This week’s news with this weeks announcements.
Contrary to what many of you thought after reading last week’s newsletter, I am in fact not retiring. I already retired. I took the old tires off the tractor and put new tires on the tractor. I retired it. I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand. Have you never retired your car? Anyway, hopefully it will be a few more years before I retire again — either by getting new tires or stopping farming.
Speaking of retiring. We are still looking for more help. Due to the loss of one employee and the soon departure of another we will be struggling to get everything accomplished daily in the amount of time it takes for the earth to spin around its axis. So if you know someone who can either help us or slow down the spin of the earth please send them my way!
We are still taking back any pint size clam shells for the cherry tomatoes.
Farm News
This week’s farm news is something I wrote earlier in the spring when I was less busy for just these types of weeks when I have no time to write a newsletter. I hope you enjoy it!
Flattening the curve. This is a saying that has come up these last few years but from our perspective a concept we have been striving for since the beginning of the farm.
If you look at the labor requirements for a farm of our size you find a fairly well defined bell pepper shaped curve with the peak in August. Now it varies a bit from year to year and isn’t always exactly bell pepper shaped. Sometimes its zucchini shaped. Other times it is more kohlrabi shaped. But in all cases it has the form of one of the many vegetables we grow.
In the early spring there is about as much to do that one person can handle the load. It is mostly seeding in the greenhouse. As the weather warms and there are outdoor tasks the labor load increases. Once the last frost has passed, the labor load increases again. Then when the pest arrive and the weed proliferate the labor load increases yet again. Add on to it harvesting, washing packing and delivering veggies and you hit peak labor.
By the time the harvesting reaches its crescendo the planting has ceased. Then the weeds start to germinate less. The pests die off or the plants are so large we either don’t need to manage the pests or the plants have passed their production time. Then when frost hits the workload drops again as the warm season crops die. Finally, by the end of October we are down to mulching garlic and putting the farm to bed. As you can imagine, finding labor to match our curve is a challenge.
One way we have flattened the curve is by introducing plastic mulch into our system. It wasn’t a decision we took lightly. We had contemplated it for over a decade. We finally took the plunge when COVID hit, our sales increased and we discovered the discarded plastic will be used to generate electricity and not just thrown in a landfill. Plus some of us were getting older and needed a less physical way to farm. It wasn’t ideal but nothing in farming is. Everything is always a tradeoff.
So we bought a plastic mulch layer/drip tape layer/fertilizer spreader combination machine. Much like all things in farming, it wasn’t a push button tool. The first year we used it –2021 — was quite the learning experience with lots of swearing, frequent swearing, and more swearing. But we figured out a few things and got better over time. Then we had the whole winter to forget these lessons and start over with the swearing, and cursing. But we also recalled how we fixed some of the problems and became much more successful using it.
Prior to using plastic we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to manage the weeds and rarely succeeding. Now we spend an incredible amount of time trying to manage the weeds and sometimes succeeding. Sounds like a win to me! But there is a cost to laying the mulch and not just in the cost of the materials. It does take more time to prep the soil and it takes time to remove the mulch. But both of these tasks are done when labor is in less demand. So we flatten the curve.
Planting through plastic is not easy without a machine. So once we chose to move to plastic we also had to buy a machine to assist us in the planting. Much like the mulch layer it has taken us a couple of years to get the hang of it. We had hoped it would be a matter of dragging the machine over the plastic using the tractor with a couple of people on the back placing the plants but as we’ve seen over and over again, it isn’t that easy. Keeping up with the slowest speed of the tractor is a huge challenge. So we’ve learned over the last two years that we have to follow up each bed with a walking pass filling in the gaps and setting some of the plants. Overall though the time it saves — and the backs it saves — is worth the extra effort.
The plastic also reduces our weed pressure so during the peak of the season we have far fewer weeds to deal with which makes it easier to harvest the produce. Again flattening the curve.
Finally, since we have to irrigate under the plastic we have to put down drip tape. Overhead sprinklers would not get the water to the plants. Laying drip tape when we lay plastic adds virtually no extra effort than laying just plastic. Once laid we can hook up the drip lines to a water supply and water the plants without having to move much more than a hose. Compared to moving sprinklers this is a far easier solution even when we have to fix a leak or two in the drip tape. Moving sprinklers requires two or more people (the more the easier/better/faster). Hooking up a hose requires one person. I am far more likely to run the irrigation when it only takes me to make it happen. So we get better, healthier plants and use less water and labor. Of course it takes time to set up the drip lines — longer than setting up the sprinklers — but we only have to do it once for each field and we do it when labor is more available. Again flattening the curve.
Plastic mulch is just one of the time-savers we’ve implemented over the years here at the farm. Maybe if I find some time I can talk about some of the others. But don’t count on it. Time is a precious commodity and it seems the never ending tasks find a way to fill every second of it.
What will we have this week?
Lots of tomatoes! Some tomatoes. More tomatoes. Plus cucumbers, squash (though I think we passed peak squash we are still getting a reasonably large number of squash), beans, carrots (we dug them on Monday but didn’t get around to washing them until Tuesday so they seem to be holding on to the dirt pretty tightly. You may need to scrub to get them perfectly clean), cherry tomatoes, some tomatillos, onions, a few eggplants, a few cabbages, a few cauliflowers, some corn, some melons for those who have yet to receive a melon, some watermelons (see “melons”), some pickling cucumbers, some basil, some cilantro, a few hot peppers and a few other things i don’t recall.
It is a Coffee and Flower week!
Recipe of the Week
Left as an exercise for the reader.
Joke of the Week
How do you fix a tomato?
Tomato paste.
As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions, jokes, brain teasers and anything else you think would be interesting.