Sorry for the late newsletter. I was too busy picking zucchini.
An announcement then on to the good stuff.
We take back pint size clam shell containers, the ones that blueberries typically come in. We use them for cherry tomatoes. Feel free to bring them to the farm or leave them in your delivery tote at the drop sites. Only 1-pint containers please.
What will we have this week?
Let me start by saying the zucchinis and cucumbers are doing really well. So we’ll have zucchinis, lettuce, various peas, zucchinis, pickling cukes, cukes, zucchinis, cukes, onions, green onions, zukes, cukes, some chard, some eggplants, zukes, a few kohlrabi, some cukes and a few other things including zukes and cukes.
Just a quick note to acknowledge that this season has not been a good lettuce season. With the widely fluctuating temps and the heavy rains and no rains the lettuce never figured out whether to keep growing or go to seed. So we started harvesting them on the small side hoping to salvage what we could from the planting. It’s unfortunate but at least we have cukes and zukes!
We have fruit this week! Fruit will be more strawberries, blueberries, nectarines, avocados, cherries and black plums.
We also have coffee, eggs and flowers this week.
Farm News
This week we dive head first into how our watering approach has evolved over the almost quarter century we’ve been farming. What? A quarter century? That’s almost a half century which when rounded up is a whole century! That is an awfully long time.
When we first bought the farm the land was rented to a corn and soybean farmer. Sometime prior to that I learned it was an apple orchard. Someone I had met in the past — that I no longer recall — said he worked here when it was an orchard. Back in the 70’s it was owned by the state Bee Commissioner — a governmental role I suspect no longer exists. I learned that when I spoke with a bee keeper early this century who knew where we were located and could completely describe the inside of our house. A bit creepy but also fascinating. How do I keep stumbling upon people who know more about this property’s history than I do?
Anyway, back to the topic. Since this was a rented corn and soybean farm there wasn’t any water available other than the house well, which being a typical residential well only provided maybe five gallons of water per minute. Once we decided we were going to farm, we needed to figure out a way to get water to our crops. And our crops at the time were quite far away from our only water source.
Now some of you who not plumbers are probably thinking, “Hey Farmer Chris, why not buy a bunch of hoses at the local farm supply store and link them together. Then attach a lawn sprinkler to the end of the hose and voilà you have irrigation!” Never thought of that. And that’s because it just wouldn’t work. Why? Because the water pressure drops along the length of the hose and the longer the hose the greater the pressure drops until it drops to zero. And when it drops to zero no water comes out. I wonder though with a hose this long — it would have to be about 1,000 feet — could the pressure drop so low that we create a vacuum? Maybe I should try that someday.
So running a long hose was out of the question. But we did have a pickup truck, and source of water, and could buy a shorter hose. Maybe we could cobble something together with those things? And so we did — with a few added components. I purchased a 250 gallon tank and a 12 volt water pump. I put the tank in the back of the pick-up truck, filled it with water, then drove it out to the crops. I attached the water pump to the trucks battery for power and a hose to the outlet of the pump. Of course the inlet went into the water tank. Using this contraption I was able to water all the plants by walking up and down the aisles, dragging along 200′ of hose. Of course this was not efficient nor sustainable but it worked.
Being more clever than I should be, I realized if I had a helper I could drive the truck up and down the aisles having the helper use a far shorter hose, like 10 feet, and sit on the back of the truck and as I drove slowly the helper would water the plants. What a great idea! No more dragging the hose over the poor little transplants. Far more efficient and of course less physical.
But like a lot of good ideas, this wasn’t one. What I failed to consider is that a Cummins Turbo Diesel engine creates a bunch of hot gases as it runs, which are released through the exhaust pipes and muffler on the bottom of the truck. These hot gases heat up the muffler to a temperature most plants don’t find comfortable. What ended up happening was we cooked the Napa cabbage before it got past transplant stage! Yikes! I guess there is a good reason tractor exhausts go out the top.
The next evolution of our irrigation solution was when we finally built our house, which included a new well. We sized the well to provide 20-25 gallons/minute of delicious, 290 foot deep, 4.5 billion year old water. 25 gallons/minute is far more water than typical residents would need. But being atypical was necessary for our future farming needs. With this new well we not only were able to deliver more water, but the well was in closer proximity to the area we farmed. In addition to the new well, we ran underground supply lines along the driving areas from the well spigot. This allowed us to get the water from the spigot to the fields fairly easily. But what we didn’t take into account were the gopher’s who reside here needing water to fill their in-ground swimming pools. Every spring and a few times during the summer we are finding and patching holes these vile creatures chew through our pipes. So inconsiderate.
Once we had running water to our fields we needed a way to deliver it that final 200 feet. We bought some sprinklers and poly pipe and cobbled together a 200′ long sprinkler system. It worked and still works today though moving it from place to place is a bit cumbersome. We also tried using drip-tape laid on the surface of the ground. Of course drip tape being drip tape it had a tendency to blow in the wind and get all tangled up. We learned to drop shovel fulls of dirt on it every 10 feet or so to hold it into place. Again this worked but was not ideal. Having drip tape on the surface made hoeing difficult.
In 2020 we finally bought a drip-tape layer/bed maker. It is a piece of equipment that goes on the back of the tractor and lays drip tape under a 4″ or so tall soil bed. This provides us the benefit of drip tape without it being in the way of our hoeing — most of the time. Sometimes the drip tape doesn’t get buried deep enough or our hoers get too aggressive and the tape gets a hole in it. But generally it works ok. It also lays plastic mulch for those plants that benefit from a warmer micro climate. With the plastic mulch we don’t have the problem with hoers cutting the drip tape since we don’t hoe the mulch.
So today about 80% of our fields are irrigated with drip tape. With the other fields we use the sprinklers. We typically use sprinklers on crops that are closely planted and direct seeded — things like beans, peas, and cilantro. We also use them on sweet corn. All the transplanted crops are on drip tape. In a drought year like we had in 2020, and 2021 and 2022 and I believe 2023, we were running irrigation about 12 hours per day. It was a good thing we had figured it out by the 2020s.
Joke of the Week
What did the plant say to the sprinkler?
Stop splashing water. You’re starting to irrigate me!