Friends!

Today's post is about friends - both of the human variety and not.

Let's start with humans. We made our FIRST SALE yesterday!! We sold two 5 oz. bags of spinach to a couple friends of ours (and had some donations, besides!). Plus, there's even more people who are waiting to taste our delicious spinach. It's great to see that there are actually people who want to support us, and will choose our produce over the supermarket's! Even at $4.80 per pound, this is quite encouraging.

Secondly, we have a bunch of animal friends! (I know, usually animals are foes, but keep reading!) First, we have this killdeer who hangs around, often in the early morning. Here's what a killdeer looks like:

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He does this funny thing where he likes to run to each bed and stand on top of each one for a moment. It's so cute. And why is he a friend? Killdeer eat bugs that can be damaging to plants! Hooray for natural bug repellents! No silent spring necessary.

Next, there's this little milk snake:

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Just kidding! (About the 'little' part) He's about two feet long and Dan almost stepped on him! But he's definitely a friend, because milk snakes are not poisonous or otherwise dangerous to humans, and they love to eat rodents that might otherwise terrorize our veggies. No need for rodent poison either! I love natural solutions.

But I promised photos of the farm, didn't I? Unfortunately, I don't have my camera at the moment, and I was so eager to write this post, but let's see what Dan has on his camera:

Oh yeah... the day the cows ran down the road. We are fielding some cows for another farm, and one day I stepped out of my house and there were cows all over the place!

Okay, any pictures of the field?...

Here we go! There's the cauliflower on the left, kale in front, spinach two rows to the right, and then broccoli all the way on the right side. Even since this picture was taken, the field has gotten bigger and better. But where are the onions? The many MASSES of onions??

There they are! Sooo many onions. I just hope they all survive! And there's me, planting... more onions... and more onions... Man, I am glad that is over. Lets put it this way: In general, we have two rows of each crop. We have EIGHT rows of onions! That's a LOT of onions...

Other photos from Dan's camera? Here we go:

Jackie patrolling timidly...

The field...

Me on the bike that Dan fixed up, biking to the market to get dinner!

And a mother cow and calf straggling behind the rest of the herd...

And I promise... Photos galore are soon to come (from my camera this time! No offense Dan, your photos are lovely). Next time, on Clover Post... The spinach that sold, the raised bed crops, and more!

~Terra

Schedules...

I find it VERY helpful to have a schedule when I need to get things done. So, just to get a better idea of what goes on around here, this is my schedule in-the-making:

5:00 am - Wake up, get breakfast

5:30 am - Go outside, do heavy work (raking beds, rototilling, mowing) before it gets warm.

8:00 am - Do transplanting, sowing, weeding, or other less strenuous work as the day gets hotter.

9:00 am - Water the seedlings and the hoop house plants as the sun has probably dried them out by now. Take a water break!

9:30 am - Continue with the lighter work.

11:30 am - Come inside. Make lunch, wash dishes, and do other indoor things as necessary. Perhaps write a blog post.

Sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 pm - Back outside! More lighter work. Nowadays its generally a lot of transplanting... later in the season it will probably be more weeding and pruning, and then harvesting and cleaning!

My afternoon is flexible. I might have other jobs to do or things to get done (you know... with my other life). But if I am on the farm, I will generally just be doing whatever needs to get done. Today it was transplanting more onions. (SO many onions!!)

Around 5:00 pm - As the day starts to cool, I can resume doing heavier work.

6:00 pm - The sun is no longer directly hitting the garden, so I give everything a good soak of water for the night.

8:00 pm - Time to bring in all the tools and equipment from the field and put them away for the night.

8:30 pm - It's probably dark, so it's time to head in for the night!

Obviously, these times are going to change as the days get shorted and longer, but thats the gist. More photos coming soon, I promise! Things are crazy right now, and it takes three days just to finish a post. But I'm serious, I HAVE pictures, I just need to get them up!

~Terra

Rain? Frost? Sun? Wind?

The weather in New Hampshire is weird. Fact. These past few nights have gone below freezing, and yet I've been consistently working in the fields in a T-shirt (and also constantly taking on and off a sweater). Tonight its supposed to be 20 degrees F! I'm pretty worried about my little onions, spinach, and broccoli that are sitting out there. I spent a few hours today gathering old hay from the barn loft and spreading it around and over the young plants. I hope it will be enough. They have survived below-freezing nights already, this is just another test.

By the way, I found a friend in a rotting hay pile outside today! Here he is:

He's so cute!

I took a couple pictures and then put the hay right back. He looked sleepy. Apparently they are rare nowadays... whereas my mom says that she used to see them around the farm all the time when they moved in.

I also had some help today. These two little ones helped to pluck stones out of the field and chuck them in the drainage ditch. There are sooo many stones, it's great to have help!

Also, my friend Julia dropped by and helped me cover up the plants with hay. I can't stress enough how helpful it is to have friends drop by.

As for the plants: Here's what the plants in the field look like right now, all bundled up:

Nice and cozy!

(Those are onions by the way)

And here are some of the guys inside:

Violet cauliflower and young broccoli in the first, and older snow crown cauliflower in the second.

These photos feature LOTS of onions, kale in the first photo, and older violet queen cauliflower in the second.

I totally forgot to snap the broccoli and spinach until they were all covered in hay, and that really made for a boring shot.

Looking forward (sort of!!) to seeing if my little seedlings survive the frost!

Love from the farm!

~Terra

Schoooool's Out! for! Summer!

I am very, very happy to announce that I have successfully finished this school year! Granted, I am running on 4 hours of sleep and 1 1/2 meals a day, and I still need to pack. But the worst is over.

So, I will be returning to the farm (for the whole summer!) tomorrow morning. And then, I suppose, the real work begins! Here is my starters list:

• Write CSA invitations and mail them to our prospective members. This is a good first thing to do, since my body is recovering from a number of things right now, and immediate heavy lifting will be difficult. Although I might procrastinate from this a bit in order to get out and walk around in the sunshine (you can imagine how tired of writing papers I am right now).
• Let Dan catch me up on how the field is coming along, what plants are doing well (and which are not) and which are ready to transplant.

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Okay, update. It's taken me a long time to get this posted... it's Monday night now. Things really took off after I wrote the above. Dan and I began to rake beds, and we've now transplanted broccoli, spinach, and some onions. We also did some direct-sow spinach, and we're planning to do the same with broccoli. Our new seedlings all look great! (That's tomatoes, violet cauliflower, and romanesco broccoli.) Also, we transplanted our biggest cauliflower seedlings into bigger pots, since we wont be able to plant them outside for a while longer. They look great too! Seems like our little seedlings are making great recoveries (pictures coming soon!)

I have the rest of the week to transplant onions, spread manure and hay mulch, rototill, direct-sow some more plants, and water, water, water. I also might be doing some emergency operations on frosted plants, by the look of it. Low twenties tonight! I'm crossing my fingers for the new transplantees.

So, things are beginning to chug right along. Old problems are out of our minds and new ones arise. Luckily, I feel ready to take it on! I'll start with those CSA letters right now...

~ Terra

Water

My weekday job at Peet's Coffee and Tea is generally pretty routine compared to the varied and unpredictable nature of farming. For today, tomorrow, and possibly Wednesday however, we can't serve coffee, tea, espresso, or just about anything else that normally sustains our business, so my coworkers and I have had little or nothing to do. The reason for this unusual situation, for those of you who live outside of the Metro Boston area, is that there is currently a water restriction imposed on Lexington, and a number of other communities in the MWDC water district, due to a recent failure in one of the aqueducts that brings water from Western Massachusetts to Boston. Drinking water has to be boiled before it is considered safe, and at the scale that Peets uses water it's simply no feasible to make beverages. So business has ground to a halt.

What does this have to do with Farming? Quite a lot actually, because having a source of clean water is important to growing food as well as making coffee. And as it happens, we are still trying to figure out how we are going to irrigate our fields this season. Our original plan was to use a catchment system and rain barrels, but installing the gutters and hoses need to make this happen may be beyond our meager budget. That leaves us either carting water by hand, or coming up with an entirely new solution. We'll see.

A lot of people in modern society take having a supply of clean water as a given thing. As recent events have shown, this is a mistake, and the current situation in Massachusetts serves to highlight how much depends on the largely invisible but vital services our utilities provide us with. One of our goals with Cloverly Farm is to be as self sufficient as possible, but it's rarely straightforward; our path to self sufficiency is going to be a long and winding one. Still, water seems like a logical place to start, since it is essential for everything we do.

Learning to Cope

Hey there y'all...

So as you know I am currently bogged down with end-of-year school work. I've found that I begin to get a bit loopy if I sit in my room doing homework for too long, so I decided to take a break and write a post.

I'm rather bummed right now, because a frost hit our dear seedlings, and a number of them (including most of our tray of chard) have permanently passed away.

This is the most difficult part of the year for me. I grow so attached to my little seedlings... even when I'm not there most of the time, apparently. When someone calls me from home, telling me that more seedlings have died, I get panicky. I go on wild searches on the internet for diagnoses and organic cures. Then I get depressed. I fall into a state of hopelessness, because what can I do, when I'm 2 hours away?

And if there's one thing that I hate doing, it's thinning. I know its going to happen, I plant 2 or 3 seeds in each plug, I don't do anything to avoid it, and then the day comes.... and I just can't. I can't pull up those little babies, who are working so hard to survive! Last year, for our little garden, I got my mom to do it for me. This year, Dan is taking on most of the dirty work. (It is interesting to note that "dirty work" in my mind means plucking little plants, but shoveling manure is perfectly clean).

It's a fact... I am just too attached to plants. As soon as a seed goes in the ground, I become its "mommy". I am crushed when one little guy plops over. Last year, I spent whole lot of energy on a couple of tomato plants that had been deemed the 'runts'. But I couldn't throw them away... so I made them their own little container. I was so proud when they bore fruit! (But it probably wasn't worth it!)

So how do I get over this? I've shoved aside the problem thus far, unrealistically reassuring myself that one day I will be such a good farmer, I will NEVER have to thin, and plants will NEVER die.

...Of course I know this is not possible. Its just a subconscious thing, spawning from my inability to cope with a regular part of nature and of farming. So how DO I cope?

I'm still trying to figure this out.

-Terra

PS. Meanwhile, here's a picture of my little babies!!

PPS. And NH, seriously, please don't snow again... not after we've all (including the plants) gotten used to the nice weather.

Dan Learns Time Management

I consider myself to be an organized person. I keep my living spaces neat, I arrange my possessions into categories, I wash my clothes with like colors. However all of these are spacial organizations; when it comes to organizing and managing my time I'm a mess, and as luck would have it I'm rapidly learning that farming draws heavily upon that very skill. So I'm presented with a choice: give up on being a farmer and take on a job where my time is organized for me or learn better time management. So far, I've opted for the latter.

This weekend presents an interesting time management challenge. If all goes well, I'll be up at the farm for two days, working on all the various things that need to get done, by myself. Terra, who has enough on her plate with school work, won't be around to help this time. Compounding the challenge is the fact that several things need to happen in a specific order. If all goes well, the end result will be our first round of plants in the ground, but between now and then is a juggling act of testing, improving and conditioning the soil. In order to make sense of this process, and accomplish everything in the time that I have, I did something I rarely do; I made a schedule.

It's a little strange to me: all throughout my years in school, I never made schedules. For large assignments I'd let deadlines be my motivator, and had I been inclined I could have plotted a very nice logarithmic function relating the closeness of the due date to the amount of work I did. I'm not proud of this method, and I've handed in some truly dreadful work because of it, but It served me well enough to earn a college degree. So trying to suddenly develop better time management skills is exercising a part of my brain that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention in the past. And it's actually a pretty good feeling.

-Dan