June -2nd week

Winter Squash Planting

This past week was perfect weather for setting out young squash plants. The irrigation was in place and working well, the weather was cloudy and overcast, but not raining... good conditions to set out finicky squash transplants. The greenhouse was full. There were 38 trays in the greenhouse with 98 plants each. That's a total of 3,724 plants to get into the field. So the challenge was to see if I could plant them all in one day. With this kind of work ahead of you there is only one way to approach. Keep your head down and keep moving! As one is slogging away in the field planting, planting, planting I tend to start to calculate things. 

Farm Math. I was averaging 2 beds/hour, so let's see, they are 300 foot beds with 18" spacing between plants, that means that I was able to drop and plant 200 plants per a row, 2 beds is 400 plants per/hour, yet there was 2 plants in each drop so that doubles the number to 800 plants/hour. And so one's mind rambles on... as you have your head down and keep moving.

Squash on the left ready to go to the field.

2 beds done, nicely irrigated while planting, just what squash want.

Head down, keep moving.

This is an apple tree root in the field. Of the 18 trees that we took out some roots are bound to reappear as the field gets cultivated.

OK, I made it to 9 beds out of 11 planted in a day.

The Farmer is done for the day.

Drip taping the tomatoes... This is model #2 in action. 

The drip tape deployment tool.

Onion planting... these are 80ft. rows.... thank goodness.

Mulching

And to end the week we mulched the squash with the bedding chopper from the neighbor's dairy farm. This was exciting. I mulched the first 2 beds in the other field by hand (200 ft. beds). It took the 3 hours... and 1.25 bales of straw (farmer math coming up). The bales were each about 450lbs... not something I could just throw around myself. I had another 11 beds to do that were 300 ft. long, I had 9 3/4 bales left to do the rest. Would I have enough straw to do them all, how long would it take me to complete the other 11 beds?

Answer: (I didn't really want to do that calculation.) Bring in the straw chopper and get it done in 2 hours.

Two beds done by "hand" and tractor

The straw chopper, ready for take off. Pulling the bales out from under the shed.

The straw chopper: IN ACTION.

Mulched squash... a beautiful thing. Some might say this is cheating, but the idea is to work smart, not hard.

Finally, nature is always amazing.

This is a a Killdeer with it's nest site. Killdeers are in the plover family and they are a noisy bird of the rural farm country. They like gravely areas and will feign an injury to avoid having you come near the nest. There were six of us walking by her nest and she set up the alarms and started dragging her wing to protect her nest with it's one egg in it. I now give her some distance and am watching to see when the baby will hatch.

Mama Killdeer and her egg. 

Robin's nest in our small front tree. They have the most beautiful turquoise eggs