This week's cheat sheet (click below) highlights arugula, kale, pea tendrils, beets, radishes, chard, spinach, kohlrabi, and fresh herbs! It covers our farmer-based (we aren't chefs, but do use a lot of veggies!) suggestions on identification, storage, and preparation for the crops in your boxes this week, as well as how we typically quickly utilize them--Enjoy!
In our little blog series on tools, we realized that we should start at the beginning and cover the main tool we turn to on the farm: the tractor!
The view from our desk (over last year's potato field)!
The tractor is best viewed as a mobile power source. On its own, it doesn’t really *do* anything, but rather is a big engine that can run all sorts of tools that do actually do things. Tractors can usually attach to tools (or "implements") on their front and back ends, with a few adding some middle attachments.
On the front end, you’ll commonly see us driving around with either a bucket loader that we can fill with stuff or scoop up stuff to move things around, or with a set of forklifts which we also use to move stuff around or as a platform to mount other tools on. In fancier tractors, you could have an additional set of front hydraulics, which would let you run a wider range of equipment from the front end. (In retrospect, we regret not going with this option when we bought our tractor since it would let us run two implements at one time, saving a lot of tractor time and fuel!). We also started using the forks to mount our new spreader for the organic chicken compost we use, so that we can spread as we are tilling, which saves a tractor trip around the field and reduces compaction.
Using the forks on the front to move things around!
Some tractors, like the old-school tractor that mostly hangs out in our yard, can mount equipment in the middle, like garden tractors have mid-mount mowers. This is a nice option for using tractors to cultivate crops because it gives you a really good view of what you are doing.
The back end of the tractor is really the business end. Different implements hook up to either the drawbar hitch of the tractor (a hitch that sticks out basically like one on a truck) or to the “three-point hitch” (or 3pt) of the tractor. The drawbar hitch hooks up to things that we simply drag around the fields, like the chicken house or the disk harrow. The three-point hitch has three connection points, which allows the tractor to raise and lower the attached implement. Most of the equipment we have attaches this way, which is best on a vegetable farm, since we grow in long growing beds that end on grassy walkways and we want to be able to raise up any equipment on the tractor so it doesn’t tear up these farm roads.
This is looking down at the back side of the tractor--the drawbar hitch is not in use (in the center), but the seeder is hooked up to the three points of the 3pt. The yellow shaft is the spinning PTO (more on that later).
Some equipment like the plows or our new field conditioner just hook up to the 3pt and are used by being raised or lowered into the soil where they are then pulled along by the tractor. Other equipment relies on the two other things that live on the business end of the tractor: the hydraulics and the PTO. The hydraulics can hook up to the hydraulic system of an implement and provide additional motion or power. For instance, our disk harrow is just drawn around by the tractor drawbar hitch, which can’t raise or lower it, but it has hydraulics that run a set of wheels. From the tractor seat, we can pull a lever to activate the wheels, which raises the super heavy disk off the ground so it doesn’t tear up the grass.
The view from the seat of the heavy disk--you can see how without the hydraulic run wheels to lift it up, it would tear up the grass!
The PTO, or power take-off, is the most business-meaning part of the tractor. It’s a grooved attachment point that when activated, starts spinning the shaft of whatever implement is hooked up to it at a super high RPM rate. Most PTO driven tools attach to the 3pt and thus can be raised and lowered as well as turned on and off. The roto-tiller is probably the best example of such an implement. To use it we position the tractor straddling the bed, engage the PTO as we start driving, and then lower the tiller into the ground to the desired depth. It takes a bit of coordination and timing to run most of these implements, as well as an ability to simultaneously look backwards and forwards, make throttle and depth adjustments, and drive in a straight line. The PTO is also the one really dangerous thing on the tractor—we have bright yellow shields on them for added protection, and make sure anyone near the tractor has fitted clothes and their hair contained so nothing can get sucked in.
Operating the roto-tiller (on last year's super dry soil!)
And that’s how tractors work! Most have two or three gear ranges, with 4 or 5 speeds in each. Our tractor can run from 1/10th of a mile an hour up to 20 mph on the road [Matt tried to debate me on this, saying he never breaks 13mph on the road. However, when I drove it down to town, I held at a steady 19.5mph, so I’m declaring myself the race winner!]. Farms of our size generally have 25 to 70 hp tractors (ours is 55hp), and given all the mud we get, 4wd is definitely helpful.
For the most part, they are easy to drive, especially if you can drive standard transmission. The thing that takes practice is getting the path straight, which you are constantly looking around and making throttle and speed adjustments. Some of the easier things newbie drivers can practice on are moving materials around the field, spreading compost or picking up rocks, and mowing. More challenging tasks include anything where a straight line is paramount, especially things like tilling in a single bed between two planted beds that we are still growing on!
Plowing up a new field!
Happy May! We are entering the season of FWA (Farmer Weather Anxiety), where moods on the farm begin a direct correspondence with the ten-day forecast. If we seem grumpy or jittery or anxious for the next six months, I can 100% guarantee you that it’s due to either raging hanger or an unfavorable weather forecast. FWA also leads to mood swings, since the forecast increasingly will veer dramatically over a period of hours. For example, Saturday night showed ten days of impending rain, which induced more than one tear, yet Sunday morning at 6am changed to four days of sunshine, which brought new rays of hope. (Fingers crossed that dry break holds still by the time you read this!)
We were extra thankful for the dry spell two weeks ago that allowed us to get seeds in the ground because most years it feels like we live the armpit of American weather, with constant rain and icky-ness that moisture and grey days breed, both in farmer attitudes and in plant diseases. This year, our FWA lifted with the weather gods’ blessing of a series of nice days to proactively plant the majority of the first few week’s crops. We weren’t alone, as you could hear our neighbors’ rumbling tractors late at night also putting in the extra hours to take the pressure off when weather turns nasty later.
Thanks to the connectivity of the internet, we have lots of company in our muddy misery as we hear from friends and growers across the country where pretty much everyone is getting hammered this season. The jet stream was stuck, setting warmer regions back most terribly during the late winter when we were still too frozen to even be in the field. In the northwest, heavy rains have some farms still unable to plant two months behind schedule. In Texas, the central plains, and parts of the Midwest, winds, rains, and tornados are trashing everything. And I frankly can’t keep up with what’s happening in the southeast—I’m going to nominate them for the worst weather in the country award because it seems like it’s either freezing and flooding there, or baking and literally burning up.
Here we are just jittery. We have a full greenhouse and an acre to plant this week, but it’s not clear we’ll get the four consecutive rain-free days we need to get the tractor in the field to prepare the soil. Yet at the same time, we have the buffer of a greenhouse to keep plants alive while they wait to get transplanted, a late frost built into our scheduling so we have lots of crops that we didn’t plan on planting for another month anyway, and the knowledge that once the weather breaks, the veggies we plant generally grow super-fast (thanks to our long northern days) and catch up. If the weather breaks, we’ll be slow to have produce at the farmers market, but should stay on track for our planned CSA start date. If it doesn’t break, we can just adjust and have more bounty further into the fall end of the season. This forecast heightens our anxiety, but we’ve been here before. We’ve had mid-May snow (it sucks, but we’ll bounce back) and we plan for end of May frost, because more often than not, it happens.
Comparing our situation to the rest of the country puts us in a weird spot. On a national scale, we frankly have a pretty terrible spot to farm, complete with constant wind, chance of frost during ten months of the year, high elevation, and a propensity for excess of water at inconvenient times of the growing season. It should be terrible, right?
Yet more and more, we have a thread of appreciation for our consistently lousy weather, because we build that possibility (okay, inevitability) into our farm planning and systems. Some farmers markets cancel if the winds are over 20 mph. I’m pretty sure we never went below 20 mph at one of our markets last year. We had so much wind one day that I caught 2 feet of air while holding down a 10 by 10 tent weighted with over 300 pounds! Some farms lose row cover at 10 mph wind. We consider 10 mph an “easy” day to row cover crops (it’s not, it’s honestly pretty hellish to spread giant gauze-like sails over plants in any wind levels, but we are used to it now). On Tuesday, Matt row-covered a bed by himself and came back saying it seemed a little windy. It wasn’t until late at night that we checked the weather station and learned that “little bit of wind” was 46 mph!
This is from last year--the little guys aren't quite this big yet!
One day in ten dry enough for field work during crunch times, we are ready for it [thanks to a new tractor that always starts and has lights that lets us work into the night]. Five inches of rain in an hour, been there [our fields cant at an angle for better drainage and we use plastic mulch on erode-able crops]. Three feet of snow in a day, check. Ice, sleet, hail, or graupel (our favorite form of precipitation), we’ve seen them all in every month but July and August. 16 foot snow drifts over the high tunnel, just a few hours of shoveling. No rain for ten weeks, yup. Microbursts snapping trees and ripping off chunks of the roof, so last year. Short of the eye of a hurricane or tornado hit (my phobia), we’ve seen pretty much all the lousy weather that we can conceive of, and seen most of it in every growing season on the farm so far.
This is the first year we’ve realized that all this chronic weather hassle, while it increases our labor and stress and reduces the economic viability of our farm, has one narrow silver lining. We have bad weather, but we have it all the time, so really bad weather often feels only marginally worse than normal and we are generally at least somewhat prepared for it. Most other places have much nicer average weather, so really bad weather when it hits them, it feels exponentially worse and hits them so much harder.
The weather is changing and getting more swingy between extremes, with more violence at either end of the spectrum. Wet spells are wetter, and dry spells dryer. That gentle southern wind that wafted along warm air to our fields twenty years ago has morphed into terrifying air-borne freight train that devastates at least ten percent of our crops each year (we hate south wind days!). The jet stream gets stuck, with lousy weather parked in place for weeks at a time, and training storms keep hitting the same towns with boatloads of rain, while their neighbors suffer in drought.
Our exposed site is at high risk for extreme weather, but this risk is something we know about in advance and build our farm systems around. We’ve been doing this because we couldn’t really afford land in easier locations, so if we want to continue as a farm we don’t have a choice but to adapt. We just didn’t realize how much we’ve internalized growing on the extreme climate edge until this season as we heard about all the struggles farms in what we think of as softer and nicer growing climates have had dealing with extremes that we consider normal.
Our takeaway is that we need to continue to adapt for this stressful new normal by trialing and building systems that are more resilient to three weeks of freezing spring gloom, and take notes and share what’s working for us with farmers in other regions that aren’t blessed with as many opportunities to test cropping techniques on the rugged climatic edge. It’s not going to be cheap in terms of infrastructure costs or time, but it also seems like the only way to keep going as a farm in these climatically erratic times.
This spring nationally shows that farmers in all regions need to become more prepared to hedge against the long spells of increasingly uncertain and extreme weather that can become parked over us. Our national food supply is built on softer areas of the country having decent enough weather to fill the grocery shelves, and as a country and an industry, we need to start proactively figuring out how we are going to keep refrigerators full when the global weather systems stop cooperating.
This year we swore we wouldn't plant until May 1st, since for the last five years, we've been hit by a killer cold spell in the last few days of April that's set crops back. However, since the weather is getting so warm so fast, we started getting into the fields last week, way earlier than planned!
We wanted to share a bit over this season about how we grow your veggies, and particularly some of the equipment changes we've been making in the last two years that will allow us to build our soils up better. We also wanted to explain what some of the weird equipment is that you might walk by in the fields! This week we are starting with what we've mostly been doing so far: primary and secondary tillage.
"Primary tillage" is pretty much what it sounds like--the initial field work that prepares the ground for planting. For us, it's a two stage process of spreading compost and/or composted chicken manure, and then chisel plowing. We make some compost on the farm (and buy some in, though we are always looking for more), but we also use an organic, dehydrated chicken manure compost that we spread in the snazzy yellow cone spreader, where it drops through the cone to fly out through the openings at the bottom (yes, spreading this is the dirtiest job on the farm!). This spreader also does double duty as a seeder, helping us plant cover crop seed for green manures at the end of the growing season or in fields we are actively growing on.
Next up is our beast of a chisel plow. This implement (in the picture below) is the one thing that can really strain the capacity of our tractor. It has five giant tines (about 30 inches high) and is pulled behind the tractor, loosening the soil to depths of 6 to 12 inches. We started using this last year because we wanted to do more "vertical tillage," which is where you don't invert the soil with a regular plow, a process which can break up beneficial microbial communities, but rather slice these blades through the soil and any compaction to allow better water percolation and root growth. We've been seeing good results so far!
Below is a picture of the chisel plow in action last week in Montana, which we actually left uncovered this winter so it will be ready for the earliest crops of the year (I know, it doesn't look like it's doing much, which is a good sign that it isn't that rough on the soil!).
[We name all our fields after states to help keep them straight. Montana is the highest, most northern field with the biggest view of the sky. California is the field with the high tunnel, since it has the most perfect growing conditions, and since our U-Pick fields are scattered in an archipelago over the farm, we call them Hawaii! If you hear us talking about going to Indiana, Maine, South Carolina, or any other state that sounds like a nice vacation, it's actually more likely we are talking about our growing fields, sadly! We are opening a field north of Montana this year, so one hot farm debate this season is if we should call that new field Alaska or Saskatchewan?]
After chisel plowing, we do one of two "secondary tillage" options on the farm. If we need a fine seedbed for direct seeding crops or using a plastic mulch, we would roto-till the soil right before planting. If it's less important to have a perfectly smooth bed, we will use our new tool for this year: the field conditioner. It's a replacement for a couple implements we have used in past years and essentially works the soil more gently with a series of tines, before leveling the soil out with a little roller in back. Our long time goal is to move away from roto-tilling unless absolutely necessary towards more reduced tillage options like this for preparing and managing our fields. Our other long term goal is to mechanize our heavier manual work so that we can handle the farm as we get older! This field conditioner hopefully helps a bit on both fronts!
And then the fields are ready to plant! This week we'll be putting a lot of crops into the ground, so we'll try to explain the tools we are using to do that in one of the next weeks! Enjoy your sunshine!
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Hartwood Farm
Farmers Maryellen and Matt Robinson
5258 Irish Ridge Rd, Chittenango, NY 13037
info@hartwoodfarm.com
Farm Landline: 315.655.5652
