tsp raw wine vinegar
1/2 C extra virgin olive oil
1 T expeller-expressed flax oil

Dip a fork into the jar of mustard and transfer about 1 teaspon to a small bowl. Add vinegar and mix around. Add olive oil in a thin stream, stirring all the while with the fork, until oil is well mixed or emulsified. Add flax oil and use immediately.

Photos: Spinach looking yummy! The birds enjoyed the savoy cabbages that had overwintered in the new hoophouse but bolted.
Copyright © 2012 Rehoboth Homestead, All rights reserved.Our mailing address is:
info@rhomestead.com

Posted in Bees, Chickens, ducks, geese, CSA, Recipes, Vegetables | Comments Off

Older Posts »