2008’s firsts

As yesterday’s CSA newsletter post announced, we had our first Early Season CSA harvest this week! It’s only been about seven weeks since the last 2007 CSA harvest, so getting back into the swing of things wasn’t difficult at all.

But, as a concession to it still being winter, we did allow ourselves more time to get the harvest in and washed. Rather than harvest, wash and pack most of the veggies on Tuesday before the delivery, we harvested, washed and packed most of them on Monday. Which meant that on Tuesday, we could focus on getting stuff together to get into town without being exhausted already. Nice. It was probably a little too relaxed for every week, but I think we’re going to keep harvesting on Monday and add other tasks to Tuesday morning’s routine to make up the difference (building a better cooler will help make this feasible into the warm season). Either way, starting the harvest a day early gives us more time to do it right, which feels good. We don’t freak out if something takes longer than expected, which was often the case in the ‘old way.’ New things are good.

Another new thing with this week’s harvest: we tried out a new purchase of ours … a lower-powered electric pressure washer, which Casey used this week to wash some of our mud-covered fresh harvested items like carrots and potatoes. Amazingly, it worked! (We were worried that it either wouldn’t work or would rip off skins and bruise vegetables.) Here’s a photo of Casey in full washing rain gear (including eye protection) using the pressure washer on our potatoes:

And some close up shots of veggies in this week’s share taken while washing:

Another first: this morning we sowed our first batch of seeds for 2008! We sowed 32 flats of leeks. Here’s me sowing in our sowing shed:

(For those of you concerned with my back, I don’t normally lean over like that while sowing … Casey just caught me in a moment of trying to see a tiny black leek seed in a tray of dark brown dirt.)

… EXTREME CLOSE UP of the leek seeds. We thought we’d include this photo to show our method of sowing: moving seeds out of a tray (bent metal flashing) with a chopstick (a handy technique we picked up from Mike Finger of Cedarville Farm). It’s certainly not as fast as using a vacuum seeder, but we use so many different types of trays (50, 72 & 162 cell plug trays) that a vacuum seeder doesn’t make sense for us yet. Plus, we like hanging out quietly sowing and talking rather than listening to a vacuum (one of my least favorite noises).

After we finished sowing, we moved the flats into our newly finished greenhouse and tried out our fancy new watering system, set up by Casey this weekend. Our sprinkler heads are the same as the last two years (Dramm Misty Mists), but we’re suspending them from the roof over the flats and we built enough lines to have one over every bench. Then, Casey connected all four lines with a series of tubing and fittings:

Each tube has its own valve so we can turn off lines when not in use. All the tubing meets at a new control timer on a solenoid valve (kind of pricey — $162 — but we’ve already broken two garden-style timers in two years):

The timer cycles based on various setting factors, so now we can open valves, set the timer and know that our starts will be watered (gently!) throughout the day. In contrast, last year we only had two lines, which we had to move around our benches and run with a manual timer — which added up to a lot of work every day. And, on hot days when we were away from the farm, we often had our soil dry out mid-afternoon. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited about these new greenhouse technologies.

A few more shots from this morning:

Casey spreading a peat cover on our newly sown leeks …

And, another EXTREME CLOSE UP on the Dramm Misty Mists, a product we adore. We bought this recent round of sprinklers at Jeff Viers Nursery Supply (we visited there for the first time last week and were delighted to find a roaring wood stove in the show room — that’s our kind of place) … on the right is a photo of the Misty Mists in action: check out the beautiful gentle spray! The only downside to hanging the Misty Mists (rather than setting them between flats) is that water drops form on the sprinklers and drip down on the flats (which can then create a ‘crater’ in the plug tray where it hits). We’ve temporarily fixed that problem by lining up the sprinklers between flats so that drips fall on the bench surface rather than in plugs.

Ok, that’s a lot of farm nerd stuff. We’ve been trying to increase our specificity & detailed photos lately in case other farmers are reading with similar problems to solve. To that end, we’re also enjoying Chris of Blue Fox’s new blog, Wanna Farm, a resource blog for farmers. We already learned one new trick for use on our Earthway seeder and hope to learn more as Chris updates the site. Hoorah for sharing ideas! And, hoorah for the first seeds of the season!