Turns out there are a number of things I have trouble doing one-handed. I had to hire in an extra worker to help at the farm yesterday, so it turns out the broken wrist is also painful in the wallet.

The continuing series of rains has kept the fields too wet to work, so as the fieldwork falls behind schedule, at least I can blame the weather rather than my broken wrist.

I can mouse around on the computer and turn pages, so I’ve been doing more research on a number of topics, including possible herbs to add for essential oils or teas and additional plants to use as cover crops. I have been adding more tasks to my list at a much greater rate than I have managed to complete any.

I’m hoping that soon I can get back to shrinking the task list. There’s a whole lot to get done.

Stewart pruning tomatoes

Keith pruning tomatoes

Rosalio pruning tomatoes

The trellis for the outdoor tomatoes is horizontally strung twine. Inside our hoophouses, we can run the twine vertically, and the plants will respond and grow much higher.

Newly pruned tomatoes in hoophouse

We grow the hoophouse tomatoes in the ground, which we cover with a woven weed-block fabric.  The hoophouse tomatoes ripen a bit earlier, but the main benefit is protection from the fall rains, which splash soil on the plants, leading to a tomato disease called late blight and the rapid death of the tomato plant. In this photo you can see that the crew has removed quite a lot of the tomato foliage.

Tomatoes on pruned tomato vine

Here you can see the thick main trunk loaded down with tomatoes. Note the stubs where side shoots were pruned away.

Pruned cherry tomato plant loaded with blossoms and tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes respond exceptionally well to pruning. Here we see tomatoes forming near the base of the plant, with just a few starting to ripen. The higher branches are awash with blossoms.

Tomato pruning takes a sizable investment in time and labor. The benefits are several. The plants are healthier and less susceptible to pests and to fungal and other diseases. It is easier to monitor the health of the plants and the fruits. Picking is easier and faster, since the tomatoes aren’t buried behind foliage. One missed tomato left go to rot can bring disease to the plant, and is no fun to discover later.

You don’t need to be as obsessive as we are about tomato pruning to benefit from some pruning. Open that plant up and let air flow through.

April is the month when the farm starts to wake up from winter. It is also a month of unforgiving deadlines. I will attempt in this entry to relay what it is like to work through April at the farm. Everyone works hard, but there are many things to enjoy while we wait the arrival of the fruits (and vegetables) of our labors.

Apple bud starting to leaf out

In winter, the farm is just not very photogenic. April is the month when the fresh new green comes back to the land. The buds at the tips of the apple tree branches open up. The blueberry leaf buds open and start to obscure the red stems. The raspberry canes catch the eye with their bright green leaves; while the deep green of the thornless blackberries leaves demand a closer look. The winter rye planted in the fields as a cover crop grows thicker and taller. Most of our transplanted vegetables are covered with rowcover for protection from the cold nights, but the peas sprout vibrant green in their rows. And the grass everywhere turns thick and tall. Actually, now that I think on it, I’m not all that keen on the idea of getting the mowers out once again.

Hawk on perch

The wildlife has been at the farm all winter, but since we are out and about more, we can pay more attention. The hawk perch we put up last year is now used frequently. I’m hoping the hawks are doing their part to control the farm pests. The photo of the hawk on the perch is not very sharp, but it is the best I have managed with my little camera at maximum zoom. There seems to be quite a few weasels on the farm. I’m happy to see the weasels, since they also do their share to catch rodents. Weasels have lived in the raspberry field for years, but there have also been signs and sightings around several different hoophouses and also at Chef Brian’s hoophouse. There are always crows around the farm. The little songbirds and robins are everywhere. Every time I take the tractor out and till a field, I pick up an entourage of crows hoping to find something tasty in the freshly turned soil.  In past years a heron has been a frequent day visitor at the farm. This year I haven’t seen yet seen one at the farm. The Canada geese population varies widely through the year, this month they are nesting. The one nest we were monitoring was raided – nothing but eggshells left. We figure a coyote ate the eggs. We have seen several different coyotes. I think they are mostly passing through, but coyotes are not an unusual sight, and they certainly are not particularly afraid of people.

 As usual at the farm this time of year, we have had to push hard to keep on schedule. It seems to me that April and May may be the two most critical months for as successful vegetable season at the farm. If things go off track in March, there is still time to reschedule or to do things over. If you can’t keep up in April and May, you may have to face abandoning crops for the year. Some crops, like lettuce, we plant every other week all summer, so we are just losing two week’s production. Other crops, like the onions, need to be planted by a certain date or we may as well not plant at all. The big planting push will end sometime in June when we plant the last of the pumpkins. By then we will be in weeding season.

Claire and Stewart planting seeds in flats

This year Claire Thomas of The Root Connection Farm next door is dedicating a significant amount of time to teaching us what she has learned about vegetable growing. We call Claire our Vegetable Guru. We plan to almost double our vegetable production this year, as well as producing plant starts for sale to home gardeners, and her advice will be essential to meeting our plans.

heirloom tomato plant starts

Rereading my April 2 entry, I see it was all about the seemingly endless rain this March. Since then the rainfall totals have tapered off, and the periods between rain events have lengthened. We do still have puddles in a few areas, but we have fields we can prepare for planting. We started out April a bit behind, but with a good shot at getting solidly back on schedule.

We spent a lot of time in the first part of April checking the soil moisture in the fields and scheming how to adjust the planting plans to use the fields that were nearest ready to work. Meanwhile, the greenhouses were filling up with plants rapidly approaching their planting dates. Even so, once we got past the March rains, we managed to adapt and to get the field spading, tilling, fertilizing, and plastic mulch spreading done ahead of the planting schedule. We finished hand-weeding the raspberries and thornless blackberries and gave the rows a spreading of compost mulch.

Spring is also prime time for equipment breakdown, since we are using the equipment constantly. We haven’t done too badly this year. I can remember two episodes with the John Deere tractor, one with the spading machine, and one with the compost spreader. Of course, the equipment breakdowns happen on sunny days when we are just finally getting some fieldwork done, not when it is raining and we can’t use it anyway.

This year, in addition to the inefficiencies of repeated change of plans and extra work due to the weather we have two additional new complications. We are opening the farmstand 4 weeks earlier this year (May 13), which pushes all the planting schedules four weeks earlier into a time when the weather is much less predictable, except that we can assume there will be more rain. We are also starting a new project this year of growing hundreds of vegetable and herb plants for sale to gardeners. This soaks up significant extra time and greenhouse space.

In the last week we did hire in some extra help in order to break the logjam of backed up planting. Dang and his crew came down to the farm after working for Claire this week and planted most of the onions. Monday or Tuesday they will plant out thousands of lettuces and other greens waiting in the starts hoophouse. With that completed, we are hoping we can keep on top of things. We were already planning to hire another crew member to start at the beginning of May.

Meanwhile, there’s lots of other work going on.

We finally got electricity out to the large starts hoophouse. We’ve done without for two years, but with perhaps undeserved luck. The exhaust fan and thermostat in the starts greenhouse should prevent the utter disaster of walking into the greenhouse to find thousands of plants baked to death because we missed opening the greenhouse up by hand. After reflection, I decided to do the same, a year ahead of schedule, in the hoophouse where we will keeping the heirloom tomato plants and other vegetable starts we hope to sell in May and June.

The greenhouses keep filling up. In addition to the greens Evert and Stewart have been starting since March, we are now getting into the summer crops. The first seedling flats of summer squash are up and will be ready to plant out soon. There are flats and flats of gourds and winter squash germinating, next week we will be starting our fancy pumpkins and larger winter squash.

Summer squash in the starts hoophouse

We have been working on our new Free Choice CSA program, and have started to sell the memberships.

Our new website design is up, thanks to Chris and to Andrea Rose, who did the site design. And I finally have a functioning home for this blog.

Cindi, who runs our education program, is getting ready for school tours the first week of May, and the first Farm Tots on May 13 when the farmstand opens.

Michelle and Peggy, who will be running the farmstand as a team, are working hard to prepare for opening day, as well as the Plant Sale and CSA tour events on Saturdays May 2 and 9, from 10 am to 2 pm.

Many, many more details, but I see I have already written plenty for now.

As a relief from all the detail, and as one last get-away before the farmstand season starts, Carol and I will be going to the World Tea Expo on May 3 & 4. Just a hint of what you may see at the farmstand sometime down the line.

For a couple of weeks now the urge to get out into the field has been growing stronger each day. We had almost two weeks with nothing more than a trace of rain, very unusual for February. Some of the fields started to look dry enough to start the spring fieldwork. Every day I watched the fields dry out some more and got the itch to get the tractor out. Every day I counseled myself to have patience. More rain and possibly even snow were sure to come. Since Sunday we have received almost 0.9 inches of rain (or snow melt), but the total for the month, 1.73 inches, is well under half of a normal February.

If we start when the fields are too wet, we compact the soil and it dries out in brick-like chunks. If we wait for things to be perfect, we probably won’t have time to get everything done before it is too late to plant. Spring fieldwork is a daily juggling act. Every day we check the field conditions against our list of the tasks we need to finish. There can be significant differences in conditions in different fields, so usually we can find some place we can move forward.

Finally, on Monday, we will be back on the ground at the farm. I talked with the guys yesterday and they are all ready to come back to work. Rob, Evert, Luis, and Juan will be here at 8 am. I have a list of tasks to accomplish while we watch for the right soil conditions for the fieldwork. Evert will be doing the greenhouse work again. We need to prune the blueberries. We’ll be preparing a couple of hoophouses for early greens production. We’ll be pulling out some old waterlines and setting up a new area for U-Pick vegetables. I’d like to expand the north animal paddock. We need to prepare for our new cooler. Other spring tasks include repairing the roads, turning the compost piles, and checking out the equipment. As soon as we can we’ll be spreading compost and lime on the fields so we can get to the tilling on time.

For the last few weeks now I’ve been watching the daffodils growing just outside my office. They haven’t bloomed yet, but they look just about ready.

Daffodil in bud

Officially, spring starts several weeks from now on March 20. This year I’m starting early.