What does one do on a vegetable farm in Minnesota in November? Find out in this week’s Farm News. But first a couple of announcements.
For all those wondering if they can pop their popcorn let me tell you that I popped some last weekend with excellent results. Your mileage may vary but I think you should be able to pop yours as well. I suggest taking it off the cob and try popping a couple of kernels. If those pop then the rest should as well.
We are still taking orders for the 2024 season. Tell your friend if you have one! And if you don’t why not join and make a few? Sign-up online or for returning members simply send in a $100 deposit either by check, Zelle or PayPal (least favorite since they charge money). Let me know if you have any questions!
I added ‘ShroomShare to the online store. Feel free to order it whenever.
One of our members wrote a lovely article that included a shout out to the farm. Thanks Autumn!
Farm News
So what does a Minnesota vegetable farmer do in November? I guess like every other year, it depends. This year I moaned and groaned for awhile about how cold and wet October was so that we couldn’t get the green garlic planted and the drip tape pulled from the field. But at the same time it was nice to be done with farming. Then last week came along and so much for winter retirement! With the warm dry weather we got to finish up the things we couldn’t get to during the cold wet October. Things like planting the green garlic and pulling the drip tape. It was a surprisingly nice week of farming this late in the year! Also, by planting the green garlic late we unintentionally started a fascinating (at least to me) experiment. We’ve never planted garlic this late in the season. I will be interested to see how it compares to the garlic we planted in October. I’m not sure if there is any value in knowing this since it would be very risky to assume every November will provide the necessary weather to plant garlic but I suppose if the late planted garlic turns out fine and a future October turns out too wet to plant garlic we won’t have to start panicking until mid November. So there’s that.
What else? Hmm. Oh yes. I worked through this past weekend performing one of the most difficult tasks we farmers in the 21st century face that our ancestor farmers did not — moving our website to a new host. Moving to a new host is one of those tasks most of us farmers rarely do so the knowledge on how to do it evaporates over time. Every time it needs to be done again there is a need to relearn those past skills. Plus, with the ever evolving internet environment how one moved a web site ten years ago is not how one moves it today — or so I would suppose since I can’t remember how I did it the last time.
The one important lesson I learned from all this is that everyone on the internet has a different way of doing it. Some are easy. Some are hard. Some work. Some don’t. And in my case, one way worked really easily for one of the web sites I manage but didn’t work for the other. Yet another way — a little less easy way — worked for the one that the other way didn’t but didn’t work for the one where the other way worked. How odd is that? I guess to put it in language we can all understand, it is similar to cultivation. Sometime it is best to use the c-tine cultivator and other times the flex-tine is more appropriate. And of course if all else fails just weed by hand.
The most surprising part to the whole ordeal to me — and I don’t want to toot my horn too loudly here — is that with one aspect of the transfer process I had a many hour argument with the support person — through the support ticket process — where the support person claimed that what I wanted to do couldn’t be done yet I showed him through screenshots that it worked on my old host exactly the way he said it couldn’t work. How do I know more about domain servers than my support person? Finally, I got a new support person who knew how to do what I was asking for and fixed it right away. The part that bothered me about this wasn’t that I knew something the support person didn’t know but that he was unable to accept what I was saying and do more research to see if I was in fact correct — even when presented with indisputable evidence! He treated me like I was some yokel farmer or something. (I was going to say he treated me like a woman but then I feel that some people reading this newsletter would mistakenly get offended by this even though the point in my saying it this way is to expose the biases of some people — especially in the tech world — against women and not to degrade women. But I don’t want people to think I am the misogynist so I’ll use yokel farmer instead).
Anyway, now that a bunch of people reading this newsletter are unjustifiably offended let me assure you that my website is working great — unless this newsletter doesn’t automatically get sent out today, in which case I will have to do some more computering.
The last item of note on November farming is our ginger trial. So far it is looking reasonably good — about the same goodness as the web host transfer. About half of the ginger roots we planted have emerged. Some are still emerging so we haven’t yet given up on those without green poking out of the soil. I still don’t know what to expect over the rest of this experiment — I suppose that is why it is an experiment — but so far so good.
That is pretty much November on the farm this year. Perhaps the next newsletter will focus on December on the farm!
Joke of the Month
What vegetable is cool but not that cool?
Rad-ish
As always, feel free to send in questions, comments, jokes, puzzlers, recipes (maybe I can get to the recipe page this winter), share orders or anything else you think would fill my cold, winter days.