Crescent Moon Organic Farm - February 12, 2010

Wow, time flies when your having fun! I've been coming down to Jack's farm for a month now. Since I started we have been working on 19 new rows on the north end of the farm. First he tilled the ground with the tractor and then as we had time we applied the fertilizer amendments and covered that with mushroom compost, which is chicken guano and wheat stalk. Dave and I would do two or three rows per day on the days we could work it into the schedule. A typical week here starts with something like preparing these rows on Monday, then uncovering the crop and start the picking for the market on Tuesday (the market is on Wednesday). On Wednesday we finish up the picking and get everything ready to load onto the truck. Thursday is a repeat of Tuesday for the Friday market. So you can see that everything revolves around getting to the market. We finished up these 19 rows and last week planted one row with lettuce and another with arugula. This week we planted eight rows of potatoes, which are kind of easy to plant. We started with five bags of seed potatoes from Canada, seed potatoes haven't been sprayed with any chemicals to inhibit the sprouting, like the potatoes at your local market. Think about it, that's one more "who knows what the side effects are" chemical going into your body, the more I learn the more I'm convinced that organics are the only way to go. So, we take the seed potato and cut them into two or three pieces, so long as each piece has an eye, or sprout and some of the meat. We cut all five bags up and put the wedges into a wheel barrel. Jack uses the small tractor with a single plow fixture and takes two passes at each row, opening up the ground about a foot deep so we can throw in the wedges, with the sprout facing up. Then we use a hoe to cover the wedges with about two or three inches of soil. Later, when the sprout pops through the surface of the garden we will go back and cover them some more. The potatoes grow radially outward from the central root of the plant, when we cover the leafy part with more soil the root will grow longer and more potatoes will grow out from the center. This planting has been the focus of the new work for a couple of weeks now. Other than this we have been busy protecting the crop from the cold weather by using freeze cloth, but you have to cover the crop at the end of the day and then uncover in the morning for picking and when there are spells of good weather we uncover the entire garden. Then more cold weather moves in, like this week and we have to go back and re-cover everything. It's like making a bed that's three or more acres in size. Other than that I've learned more about biodiesel and using wvo (waste vegetable oil) as a fuel and why Jack uses an open system when he makes his biodiesel. It's been very fruitful on the knowledge end of things and I'm looking forward to learning more in the weeks ahead.