Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Plant 'til your planted!

Mid May and we enter the planting frenzy. At times it seems that there isn't enough daylight to get all of the work done!
Landis was in town the other day and was asked by a friend if we had our planting done yet. This is a question that we get numerous times each spring and it often leads to good dinner table talk at the farm. On a diversified market farm like Hermit Creek, we typically start planting season in March with transplants in the greenhouse, then progress through the April hoophouse season into May and the start of field work. We keep on planting on nearly a weekly basis into mid September or even early October if we're late getting winter rye in. As a crop is harvested, something else goes in to take its place.

We rely heavily on our transplanter for a lot of the field work. When we first started the farm in the early 1990's, we planted by hand. Onions took a week to plant out and left us sore. Today, with a crew of three, we get the onions done in a day and save our bodies as well. We've learned that we can use this relatively simple machine to plant almost everything that we don't directly seed (such as carrots, radish, salad mix, etc). It plants through plastic mulch and we use it for as diverse of crops as strawberries, potatoes, corn (grown in soil blocks), and melon to name a few. Although it works best with two people planting (by adding seats, we can add up to four planters), we've figured out ways to get by with just one. And by working with transplants, we can jump ahead of our short northern season for many of our crops.
Rain today, our first rainy day in weeks. We have had three drought years in a row and already this spring, it seems like we are headed down that dry path again. I had hoped to get some chisel plowing done, but today, let it rain.











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