The King is Dead

Long live the King! But first an announcement or two.

Just a reminder that we take pint size clam shell containers to use for cherry tomatoes. Feel free to bring them to the farm or put them in your delivery tote. Saving the planet one clam shell at a time!

I have to assume since few (nobody) was able to help with the garlic harvest last Friday that it just wasn’t a good day to do it for all you who have been chomping at the bit to get out here and harvest it. Luckily for you, we did not have time to do it. So, there will be another opportunity for you to take off work from your lousy job and come lend a hand. I’m not sure when that will be. It depends on the timing of the topic of this week’s newsletter below.

Now on to the topic of this week’s newsletter!

Farm News

A while back I told you about a problem I was having with my tiller. As I quick reminder: the tiller went “clunk” when it shouldn’t have gone “clunk” but eventually stopped going “clunk”. Well this week it still didn’t go “clunk”. In fact, after a brief use it didn’t do anything. No “clunks”. No “whirs”. No “plinks”. Sure the PTO shaft turned fine. But the tilling part of the tiller did not. And this is quite possibly the most important part of the tiller. A tiller can’t be called a tiller if it doesn’t till can it? This was a bad sign. This was the kind of problem where the solution does not involve a lot of repairing. It calls for a new tiller. So, that’s what I did. I bought a new, expensive tiller.

I suppose I wasn’t surprised it happened. In fact, this was my exact plan. If I could keep the old tiller working until the season ended I would take it apart and see if I could figure out what was causing the clunks. If I was unable to keep it alive then it was time for a new tiller. So, I just had to implement part B of the plan — unfortunately.

So now I have a new tiller attached to the old tractor. I also bought a bigger tiller that they didn’t make back 20 years ago. I think that was the right choice but only time will tell. With the wider tiller I am able to cover my tracks, which wasn’t the case with the older one. Now there is no way to tell which direction I was tilling so it will be much harder to find me!

Once I got the tiller assembled — some assembly is always required with farm implements it seems — off I went to try it out. Of course it didn’t work well immediately. I had some tweaking to do. By the way, I’m much better at tweaking than twerking but I’m working on it. And once the tweaking was accomplished I set about to till. And boy did I till!

The next day as I was walking down the drive I found a broken bolt and nut. Not a good sign. These things don’t just fall from the sky. Was it part of the new tiller? I hoped not. And suspected not as well since it was a bit rusty with no visible signs of paint. But what was it from then? I looked around the tractor a bit then decided the time to figure it out would be tomorrow.

The next day was tomorrow so I started looking around the tractor. I then recalled that while I was driving the tractor during the previous day’s tweaking I felt a noticeable shift in the load (some could say this is a sign of twerking but I would never say that) on the back of the tractor. A thousand pounds has a lot of inertia so feeling shifts isn’t necessarily problematic. But in this case it was worth considering.

I discovered a u-bolt that holds the three-point hitch stabilizer had broken and that was the source of the bolt part and nut. Of course finding a replacement wasn’t possible on short notice and I needed the tractor to compete a bunch of stuff so I just got a couple of regular bolts and nuts and reattached the stabilizer. All was good on the farm — until it wasn’t again.

As I was driving the tractor carrying some of this week’s squash, Sharon mentioned that it looked like my tractor tire was peeing. Yikes! Looking down I had to agree with her. It appears I have ruptured a hole in the sidewall of the tractor tire and the fluid was leaking out. I know what you’re thinking, “Wait. Farmer Chris. There is fluid in your tires? That sounds problematic in itself!” Well it is not — except when it starts leaking out. Many of us farmers put fluid in the tires to increase the weight of the tires. This provides greater traction and increased lifting ability of the front end loader. As we all recall from high school physics, traction is the friction between the tire and the surface it is rolling over. Friction is proportional to the normal force between the two objects — in this case the objects being the tractor tire and the earth. The normal force is the weight the tractor exerts on the wheel due to gravity. So by adding fluid to the tire we increase the weight of the tire thus increasing the normal force and thereby increasing the friction! Who knew high school physics would prove so valuable?

Of course increasing the lifting ability of the front end loader by adding fluid to the tires also has to do with physics. This problem is left as an exercise for the reader.

So the bottom line is that the tractor is now in the shop getting the tire repaired (hopefully I’ll not have to replace it). This pushes some of our plans — like garlic harvesting — until we get the tractor back — hopefully this week. In the mean time we have plenty of things to do without the tractor so we aren’t just sitting around.

What will we have this week?

We will have more squash (the bok choy of summer veggies), tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, beans, sweet corn (the second and slightly larger variety), the last of the snow peas, the last of the fennel, kale, the first of the cabbage, a few cauliflower, a few kohlrabi, lots of broccoli, some cucumbers, some pickling cucumbers, some hot peppers, cilantro, onions (sounds like salsa!), a few eggplants, and of course all the other things I have forgotten.

This week we have flowers (and for a few people their forgotten mushrooms).

This week’s recipe

Joke of the week

What did the broccoli say to the cauliflower while making their getaway?

“Floret!”