If you subscribe to PVF-West, please read all the new information on this website.  There are changes — we have one share size and one season length now.  Much simpler.  PVF-East continues to maintain its complicated structure, with three share sizes and two seasons.  Read all about it.

We have been resting and getting energized for the next season, going to conferences, reading seed catalogs, reading the regular newspaper.  We don’t mind cold, wet weather in January one bit, since it keeps us inside and guilt-free.  We are looking forward to spring, but we are in no particular hurry.

Here’s a photo from that tremendous snow of late December. We went out over and over to keep moving the snow off the hoophouse so it wouldn’t collapse. That puts a whole new meaning to snowstorm. We also turned the heater on in the big greenhouse for the same reason. All structures survived the weather. I always think that these super cold nights are freezing our insect enemies in the ground. That’s another way to enjoy the winter, especially when I can stay inside and watch.

You can see the trickle irrigation tape running down the center of the bed. Now that we can see what is what, it’s time to bring in the beloved Bartschi root digger. The driver keeps the machine moving very slowly straddling the bed, while two people “birth” the roots behind.

Stephen and Zeke are catching the roots as they become unearthed, making sure they don’t get reburied by soil, or fall into the abyss that the root lifting blade creates. Now the rest of the crew can come in and calmly and quietly collect the sweet potatoes, separating them from the vine.

Unlike sweet potatoes from the store, these roots come in every possible shape and size. Some of the biggest are over 4 pounds! As long as it’s edible, we consider even strange ones food too. So, from about 3000 plants, we harvested 235 green pony baskets of potatoes. That’s about 6000 pounds of goodness.

How’s everyone enjoying their veggies this year?

This is what a happy hen looks like. We keep only hens, no roosters, so we call them the Ladies. I’ve learned from my hip young workers that the slang for vacation is Vakay. Thus the topic of my post. The ladies, all 183 of them, have been out in the field all spring, where the variety of greenery was a bit slim. So, last week we brought them over the a very diverse and interesting area for a little vacation. This spot has weeds of every ilk, wood chips, hay bales and piles of leaves for the ladies to play in. They are so busy all day scratching and pecking that they can barely look up when we drive by. They live in this deluxe hen house at night safe from Mr. Fox. They lay eggs in the morning in the nest boxes, then party the rest of the daylight hours outside.

The fencing is just to keep them from eating crops or getting out on the road. They have lots of room to roam and express themselves. For me this is the most important part of being a chicken keeper - keeping them happy. The ladies also have access to real DIRT for giving themselves dust baths.  This dust is important for keeping parasites and lice off their skin and feathers. Yet another reason to support free range chicken products! Enjoy.

We have a fairly loose plan of where different crops will go as the season begins. Then, the actual on-the-ground factors come into play. “Where is it dry enough to plant?” becomes the key question. Remember that any given field needs to go through a series of processes to go from covered with plants (winter cover crop of rye) to ready to plant a crop. Each of these steps requires dryish soil conditions.

Luckily, this season I have such excellent teammates that we have managed pretty well to continue to plant and sow in the given 10 minutes of perfect soil moisture - quick quick before the next rain comes. It also requires all machines work properly during that exact window of opportunity. So far, no major set backs, just things being on the late side.

Last Friday we enjoyed a full 5 hour pre-market harvest in the pouring rain. This is when you really find out how effective that rain gear actually is. As I told my folks, I’m pretty chipper with mudboots, a felt hat with a brim and rain pants. I get grumpy when the moisture reaches my core (chest and underarms) and then it’s pretty lousy out there. In order to not get stuck in the mud, we picked the load into a trailer (no need to protect from the hot sun). What an beautiful load.

And then after we pick, we need to wash all these greens and pack them up for market. That was two people for 2+ hours! The rest of us picked peas in the mud. My core got wet just in time to call it a day. We were a gorgeous bunch of farmers.

One of the hardest concepts for consumers is the idea of patience. We have now been trained that our every whim can be satisfied within seconds (just ask wikipedia the definition…) or with in minutes (just drive to the store and get it) or within hours (order on-line, get it next day). But in farming you just have to wait. Seeds take as long as they please to germinate, plants take weeks to become mature enough to eat or at least to become grown-up enough to start mating (making flowers and then fruits!).

Let’s just track the lettuce that will be your dinner this week. The seeds were started in the greenhouse in early March. They become cute little plants in the greenhouse. They sat outside for a week, got ready for the “real” world of full sun, heat and cold. We transplanted them into the field on April 27.

Today, 5 weeks later they are big enough to become dinner. Lettuce is pretty much one of the fastest crops: only 8 weeks from start to finish. Other crops like tomatoes and eggplant are at least 4-5 MONTHS from seed to first fruit. And then our fall favorite, celeriac, is the grand champ of patience, 6+ months of growing time.

So, please understand, it takes time to grow food!  We do employ a few tricks of the trade, but they can only buy you days, not weeks or months.

Now, try to imagine planting fruit trees:  3+ years from planting to the very first harvest! Now, that’s a whole other take on patience. Thanks for your anxious questions about when something is ready. We’re having a nice long spring trying to make your wait as short as possible.

The deal is not dead yet.

For those of you late to the story please use email to each Board of Supervisors member and School Board member to register your upset. For those of you that are up to date, please send them another one. I am told by those who know, that these letters are making ALL the difference.

Here is our best local paper coming out in strong support of our cause.

Please visit Wheatlandalliance.org for pertinent information, addresses etc.

Thank you for helping us to continue to thrive.

The video of the meeting can be streamed online or downloaded (large WMV). The audio of the meeting can be downloaded.

Thanks to everyone that showed up for support and to everyone that’s taken the time to contact the board.

Demonstration on Monday May 4th, 2009 6:00pm
Loudoun County Government Center: 1 Harrison Street, S.E., Leesburg, VA 20177-7000

We will present our 900 petitions, have a press conference, and have as many people as possible with signs standing in the courtyard and in the lobby of the building. This is to get us fired up for the 6:30 public comment period. We need to have so many people speak to the supervisors that they have to sit there until midnight hearing our concerns. Our goal is to get the Board of Supervisors so upset and embarrassed by this debacle that they pass some kind of resolution or motion that states a school cannot be built on these properties. That will make the sales contract Null and Void. We have two legal opinions that agree with this as our best avenue to stop these schools.

If you can’t join us, please make some phone calls and get BODIES on the site. We have three days to get this together. It’s now or never.

Deluge the Board of Supervisors with emails (bos@loudoun.gov) and calls (comment line 703-777-0115) demanding this land purchase be stopped by any means!

Thanks and see you there!

http://wheatlandalliance.org/

Semi w/fence posts

They had a wonderful attachment to a skid loader called a post driver, which bashed in the 12′ post almost 3 feet in the ground, bang bang bang.

Post driver

And then another loader with the fence stretcher would unroll the 8 foot woven wire fence. Once the grounds men held it up to the posts, it would pull the wire very taught and they would nail the fence to the posts.

fence stretcher

I was impressed with the steady pace and speed at which this all took place. Wonderful equipment and highly skilled workers are a joy to watch. It’s nice to know that this big chunk of change ($16,000) was well spent. Now we’ll see how the deer adapt to this new line of defense. Remember that this is replacing only 1/3 of our fence, in the most “challenged” areas. We have to grow some more veggies, make some more money and invite this team of fencers back again next spring.

woven wire nailed into place

We started with one strand of electrified wire around that one acre patch. We moved to two strands, then two whole fences 3 feet apart. Then in 1996 we went big time and put up a “permanent” seven strand electric fence around the whole 50 production acres. It was a huge project, costing a fair amount of money and many people hours. That worked for a few years. Then the second fence outside the first. Then 3-4 years ago 7 foot plastic mesh, attached to the ground with 12″ ground staple so they couldn’t get under the fence. And now, this winter I could see that the deer have started to jump over. So, next week, a company from PA will come down and spend 3-4 days installing an 8 foot woven wire fence. It costs $5 per foot and my fence is more than 8000 feet around, so I am only affording to replace 2900 feet at the most high pressure areas = where I can tell they are jumping over. I anticipate doing this 2 more years until the whole fence is replaced. That’s right, $40,000 invested in keeping Bambi out. As you might imagine I enjoy venison quite a bit, mostly out of poetic justice.

So we are quickly trying to dismantle the existing fence so the new one can get installed next week. That means taking down 20,000 feet of wire, 2900 feet of plastic mesh and many half-rotted fence posts. It’s a big job. Here are two pictures of our worst section in terms of the complex of weedy perennials that have taken hold in the fence line.

I got so frustrated with separating the mesh from the pokey weeds that I brought out the skid loader and just smashed it down and ripped it out of the ground. It was very satisfying. But we still had to roll up the good parts of the mesh and fold up the ruined pieces to throw away.

I’ll show you the beautiful new fence when it gets here.

Some plants handle this kind of rough activity better than others. Cabbage is in the Brassicaceae family and they are pretty good at being transplanted. Plants in the Cucurbitaceae family are less happy about jostling so we seed them directly into the cell trays, or even seed them directly into the field.

You can see that the greenhouse fills up quickly at this rate. One seedling flat yielded 6 trays of 72 plants. We’ve also been working with many fancy herb plants, moving them for 85 cell trays to 50 cell trays. These are herbs that come from cuttings: rosemary, lemon verbena, tarragon, and lavender. So now the greenhouse looks like this:

We also seeded dill and cilantro for the first time. We put a pinch of seeds into each of the 84 cells, 7 trays of each variety. They will be ready for the field in 5 weeks or so.  Tomorrow we head out into the sunny weather (at least that’s what “they” are promising) to prune our neighbors blueberry patch. This earns us many hours of picking blueberries in July for free!

Bedding Plants

We are also slowly making our way through the top half of the greenhouse, weeding and putting down landscape cloth to try and keep it clean and weed free through the season. We are then setting up our makeshift benches on top of the cloth.

It’s been hard work getting the chickweed out of the gravel, using our fingers and a shovel. The first blisters of 2009 happily reside on my right hand. That’s one of the costs of taking the winter off.

Thanks goodness the weather has been more cooperative these last few days, with night temperatures above 45 degrees. That means the heater has not had to work to keep the plants happy overnight. We run circulating fans at night to keep the warmer air in the top half of the house mixed with the cooler air at ground level. They also keep the plants from collecting so much dew and inviting fungal pests.

As for veggie crops, the chard, fennel, onions and leafy greens are up and growing. This week we start seeding some of the sexy annual fruit crops that make our season prosper: tomatoes, eggplant and peppers which are all members of the Solanaceae family.

We will also head out to the field today to see if it is dry enough to do some early tillage. One of the worst things a farmer or gardener can do to the soil is to work it WET. You end up creating clumps of clay that will plague you for years to come. If it’s indeed dry enough, we’ll till and plant some peas. It’s early, but these super warm days and light winds have dried the top of the soil at least.