This Week on the Farm 10/2
So far we have had four frosts this fall. At this point in the season that is pretty normal. This Friday and Saturday it is supposed to get very cold and it will probably be the end of the summer crops like peppers and eggplant.
With the lack of rain we are back in a severe drought. It hasn’t rained in about two weeks and what rain we did get in late summer was not enough to bring us out of the drought. We have had to start irrigating our direct seeded fall plantings in order to have them ready before the end of the season. Hopefully we get some rain in the next week to help our plants along.
A lot of our labor this week has been going towards field clean up. In multiple fields we have to remove the irrigation equipment (sprinklers and hoses) before we can mow and disc down any weeds. Once the field has been mowed and/or disced we come through with a pull behind spreader. Using the spreader speeds up the process of seeding the cover crop mix of field peas and oats.
So far we have four out of the twelve fields ready for winter. Four more are ready to be disced and then seeded. Several of the fields still have a fair amount of vegetables in them, so we have to wait until we are done harvesting before we prep them for winter. We hope to have all of the field work done by the end of October.
In the next couple of weeks we will start planting our seed garlic. We are still waiting for two more varieties that we purchased this summer to get shipped. Hopefully they won’t be on back order until November, or become out of stock before we get our shipment. It is absolutely ridiculous how often that happens, no matter the seed company.
This Saturday we had help harvesting the potatoes that are in your box this week. Joey Connaughty and two of her boys came out to the farm and helped pick up the potatoes that our harvester shoots out. We would like to give them a big thank you for their help this weekend and for their help throughout the summer!
Harvest days are getting more and more miserable as the temperatures drop. We have had to start adding a little bit of warm water to the wash water so that our hands don’t go numb. After a crop has gone through the washing line and has been packed in the boxes, I like to warm up my hands next to the kerosene heater in the garage. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn’t dip below freezing while we have to be outside harvesting. There is just no good way to keep your hands warm while you are harvesting and washing veggies.
In equipment news, we have had to replace the battery on our 4-wheeler. It is about seven years old and still had the original battery. Don replaced it and now it is working again.
We are probably going to have to have some major work done on Tyler’s red truck. It looks like the ball joint on the front left tire is broken so that the tire is angled in toward the truck. Thankfully we just bomb around the farm in the red truck and we don’t rely on it for deliveries. Last year we were late for a delivery when the same issue happened on the green truck. Now we just have to find the right time for us to get it into the shop when we don’t need the truck for a couple of days.