First some housekeeping, PLEASE RETURN YOUR BOXES! They cost almost $2 a piece and when they don’t get returned, we have to keep buying new ones which costs us and, eventually, you, money. In an effort to keep more boxes in circulation, we’d like to institute a new box policy. Next week, if you don’t bring back your box from the previous week, we’ll ask that you transfer your box veggies to a grocery bag and we get to keep the box. That way, we’ll still have a box for your veggies the following week.
Enough of that. At the farm, things are looking pretty flat. We are mowing down and discing up fields as fast as we can, getting ready to sow our fall cover crop. While we still have some planting and sowing to do, for the first time since spring, the number of beds in production is going down instead of up. This would all be very exciting, as opposed to mildly exciting, if it wasn’t so darned dry. We may be able to to get all our fields ready by our Sept 15 sowing deadline, but if there is no rain to bring up the cover crop, there isn’t any point to seeding them. We tried growing cover crops this summer with no rain to help germinate the seeds and we got a very small amount of cover crop and lots of lovely looking weeds. Oh well at least it was green.
Speaking of the dry, I was thinking today of how miraculous our drip irrigation system is. Before the drip system, we used overhead irrigation which involved hauling 20 ft aluminum pipes all over the farm. We could only water about 10 beds at once and for each “set” we had to move a minimum of 12 pipes. In a year like this one, we would spend the majority of our time moving pipe, not weeding, not thinning, not scouting for bugs, just moving pipe. Not good for morale. Now we can water about 60 beds at a time and only have to start the pump and open and close a few valves. Not only has this improved morale, it have improved our vegetables. They get a lot less diseases when they aren’t wet all the time. And we have fewer weeds because we are watering only were it is needed. It has also allowed us to open up new ground much further away from the creek. This, in turn, has let us give some of our fields a rest. This will help with soil health, weed and disease management and hopefully result in even better vegetables and better morale.
Nick’s Corner
Throughout the season there are times when I look around the farm and am impressed by all the hard work it takes to grow the food that graces our tables at the tailgate markets and CSA boxes alike. This past Sunday, though, I realized our work is a piece of cake compared to that of the honey bee. W
e went to our local bee expert’s house to extract the honey that our bees have been making over the past several months. I was looking forward to the experience all season. It was really interesting to see all that goes into a single jar of honey. And what I mostly marveled at was the bees ability to make such a sweet and wonderful treat. To me it is mind blowing that bees are able to transform nectar from the flowers that surround the hive into liquid goodness. Now that is serious hard work. Needless to say, during the extraction process there was lots of honeycomb and honey to be consumed. I definately left Dave’s place with a serious honey “buzz.” We ended up with a lot of sourwood honey along with some sourwood-buckwheat mix, both of which were wonderfully delicious.
In other news, this past weekend was a make-up CRAFT (Collaborative Regional Association for Farmer Training) tour at Flying Cloud Farm in Fairview, NC. This farm was in a beautiful location. As always, it’s great to have a little social gathering with other farmers from the area. Visiting all of the farms through CRAFT has really shows the diversity of ways that farming can be done. It’s exciting to see that with farming you can pretty much live however you want. Each farm has it’s own character brought about by the farmer. It’s great to see the creativity that manifests itself in the farming community.