Fall Farm Chores

Having fun pulling up drip tape

This week I talk about those last few farm chores we do before we can say the season is over, which it is for you but not for us. But first these two announcements.

In case you didn’t know, the season is over. If you accidentally come out to the farm to pick up your produce we don’t want you to waste the trip so we’ll find a nice project for you to do, like pulling up drip tape. Just one of the many services we perform for our members!

We are taking orders for 2025. Yikes! 2025 already? We are a quarter way through this century. Seemed to take a lot longer for a quarter century to pass last century. Anyway, for existing members you can send in a deposit of $100 to reserve your spot. New members should order through our online store. You can choose “Deposit Plan” at check out if you only want to put down the $100. However, if you want to use a credit card you’ll have to pay the full amount. My store doesn’t believe in partial payments when it comes to credit cards.

What will we have this week?

Lovely weather apparently! Other that that, nothing.

Farm News

This is the week where we put the farm to bed. Activities to achieve this include — but are not limited to — pulling up drip tape, removing plastic mulch, rolling up header lines, storing away sprinklers and other equipment, winterizing the tractor, removing the storing the tomato cages, and mulching the garlic. The biggest project of those is of course removing the plastic mulch and drip tape. We started using plastic four years ago or so. I wasn’t keen on doing so since at the time the used plastic would end up in the landfill, and that just seemed like a terrible idea. But now all trash in Washington County gets sorted and made into fuel to generate electricity. Still not perfect but at least it is not filling up space in a landfill and is serving as fuel to replace fuel that would have been extracted from the ground anyway. So a partial win.

Tomato cages resting for the winter

What I’ve learned over the years about using plastic mulch and drip tape is that it doesn’t really save labor over the course of the season. It helps reduce labor in some areas of farming but adds labor in the installation and removal processes. Let’s take a look at some of these areas.

One of the reasons for using plastic is that it suppresses weeds so that is less hoeing and cultivating. This is true, but we still have to cultivate the aisles and weed the holes where the plants protrude from the plastic. Yes it is less time consuming for sure but still isn’t labor free once the plastic is down.

Another thing about plastic mulch: it takes extra time to prep the soil and lay the plastic in the first place so this is an area where we are adding labor. And of course there is the cost of the plastic and the cost of the machine to lay the plastic. And finally, there is the labor expense of removing the plastic, which isn’t trivial. It is a multi-day project.

So we are adding labor to the spring and fall and reducing labor during the summer. In essence, plastic mulch flattens the labor curve. During the peak of the season when we are busy harvesting, washing and packing produce we aren’t as concerned about weed management as we were in the pre-plastic era. By then the plants are big enough to compete with the weeds that may have germinated after the hole weeding. By then it is next to impossible to cultivate the aisles anymore due to the size of the plants. The tractor doesn’t have the ground clearance to drive over the plants anymore. So we are able to focus our labor on getting the produce out to our customers instead of spending valuable time hoeing and hand weeding.

Fully mulched garlic

That isn’t to say we are done with those. Many of our plants aren’t grown on plastic. For the most part, the only ones we do grow on plastic are the long-term warm season crops like tomatoes, peppers, and winter squash. But using the plastic on those reduces our labor for those crops and frees it up to do all the other farm chores that need to be done. And that makes farm life much easier.

And of course we can’t forget other benefits of using plastic mulch such as the water savings plastic mulch and drip tape provide. Without these two things the last few years we would have been short of water to irrigate the farm during the drought seasons. We just don’t have the capacity to irrigate overhead all the produce we produce. And finally, it warms the soil and allows for some level of frost protection. We’ve seen in past years when we’ve had a late frost our warm season crops survive at greater quantities when they’ve been planted on black plastic than when they weren’t on black plastic. You can learn more by reading this newsletter.

Anyway, all-in-all we find using black plastic on the long-term warm season crops is more beneficial than detrimental. Even at this time of year when we spend days and days removing it. Now if the weather was wet, cold and nasty while we are pulling it up I might be feeling differently about plastic mulch.

As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions, orders, jokes, and anything else you think would enlighten my day!

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