This Week on the Farm 4/22
Happy Earth Day!!! It is days like this that make me proud to be a Wisconsinite. Thank you Gaylord Nelson!
It has been another busy week. Monday we were lucky enough to get Dave and Kate Carlson’s help cutting up our seed potatoes. I honestly was dreading the job after last year when I had to cut up 250 pounds of potatoes mostly on my own. This year it went so much faster. We cut over 400 pounds of potatoes in less than two hours! Hooray for teamwork!
On Tuesday we planted potatoes with our old school potato planter. We don’t have any new footage of the potato planter in action since it was just Tyler and I, but we did post an explanation of how it works on our facebook page. There are also videos of the planter from last year. It took us eight hours to plant all of the potatoes and we barely made it in before dark. We ran out of room so Don rescued us at the last minute by working up one of our side roads. We figured if we put all of the rows end to end we planted over a mile and a half of potatoes!
Thursday we drove up to Cashton to pick up our cover crop seed. The ride was much more hilly than we anticipated and I think next year we are going to take the interstate instead of county highways. It was a little too curvy for comfort when you are trailing as much weight behind you as we were on that trip. As soon as we work the rest of the fields we will be able to plant the cover crop in our two fields that are going to be fallow this year.
Today we got some help planting our first planting of scallions and our yellow cippolini onions from members of the UW-Madison Horticulture Club. We planted two full rows of scallions by hand and used the transplanter to plant six and a half rows of the cippolini. It was really great to meet new Hort students and to get so much help!
Other things we have done this week include seeding tomatoes and herbs, moving onions/leeks/scallions/pac choy/kohlrabi/lettuce into the unheated hoophouse so they can harden off before being planted outside, holding an open house at Harmony Cafe in Green Bay, and working on equipment. We have also spent two to three nights this past week checking the temperatures every hour to make sure we protect the berries from frost. We have had to go outside twice this week to turn the sprinklers on at night. We are probably going to have to turn the sprinklers on again tonight. What we do to protect our yummy berries!!