The Hopeful Blog of Tiny Farming Infrastructure

The start of this year has been a haul for a lot of us, and I realized that in the bustle of early spring and the gloominess of everything going on this winter, we haven’t shared the more fun things we are doing on the farm for 2022.

The big deal this year in terms of projects is that we are going to do something very different… NOTHING new!

We are trading out equipment that isn’t working well in our farm system! We have a fancy rototiller, but it doesn’t like to be used on hillsides (obviously not great up here in Fenner), so we are swapping it out for a more basic model that doesn’t care about hills!

Okay, okay, that’s not entirely true since I’m about to share a whole long list of new and exciting things coming. However, we aren’t taking on any single large project (like last year’s shed and tunnel, or the greenhouse the year before, or all the equipment before that.

Essentially, we are moving out of farm startup phase (where every year’s just about getting the minimum of things you need to produce a crop) and moving into the phase of making our systems keep working despite the craziness of the world around us. 2022 is becoming the year here on the farm of trying to remove the frustrations and pet peeves that are common for newer farms, and overhaul the systems and equipment that don’t work for us, so we can keep growing our delicious produce!

Farming (and starting a farm in particular) is this weird, multi-generational beast of a profession. The first generation on the land has to pour a lot into capital improvements and building up the system and infrastructure, with the goal of hopefully/ideally making things easier for the next generation (or those same first gen farmers as they get older!).

A tiny improvement… I have literally searched the globe for these rolling dibblers for a decade, before learning that a farmer in NY just started 3D printing them!!! They are lifechanging (and make little indents in the soil of our seed flats so the seeds are all perfectly triangulated in the middle of the cell).

Even after ten years, we are still a start up sort of farm that runs on pretty lean infrastructure. There’s still more greenhouses to build and that long awaited fabled wash-pack barn (one day, one day we won’t wash veggies under a tent!). There’s constantly rotating equipment, road repairs, and then fixing or replacing everything you can imagine as it breaks down or wears out. We spend about 5% of our annual budget on repairs and maintenance, 10% on immediate necessary capital improvements, and another 5% on loan service for those more costly capital projects (like the bigger greenhouses and tractors).

Some days it feels like this basic task of farming just takes SO MUCH STUFF, and we are constantly running around trying to catch up and get established.

This spring’s original plan was to build the one last high tunnel we need. However, between optimistically making that plan last year and getting the re-priced quotes on the tunnel this year, prices on greenhouses almost doubled (eek). Additionally, we learned last year that if the new summer “normal” is 20” of rain in a month, even our well sited tunnels will flood from the bottom up as the water table just keeps on rising (double eek). It just didn’t seem to make sense to build another high tunnel this year right next to the one we are doing major drainage work on.

It was almost a relief, though (once we got over the sadness of not being able to complete the project) to have a reason to slow down and reapportion that greenhouse planned budget solely on tackling the low hanging fruit of tiny, low-cost farm system improvements this year while we let the supply chain wackiness settle down around us. (It will settle, won’t it?)

This road, the bane of Matt’s existence, is finally going to get worked on! Also, we have some killer burn piles going on, should there be a spring farm/CSA bonfire party?

For instance, adding more gravel to the farm road.

Or putting everything in the garage where we pack shares on castors so we can push all the shelving out-of-the-way and have more room to pack boxes.

Or ripping out the floor of our original walk-in cooler so we can reseal it, drop it 6 inches so that we can wheel things in and out of the cooler instead of lifting, and have space to build shelves so that we can store short piles of vegetables rather than just giant tall ones. Because the box of veggies we need will always be the one on the bottom of the giant teetering pile.

We are designing a new greens spinner to amp up our lettuce, spinach, and greens quality and storage life (so many more salad greens are coming!).

The leftover equipment shed wood went into a shiny new extra long potting bench so we can seed more efficiently. We also got a new hand seeder from Japan and can crank out twice as many flats in half the time.

We added sides to the irrigation pump shed so it’s quieter for our neighbors and the pumps are better protected from rain.

We are renting a trencher and adding drainage * everywhere. * Tunnel edges, greenhouses, farm roads, if Matt can trench it, there’s gonna be a trench! (I swear, every time I go out into the field, there’s a new ditch just ready for me to fall into it. Beulah views this as a wonderful expansion of her drinking water system.)

The year of digging everything up to improve drainage has already begun in the high tunnels! In addition to adding French (aka curtain) drains, we are also planning to trench and install a French drain right down the middle in this tunnel.

I wrote out a giant book of how to manage everything in the farm office in case I get sick (my paranoia during Covid is that I’m the bottle neck here on so many systems, like everyone getting their CSA boxes nicely each week!), and I started in on creating some new training and practices manuals so it’s easier for new folks to learn how to do some of the most fun farm tasks.

We formed an LLC (I know, all fancy and cooperate and stuff!), which doesn’t really change anything around the farm, but does mean we legally both own the farm (so no one is just a “and spouse” any more!). This is also kind of a super long term thing for the future if we want to have the capacity to bring in any younger farmers to join us in growing.

And the list goes on… Basically, what feels like the most hectic year in the world ever has somehow become the year on our little farm where we try to address and eliminate the bumps that make a farming task harder the best we can (or at least tackle the ones that are solvable with a little time and thought, minimal amounts of money, and nothing that’s getting hit with wonky supply chains).

We’ll report back at the end of the season to see how many of these little projects have helped!

And lest I forget to mention, the whole point of all the micro-projects on the farm is to make sure we can keep growing delicious veggies for our CSA and farmers markets :) Shares are still available!

The Nature of Time

One of the things that I have a love/hate relationship with on the farm is time. Individual days and weeks can sometimes seem so long (especially when that harvest list runs onto three pages!), but since there’s so much repetition of patterns and tasks from year to year and day to day, it becomes hard to hold onto time beyond the general feel of seasonality.

But on a farm of our scale and crop mix, time is the main limiting factor!

Raising diversified veggies on a smaller scale is kind of a crazy thing to do (more on this topic in later blogs). Last year we had something around 700 plantings total, of over 150 crop varieties, and each was handled slightly differently at each stage (seed starting, greenhouse water and heat, planting, cultivation, harvesting, and post-harvest).

When you think of farming, likely tractors and planting and weeding pop into your brain. Yet the actual growing of the crops doesn’t even get anywhere near 50% of our time! We actually always have a few nice young guys call wanting specifically to be hired for a tractor work job each year, which we don’t really have. We use our tractor hard, but even after seven years of what feels like constant use, it barely logged over 2100 hours (that’s the tractor equivalent of a car’s 100,000 mile mark or so). It works out to about 300 hours a year, which spread out over 30 weeks of active field work, is only about 5 hours a week of sitting down tractor time each for me and for Matt!

Note Beulah’s careful supervision of the plow. For some reason, the plow and the field conditioner (but not any of our ten other tractor implements) require constant monitoring?

In 2021, we took out a loan to build a shiny new heated greenhouse. We filled it up almost immediately (I have utterly no idea how we managed to grow almost the same number of flats in our old 17x36’ one for so long—the new one is 30’ x 72’ and literally was filled to the brim).

My old greenhouse was bought in 2004, so this addition really impacted the economics of starting seeds for us. On one hand, we have to pay for the tunnel and the added heat needs, but on the other hand, we are saving A LOT of time on shuffling flats and banging into each other all the time. However, we needed to recalculate what it costs to grow a flat so we know how much to sell plants for, and to guide our annual decision of if things that can be both directly seeded into the field or seeded into the greenhouse and transplanted later make more sense one way or another. (For instance, in spring we transplant spinach since it gets a big jump to be ready for the first CSA boxes, but in summer it’s more cost and time efficient to just seed spinach in the ground.)

All the seedlings getting big for CSA shares and farmers market sales

This greenhouse math and stop-watching seedings started our first year of doing time analysis of how long things take (extra shout out to Rachel for being the best at remembering to do so and leaving reams of helpful notes for me this winter)! In case you are farming along at home, or a math nerd, when the greenhouse heat is running, it costs us between $25 to $40 per day to run the greenhouse for both heating and watering (this doesn’t reflect construction costs or supplies/seeds). Yet what was most interesting to learn is that even with relatively high propane costs, the human time of watering flats costs as much as the heating as soon as it’s over 32 degrees at night (watering well is a skill that just eats up time, but also allows us to really observe crops for potential issues).

This inspired me to do a few more labor time analysis this summer—how many hours do we spend harvesting? Can our harvesting metrics improve? In the heat of the CSA—those 18 weeks where the CSA is going—we spend a solid 65% of our time as a farm team solely picking veggies, so any slow downs in harvest (or speed-ups) greatly impact how much time we have to do other tasks on the farm.

Harvesting daikons on a chilly morning, putting them into groups of ten for efficient boxing and counting!

We were a little short staffed this summer (we strive not to let this happen but some years it does), so I ended up having to harvest one crop for the week pretty much every Sunday morning. This labor shortfall did give me a nice controlled window, however, to time different crops and how long harvest and washing and packing runs.

I have to confess here—while harvesting is typically most of our team’s favorite work on the farm, it’s hands down my least favorite activity (which is too bad, because I’m the fastest harvester so I never get excused from it). What I love to do is WEED. I could weed 12 hours straight and be happy as a clam. Unfortunately, I never get to live my dream because we spend so much of our time managing the farm to have fewer weeds that I have to harvest rather than embrace my OCD heaven with a hoe.

Harvesting again… note the sad deficit of weeds in the background.

Anyhow, we didn’t perfectly capture everything, but the result of all this recordkeeping was that we have our first look at where we actually spend time on the farm (rather than where we “feel” like we spend time on the farm).

Because the feeling of time lies. If you are having fun or in the zone (or me with my hoe), you can look up and be amazing that it’s afternoon or the sun is setting. But other things FEEL like eternity. For instance, when we go into the zucchini or cucumber mines, it feels like all four of us have been harvesting fruits out of their scratchy walls and floors for eternity (or at least three hours). But the darn stopwatch tells us it’s only been 45 minutes.

This temporal reality check was super helpful this winter as we think about upgrades for the 2022 season. We farmers so often think about equipment upgrades on field work (like new plows or tillers or all that stuff), but through time analysis, it became clear that we really need efficiency tools to help with harvest and washing of the veggies! So greens spinners and more shade tents and things on wheels. A super unsexy cooler floor overhaul. And of course so many more tote bins to harvest in to!

More math next week! But we did a story (saved in favorites) on our Instagram if you want to see more of the time breakdown numbers!

High Tunnel and Snow!

We've been neglecting our blog a bit (in favor of Facebook, where we have loaded the Hartwood Farm page with pictures from this past season if you want to check them out!), but with our ongoing website overhaul (lots of new photos up in the gallery), we are trying to get back up on the blog horse and keep it more updated this next year! This summer of 2014 was another fairly crazy growing season here in Fenner/CNY in that it rained and rained and rained yet again. Unlike last year when we had tons of rain in the beginning of the summer and then it dried out, this summer it was constantly wet Mondays through Thursdays, before drying out a bit each weekend. The problem became that things would just barely dry out enough over Friday and Saturday so that we could get in the fields to till, cultivate, or seed on Sundays, but the rain would start all over again on Mondays. This made for *extremely* busy Sundays, somewhat weedy fields (since we prioritized planting over weeding!), and a fairly high rate of plant disease (since most plant health issues thrive in the cool, wet weather we saw).

We decided that it is essential for us to have some protection against all this rain and that we need to start investing in some high and low tunnels. This fall our big project was the high tunnel (which is essentially a greenhouse frame without any heating system). We bought a 30x96 Rimol Nor’easter frame, and as of yesterday (where we had to shovel about 5 feet of snow off of it!) we are pleased with it’s weight bearing capacity!

We put the house in the flattest spot in the fields (the “advantage” of slightly rolling ground is that we had limited options of where the tunnel could go, so it was easy to place!). It’s aligned east-west, so the long side faces the rough south wind. (Oddly enough, we find the summer winds out of the south the harshest and most destructive here on the farm, so we wanted to protect against them. In theory, when the wind gets really bad, we can lower the sidewalls and it will flow up the arch of the tunnel.)

It probably took us 20 person days to get the tunnel sited and built, but we were doing it around the CSA and market harvests, so it might be possible to do future ones faster? Putting on the plastic was the hardest part (Fenner is a little too windy to unfurl a 150' x 48' sheet of plastic), but we had 8 AWESOME neighbors come and help with this exciting stage (THANK YOU all!!!).

This winter, we have a rye/pea cover crop in the tunnel and are learning how it holds heat and handles snow. So far, it’s taken 50 mph gusts of wind, but we suspect we’ll get some 70 mph gusts before the winter is out. We don’t have power in the field, so it’s just got one layer of plastic. Judging from how it’s shedding snow (which is poorly), it may be worth investing in a second layer of plastic and some solar charging next year, since that will help it shed snow and wind better. We also see a snow blower in our future, since the sidewalls are quite a job to keep clear with a shovel!

Our main goal with this house is to get an earlier and healthier crop of tomatoes for the CSA, then pull out the tomatoes in time to replant for next year's November and December winter CSA and farmers market greens harvests. Over the long run, if this house survives Fenner conditions, we would like to add several other high tunnels, and rotate our hens through them for winter housing (and fertilization!) since the chickens are not fond of walking in snow.

We plan on starting our tomato transplants in the house sometime between April 15th and May 1st, depending on how daring we feel. The house does not have any supplemental heating, so we probably won’t push it too much this year, but we would love to get some nice ripe tomatoes by July 4th!  We'll have more pictures inside the tunnel as things warm up in the spring!

March Snows Bring Warm Aprils?

Hopefully!  (With 10 to 18" coming down, our fingers are crossed that this will come true!) Either way, spring is on it's way at SOME point this month, and thus, seed starting (and Growing Season 2014's official start!) are underway!  We'll get going back on our normal blog posts now (we didn't have much going on during our much needed winter break) since summer is gearing up around the farm FAST!

This week's news includes seed starting, greenhouse prep, CSA shares, and translating chicken...

First the fun news!  Seed starting is under way--onions, early leeks, shallots, scallions, oregano, parsley, rosemary, and some flowers are in their flats and getting ready to germinate!  As you can see from the picture below (and our cramped seed starting pics on Facebook), we have them in the house on vast numbers of tables now set up in the living room and kitchen.  It's funny, 2 years ago we swore we wouldn't have this many seed flats in the house ever again after we upgraded our greenhouse heating system.  We are eating those words so quickly for two reasons--first, we wanted to start getting away from buying in all our onion plants and try out some new varieties from seed (and onions need to start a few weeks before we want to fire up our greenhouse).  Second, we were oblivious to propane supplies and prices early in winter and all of a sudden, cohabitation with ten thousand seedlings for a few weeks seemed like a quite reasonable prospect!

The greenhouse is also looking good--we'll have details and pics on that in our next post.  We have fired it up a little bit (though we are waiting until this weekend for the official heater start day), have it mostly cleaned out, and are working on this season's upgrades (new floor and watering system!).  It's been wonderful working to prepare the house this week--even without the heater running, things get toasty during the day!

We do still have CSA shares available--Tuesday in Fayetteville, Liverpool, and Syracuse, and Friday in Fenner!  Give us an email or call if you want to learn more about the CSA or signup online.

And we promised you some chicken translation... Well, we are pretty sure we made out some F-bombs to the chickens clucking this morning.  The poor ladies were relishing the sun and warm temperatures as they managed to excavate some actual grass and dirt in their dooryard this week.  However, they are extremely under-impressed with this big snow and have been squawking to make their displeasure known (though the good girls keep on laying!).  We have promised them grass (and possibly a new house?) sometime in the next four weeks!  The farmers are also under-impressed with this storm, which is the first one blowing from due north, so it deposited a thigh high drift in the yard between us and the hen house.  Spring is coming, isn't it?  Our next blog will be set in the spring-like greenhouse at least!!!