Intensive Agriculture

I often find it hard to remember how our days start. I guess now that this is such a familiar routine for me (get up, ride my bike, drive to the farm, meet, start work, ... etc), I'm starting to find it difficult to differentiate the days. But okay, here's what we did today:

• Seeded the corn (popcorn), for the seed saving garden, by hand.
• Seeded two beds of sunflowers, by hand.
• Put out drip line for the fennel.
• Jeff cultivated the peas with the tractor.
  
• Jarrod and Jeff worked on the sprinkler system some more. by the end of the day they had got it running.
• Moved the very healthy brassicas seedlings outside so that they can acclimatise. The term "harden off" seems rather out of place in this heat.
  
• Hoed three beds of peas that had poorly germinated.
• Pulled back the floating row cover on the turnips, radish, and a bit of the pak choi and lo! the pak choi is beautiful, edible and huge! Well, not too huge, there is still more it can grow, but this is slightly poor timing since the CSA and markets doing start for a few more weeks.
  
• Leslie and I used the wheel hoes to weed the turnip and radish.
• Put out drip line for the flowers and the turnip and radish.
  
• Then Leslie and I hand weeded the lettuce mix.
  

Okay, and when I say "hand weeded" I mean it. We were down to the real grit of intensive organic agriculture. It's the kind of horror you think about when first try to fathom farming without herbicides and pesticides. You know, getting down on your hands and knees and picking out every last weed. Well, we did that today, in the lettuce mix bed. Why? Well, it was just rather weedy, unfortunately. Maybe a combination of poor germination in patches, slow growth of the lettuce, and not being able to get much closer with the tractor.

In any case, the job was concentrated and controlled, but actually incredibly fun. I gather this assessment of the job is highly subjective. Leslie describes it as "morally crushing" or something. But whatever, I think the amazing part is how accurate one can be at this task whilst still getting the job done at a reasonable (but slow, undoubtedly) pace. Lettuce mix is, as it sounds, various varieties of lettuce planted all very closely together. It's harvested when it's young. Currently the lettuce is not much more than a sprout -- maybe 1 to 1.5 cm tall, and as I say, packed tightly. In amongst and especially around are the weeds. The job involves precision picking and scraping with your hands to get all the weeds without harming the lettuce.

Part way through Leslie and I discovered a new tool -- the "oscillating finger stirrup hoe". Actually, we just used a small spare pipe clamp that was lying around, like so:
We then just bent it to form more of a U shape (i.e. a stirrup shape). This becomes an excellent device for scraping away at the earth, just like a regular hoe (or oscillating hoe). If bent into more of a V shape then the angled portion of the V can be used to pick out individual weeds from amongst a clump of lettuce and the sides of the V can be used to scrap larger areas clean. Fantastic, I say. I think I'm going to perform some user studies and the publish our results in a farm journal *wink*.

Black Plastic

I forgot to bring pictures home again. Nuts.

In any case, today was a pretty intense day, I'd say. We transplanted all of this season's tomatoes (seven 400 foot beds, single row, two feet spacing) before nine thirty. Then we moved on to running irrigation over eight beds that will be used for melons and such, and covering those with... erk... black plastic. Erk, I say. What a treacherous job it was to roll out this stuff in the heat today. I think we were all feeling rather beat up by the time we had finished... around four in the afternoon. During that time Jarrod and Leslie seeded the fall roots.

The rest of the day was spent in various jobs. Amanda, Jarrod, Ali, and Jeff weeded a few rows of peas that hadn't germinated well so that weeds were coming through fairly strong. Jarrod and Jeff also experimented with a few old sprinklers we have to try to get a system going (rather than laying more drip tape). Leslie and I transplanted planted tomatoes, melons, ground cherries, and planted cucumber in the seed saving garden.

Good night.

Rather Hot

What did we do today? We direct seeded 16 beds of squash and cucumber. That took a few hours. Then we had an amazing, and very impromptu, workshop on soil with geologist John Slack (sp?).

Our previous soil workshop was excellent and gave us all the right foundation for what we learned today -- which was a whole lot more. John worked his talk around the soil profile he extracted from the ground using his "dutch auger" (I reckon that's a decent bad band name, or at least lead singer). He explained how taking soil for a soil test from only the first foot is really only worthwhile if you're trying to sell someone fertilizer -- instead, everything down to the "parent layer" is extremely important. He explained different nutrient cycles, the importance of calcium, limestone formation in southern Ontario, what goes on in each soil layer and how they're formed, how soil life adapts to the nutrients available, and on and on. Such an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guy. After learning all of this stuff about soil I'm starting to wonder why I'm not going into soil sciences (seriously!).

He also recommended this site: www.soilandhealth.org as a good resource.

Anyhow, after lunch we put down drip tape for the beds we had seeded, and we covered each of them with floating row cover. There's something very beautiful about seeing the field broken up into even lines like this. (Pictures coming). There's also something vaguely creepy -- it seems incredibly unnatural and somehow... disfiguring... like putting masking tape over someone's eyes.

After that Ali prepared beds for tomorrows seeding, and Jeff and I talked irrigation. He'd like to use sprinklers over part of the field (the early root crops and peas) so that we don't have to run drip tape. I'll have to write more about drip tape, but basically the way we're using it makes it extremely painful. Mostly because we have to keep removing and putting it out again and again, each time the beds are cultivated (by hand or with the tractor). Using sprinklers would save a lot this hassle.

Recap and Pictures

Alrighty, here's what we've been up to over the past few days:

• Jarrod and I finished up the guts of the coolroom. We hung the door, and put up the last bits of the wall. Here's a grungy picture from a few days back:
  
  
  


• Leslie and I seeded a bunch of corn, some to save seed from and others for the CSA. We used a neighbour's corn planter tractor implement. Actually all I did was walk behind the tractor to make sure everything was working well whilst Leslie did the hard part of keeping the tractor in line. Okay, actually, this corn planter contraption makes the whole process a piece of cake.
  
• We all did a a lot of hoeing. Most of Wednesday, and Thursday I believe. We weeded most of everything that we had planted up until now. This is pretty hard work, mostly because it involved standing in the sun during those hot days. Oddly (or not so oddly) I'm getting pretty familiar with being uncomfortably warm. It's a rather peculiar mix of feeling sweaty and gross and a bit worn out, but also willing to keep going because it's fun and you know you're making progress. It's a bit like the volume has been turned down on the complaints line from my body. I can hear an upset voice on the other end, but I can't quite make out the details of the complaint. And that makes it easier to just hang up.
  
• We planted a few beds of stuff. I can't remember exactly what. I know fennel was in there somewhere. Poor, unfortunate fennel. Fennel is the pasty white wimp of the group. It's so darn fragile. Anyhow, here'r some photos of us planting (from a few weeks past):
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Jarrod
  

  

  Amanda
  
  

  

  Me
  
  

  

  Ali and Jeff
  
• Amanda and I spent Friday afternoon retying all the knots for the tomatoes in the greenhouse ('cause we had the wrong knot).
• We put out irrigation lines for the all the Alliums (onions, bunching onions, leeks) and the garlic.

Also, remember that I mentioned we had a soil talk the other day? Well here's a few pictures from that:

l to r: Me, Tarrah, Jarrod, Amanda, Ali

l to r, b to f: me, tarrah, jarrod, amanda, jeff, ali

And finally, since I haven't formally introduced you yet to the whole 2007 Whole Circle crew, here we are:

Back row: Manuella, Leslie, Amanda, Ali, Me
Front row: Johann, Maggie, Jeff, Jarrod

All photos here were taken by Leslie.

Hoe-down

Today:

• Seeded lettuce, and spring onions (whilst listening to a This American Life episode on Testosterone).
• Hand weeded (via the hoe) the last bed of kohlrabhi we missed yesterday.
• Thinned the radish and the turnip.

Today was all about the hoe. It's a wonderful tool, I have to say. Used properly it replaces an squadron of bent fingers and backs. A tiny arm movement and suddenly you've scraped off the surface of the soil and along with it any flimsy weeds. I also used it to thin the turnip very successfully.

I also have my first real and persistent pain. And wouldn't you know it, it's in my hands. It runs in a band across the top of my palm where my knuckles are. It's more of a stiff feeling, as if my hands haven't been used in a long while. It's generally most painful in the mornings after the bike ride in the cool air and becomes unnoticeable once I've started working. Some of the others complain about this sort of pain too, so I suspect it just comes with the territory.

Dirt

Alrighty here, another few days to recap.

Last Thursay and Friday were spent doing similar things. Jarrod, Jeff, Amanda and I spent most of the days constructing an insulated room within the existing coolroom. The idea being that since the existing coolroom is massive and not air conditioned (it's cooled with sensible opening and closing of the main door throughout the cooler months only) but still insulated we could build two walls and a door and suddenly have our own reasonably sized room to store vegetables. And we could use a hacked window air conditioner I mentioned before to cool it.

We managed to build most of it, less the door. As before, it was a lot of fun to pretend to be a carpenter. I also spent some time calling around to electricians and appliance repair folk to see if anyone could give me advice on how to hack the air conditioner and how exhaust the heat. Eventually I found most of what I think I need to know from my friend Shaun over at Fidalia Networks Inc. who has a ton of experience with refrigerating server rooms.

Saturday was another learning day, and this time we had a talk by my roommate Tarrah on soil. A really fantastic talk. We learnt about the origin of soil, soil composition, the mineral composition of soil, soil structure, and soil life. All of what could be was applied as Tarrah had us out in the fields all morning digging holes and inspecting our soil.

Did I ever mention that I wanted to start a list of organic farming axioms? Well, regardless, Tarrah's workshop highlighted the axiom, "Feed the soil, not the plants". That is, rather than dump liquid fertiliser on the soil intending for the plants to soak it up before the next rain (where it'll get washed away into the rivers and ground water) instead, intelligently rotate crops, apply compost, or other amendments and practices designed to encourage healthy soil life which will make the existing nutrients in the soil available to the plants.

Anyhow, yesterday we spent the morning planting strawberries (just in the home garden), making soil mix, and getting the seed potatoes ready for planting. The afternoon was a frenzy of hoeing and floating row cover moving. Five hours later, and we had de-weeded the entire brassica planting. This was such a dusty job... when I took a shower last night the water ran silty brown for a minute or so.

Crop Rotations

Another great day. Today we took the morning and part of the afternoon as a learning day. The subject: crop rotations. I've heard the principles many many times before, but Ali, Leslie, and Jeff did an excellent job of going into the gritty details of how to pull off designing a good crop rotation given all the different competing constraints under consideration. (alliteration anyone?) More than giving us a good basis in the theory, they explained exactly how they had come up with the current and past rotations for our farm, and how they had changed it in response to observing the fields throughout the season (e.g. what they did when they noticed one field stays damp most of the year, etc..).

After all that I spent a while researching air conditioner thermostats in the hopes of learning how to hack a room air conditioner into something we can use to refrigerate a cool room. Anyone know anything about recalibrating thermostats? (Taking a look under the hood I discovered that the thermostat has a little Allan key driven screw that I suspect adjusts the temperature calibration. I'd need to change it so that the air conditioner keeps the temperature around 4 degrees Celsius.)

I then spent a long while with Amanda and Ali stringing twine from the roof of the back half of the green house so that we can tether the tomatoes. There's a nifty we knot used to adjust the slack of the twine as the plant grows so that you can keep wrapping it around the stalk. It's something like the Lobster Bouy Hitch or the Tautline Hitch.

Recap

So I guess I've taken some time off from this. Got rather busy I suppose. Here's a quick recap:

Wednesday: CRAFT day. Very fun. More on this later, I hope. Learnt a lot, met up with some people I knew from a while back.

Thursday: Inside day. Cleaned up the shed. Finished the harvest cart, again.

Friday: More clean up and random jobs for the first half of the day 'cause the ground is still wet. Then... crazy go nuts in the afternoon as the ground dries up and we all stay until 9pm to get all of the planting done that day because of the promise of rain the next day.

Saturday: no school rainy saturday. i.e. no work today.

Monday: planted celery, moved floating row cover around. Did lots of things in the shed... can't quite remember in my delirious state of tiredness at the moment. Oh wait, we seeded lots. All the fall brassicae actually. Plus fennel. Plus other stuff in the shed...

Today: Spent the morning debugging a problem with the webpage. Also worked with leslie to plan out some of the seed saving garden. Hacked down every variety of last years kale save one which we'll use for seed later on. Planted beets for seed saving. Made steamed nettle for lunch. Put seed potatoes in bins to get them ready for seeding soon.

G'night.

Cool Hand Luke

Ever seen the film "Cool Hand Luke"? I recommend it. It contains several amazing scenes. In one, we get this bit of classic dialog:

Luke: I can eat fifty eggs.
Someone else says: Nobody can eat fifty eggs.

Okay, I guess you have to see the film. In any case, there's a scene where Luke and a bunch of men on the chain gang are laying down a road, in the heat, and the everyone is grumpy and moving slowly just hating what they're being forced to do. All of sudden Luke starts going like a mad man, tossing gravel down as fast as he can. Everyone joins in and they're suddenly enjoying it. Hootin' and hollerin' and getting a thrill out of the intensity of everything.

Well, today was nothing like that. No no, I'm kidding. Today was very much like that, minus the Luke. As a group we just settled into this incredible rhythm of work. Transplanting, like yesterday. Only today it seemed to go at a quicker, more consistent, and energetic pace. We were planting with a wider spacing (every 12 inches, and sometimes 18 inches, rather than yesterday's 6 inches), and sometimes we'd only plant two rows per bed instead of three. That really made things cook.

But more so I think it was just that we all knew what we were going to be doing, and so we relaxed into it and decided to "give 'er", rather than be so concerned about how much our back or legs hurt, etc. Or maybe this is just my experience of the day, and everyone else experienced it entirely differently. I'll have to ask.

In any case, a great day. As I say, we planted all of the brassicae (Cabbage, Broccoli, Kolhrabi, and Pak Choi), plus parsley, I think. Maybe something else too. I spent part of the afternoon baking blueberry muffins for tomorrows CRAFT day (it's a pot luck lunch at one of the CRAFT farms -- more on this tomorrow). We also layed out drip line for the brassicae and floating row cover.

I have to say I'm still coming down from the buzz of today. I think I really enjoy sustained hard work with a fast pace. It's also great to be digging around in the dirt all day. My hands, arms, and face were dark brown with dust this evening. Leslie and I noted that our cuticles have disappeared or are disappearing from our hands -- likely getting ground (get it?) away by the earth as we continually jam our hands into it.

Transplanting

Today was rather tough (but maybe that's because I'm a 'nub'). We transplanted four 400 foot beds of onions (three rows each) and two of leeks, both at a six inch spacing. So that's six beds of the twenty-one we'll be transplanting this week. Sheesh.

It was a great day though. I really enjoy this sort of sustained and focused work. Oh and, I've had the song "spanish flea" stuck in my head all day too.

A Structural Explanation of Farm Injury

The other day it occurred to me that there is a very simple structural explanation as to why farming is so darn hard on the body. Consider the following:


That's right, what we have there is a diagram of a human, standing comfortably on the earth. If we roughly categorise the components of the system above, we see there are different bands of functionality oriented in space:

That is, our head contain four out of our five major perceptual apparatuses. Our upper torso houses our hands and arms which for a "small"-scale vegetable farmer are the primary tools for manipulating the world (i.e. weeding, grasping, pushing). Our hands are also our primary tools of our sense of touch. Our torso is all about supporting the upper part of our body in all of its positions, and in addition contains many of our major organs. Our legs are also part of our support system but they are differentiated by their primary role in our locomotion. And finally, at the very bottom is the earth.

Now, for us farmers here's the problem:

All of our tools -- our eyes, arms, and hands -- are located at the top most part of our body. The earth and the vegetables that grow in it -- our primary work area -- are located beneath our body. That is, our tools are separated from our work area by a large gap (relative to the size of our body). To bridge the gap and bring all of our equipment down to where we are going to use it, we need to fold our body. And the folding happens either at our back, hips or legs, or all three -- but it definitely has to happen.

Thus, in order to do much of our work we're bound to put strain on these areas of our bodies. It's an unavoidable consequence of the physical layout of the human body. Of course, this is a well-known problem -- it's why we have long handles on tools, and why home gardeners have raised beds, and such. I just thought it's interesting.

Now, given a few millenia of evolution maybe farmers will end up like this:

(That's an extra head on the lower torso, and a pair of arms coming out of the thighs).

Seeding

So yesterday was the first day of seeding in the field. It was finally dry enough so Jeff, Leslie, and Ali went out on the tractors and had the seeder (a "planet junior") following the spader. They seeded about two acres of early root vegetables: carrots, beets, parsnip, and peas, I believe. Amanda and I weeded and thinned the transplants that are outside so that they're all set for tomorrow, and Jarrod helped get the main irrigation lines laid out. Amanda and I helped out with that at the end of the day a little.

Make Work

Today was a bit of a day of random jobs. The farmers are all waiting on the edge of their boots for the fields to dry enough so that we can out there and seed and plant. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and dry so I think we'll do it then.

That reminds me, we begin working Saturday mornings from now on. We're still only working 8am to 6pm, at least for another week.

Today:

• Jarrod and I put a rail on the cart to stop the boxes of veggies from sliding off if the cart is tipped too high.
• We discovered that the forks we had built for the bicycle wheels were too flimsy, so we scrapped them for an entire wheel and axle assembly we dragged out of the scrap heap.
  
• Lunch. I dug out some wild leeks from the sugar bush and made a spinach salad with them. It was rather basic. I guess I had hoped for more 'cause on their own the leeks are quite sweet, oniony, and also have a strong table pepper taste.
  
• Amanda and I weeded the unheated portion of the green house, and then strung rope to hold up the tomato trellising.
  
• Ali and I removed the piles of rock from our earlier rocking picking sessions (totally not mundane) into the bucket of the tractor which Leslie drove.
• Jeff and Jarrod set up the basic framework for the irrigation system.
  
• Ali, Jeff, Leslie and I picked some of last year's kale and collards that are regrowing. Just for eating at home.
  

Cart

Time has been a bit bare in the past few evenings, what with coming home at 6:45 - 7pm, and then typically sitting down to dinner with the 'family' here. It's been 9pm by the time I've cleaned up and am ready to sit down to do some reading or typing (and... being in bed at 9pm is a grand thing, I say). I suspect I'll have to unhook myself from the rest of the house's routine if I have any hope of having some time to myself this summer.

So, anyhow, Yesterday was a learning day. The topic: health and safety on the farm. Jeff led us through a discussion on lifting, dressing properly for the sun, hydration, using the tools correctly, wearing safety equipment, interacting with the animals without getting a horn in the temple (our cows have their horns), and safely working with and around tractors. This day was good fun, and also oddly exhausting. Jarrod, Jeff, and I spent the afternoon working on the bus door and the harvest cart.

Today jjj spent most of our time working on the bus door and harvest cart (except for the early morning where Jarod and I rebuilt part of a fence). The bus door is done, and we just need a tire and some tubes for the wheels of the cart before it can be put into service. Leslie used the 'Einbach' (sp?) tool on the bit of the garden we'll be planting in soon. This is a tool that fits onto a tractor and has several little steel tines that drag across the ground (maybe penetrate an inch or two deep). The action is much like if you dragged a garden rake across soil. The intention is to break up the soil a bit and thereby kill any weeds growing. If it's used a couple of times over a few weeks it can essentially rid the top two inches of soil of weed seeds. In this case, since we're planting in it as soon as it's dry enough, it will just lessen the weed 'pressure'.

Ali and Leslie also spent several hours on the tractor cultivating a (the?) potato field with a tool called a 'spader'. It approximates 'double digging' -- a method of deep cultivation which doesn't invert the layers of soil. Material and microbial composition apparently changes dramatically in the upper 30-60cm of soil, and so keeping the soil layers in place is important maintaining soil health. (I'll have to write a post about farming axioms I'm learning, but one of them is "healthy soil means healthy plants").

Amanda did odd jobs most of the day, and in particular did a lot of work in the back half of the greenhouse getting it ready for the tomatoes.

Upholding the Gender Stereotypes

This May Day we at Whole Circle Farm decided to strengthen our commitment to farm gender stereotypes. Jarrod, Jeff, and I spent the day working in the shop, working with steel. You know, cuttin' steel, bending steel, grindin' steel, hammerin' steel, burnin' steel with flames. The womenfolk (only Ali and Amanda today) spent the day doing girly stuff.. you know, baking, darning our socks, and whatever else they do. Okay, not really. They spent the day picking rocks, doing greenhouse work, painting another section for the sign out front, and tending to the day-old chicks that arrived today.

I think everyone noticed the gender split today, but it "just sorta happened" that way. Ostensibly because Jeff had work to do on repairing the bus door that got trashed the other week, and Jarrod can weld, and I.. well, I guess maybe because I'm handy with designs and numbers and such... or maybe it's just because I have a penis. Most likely not, but you never know.

Anyhow, so what exactly were the boys working on today? Well, Jarrod and I, with a lot of Jeff's help, are attempting to create a wagon to carry our washed and bunched vegetables from the processing area in the shed to the cooler in the barn. It's a short distance, but a real drag if you have to carry one box at a time. Since the fields are not dry enough to work or transplant into we have some time to work on projects like these.

Personally, I find making tools is a fantastic way to spend time. It's what I love about working as a computer programmer. That is, often I enjoy making the tools to automate or assist with the day-to-day cruft, more than I like doing the steady work on the larger project. It turns out that the same is true for me in farming. I really love designing and then building a tool for a job that I know is tedious, but will now be just a little less tedious. I absolutely love the physicalness of working with metal and wood and screws and such, to pull together a functioning thing.