Our current “temporary” water line has been laying on top of the ground for 3-4 years and is always in danger of being mowed or tilled in two.

My neighbor Carl and I had planned on going in together to rent a ditch witch for a day this winter and put a few thousand feet of water line in on our respective farms. But as you know, it has been a little moist since November.

My immediate need was to bury 100′ of new water line so we can lay down the landscape fabric. I could do that with tools on hand, a single shank sub-soiler and a trenching shovel.

Using the sub-soiler was easy, I was on the tractor. I made 4 passes with the sub-soiler, even stopped to switch out the chisel point to a wider sub-soiler attachment that would hopefully remove more dirt from the ditch. I am lazy.

It finally got to a point where I had to get off the tractor and use the trenching shovel. The trenching shovel is basic. No on/off switch and only two apps, left hand and right hand. Dig down, lift up, toss to the side. After 20′ feet of that, I was huffing and puffing, it was 5:30 pm and I decided I needed to go to Lowe’s to buy supplies to supplement the automated green house watering equipment the UPS guy delivered.

I had planned on finishing the ditch Friday, but it had started to sprinkle on the way home from Lowe’s and I did not want to take the chance of dealing with mud rather than dirt, so I finished the ditch around dark on Thursday. I have not used the ditch shovel in over a year. Now I remember why.

That is what it is called when you bust up garlic bulbs into individual garlic cloves and that is what we did most of the day Tuesday with the help of CJ.

It is not that hard of work. We get to sit around. sit being the keyword, listening to the radio, and busting up garlic.

It is repetitive and your thumb will get sore from peeling that much garlic. We have found that rubber finger pads, like they use at the post office for sorting letters, are a big help.

Jenifer has always been faster than me at peeling garlic, but CJ was a garlic popping machine. She put rubber finger pads on both her thumbs and went to town.

I call that just showing off….

Garlic Varieties

Most of what we will be planting Saturday will be a hardneck variety called Music and a softneck variety called Inchellium Red.

We will be planting much smaller amounts of 7-8 varieties of both hardnecks and softnecks to build up a seedstock supply. It will probably be two years before we have enough of those varieties to sell at market.

Garlic is our longest term annual crop. Planted in October and harvested in mid-June, it is 9 months to fruition.

Prepping Garlic Beds

I hear your thoughts – “Is he ever going to shut up about the garlic?”

I am a little obsessive I guess about garlic. Especially since I held back 85 lbs of some of the best garlic we have ever grown for seedstock last year but did not get it planted till late February because of a wet winter and ended up with very small bulbs and nubbins of garlic.

Jenifer has told me multiple times, concerning this year’s harvest, is that we got what we got and it is what it is so just let it go and shut up about the garlic.

I called my cousin Lindsey to bring me two truckloads of 2-3 year old aged leaf compost, which he did last Friday.

Wednesday, Jenifer and I spread, by hand, around 300 five gallon buckets of the stuff on the 18 100′ garlic beds.

The beds still have to be fertilized. The mixture I came up with is 8 lbs of worm castings, 4 lbs. of McGeary organic fertilizer, 2.7 lbs of azomite, 2.3 lbs of greensand, and .33 lbs of humate per bed.

That sounds like a pretty specific mix, like I know what I am talking about. Put down your pens and quit cutting and pasting. The standard rate for applying earthworm castings is 20-30 lbs/1000 sq. feet. Most organic fertilizers are 300-500 lbs/acre or 4 lbs. per 300 sq. foot bed.

The figures for the Azomite, greensand, and humate, I just weighed what I had on hand, divided by the number of beds I have, 18, and there you go. Totally unscientific.

I spent a couple of hours getting the turkey set up in the brooder while everyone else was harvesting and washing around 500 heads of lettuce. The forecast for Friday is 97 with a heat index of 101-103 and our thoughts were that our lettuce would be better suited in the walk-in cooler than in the field.

We then started tying up tomato plants to their individual stakes. Labor-intensive… Erin and i were pulling off the suckers and Jen, Pam, Charles, and CJ were following being doing the actual tying.

It takes about 10 man hours to tie up our 600 tomato plants and it happens every week.

Then we moved to the garlic patch and started pulling up garlic.

Around 4 pm, everyone started to fade. Complaining about minor things like open, oozing blisters, heat stoke, and other such non-sense…

Jenifer and I have been humbled by the caliber of folks that have shown up this year to work along side us.

Joe and Jenny got to hear me yelp like a girly man. After the initial shock, I grabbed it by the tail and held it up to gauge it’s length, close to 5 feet.

Jenny is a high school senior from Charlotte Latin that was doing something called “Observe and Serve” as a requirement for graduation and she came out and helped us for 3 days. We did not know what to expect from her and I am sure she felt the same way about us.

Jenny impressed us. Her first job was counting out 3,000 worms, 250 at a time into 3 gallon worm buckets working with me and Charles. .

Later in the afternoon, we ran across a big black snake behind the barn amongest the apple trees.

I caught it by the tail and held up, about 6 feet.

Wednesday, I watched a 4′ black snake meander down a post from the barn loft. I was watching it move as he slid along and headed out of the barn.

I noticed a lot of snake. As the black snake exited the barn, another bigger black snake was coming in. They entertwined briefly.

It was really cool to watch.

Tuesday, I spent all day potting up young transplants of eggplants and peppers into 4.5″ X 4. pots. Why do I mention this? We used to transplant the plants directly from the flats into the garden. They did ok. We have found though that if we take the time and spend the money on large peat pots, it is well worth the effort.
Instead of subjecting a small transplant straight from a 72-cell flat to our red clay soil, we pot them up. A 4.5″ X 4″ peat pot surrounds the plug with about 8 times the volume of excellent growing medium as opposed to sticking them straight in the ground.

Our transplant potting mix consists of Fafard 3B (peat moss, bark, vermiculite), Black Cow compost, worm castings, and is amended with a complete 5-3-4 organic fertilizer, azomite, a volcanic rock dust, and lime.

It is more work to transplant the large peat pots but eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes are long term crops that have the potential to keep producing until first frost. It pays to take a little extra effort on the front end.

Wednesday

It was an interesting and fun day!
CSA members Joe and Jonathan showed up to work.

We were in clean-up mode and Joe and I started working on an eyesore, the hay wagon from hell piled with junk setting right across the driveway from the greenhouse.

Jonathan helped Jenifer clean up the greenhouse and set in to potting up tomato plants.

The hay wagon was loaded with junk that I had not used in 3 years. I save everything. Joe was making fun of me, holding up 8″ pieces of rotting of 2 x4’s asking if he could toss it. I had to think, those pieces of wood would make great small wheel scotches.

I love it when CSA workshares show up. Jenifer goes out of her way to feed them. Wednesday, she made an arugula salad with FL. blood oranges, and Rooti the pig country ham. Awesome!

Joe and I took the eyesore hay wagon down to just the running gear. We piled the junk either on the trash pile or burn pile and then used wrenches, hammers, crow-bars and the front-end loader of the tractor with a chain attached to remove the old timber..

I am good taking stuff apart, it is putting it back together that I have always had a problem with.

Collard Raab by CafeMama

What is Collard Raab?

I had not heard of collard raab either until last Saturday when Maria Fisher walked up with a handful of collard seed stalks and asked me what she should charge for them. I just gave her a blank look. Sensing that she was dealing with someone that was not culinarily hip and cool, Maria patiently explained that they were called collard raab and offered me one to try. Wow!
I have been eating them raw all week and Jenifer sauteed some in garlic and olive oil one day for lunch.

Normally, when I see collards going to seed, it indicates the crop is just about over. The majority of the plant’s energy is concentrated in sending up a flower stalk to be pollinated and produce seeds.

I just never had thought about eating the immature flowers but it makes sense. Collards are the brassica family, along with broccoli and cauliflower. Heads of broccoli and cauliflower are just large immature flowers.

Tomatoes, Peppers, and Eggplant

Sunday morning, I noticed the tomato seeds I has sown the previous Tues. were sprouting, so i moved them to the greenhouse for the day to get the benefit of full sun. We had had them sitting on a 6′ folding table behind our couch in the living room.

Peppers and eggplants prefer 85 to 90 degrees to germinate and can take up to 3 weeks to come up. What we started doing last year is to wrap pepper and eggplant seed in a warm and moist paper towels and stick each variety in plastic sandwich bags. We place 3 pint jars filled with hot water in a small lunchbox cooler, lay the bags of seeds on top of the jars, and put the lid on. I change the water in the jars about every 12 hours. This cuts the germination time down to 4-5 days.

Amazing Amount of Work This Week

We offered some working shares for our CSA this year and it is working out well. A working share is an exchange of labor, rather than money, for a share of vegetables.
We have 7 work shares and some have already started and we are trying schedule in the rest.

Many hands make light work but it runs me ragged trying to keep those hands from being idle and bored.

What would of took Jenifer and I all day to do, gets done in a few hours when we have help. It is just amazing to be so productive.

Levi’s Cabbage Plant

If you recall, Levi brought home a cabbage plant last week from school. We made a spot at the end of one of the beds in the greenhouse for it.

Last Tuesday, I was seeding flats outside and had the greenhouse door propped open. I did not notice the rooster and 3 hens go into the greenhouse. These chickens can roam the world if they choose. They choose to annoy us instead.

They stripped Levi’s cabbage plant of all it’s leaves, then proceeded to scratch up the dirt around the plant and sit on it. I was livid and screaming at the chickens. When Levi got home from school, he was extremely bummed.

Jenifer offered to buy him another one at the farm supply but he said he had to use the one from school for the contest. I made up compost tea and had Levi pour it over his mangled plant and we built a wire cage to go around the cabbage. The tea seemed to of done the trick. The cabbage putting on new growth.

Massey Ferguson Combine

Sunday, Levi and I went to her farm and spent a few hours there. While she showing us around, she mentioned that she had horse manure free for the hauling. My eyes lit up. We went to look at it and it was a pile about six feet high…cool! We were coming out of the pasture and I noticed an old combine in a shed and I asked if I could go look at it.

She said she had been trying to give it away to free up shed space. That is how I ended up with a combine. Not sure what I will do with it, I still have to go and move it. The back tires are dry-rotted, I am mechanically inept, but it was too good to pass up. Best I can figure, it was made in 1962-1964, It is a similar model of this combine.

We don’t heat our greenhouse because the propane costs would be prohibitive. On a sunny day with temperatures in the 40’s, the greenhouse will easily heat up into the 80’s. It cools down quickly though at night.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, we are expecting temperatures around 22-23 degrees. We will take the flats of seeds off the tables and set them on the ground in the greenhouse to take advantage of the natural heat sink of the earth. We will cover the flats with insulation board and blankets.

We won’t be planting outside anytime soon. Aftert 1.6 inches of rain Wednesday, everything is squishy.