We Bought Land!!
The grove of trees in the background is our new land! Our pack shed will go in the clearing in the center of the photo.
We’ve been working on this for awhile and we’re happy to announce that it’s official: we purchased 6.7 acres in Waseca County adjacent to our produce farm! You may or may not know that our farming situation for the past 5 seasons has been a little different than what you’d expect. We’ve been driving about 30 miles southeast of Mankato to our 2 acre vegetable plot and hauling all of the produce we’ve harvested back to our home near Mankato for washing, packing and temporary storage until it ends up in your Farm Share, our Farmers Market Stand, or the Saint Peter Food Co-op.
This farming setup hasn’t been without it challenges. We’ve had to be very diligent about the amounts of produce we harvest. Going back for more produce because we didn’t harvest enough wasn’t really an option for us because of the time required. In addition, we spend about an hour every harvest day driving. That’s a lot of time we could be using for weeding, harvesting, washing and other farm tasks. The weather also poses a challenge; the weather at our house isn’t necessarily representative of the weather at the plot and we’ve had a lot of issues with jobs that require certain conditions that were hard to predict. In addition, we’ve had to haul coolers and ice on our harvest days to help keep our produce cool. You get the idea, farming like this was really hard. We spent a lot of extra time because of the distance between our home and our farm.
What’s Next?
The land by itself doesn’t really help us solve any of the problems mentioned above. That’s why we’re investing into infrastructure and a brand new pack shed. Our pack shed will be a dedicated building for washing, packaging, and storing produce and it will be located on our new land. Our pack shed will have a number of features that we’re really excited about:
A rough, to scale, sketch of our pack shed floor plan.
Floor drains: We wash a lot of produce and floor drains will help us keep our shed clean, dry and safe by moving muddy wash water out of our shed.
Insulation and heat: Our last harvest of lettuce was on November 8th this year with temperatures hovering around 30 degrees, just below freezing. Insulation and heat will help us maintain comfortable temperatures as we continue to extend our harvest season.
Larger walk-in cooler with space for another walk-in cooler. We maxed out our 8’x8’ walk-in cooler several times this season. Our new pack shed will have a 12’x12’ cooler with room for a second cooler if needed.
On site bathroom: this might seem silly but it’s going to be really convenient to not have to walk up to the house to use the bathroom. It will save time and help keep mud and dirt our of our house.
We hope to start on the pack shed first thing in Spring 2020 with an anticipated completion date of early August 2020. We have a lot of work ahead of us but we’re so excited to be making this investment into our farm, our community, and into providing great tasting, healthy, sustainable produce for you!
p.s. If you know any electricians, plumbers, masons, or other contractors let us know! We’re working on gathering bids for our project and any additional leads would help us out a ton.
2019 Slightly After Mid Season Update
The bright green and red are our lettuce mix! Ignore the weeds :)
It’s hard to think we’re over half way through our farming season with back to school this week. But here we are nonetheless. As I write this we are in the middle of week 11 of our CSA. We like to keep everyone updated on how things are going on the farm and while we’ve been active on Instragram we haven’t been able to keep our blog updated. This seems to happen every year and really it’s just the reality of the prioritization of tasks on the farm. That said, we do have a mid-season recap and some news about what to expect for the fall.
Year of Plenty*
This season has been unbelievable so far. We’ve had better crop yields on nearly everything we grow and that surplus has been showing up in the CSAs this year. On average our CSAs this week contain about 15% more value of produce that last year! One of the things we love about the CSA model is that we all share in the successes and failures of the given year. With farming, it only takes one weather event to completely ruin a crop or group of crops and the CSA model helps us, as farmers, to withstand those types of events. The return for the risk that our members take is that in years of plenty we share in plenty.
Our tunnel has also helped us this year. We’ve produced more varieties of lettuce more consistently than we have in the past. It’s also an investment that paid for itself in the first year of use! We’re really excited to have taken the step into season extension and look forward to adding more tunnels in the future.
The asterisk is for a couple areas of failure on our farm this year. We generally always seem to have something that doesn’t work out for us in a particular season and this year it was two crops whose yields are lower than we were hoping. First is onions - they got over grown by weeds which drastically reduced their size and the quantity of onions we have available this season. The second is garlic - we lost about 25% of our crop from flooding in March and another 10-15% from our mulch being washed away which cause the weeds to get overgrown in the garlic. That’s not to say that there won’t be onions or garlic in your CSAs just that there will be a lot less of each than we intended.
What to expect the second half of the season.
Our late season crops like tomatoes, peppers and winter squash are looking good, especially our butternut squash! You’ll start to see tomatoes in your shares in the next couple weeks with winter squash to follow in September and October. Our melons look ok. We don’t expect a bumper crop of watermelon or honeydew melon but we do anticipate having enough to include them in your shares. We will also continue to have carrots, green beans, beets, herbs and potatoes. In addition, some of our spring favorites will be making a return; we recently seeded spinach, radish, cilantro, kohlrabi, and lettuce mix. If the weather continues to cooperate we’ll have a really nice selection of produce available this fall.
Year end pot-luck
In the past, we’ve hosted a CSA season end pot-luck at our home. This is a private event for our CSA members as a thank you and a chance to come together and get to know each other better. Also a chance for you to ask any burning questions you might have about our season and what our plans are for next year. We usually grill burgers (and have vegetarian options as well) and leave the sides up to you. Those of you who pick up on Mondays know we’re a little tight for space at our home so we will likely have this event at an alternate venue. Stay tuned for more information in the weeks to come.
Planting!
We were finally able to squeeze in a few days of planting outside of our tunnel over the past weekend. We put in several long days but we were able to get completely caught up on planting. Over the weekend we planted the following: potatoes, onions, peas, carrots, spinach, beets, kohlrabi, kale, arugula, popcorn, sweet corn, lettuce, swiss chard, and radish. In this post, we’ll go over a few of the tools we use for planting.
Tractor & Tiller
Our tractor and tiller, brand new in late 2016.
We use our John Deere tractor and tiller to prep the ground for planting. The tiller helps to break down residual matter from the previous year and to help soften the soil so that we can plant easily into it. It also helps us kill the first flush of weeds that started growing (though it also brings new weed seeds to the surface).
Tilling is a destructive means by which to prep soil. We try to mitigate the destructive potential through a variety of means. First, we only till very shallowly - about 2-3” deep so that we don’t disturb the deeper soil structure. Second, we plant cover crops as much as possible. Cover crops have amazing potential to help rebuild soil structure as well as many other benefits such as attracting beneficial insects, fixing nitrogen from the air into the soil, and suppressing weeds. We also use animal manure as our fertilizer source. Animal manure helps rebuild soil structure by introducing rich, organic matter in a form more stable and available to plants. Finally, we minimize our fall tillage (we use a chisel plow in the fall) to only the areas not under cover crop. These areas are where we have long season crops like winter squash, popcorn, and most melons.
Push Seeder
One of my favorite planting tools is our Hoss Tools push seeder. The seeder has individual plates with holes of varying sizes and spacing to accommodate the various sizes of seeds we plant. It works by a drive wheel that rotates the seed plates and drops the seeds into the ground. The seeder also has adjustable depth.
I like the seeder because it’s so versatile. We have multiple plates and can plant nearly any type of seed. Not only that but we can get blank plates - that is, plates without pre-drilled holes, that we can use to create our own size and spacing! This gives us a lot of flexibility at a minimal cost and saves us hours of labor.
Wheel Hoe w/plow Attachment
We also use the Hoss Wheel hoe with plow attachment for onions and potatoes. Seed potatoes are just quartered potatoes - they’re too big and bulky for our seeder so we have to plant them by hand. We plant onion sets which are onions that have grown to about the size of a marble, then harvested and dried to be replanted the following year. We use the wheel hoe to plow open a furrow for planting. After we planted, we flip the plows around and cover the furrow.
Misc. Tools
We use a few other miscellaneous tools to help plant. We use an iPad for our record keeping, recording the date and row feet of crop planted. We use fence posts with string to help keep our rows straight an evenly spaced. We use a measuring wheel to help us make accurate length of rows.
Seed starting and our first tunnel.
It’s hard to believe all the snow we had this winter is gone! Even harder to believe is how quickly it melted. We really couldn’t have had better weather for melting the snow and helping our spring along. We’ve been busy in the past month getting prepped for seed starting and starting seeds! In the next few days we’ll even plant our first transplants outside! It’s an exciting time of year filled with hope of another bountiful season. In this post we’ll go through our seed starting setup and talk a little about how the setup of our first caterpillar tunnel went.
Our indoor seed starting setup has several important components. First, we have our basement prep table. This is where we fill our trays with organic potting mix. Trays have individual cells for each plant and come in a variety of sizes. We use two sizes that accommodate 50 and 128 plants. Once we’ve filled the trays with soil we plant each seed individually. We’ve already planted over 2000 seeds this year with many more to come!
The next component is our germination chamber. This is a new addition to our farm that we made this spring out of a recycled upright freezer, a couple crockpots and a temperature and humidity controller. We’re really excited about this because it will allow us to control the two most important factors in seed germination: temperature and humidity. We’ve already seen great improvements in our germination rates especially with parsley. In the past, we’ve been lucky to be above 50% germination. That is, of the total number of seeds we planted we were lucky to have more than 50% of them germinate. This year, with the germination chamber, we’re over 90% germination on parsley! Side note: our other crops germinate much more consistently with rates approaching 100%.
Finally, we have our grow racks. We bought one on Craigslist and the other we put together using parts we purchased from Home Depot. Simply put, it’s a series of shelves with lights on timers that simulate day and night cycles for our plants.
Once our plants are established in their trays we’ll begin the process of “hardening off.” This process acclimates our little plants to the more harsh conditions they’ll face outside. The hardening off period allows the plants to adapt to full sunlight, wind, and greater temperature fluctuations before we plant them outside.
Bonus: Caterpillar Tunnel Setup
This was our first go at setting up a caterpillar tunnel and overall it went pretty well. We started by measuring out where our tunnel will go so that we could set the corners. Then we pounded large rebar stakes into the ground every 5 feet on both sides. Next, we constructed the bows that support the structure from 3 pieces of curved metal tubing secured with tex screws. Then comes the plastic - we rolled out the plastic and pulled it up and over the bows. The plastic is secured on either end by metal t posts pounded into the ground. To tighten the plastic a series of crisscrossing ropes are installed and pulled tight in between each metal bow. Finally, we placed sand bags around the structure to secure the plastic to the ground in the event of wind. The whole family got in on the set up. Kit, our cat was very interested in the tools we were using and Axel, our dog just wanted to be near us!
What'd we learn at MOSES 2019?
Lara and I attended MOSES 2019 in La Crosse, WI this weekend. For those who are unfamiliar, MOSES (midwest organic and sustainable education service) is an organization that promotes organic and sustainable farming and hosts the largest organic farming conference in the United States. The conference is huge, with well over 3000 attendees, tons of presentations from farmers, scientists, PhD students and more as well as film screenings, research presentations and round table discussions. It’s sometimes hard to choose what to do at the conference because there are so many good options! We attended talks on subjects ranging from managing tomato diseases to pasture raised pork to stress management. In this blog post we’ll go through some of our big takeaways.
Soil
I attended several talks on soil - it’s the foundation of everything we do - so I like to prioritize learning more about soil as much as I can. One big take away is scientists have a very small understanding of how soil works. In one acre of soil there is the biomass equivalent of 8.4 cows in things like bacteria, fungi, worms and other living creatures. Of that biomass scientists have only documented and named about 20% of those creatures. What does this mean for the farm? For us, limited understanding makes it hard to trust anyone that says x is the thing to do for your soil. Instead, we will try to mimic nature as closely as possible; this is what most agronomists would suggest. This includes using mixtures of cover crops to simulate the diverse species of plants you see in nature. Applying animal manures and compost to mimic the natural way animals fertilize soil and we will try to minimize tillage as much as possible. Lara also attended an introduction to soils class and found the current research continues to support the practices we are using.
Tomato Diseases
The big take away here is that we really need to invest more in caterpillar tunnels and high tunnels. We can reduce occurrences of tomato disease considerably which will increase our yields considerably. We’ve held off on investing in this infrastructure until we move to the land where the majority of our veggies are located. We’re making progress on this! We purchased a small caterpillar tunnel this season for use at our home (though we’re using it for lettuce production instead of tomato production). Other things we can do for our field tomatoes include things we’ve already been doing - crop rotations, pruning, laying mulch down, and applying organic copper at regular intervals to slow the spread of disease on a regular schedule.
Pasture Raised Hogs
I (Lara) have always had a great interest in livestock. Convincing Dan to raise chickens has proven to be a great way to diversify our CSA and get free nitrogen rich manure! There are some great benefits to be gained were we to raise pigs. First, we would be able to sell high quality meat to our customers adding economic benefit to our farm and diversifying the CSA. Second, we would get free pig manure to enrich our soil. We would also get some low grade free tillage on our land as the pigs have a tendency to literally "root” around! They love eating plant roots high in sugar and will turn up soil in the process. Dan and I are interested in farming on a closed loop system which means anything that comes from the farm goes back into the farm - we wouldn’t have to pay so much to purchase outside fertilizers. In addition we want to farm in a way that mimics the natural symbiotic relationship of plants and animals. There is also the bonus of pig companionship! They are smart creatures with funny personalities. We are excited to invest in pigs in the next couple years!
Stress Management
Lara attended a short session on women managing stress in agriculture. The tips provided in the session are applicable to all humans working in agriculture. Farming has one of the highest rates of suicide in the nation; many factors contribute: low wages, debt, isolation, intense labor. One way to manage the stress of the job is to plan vacations where you can focus on slowing down and resting your body and mind. Dan and I always take a one week vacation mid-season. It keeps us healthy! Other suggestions included making time for your hobbies, eating healthy, and taking care of your body (your greatest tool in farm work). The key message is farming will be stressful and having a plan to mitigate the stress will ensure a successful long term business.
What does this mean for you?
Better produce, more options for your CSA, healthy farmers, and healthy land! The things we learn at the conference are things that directly affect you. We apply the techniques and recommendations we learn to get better at producing healthy, great tasting produce and animals that will nourish you and your family. There are always things that we can do better and we always try to learn the best techniques to ensure everything we grow for you and your family is healthy, delicious and sustainable!
What's new for 2019?
One of the things we love about farming is that no two years are the same. This is true on multiple levels: the weather is never the same, the crops we grow constantly change and the way we grow them progresses through iterations of improvement every season. While we can’t control the weather we can control which varieties of crops we grow and our methods for growing them. Read on to learn about the biggest changes we’re making for our 2019 season.
Our first caterpillar tunnel!
What is a caterpillar tunnel and what is it used for? Caterpillar tunnels are a form of season extension that are made with really large sheets of plastic draped over metal ribs that are anchored in the ground. They offer protection from the wind, rain, heat and cold giving us a slightly longer growing season for the things we grow inside them. The most popular produce to grow in them are tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and lettuce. We intend on using our tunnel to produce lettuce which leads us to our next change for 2019.
Season long lettuce experiment.
One of our favorite things to grow is lettuce and it also happens to be something people really love. Dan took an online class over the winter to learn about strategies for producing lettuce all season long. We’ve developed some systems and invested in the necessary infrastructure to grow lettuce all summer long. This is very much an experiment year that we will use to hone our systems and ensure the lettuce we produce is sweet, crunchy and not bitter. Ultimately, our goal is to have lettuce available every week from mid May through October and perhaps even into November. Don’t worry, we won’t overload lettuce in your CSA box though it might take some time to figure out the correct quantity.
Establishing new perennial beds.
Our current strawberry and raspberry beds are getting pretty old and thus their production and quality is deteriorating. Raspberries and strawberries take a couple years to get established and we have been reluctant to establish new beds at our current property for fear of moving before they’re established. Recently, we’ve made some progress towards buying the land we farm so we’re going to be investing in new raspberry, strawberry, asparagus, and rhubarb beds this season. We hope that in a few years we’ll be able to provide all of these perennials in our CSA boxes and farmers market stand.
Meet Zack
Hello!
I know it's been awhile but I promise these will be more regular from now on. Today I want to share with you about our farm hand - Zack. As we know farm work is never done and when you get bigger there is more work to do! This calls for more help; we began hiring extra labor last year and just loved Lindsey! We are lucky again this year to have our good friend working for us three full days per week. Zack's experience is varied - he spent some time in the business world and is currently pursuing his MFA in Fictional Literature at MSU in Mankato. When he's not busy writing Zack loves to bake and cook - he has a knack for both. Running is another serious endeavor Zack commits to. He has run several 1/2 marathons with goals to increase his speed each race. Though Zack's farm experience is limited, his work ethic is not. He is such a huge asset to us - keeping up with us weeding, hoeing, putting up tomato cages, and harvesting and preparing produce. Zack does all these tasks with care and efficiency - he never complains - even on days when it's 95 degrees and we ask him to pound posts. We enjoy Zack's company and humor. If you ask him what kind of vegetable he would be he'll tell you brussel sprouts because not everyone likes them and you have to do a little work to get the vegetable from the stalk. Needless to say Dan and I are fans of the brussel sprout (Zack)!
What do we do when it rains?
Hello dear reader!
Today it is raining. Again. As farmers when our produce is in production mode we harvest in ALL weather. Today though we don't have anything to harvest yet. We won't weed either because our footprints would compact the soil and make it harder for things to grow. Instead we get caught up on all the chores around the house. Here is a short list of some things we can accomplish:
- 1. Clean all our harvest buckets from last year
- 2. Cut re-mesh to make tomato cages
- 3. Build and sand down cedar crates
- 4. Care for our chickens
- 5. Write a blog post
- 6. Apply for our marriage license (It's only 15 days away)
- 7. Grocery shopping
- 8. Leisure time - not sure what that is but we try to make time for it!
We are trying to be patient as our crops grow. Things are looking good in the field and are growing fast (though not fast enough for us) considering we planted a month later this year than last. We are proud of what we have accomplished thus far and look forward to our season beginning just one week later than last year. Dan and I are also tying the knot the same week and couldn't be more excited (stressed out)!!! Good thing we have Zack to help us out this year! (More about Zack in our next blog post.)
More planting, more weeding and lots of progress!
Spring planting continues on the farm. We planted our vine crops (cucumbers, summer squash, melons, etc) over memorial day weekend and were able to get in around 550 peppers, tomatoes and basil before the storms hit! We don't normally like to plant in that kind of heat but our plants were in need of being moved out of their pots and into the soil.
Many of our crops do just fine in the heat - in particular sweet corn and popcorn LOVE the heat. Some of our crops suffer in the heat - lettuce, spinach, peas - all would have liked the 100 degree days to wait another month. Fortunately, it seems the damage was minimal and the rains really helped keep things going after that heat wave.
We continue to work on weeds as they tend to love the heat as well. We will be writing a post soon that covers the many methods we use to control weeds on our farm. Stay tuned! In the meantime enjoy these photos of the progress on our farm.
Chicken tractors, planting, and weeding!
It's been a very busy month on the farm! The weather has finally warmed up, we're getting a good amount of rain (if not a little too much) and our new batch of layers have moved out of their brooder box to the outdoors.
The first couple photos in the gallery below are pictures of our home-built "chicken tractor." A chicken tractor is a mobile enclosure that we will use for our meat chickens permanent home when they are big enough to move outdoors. Chicken tractors allow us to keep our meat chickens in a controlled location but also allow them to forage and be outdoors. We will move the tractor daily so that our chickens always have access to fresh pasture. The enclosure also keeps would-be predators out. It's a win-win situation.
We've put our second batch of layers in our chicken tractor until they are big enough to integrate with our adult layers. This allows our adult chickens to "introduce" themselves to our new chickens without the risk of the new chickens being injured as they re-establish the pecking order. Yes, the pecking order is real thing; it's a social hierarchy of chickens that's established, sometimes by pecking, and each chicken has their own spot.
We were finally able to begin planting in early May - we started with our potatoes and onions and moved onto other early season crops like peas, lettuce and radish. As of this writing, we have planted potatoes, onions, peas, radish, lettuce, carrots, arugula, spinach, swiss chard, popcorn, kale, kohlrabi, brussels sprouts, and beets. We've also transplanted our cabbage, broccoli, thyme, oregano, and parsley from their indoor pots to their outdoor locations. It's been a busy couple of weeks!
The warm weather and rain has helped all of our plants germinate quickly (and, unfortunately, the weeds too) and everything we've planted is up. We've begun cultivating our produce to try to get a head start on the weeds. We're also planning on transplanting our tomatoes, peppers, and basil in the coming week.
It's a busy time on the farm and we're loving every minute of it! Check out the photos of our progress below:
