A heavenly week

I’m sure other farmers in western Oregon will jubilantly agree: this last week of dry, sunny, warm weather was unbelievable. I mentioned in this week’s newsletter (but it’s worth mentioning again) — this weekend we were reading highs of 68° in the shade at our place. In mid-February. All I can say … wow.

We’ve made what we hope is good use of the weather (once it starts raining again, we inevitably think of more we should have done during a dry spell). A few events worth noting:

This weekend, we ‘worked up’ some empty beds in last year’s field so that we could sow some quick growing early spring items (radishes especially). As I mentioned in our newsletter, we used the Allis for this task. Here is a photo of the toolbar arrangement of hilling disks and shovels:

What this set-up achieved was a nicely lifted bed with a soft, low hill running down the middle. The hilling disks loosen and move soil into one central hill, and the shovels further loosen soil on the sides so that more soil can be hilled in each subsequent pass. This is a technique we perfected last fall when the winter rain arrived earlier than we expected (& we also coincidentally broke the drive shaft on our rototiller). It allows us to build a bed when the ground might otherwise be to wet to till. We only gain a single row from this method, but it’s better than nothing. Also, using the G allowed us to work just the bed, leaving sod paths intact — thus eliminating our need to weed paths in the near future (or have a muddy path once the rains start again). Here’s a picture of the Allis in action:

… and the resulting bed …

As you can see, this bed is in the middle of our ‘in-use’ plantings, which is part of why we took a lower impact approach. It’s certainly not a perfect solution, but it works for mid-February (or in October when the rain won’t stop). We planted our garlic in the same single row manner last fall to good success. The only downside seems to be the potential for erosion on the hills & the space inefficiency (which right now is the least of our concerns). And, speaking of garlic, ours has really taken off in this warm weather:

You can see some hill ‘erosion’ in this picture, mostly due to weeding out oats earlier in the week. Note to selves: don’t let a cover crop go to seed & then plant garlic in the same place! So much to learn …

Another lesson from this week (not related to weather): eight low-watt propagation heat mats probably shouldn’t all be plugged into one outlet. When our downstairs circuit stopped working this Monday & kept tripping, our investigations found this:

Scary! Fortunately our generous neighbor had a few extra outlet parts in his garage, so we were up & running again in just a few minutes. And, now the heat mats are on two separate extension cords to two separate outlets. And, we’re watching them carefully. We’re planning to wire the new pole building soon, and then we’ll move the greenhouse power over there — most likely on it’s own dedicated circuit so we don’t have to worry about it ever.

… back to warm weather good news … we personally made good use of the warmth to take another bike trip to the river this week. The paper kept predicting rain and when it didn’t arrive by Wednesday afternoon, we couldn’t resist taking off. The river was beautiful. All the plants & animals are still in winter mode, but buds are bursting everywhere …

We arrived back at our house at dusk, just in time to watch the full lunar eclipse — a first for both of us.

Yesterday brought two very welcome events. The first was that we finally achieved resolution on our well’s status. After much patient blowing, adding of pea gravel & fiddling on the pump guy’s part, we now have a clean, reliable well that will supply 60 – 75 gpm. We were of course aiming for more (aren’t we always aiming for more?), but that will be sufficient, especially since we won’t be afraid of running our water dry the way we were with the slough last summer. And, we still have the slough too. So, our water situation will be fine for this year. We will still have some headaches I’m sure (irrigation does rhyme with irritation after all), but we’ll sleep much better too. We no longer have to fear that we’ll run out of water in mid-August. That’s a great feeling.

The second exciting event of yesterday was that we started working up our 2008 ground. As we’ve described here before, our farm management plan is to work our two equally sized fields in a two-year rotation so that each field can have almost a full year ‘off’ from growing vegetables (during which time it will be in an oat & red clover cover crop). That’s been our ‘plan’ for a while now, but we have yet to actually implement it since we’ve only had one season here.

We’ve been nervous all winter about how & when we would start working up the second field, which was in a nice oat cover. Last year a rototiller was our only tillage method, & it’s a pretty high maintenance method — rototilling requires fairly dry ground & it’s slow. Plus, we grew dissatisfied with the soil results of a rototiller last year. Our ground is light to begin with, and if we tilled enough to incorporate our cover crop, we found that the resulting soil texture was extra fine & prone to compaction. We also didn’t appreciate that the tiller’s up & down circular nature brought old weed seeds to the surface each time we used it. (Since our ground has been farmed for 100 years, we’ve got a plenty big weed seed bank.)

Last fall we purchased two new implements that we hoped would give us more tillage options: an eight-shank John Deere chisel plow & a two-meter wide Lely Roterra (a power harrow). The plan is to use the chisel plow for primary tillage & incorporating our cover crop & use the roterra for final tillage. But … we hadn’t used either yet since it’s been winter. So, every day that we looked out our window at both implements, we’ve wondered how they’d work with our tractor & in our ground — especially the chisel plow, which looks rather massive when not mounted on our tractor.

After a week of dry weather, we decided yesterday was the day to try out the chisel plow. We’ve been waiting to work the field for as long as possible to give our cover crop the most time to grow. To that end, on yesterday we only worked up the ground we’ll need in before April (we’re betting on another dry spell before then), so three-quarters of the field is still in an oat cover.

But before I get ahead of myself: the good news is that the tractor handled the chisel plow just fine … and the chisel plow itself is amazing. Amazing. Since we’re used to relying exclusively on the rototiller, we worried that some of our ground might still be too wet to work yesterday. Although our ground is well drained, we’ve found that cover crops help hold residual moisture, so last spring areas of our field with a good cover crop stand required longer dry spells before working up. The chisel plow eliminated that worry — even though the ground still contained some moisture, the plow fractured the soil beautifully. The plow ran through the ground effortlessly & didn’t create any of the difficult goopy mess we previously associated with tilling the ground ‘too early.’ Casey’s remark upon using it was how ‘gentle’ the chisel plow felt in the ground. Since there is no turning involved, the ripping action meets little resistance but is still powerful and highly effective. Here’s a picture of Casey and the chisel plow in action:

… and a picture of the resulting soil condition after one initial pass:

In just a few hours (with many stops to look, reflect & discuss), Casey was able to work up an acre and a half of our field with two passes, one in each direction. After two previous springs of messing around with tillers and disks on cover cropped ground without much success, we’re super excited about the results. Our goal as farmers is to always have a high residue, large aggregate soil texture, hence the discontinuing of the rototiller. It’s wonderful to acquire tools that help us meet that goal. Using the chisel plow felt so easy, gentle & yet very effective. We love that the resulting soil still has its structure yet is fractured to aid in cover crop integration. Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!

Now we can’t wait to use the roterra … soon! The season has begun!