Tomato progress: Now there's a lovely sight!

Silas monitors all things ripening on the farm, especially berries and cherry tomatoes. So of course he was the first to find these little green beauties.

Cherry tomatoes in the Big Tunnel June 11.

Tomato plants give a distinct scent from the time they’re wee, and it gets more intense as they grow sturdy and climb. Even in February, when we’re watering baby tomatoes under the grow lights, that aroma brings to mind summer. Filling buckets with cherry tomatoes. Finding a beautiful Cherokee Purple heirloom with a nibble out of it, so it’s all mine to ferry home and savor with feta cheese, or cook down to sauce. Glowing yellow tomato dust from fingertips to elbows.

Like a lot of things, there’s a good deal of joy in the anticipation weeks. After all, it’s fun to poke around, spying on the green fruits. There’s no real work in that. When the tomatoes finally do burst on the scene, it’s high summer, and the harvesting gets intense all around.

Here are the tomatoes in the Big Tunnel. Jay added more clips to the string, and they’re due for another pruning.

Here’s a tomato comparison photo.

This was about two weeks ago, on May 29.

~ Stella

The first CSA harvest is in! How much did we pick?

We’re packing 55 CSA shares for Lucky Season No. 7. We have 20 half shares and 35 full shares, and the harvest is in for this week’s CSA. They’ll be packed tomorrow morning, and then distributed over three days.

Over the seasons, we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) there are two keys to a smoother CSA week.

1.) Have a detailed, written plan for the week. When it’s written out, you might look at it and say, “Well, damn.” But you must have a plan in front of you. It’s better than looking around the farm and having that same thought. For the CSA, I make a list a week beforehand of the produce we think will be ready to harvest. Jason’s seeding and planting schedule aims to hit its mark every week, but of course the weather is always a big factor. I plan out what we’re going to harvest down to the exact number of kale leaves. Then, I map out when we’ll harvest. Having a clear plan makes any changes that crop up during the week less painful.

2.) Do. Not. Procrastinate. Never. Don’t do it. No. Do not. We mostly stick to the written plan, but if an opportunity presents itself, we take it. Like, say, the radish pulling went way faster than expected. Okay, then pick some spinach right now instead of tomorrow. We cut greens that store exceptionally well, such as kale and spinach, as early in the week as possible. When cut properly, in the cool of morning or evening, and immediately rinsed and stored in airtight containers in the cooler, they can keep for several weeks, so picking them a few days in advance is perfectly fine. Early on in my farm years, I had the ridiculous mindset that all CSA produce had to be harvested only one day before it’s packed. This is completely foolish. Fresh vegetables store well. Don’t make it harder on yourself than it needs to be.

This is our second season with about 55 members. For our biggest CSA season, we had 75 members. That was when we had a part-time helper. With Jason still working off-farm full time, we decided to keep the CSA around 55. The fact that we sell out every year is a positive indicator for future expansion.

But back to present day. Want to know how much we harvested for this week’s CSA? Here you go:

Kale: 20 pounds (This is 600 big leaves.)

Lettuce heads: About 100

Pea shoots: 7 pounds

Oregano: 4 pounds

Spinach: 6 pounds (This week, the spinach is only going in the full shares. Sometimes we alternate what the half shares and full shares receive. It all just depends on how much is ready to harvest.)

Parsley: 3 pounds

Green onions: Not sure how many. It felt like an eternity’s worth. Darned green onions. A tedious vegetable if there ever was one.

Radishes: About 3 bushels

Every season, as that first CSA week draws near, I get nervous. We still harvest for local shops and fill website orders every Monday, plus we’ve got to, you know, grow stuff. There are times when the weekly schedule looks totally bananas. There are times when I look around and think, this whole thing is nuts, isn’t it? Are we nuts? Well, maybe it is, and maybe we are, but, we’ve got a plan, and we just need to stick to it. And no procrastinating. No. Never. Huh-uh! Don’t even think about ! ;)

We’re loving the pick-up we bought last fall, even with all its quirks. It’s so easy to load bins in the bed. We’ve still got the Toyota RAV4 and its trailer, but the truck is much easier. That’s the whole lettuce harvest for the CSA this week. It’s about 100 heads. Time to take it home and let it soak before storing it in the cooler in bins.

~ Stella

First garlic harvest

Jason and Silas pulled the first garlic last weekend. It’s early for garlic around here. This Early Portuguese was in the Little Tunnel all winter. We’re saving these heads for seed garlic, which means we’ll break them open and plant the cloves.

A lot of the outdoor garlic has curly scapes. We’ll cut those soon for CSA members. Scapes, which are the start of a blossom on a garlic plant, have a delicious flavor. They must be cut to prevent the plant from focusing its energy on a flower, rather than a nice garlic head. This is our first truly serious dive into garlic growing.

~ Stella

How we water now: 1-inch water line & improved germination

Previously, the farm’s direct seeding, rather than transplanting, didn’t boast a great success rate. By “the farm’s,” I actually mean Jason’s. And I’m not saying that to throw him under the bus. Farming, we’ve come to learn, means spending a considerable amount of time solving one problem or another. And when it comes to problems on the farm, Jason’s the one who typically does the legwork to figure them out.

So it went with the germination. He tested hypotheses (old seed, bad seed, too little water), but the subpar germination issue persisted. After awhile, he suspected the water system. So let me quickly walk you through how we water. Pond water is ushered up a big hill via buried, 1-inch line. It’s pushed up by a submersible pump with electric power. When the water reaches the gardens, it travels to the beds through 1/2-inch lines. These are connected to Senninger Xcel-Wobblers that sit atop waist-high plastic stakes. For a 125-foot bed, we use five wobblers, and provided a spider hasn’t turned a sprinkler head into its own personal high rise, the wobblers work well.

However, this system was only throwing water on about four beds at a time, and since we didn’t immediately have a limitless supply of sprinklers (on a budget here, folks), this meant constantly moving water lines. To move a water line, we take the wobblers off the stakes, pound the stakes in where we need them, and reattach the wobblers. We also drag the water line to its new location. The process is a nuisance, so we accumulated more wobblers over time, but the system was still inefficient. We knew the wobblers weren’t at fault. And despite the water’s uphill climb, the water pressure seemed fine, too.

After some tinkering with the pump filter, Jason got the wobblers to throw water over up to six beds. Still, the germination problem persisted.

Then, Jason installed 1-inch lines in all the high tunnels. As soon as he put those in, he noticed drastically improved germination in the tunnels. Seeds germinated faster and uniformly.

When he emailed Dubois Agrinovation in Québec, his suspicions were confirmed by a “conseiller en irrigation.” Actually, I could have skipped this entire post, and just reprinted the guy’s email. “If you have 5 Xcel wobbler on line. Need 1’ pipe.”

So Jason began the conversion process, swapping out the 1/2-inch line with 1-inch line everywhere on the farm. We went from throwing water on four to six beds, to throwing water over six to eight beds. But the most important thing is that more gallons per minute are being hurled on the beds.

The best example of this new success is radish germination. With the bigger water line, radish seeds germinated and stood three-quarters of an inch tall within three days, and popped up in uniform lines. It seems like this is one problem Jason can check off his list.

Jason first noticed the improved germination in the Big Tunnel, which had new 1-inch water line. In this photo, there are radishes on both sides of cucumber plants. Within three days, these radish seeds were already three-quarters of an inch tall.

~ Stella

Tomato progress (lean & lower method) - May 10 & May 29

This year, we’re trying the “lean and lower” system with vining crops in the tunnels. You can read all about that here. Here’s a look at how the tomatoes are doing. First, is a photo from the Big Tunnel taken May 10, 2021.

May 10, 2021: At this point, we only had tomatoes in the tunnels. There’s too much of a frost risk outside. Most of the tomatoes were still too small to clip to the string.

Here’s the same row, about three weeks later. They were all big enough to clip, and some of them now have two clips. So far so good.

May 29, 2021: Many even have blossoms.

~ Stella

Landscape fabric & a single fistful of weeds

Last night, as we walked through the Big Tunnel, checking out the tomato blossoms and talking about whether to start the CSA in the first week of June, or wait a week, I absentmindedly plucked weeds from the lettuce.

Exiting the tunnel, I looked down at the weeds clenched in my fist. A single fistful of weeds. That’s it. A full row of lettuce, and thanks to the landscape fabric, only a measly clump of very determined grass and Lady’s Thumb managed to squeeze around some of the lettuces.

We’ve learned lessons about being careful with when and where we put fabric down (early spring in a tunnel is risky because of voles). But when fabric is successfully put to use, it’s life changing when it comes to weeds.

This is my third season dealing with a chest problem that’s most definitely irritated by vigorous weeding by hand or with a hoe. (I’ll write a post about this eventually.) To casually pluck a few weeds in less than a minute feels like a miracle.

In this next photo, you can just see another lettuce row - with no landscape fabric - on the far right side of the tunnel. This lettuce was weeded at least three times, and is still on the verge of going out of control. Tending the lettuce by hand on this farm requires hand weeding and hoeing. The hand weeding is necessary to pluck out stubborn grasses by their roots. While the best rule to follow is to hoe before you even see baby weeds, this gets very difficult with two people (especially when one of us has a full-time job off farm).

Today, I’ll likely hand weed that lettuce row on the far right again. But knowing that I only have two lettuce rows right now to hand weed with no landscape fabric is a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.

As you can see, we’re also putting grass clippings and straw to use this year around long-haul crops like tomatoes and peppers. The very fact that we now have time and energy to rake up grass clippings says a lot about how things are always improving around here. (Hopefully getting a sweeper for the clippings soon.)

As for the life of the landscape fabric, it isn’t like single-season plastic. Fabric can last for decades if used properly.

The grass clippings, straw, and fabric all take a little more time and effort when you transplant, but escaping the physical, mental - and financial - toll of weeds is beyond worth it.

~ Stella

We're trying a new system for high tunnel vine crops

Tomatoes and cucumbers are climbers, and they can get out of hand fast, with vines sprawled across pathways and tangled, leading to spoiled and diseased fruit. We’re, ahem, speaking from experience here.

But when vining crops are given priority status on a farm’s to-do list, they can be bountiful and valuable.

A confession: we’ve struggled with trellising and pruning tomatoes. When dozens of things on the farm need our attention all at once, and the tomatoes need TLC, there hasn’t been enough L&C to go around.

So why are we entering this season thinking things will turn out any different? Well, for one, boundless optimism is a personality requirement for gardeners. But, in all seriousness, we’re just more ready. As our farming experience and knowledge accumulate, we solve old problems and make time for new priorities.

One such priority is a whole new technique in the high tunnels. It’s called the “lean and lower” system. Jason strung steel cables across the top of the Big Tunnel and one of the Cat tunnels. We dangled a Tomahook with a cord over every tomato plant, and we’ll attach the vines with trellis clips. When the cucumbers are in the Big Tunnel, they’ll each have a hook, as well.

Videos demonstrating the lean and lower system have us chomping at the bit to try it. As the vine grows, you give it more cord, and slide the Tomahook down the steel cable, freeing the plant to grow taller. It’s an intense production system, urging plants to reach their potential. A tomato vine loaded with fruit is heavy, around 20 to 25 pounds, if not more. We have about 60 plants in the Big Tunnel, so that’s potentially more than 1,000 pounds of weight. (The Big Tunnel is strong, and Jason added supports to the Cat tunnels, so the heft shouldn’t be an issue.)

We’re excited about this system, and approaching it ready for the required labor and time. We’ll post regular photos and updates of our vine plants this season, and you can see how it goes right along with us.

These are the Tomahooks. They hang off steel cables that stretch across the high tunnels. We’ll clip the tomato and cucumber plants to the cords with trellis clips. (P.S. See those small, bright green plants at my feet? Those are celery in the Big Tunnel.)

Jason and Silas hang the Tomahooks on one of the steel cables in the Big Tunnel.

~ Stella

P.S. For the outdoor tomatoes, which we’ll plant around Memorial Day weekend, we’ll still use the Florida Weave. For the weave, you use T-Posts and twine. The twine cinches the plants up, and more strands can be added as the plant grows. Side (but extremely important) note: our outdoor tomatoes, and, well, everything outdoors, is now safe from marauding deer, thanks to a 7 1/2-foot fence.