Progress!

This weekend we had great progress. Things are coming together nicely. The seedlings look great, the beds look great, the gophers love us.... as in they sure do love it that we are growing food for them. Too bad they don't have any money to give us. And unfortunately for them, they are in constant peril with all the traps that have been set. They are tricky though and somehow manage to steer clear of our traps at times, while some are just not so lucky. It's an awful part of the farm life and we don't like it, but their natural predators (coyotes, foxes, apparently weasels, and who knows what else) have been kept out of the system by our fencing and so we now are the top predators in the system and must keep them to limited numbers lest we be over run by money toting and grubbing gophers and moles.

But alas, why start a blog post telling of the gopher trapping? I'm sure you'd much rather find out what we have been up to since the last post...

well, first a couple of images I forgot to post with the last one. These are just two images of what the blocks looked like on May 29th

foreground to background: tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, summer squash, beans, beans, and more beans, and some various greens

the keyhole block with potatoes around the outside and herbs, sunflowers, and some beans in the center

For the next 2 weeks we prepared more of the keyhole block. On the 29th it was still grassy in the front area, so that needed to be scraped, allowed to dry down, and then started to sift some compost for the bed. By June 10th the area looked like this:

 I decided that the keyhole block was going to be more free flowing with it's design. I wanted it to have a design that allowed for fun and interest. I built these bean trellis' using redwood branches found along the edge of the property. In the end, I chose branches that had an arching form and a strong upright. They sort of lent itself to this design I call the "spiderweb sail" trellis. Call it whatever you want, but the idea was that when you enter into the center bullseye of the keyhole, my hope is that the beans (Grandma Nellie's Yellow Mushroom pole bean that is!) will grow and entangle and fill the spaces of the trellis and you would therefore walk through a sort of arbor/wall of bean plant. We'll see if that actually happens!

entering the bullseye through the spiderweb sail trellis

We also started working on our irrigation. At first in May, we had bought dripper irrigation that had emitters installed inside. This ended up being a problem because for one thing, the emitters were about a foot apart which was too far for most of what we were planting, and for another, it's more expensive and time consuming to set up. By early June we decided to change some of the irrigation we already set in place by changing it to T-tape drip line. This is pretty easy to use, less expensive, can be shaped to oddly formed beds (like our keyhole block as you will see later) and has slits in it to allow for water to drip every 6 inches or so. So we are using the emitter installed drip for some things that are further spaced apart like our squashes (after all, we already spent the money). The T-tape is best for pretty much everything else and especially things that are sown closer together.

Here's a photo montage of some irrigation and all the plants that I'm sure everyone wants to see!

June 10th

 

and last but not least for June 10th it was blazing hot, so hot that this is us 

working hard on the farm despite the heat:

June 17th

The first peppers! These are Padron peppers. We quickly fried them up with a bit of coconut oil and ate them with delicious meal of rice and beans and slaw. These were not hot. Supposedly 1 in every few will be hot.

A first tomato.

June 25th

These photos document the completion of our keyhole block with planting of 3 kinds of beets interspersed with carrots. The root veggies need a very fine seed bed so I added 3 wheelbarrows of finely sifted compost and dug and raked and declumped and reraked quite a bit in order to get it as fine as possible. I'd probably have to be there for days before it was super fine, but I hope it's good enough for finicky carrots. I also planted different kinds of greens between the funky potato contraptions; 2 varieties of chicory; escarole and endive as well as red giant mustard and arugula.

 And to round out this post, more photo montage of how we are making Progress...

We are getting so close....

so close to maybe being able to say we are actually creating a small farm. Certainly it's very small for a farm that might be able to allow us to make a little money, but it's certainly the biggest garden we've ever had.

Before we moved to Sebastopol we were "farming" on a hilltop in the backyard that literally would produce maybe a handful of yummy edibles at a time. The sun wasn't enough, it could be very cold and windy, and basically we made little raised garden beds by bringing in enough soil to give us maybe a foot of depth if we were lucky. And there was a mole or vole that was hanging out in the raised garden area that would tunnel around and push up our soil (that was only maybe a foot deep). It was more of a hobby garden, but it kept us happy and always wishing we had more; more space, more sun, more soil, more vegetables and more fruits to eat. And we are getting closer and closer to that crazy dream we have.

At least we are finally on the right path and working towards it. We've made more mistakes we'd like to admit these first 6 months or so, but we are learning a lot and with time we won't be making as many amateur mistakes and if we do make mistakes, hopefully they will be at least worthwhile so that we won't do it again. I think most of us out there know that we actually become more knowledgeable about something the more we get to know it inside, out, backwards, forwards, done right and done wrong.

All that being said here's the progress we have made in the last few weeks and I must say we are getting close... getting close to at least having all the seeds and plants in the ground that we had envisioned for at least this first go.

May 20th

day of the annular solar eclipse

planting Turkey Craw seeds into a prepared bed. Turkey Craw is a pole bean so we will have a trellis system in place

planting more tomatoes and peppers. we had to buy in most of our peppers because the slugs kept eating our transplants. we managed to get a handful of seedlings after sowing pepper seeds 2-3 times though. they were small, but  big enough to put in the ground

 

a new potato protection design. Mountain Rose potatoes are planted in here

A bit of a Panoramic shot for May 20th

the shadows and light was odd around the peak time of the eclipse. this photo was around 6:20ish

 May 21st

setting up irrigation and planting some melon seeds

May 25th

sprouting!

German Butterball Potatoes

tomatoes

the "bullseye" in the keyhole block planted with Hopi red lima beans, Hopi black dye sunflowers, a Malabar spinach plant in the center and cilantro around the base

beans sprouting! Painted Pony

remember those beds we were hoeing and scraping back in April? Well we prepared them just enough to throw in some squash seeds and this is what they looked like at the end of the day on the 25th. due to area that we worked and how the blocks and pathways are set up this is what this block is shaping up to look like at this time. basically we are working what will become two separate blocks. right now it's a block and a half.

May 28th

more sprouting and preparing and sowing

first squash seedling! Guatemalan Blue Banana squash germinated first

red radicchio Palla Rossa seedlings with a tiny flea beetle. flea beetles munch upon the cotyledons of the radish seedlings

first melon seedlings!

we decided that I planted the potatoes in my box too close so we dug them up and then put some into a new contraption and also in the squash block where we had a few beds unused. these are La Ratte fingerling potatoes

potaotes just put right into a bed without any cage to keep them safe from the gophers and moles. we will see what happens (maybe it will protect our squash plants if the potatoes keep them busy)

new potato contraption

new potato contraption finished

now the German Butterball potatoes have at least enough room to grow more potatoes. we attached another side layer of wood above the first sides

 Well, for now those are the photos showing the progress. We'll have more soon as we get more work done. 

We are getting close...

We have to apologize for our lack of posting, but it's not really our fault. You see, we'd love to just keep you updated with words, but it's not nearly as fun as also being able to see photos. Unfortunately our camera finally decided to really die on us so we have not been able to take new pictures. I have procured a camera though by other means and so I have lots of progress shots to share and can explain along the way.

And here we go:

As of late April we were hip deep in a lot of this

vetch, barley, bell bean cover crop

and this is what we were doing a lot of

mowing down cover crop by hand with a Japanese sickle. we didn't have our scythe yet so it was a lot of back breaking work

mowed beds

a partially scraped bed and the scrapings drying in the sun

beds mowed, scraped, drying in the sun and we started to rake away the dried grass

we also spent time building (and rebuilding/turning) our compost pile

 The cover crop and grass scrapings all go into our compost piles. We have made the above compost at least 3 times now (in the photo the first pile in the forefront is being turned into the second pile in the back and we have turned it one more time to make the third pile), but we have so much other stuff to get done that we have decided that we can build as many compost piles as we want at a later date after all the plants are planted and seeds are sown.

 By the time we had our first beds mowed, scraped, and raked we were ready to start preparing our beds with our powdered elements, compost, and dig them in so that we could plant. I won't go into full detail of our bed preparation method here, but I will show you some of our first plantings!

Australian Brown Onions (left 2 rows)! Cipollini Onions (right 2 rows)!

Tomatoes!

 

tomato, pepper, and future melon, cucumber beds in the early morning

Our two methods of planting potatoes. we both had different ideas on what to do, so we decided that we'd try both methods. chris came up the aviary wire cage idea set in the ground (with my added wood base and wood corner additions) and I decided to build somewhat of a box that would get wood sides added as the potatoes grow and we hill the soil around the plants. 

 

The third Compost Pile

This was the 3rd compost pile on May 13th about 1 week after building it the 3rd time. it breaks down fast and a compost pile should be turned every 3-4 days to keep it hot and doing the job of composting. we don't have the time right now for that, so we have put it on our lower priority list of farm tasks.

 

Remember those beds we hoed and scraped in April? Well, I went back through and re-hoed all the beds so that the grasses would get broken up. They were starting to grow again and we needed to work on them at least one more time. These beds will have our squash plants in them. We have decided to have these beds be 12 foot long by 3 feet wide which we hope will be much more manageable than the 25x4 foot beds we are working with currently.

May 13th on the farm

 This is the space we are currently working with for most of our plantings. In the foreground is our "keyhole block" that will have herbs, sunflowers, some beans in the bulls eye center, carrots and beets on the sides and potatoes in the boxes. There is also the bed of onions and leeks on the right to the block. The block of beds in the midground on the left will have our tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons. The block of beds in the midground on the right will have all of our bush and pole beans and leafy greens. We are calling this our "beans and greens block". Then the grassy area beyond the prepared beds has the squash beds that are hoed and will be mulched.

By May 14th the keyhole block looked like this:

chris preparing the herb portion of the keyhole. I decided to make the center our cardinal directions bed with sunflowers in the 4 corners and beans planted in the middle spaces and then a malabar spinach in the center and cilantro seeds around the base

we prepared and planted the bed in the background of the "beans and greens block" with 4 kinds of greens: giant red mustard, mizuna, red radicchio, and wild arugula

 

 

 

 

the mizuna was the first to germinate. it germinated in 4 days!

planted American Flag leeks in the onion bed

right now we are hand watering until we have time to put in our irrigation

 Well, that's what we have to share for now. We've been so busy farming it's hard to have time for blogging. We are rushing to get as much done as possible before the daylight starts lessening again. It's nice to have these long daytimes so that we can get up early (yes, even by 6am) and work late into the day (with a siesta midday if we can afford it!)

Thanks for stopping by
C+C