Recent Posts
Tiny Farm Blog
Return To Blog Listing
Two acres and some tools: a photo-blog of daily life on an organic microfarm.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'fieldwork'
Friday harvests get quicker!
Friday harvests are getting quicker as the season winds down. This has happened at least for the last couple of years. Where earlier in the season, we finish around 8-9pm, we’re now mostly wrapp...
Beautifying the good garlic
Toshiko, WWOOFing from Osaka, Japan, via Vancouver, where she’d been studying English for the last few months, is our last guest in the field of the year. She arrived last Friday night, and stay...
Pumpkins and pigweed
Today, the pumpkins came in, wrested from a jungle of pigweed gone wild. Every year, a few of the 40 50′x50′ sections that make up the 2.5 acre garden get a little overrun with one weed or...
Fall frost watch 2008
Tonight is the first real frost watch of the year. I covered a bunch of beds for a couple of nights last week, but the chance of frost seemed slim, with the overnight forecast around 35°F (<2°C)...
Fall harvest
We’re definitely into fall weather now: the thermometer may still read “warm” but there’s always a cool edge in the air. This is the best field-working weather, you can go on f...
Violet returns: visiting with worms
Young Violet (2) returned to the field, sans siblings. She seemed to have fun on her first garden visit, on a sunny afternoon—today’s cool, cloudy, wet conditions didn’t faze her in the ...
Trimming garlic
From the long stack of garlic drying in the barn, we’ve been taking out about a bushel a week since harvest began in late July. Today, we finished preparing the rest of the harvest. Lynn, Raeche...
Fantastic egg tray technology!
OK, so they’re just regular cardboard egg trays from the commercial kitchen world, and they’ve probably been around exactly like this for decades. BUT, they haven’t been around HERE....
Cutting spinach
Spinach has kinda been the star of the harvest for the last couple of weeks. After a “normal” hot, dry summer, it’s usually not around at this time of year. This season, with all the...
After the row cover: weeding!
After about a month, we permanently removed the row cover from the last transplanting of fall brassicas, two sections with about 20 x 50′ beds in all. The cover protected against flea beetles, a...
More post-harvest action
If it’s Friday, it must be time to harvest! After a beautiful weather week with barely a cloud in sight, an otherwise welcome gentle rain today meant a bit of a muddy harvest. Here, the picking ...
Good beans…
Just a few sunny days and the new planting of snap beans have sized up perfectly for the Friday harvest. They’re the crop of the week, a shade on the young side, maybe 2-3 days from being fully ...
Last of the lettuce
Can’t quite seem to stop planting! Lynn and Libby put in a last 200 or so lettuce seedlings to see how far they’ll go in fall growth. The soil is still moist an inch (2.5cm) or so down, bu...
Poor tomatoes
Checking out the tomatoes’ progress is definitely the least happy task of this season. After removing most of the hail-damaged fruit, there’s not that much left, new growth is slow, and wh...
Post-harvest aftermath
Sorting and packing after harvest—post-harvest processing!—is in good part a wet job, made a lot messier in rainy weather when root crops come in with a load of mud attached. Once again this seaso...
Scrabbling for potatoes
Thursdays are potato harvest days. Without a walk-in cooler, the main weekly harvest for CSA and Saturday farmers’ market is mostly confined to Fridays, with potatoes being one of the few crops ...
Burlap breaks down
After a nice long ride, the burlap (of the burlap carrot germination method) is finally breaking down, shredding as we fold it up off the final carrot beds of the season. Even in this wet weather, the...
Harvesting around the rain
Have I mentioned that it’s been RAINING a lot all summer, like, a few times a day? We’ve taken to planning the Friday harvest to fit the slots between downpours, using…weather radar ...
Pigweed rehabilitated?
You’ve gotta respect pigweed. It’s resourceful, extremely flexible and adaptable, prolific…it just keeps on coming! It’s managed to grow in tiny dirt deposits, through rust hol...
Laid back Friday harvest…
With the poor weather-driven slow growth and setbacks (like, hail), Friday harvests so far this year have been nothing like last year, much easier, less to do, relaxed. There are usually three to five...
Garlic all in
Harvested in three parts over the last week, the garlic is now all in! This crop seems to’ve done well once again (I LOVE growing garlic!). For the first time, there’s a small pile of dama...
Hail damage reassessed
Three days after the nasty hail storm, and the full extent of the crop damage is more evident. It’s quite a bit worse than it first appeared. The plants will bounce back, but we’ve lost a ...
Massive new potatoes
Our first potatoes of the year are HUGE, some of the biggest potatoes I’ve grown by far. I guess they really liked the rain. First dug: Yukon Gold and Chieftain. As usual, the harvest method is ...
Digging garlic
Considering that our clayey soil has hardly had a chance to dry out with all the rain, this year’s garlic is looking good. With Lynn digging away, the first third of the garlic patch is up and s...
Beans and big weeds
Hand pulling big weeds is a regular garden feature this summer of rainy, weed-favoring weather. In the before and after, the second and third plantings of snap beans (Jade and Indy Gold) are disappear...
More carrots
Wouldn’t DREAM of starting carrots without the burlap method now. Maria and Lynn remove burlap from the third planting of the season, using the fold and fold again approach rather than rolling...
Cut flowers arrive
Zinnias bloom! At least, a few varieties are starting, along with many of the other cut flowers in this year’s trial bed. Much of last year’s first trial bed wound up worse for the wear af...
Kids in the field
A fair number of kids have dropped by the farm, parents in tow, but today was the first time since I’ve been doing the tiny farm blog WITH PEOPLE INCLUDED, that smaller children figured directl...
Working the tiny tractor
Working with the tiny tractor always looks like fun: after three seasons, it’s still fun for me, and just about everyone else seems to enjoy it, too! This Kubota compact tractor is dead simple t...
Maria from Barcelona…
Less than 24 hours after arriving from Barcelona, Spain, WWOOFer Maria is in the weeds! Here, she hand weeds parsley with Lynn. Maria is our first longer-term WWOOFer, staying for about six weeks. I f...