We've got a whole lotta oats!
Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Cucumbers
- Tomatoes
- Green & romano beans
- Beets/chard
- Cut lettuce
- Carrots
- Summer squash
- Potatoes
- Torpedo onions
Back when we first started this farming venture in 2006, the concept of a “harvest season” wasn’t completely relevant to our work. We started planting in the spring and soon after began harvesting the earliest crops, such as lettuce, peas, radishes. The harvesting continued at more or less the same pace through the end of the CSA season, with the exception of some minimal “storage” crops (namely winter squash, potatoes, and onions) — but we didn’t even grow that many of those until we started the year-round CSA.
Today, the picture is different. We’ve learned over the years that storing many of our winter vegetable crops out of the ground makes for the most consistent quality, so two years ago we started dramatically increasing the amount of late summer and fall harvesting we were doing. In addition to harvesting large quantities of garlic, onions, and winter squash, we also started harvesting cabbages, carrots, potatoes, and more.
This year, as we work more toward the “whole farm” system we described last week (integrating more kinds of crops and animals on our growing farm), the concept of the “harvest season” is becoming even more relevant. In addition to looking ahead to our big veggie harvests (onions will begin soon), we’re contemplating the mechanics of grain harvest, cleaning and storage as well. We’ve done this on a relatively small scale over the last two years (last year we harvested 1,000 lbs each of dry corn and oats for our home flock of chickens and our own use), but we’re really stepping it up this year.
Just this last Thursday, we brought in the first — and biggest in scale — of these grain crops. Unfortunately our little ancient combine is temporarily broken down, so we hired a neighbor farmer to combine about 15 acres of oats that we sowed last fall. The harvest resulted in 20 tons of oats, which was our goal for having enough for the Full Diet CSA eaters and our poultry over the next year (both the laying hens and some meat birds).
(As an aside, for those gluten free folks who may be considered about potential contamination: before harvesting our oats, the neighbor farmer harvested his own certified seed oats, which have to meet very strict requirements for field purity, meaning that the combine was in a safe “oat only” mode by the time it got to our field!)
The logistics of this first big grain harvest were pretty ridiculous at times. As always on our farm, as we grow into new arenas, we find that we have to take on a little more than we can handle in order to afford to later set up our infrastructure more appropriately. In other words, there’s always a little bit of scrambling, jury-rigging and shoe-stringing it at first.
It’s challenging at the time, but we’ve found this method works best for making sure we spend our money wisely — often we don’t even know exactly what we need until we’ve begun the new project, so it seems wasteful to try to predict ahead of time and spend lots of money upfront. For us it works better to jump in and figure out the details as we go (and as we earn income from the new project).
In this case, we knew how we wanted to store the oats (in one ton tote bags — each fits on a pallet), but we weren’t sure how get the oats into the bags and where to store them once they were filled. Our dry covered space is still fairly limited. Our long-term goal is to purchase some shipping containers (very affordable dry, mouse-proof space!), but we don’t have the funds or the time to get those set up just yet.
So, the oats were in our neighbor’s truck — what to do? It turned out to be a little bit of a dance to make the final quick decisions — we couldn’t dilly-dally since our neighbor needed his truck trailer for other harvests. We weren’t even sure exactly how many oats we’d use in a year — we can’t imagine people eating more than two tons; the layers would consume quite a bit more than that … but 20 tons? That’s a lot of oats, even if it was our high goal initially.
Given our uncertainty and lack of storage space, we decided to store just over half of the oats in a local grain elevator. It’s possible that we may just end up selling these later in the season, once we get a better sense of what we do or don’t need.
We kept back just over nine tons of our oats to store here on the farm — this is still a LOT of oats. We had our neighbor farmer dump them on the driveway (so ridiculous looking!), and then we manually scooped them into the large one-ton tote bags. This was a plan that we were worried just might not work (How hard is it to shovel oats into giant bags? We just didn’t know!). It turns out that it worked quite well, even if it was an unusual way to deal with grains.
We scooped the top layers for people use (which honestly will make up a small minority of everything we have) and the rest of it for chicken use. Our laying flock is already enjoying these freshly harvested oats!!!!
We’re stowing these bags in various places around the farm, since we don’t have nearly enough room in one place. There’s no question this harvest has been a bit goofy, but all in all it feels so good to have brought in a fairly major (and new) crop on the farm. I like to think of it as (mostly) tucked into bed. We’ll have to keep a close eye on the bags here on the farm, to make sure that they stay dry and free of rodents (both of which should be fine, especially with the air flow spaces we’re providing, but it’s good to keep close tabs on these things, especially in the winter).
Of course, this is just the beginning of the grain and vegetable harvest season, albeit a big, good start. And, the oats themselves will require a bit more work too, at least for people eating. We are in the process of getting an oat “dehuller” built — unlike wheat and other grains, oats tresh out in a rough “hull” that must be broken and removed in order for us to eat them. Generally the dehulling process is done in large facilities (really, everything about grains is scaled pretty big), but a CSA member and welder is working on fabricating a smaller version for us to use on the farm. We’re crossing our fingers that it works as planned, because we are so looking forward to eating farmgrown oatmeal all winter! (Oh, yes, to have oatmeal, we’ll also need an oat roller, but those are available at a homestead scale.)
We plan to have our own combine running as soon as possible so that the rest of the year’s grain harvests will happen on our timeline with our own equipment. And, by next year’s season we will have our storage situation more settled. One step at a time!
And, in case you have a good memory and are wondering how our earlier big harvest of oat and clover baleage turned out (in spite of the rain), we’ve cracked open a few bales recently and — WOW! — they are awesome! We had to wait for the fermenting process to take hold in order to assess the quality of the product, but now that they’ve had time to do their sileage thing, the animals are loving it. Casey tossed in some of the oat baleage to everyone last week, and they dug right in.
Anyhow, that’s the latest fun story on the farm. For full disclosure, I’m actually writing this newsletter on Friday afternoon, a few days earlier than my usual Monday morning — I’m trying to keep ahead on my usual farm work, just in case this baby decides to arrive sometime. Monday the 27th is technically the “due” date, so perhaps I’ll have a fun announcement to add to the newsletter before it “goes to print” next week! In a way, I guess that’s another harvest we’re waiting for!
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
… and the rest of the farm crew!
~ ~ ~
Next week’s veggies (probably!):
More of the same summer stuff, plus sweet corn! (We thought we’d have the corn this week, but then the temperatures cooled way down — should be ready for sure by next week, and we have a LOT! YAY!)
