600' of plasic down!

I think my whining last night worked because Craftsbury got a nice rainstorm last night! It made the day today go a lot faster. Jess and I covered the second row with plastic as soon as we got there and with no watering. Then we raked out what was left of the other two rows, watered just the surface and put plastic on those! 600' of plastic in about 3.75 rows, all ready for tomatoes and peppers!

I want to be able to remember how I did this next year so I don't have to reinvent the wheel so ..

1. Place poly posts 3' apart at either end of the garden (3' beds, 3' paths)
   
   
2. Run string (old poly wire this time) between them and pull straight and tight.
   
   
3. Put 5 more poly posts down each side so that each row is split into 6 sections (this number was arbitrary but worked well for having stopping/break points in the heat the other day)
   
   
4. Hang poly wire about 2' off the ground - high enough that you can work under it on the close side and over the closer side to reach the far side.
   
   
5. Reach across bed and pull in dirt with a steel rake all down one side of bed. Repeat on other side.
   
   
6. Smooth out bed - the beds we did so far end up raised about 5-6" off the walkways. Make them slightly wider than the poly-wire.
   
   
7. Use pointy hoe to cut ditches down each side along outside of poly wire.
   
   
8. Pull plastic over bed a few feet at a time, burying edges in trenches.
   
   
9. Stand back and admire completed rows.

The 'pointy hoe' mentioned above is something I found at Kenyon's this morning. It's probably got a cool name but I'm going to stick with 'pointy hoe'. It works absolute wonders for digging the ditches for the sides of the plastic. I'm going to use it for what's left of potatoes too.

Spring Drought

The soil in my garden is dry to 5-6" at this point. I have to close my eyes to keep the dust out of them whenever there's a breeze. Obviously this is less than ideal!

Jess and I spent today working on beds for tomatoes and peppers. She had to water one, 150' long, for over 2 hours to get the soil semi moist! Even then there was more dry than wet soil if you turned it over. We got one row covered, a second one raked and trenched and a third one half raked.

I'm going to try to get some old hay and mulch the hell out of everything. Even the corn if I can get enough!

Onions Are Wet!

The onions all got watered today. There's a nicely functional water line running back to the barn and I can hitch my garden hoses to it easily. The soaker hose was hitched up for a while but only did about a 6" wide spot so I gave up on that. It'll work better for peppers or tomatoes, especially if I just put it under some of the plastic.

Tomorrow is supposed to be 87 and Sunny so I'm probably going to go up and water tomorrow night. I may just stay and measure beds til it gets dark. My current goal is to get them all marked this week, rake and do plastic this weekend and plant next week. There should probably be some sort of fencing in there somewhere but I'm not sure where yet.

Irrigation Woes

Today I woke up, stretched and my upper back immediately went out of wack again. I popped a handful of OTC pain killers, got in my car and gritted my teeth through every corner, acceleration and deceleration all the way to the farm. It made for a long day but the worst of it worked its way out by mid-day and it ended up being the least of my problems.

First some background - I'm using some of my old cow watering pipeline for irrigation pipe to get water to my garden. Then the plan is to use soaker hoses or a garden hose as needed. The water is coming from a pond on the edge of the field (down a little hill). A generator will run a sump pump when it's needed. Not ideal but it should work for now. The pump sits in a 70ga water tank that keeps me from sucking up too much pond bottom gunk. A hose connects to the pump to go across a farm road to the pipeline. The hose is just for portability so I can move it off the road at the end of the day. The pipeline goes up the hill to the garden.

I grabbed one length of pipeline today, dragged it all the way back to where my garden is (which was not fun with a sore back), and realized it was about 50 feet too short. It also had a hole in it. Not a huge problem - there is plenty.

I went and got another (a full 400 footer), got it laid where it needed to go, went to hitch it to hoses at either end and realized I didn't know where any of my connectors were. Not a big deal - I wanted a new hose from Willey's anyway so I got the connectors while I was there.

When I got back, I hitched everything up, Bruce and I went to get a generator to power a sump pump, and it wouldn't start.

Plan B was an inverter that Bruce had in his van. I got all the way to the pond with it and found out that my lighter in my car doesn't work very well.

I went back to Willey's, got a bigger inverter (and one with battery clips), got back, hitched it all up and it came on! Unfortunately, the pump is under powered and water just kinda burps out of the end of the hose at a completely useless rate.

That was where I gave up for the day. Tomorrow I'm rerouting some water line back to the barn. Luckily a lot of the old pipeline already goes that way and just needs to be fixed so it shouldn't be too bad. It also means that if the generator fails again (once it's fixed), I'll have a backup!

Better now than in July I suppose.

There's nothing but sun and temps in the high 70s in the forecast. I'll be doing as much as I can to get rows ready and then if the forecast is still promising next week I'm going to start the main planting! I have all but Wednesday off next week so I should be able to get a lot done!

Horse Powered Potato Planting

A couple of weeks ago I agreed to plant 300 pounds of potatoes that were donated by High Mowing Seeds to the Vermont Food Bank. 250 lbs were "All Red" which were exactly what they sound like and 50 lbs were "Katahdin" - a yellow potato. I then proceeded to throw my back out and am still not in great shape. Luckily there's a lot of good people around!

On May 18th, Bruce Urie and I cut up the potatoes. On the 19th, Rick Thomas and a crew from Sterling College came and planted them with their draft horses! Both the potatoes and everyones time were donated and everyone involved deserves some major kudos.

I still need to plant 40 lbs of Yukon Gold's that I purchased because I forgot to take them up in time. They might wait til after tomatoes and peppers at this point.

Photos of the planting may be viewed here!

I realize I am kind of a slacker when it comes to posting here :-)

Last Thursday I planted 1200 onion plants. It turns out 30 bunches was a good size from Johnny's as it gave me slightly more than I needed to fill the top row of the garden. The backs of my legs hurt for 3 days from all that bending over.

It dropped down to 21F last Sunday night so we'll see how the onions look this weekend.

The tilling has begun!

Enough of my garden got both plowed and tilled today that I can start making rows for both onions and potatoes! The soil looks good and there are very few rocks. There's toooons of broken up sod to deal with though. It suddenly looks like a huge, daunting task.

I also picked up the seed potatoes from the food bank and cleaned up enough space in the hay loft that I can cut them and leave them there to cure.

Pepper transplants

Peppers got transplanted last weekend. Jess and I transplanted just over 350 of the little buggers into 50 packs. The bell peppers are ahead of the hot peppers but not by much. The Jimmy Nardello's (big red frying peppers) are somewhere in between.

I had a lot of dead spots in the pepper plug trays. It seemed to have more to do with where in the tray the plants were than what varieties were involved. I'm guessing it was a watering issue since I started them at home without a good way to water plug trays handy. I think next year those trays with 10 open rows in them might work better for starts.

I got an email last week from the VT Foodbank saying that High Mowing Seeds was donating a large amount of seed potatoes to people who would grow them for a food shelf in Vermont. I measured last weekends, rearranged all my plans and agreed to take 300 lbs for myself.

To help make room for potatoes I cut out or cut back on a lot of things that were either low on the food bank's priority list or high maintenance for me. Main crops are now tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, corn, broccoli, and onions. More than half the square footage of my garden is now succeptable to late blight which after last year is a bit terrifying.

I have started my summer work schedule as of 4:30pm and have Tuesday-Thursday off this week to work at the farm. I'm in a work training all of next week but other than that I don't work another 5 day week til the week before classes start in late August.

This week I need to:

• Pick up potatoes from the food bank
• Clean a spot in the hay loft where I can leave cut potatoes to dry
• Mend the water hose that goes from the barn back to my garden
• Prepare beds for onions (if the garden is plowed when I get there)
• Get ready to plant potatoes (hopefully this weekend)