Farmer Dan’s Vacation Prep
The week leading up to any vacation from the farm is an extra busy one. Not only do we have the usual harvesting, washing, packing, transplanting, weeding, crop care but I’m also anticipating everything that could get done a week early and trying to get that done too. It’s a lot and I thought it’d be interesting to go over my preparation steps in this weeks blog post.
A side note: my vacation to the boundary waters wilderness was excellent. Beautiful scenery, good weather, good company (the fishing was bad though!). Anyway, onto the vacation prep:
Weeds. This is the big one. A week is a long time for a weed to grow so I did everything I could to kill the weeds before I left. This meant a cultivation pass of the entire farm on Friday, flame weeding newly planted but not yet emerged carrots & beets, and tilling extremely weedy areas and harvested crop areas. The results were great: I’ve never left the farm looking so clean. We do have weeds but it wasn’t too bad.
Planting. As luck would have it there was only one item on my planting schedule to be planted last week. I decided to delay it a week.
Staff Notes & Notes for Lara. I chuckled at myself as I ended up typing up four pages of notes for Lara and my staff. These notes are the things inside my head that I just do every week. Monitoring the weather, monitoring the tunnels, payroll & HR things, crops that are coming into season, transplant list and where to transplant & so much more.
Emails. I had several emails that I wrote in advance and scheduled to send while I was away.
Now that I’m back I am so glad I worked extra hard to stay ahead of the weeds. We got around 3-4” of rain while I was gone and the weather and ground was not fit for weeding at all last week. Lara and my staff did great keeping things humming along last week and we didn’t have any major problems.
The farm before I left on vacation.