Wednesday, April 17, 2013

First Harvest

Today, I reached a milestone in my farming journey, the farmer's version of the first day of kindergarten--my first harvest!  Yes, I've harvested produce many times before today, but it was never really my produce--it was somebody else's crop that I was hired to help with. What I picked today I can rightfully call mine.  I chose the varieties from the seed catalog, I prepped the beds, I sowed the seeds, I weeded the seedlings, I harvested the crop, I washed it, I packed it into boxes, and I waved it goodbye as it climbed aboard the delivery van en route to the local chef who ordered it. 

I should actually say we, not I, and ours, not mine, as my partner Becca and I are jointly working the farm. In using "I," I do not intend to take more than my share of the credit, I am simply trying to convey the sense of ownership and pride that I feel towards what I grew.

Today's harvest was small, but a good warm-up for larger harvests to come.  I was working on my own, since Becca was at her second job at a neighborhood coffee shop, so I'm glad the harvest was not a big one--it took me long enough as it was.  Being the first harvest of the season, I had to spend time gathering and then cleaning the necessary supplies--harvest crate, harvest bucket, soap, scrub brush, knife, salad spinner, hose, spray nozzle, wash tub, drain plug, plastic bags, waxed cardboard boxes, labels, and an invoice.  Whew!  In all, I picked 4 pounds of lettuce mix, one-half pound of baby arugula, and one bunch of Easter Egg radishes.  The harvest supplies were heavier and more numerous than the actual crop!

I have never grown lettuce mix before, so I am learning about this crop as I go.  When it came time to sow the lettuce mix seeds one month ago, Becca and I spent some time on the Internet and reading seed catalogs to figure out how to plant it.  We settled on using our Earthway seeder and planting 8 rows per bed.  This is a fairly dense planting, with not enough room between rows to fit a hula hoe for weeding, but with enough room for weeds to grow (see photo below).  This leaves us with only one option for weeding the lettuce: by hand.  Yuck!  So Becca and I spent a couple of hours on our hands and knees yesterday afternoon, pulling up nut sedge, bermuda grass, lamb's quarters, and rogue tomato plants that seeded themselves from the tomatoes Eric and Sarah planted last year.  (Ironically, these volunteer, unidentified tomato seedlings actually looked better than the ones I intentionally planted yesterday on the other side of the farm, tempting me to dig them up and transplant them!)  We had no idea how much of the bed we would need to harvest to meet our order of 4 pounds, so we weeded our entire crop, 50 bed feet, just in case.  (It turns out that it only takes about 9 bed feet to yield 4 pounds of lettuce mix, so we didn't need to weed as much as we did, but now we know.)  As of this morning, I had no idea how to harvest the lettuce mix, so back to the Internet I went.  YouTube videos proved unhelpful (although I was entertained by one playing soothing music while showing a tractor harvesting lettuce mix on a slightly larger scale than my little farm) but luckily the company we ordered our lettuce seeds from had produced a great 2-page handout on lettuce mix, including how to harvest it.  Apparently, the mix should be harvested when 4-5 inches tall, using a sharp knife to cut about 1/2 inch above the soil level while holding the tops of the greens in the other hand.  This method ended up working pretty well for me. 

Once the greens were cut, it was time for their bath.  I used a large metal stock tank to wash the greens, at the same time picking out a few weeds that snuck past Becca and I yesterday.  Once the greens were washed, I transferred them to a high capacity salad spinner to dry them off, then packed them in plastic bags.  Once in bags, the bags were loaded into a box and the box placed in the cooler for short-term storage.  Mission accomplished! 

Next Friday, we will have a much larger harvest, as our first farmers' market is next Saturday.  We're hoping to bring lettuce mix, baby spinach, baby arugula, radishes, rhubarb, and strawberries to the market, so Friday will be a busy day of picking.  In the meantime, we'll stock up on harvest and packing supplies and get the packing area better organized so our next harvest will be more efficient.

Bed of lettuce mix, before weeding and harvest.
Bed of lettuce mix, after weeding and harvest.
4 pounds of just-harvested lettuce mix.
One-half pound of fresh, baby arugula.
Baby arugula going for a swim in the wash tub.


Easter Egg radishes.  So proud of my little babies!

Saturday, April 13, 2013

5 + 7 + 5 = ?

On my drive to the farm one morning this week, NPR featured haiku about Washington DC's cherry blossoms.  The short, simple poems were intriguing, and got me counting syllables.  Haiku is perfect for me right now, since I feel too busy to write for very long, and the one other time I did sit down to write a blog post, I struggled to find the right words.  So here are a few farm haiku to kick off my second season of blogging.  I do realize that they probably won't make much sense to most of you, but as our local NPR host commented, the beauty of a simple haiku is lost if you have to explain it. 

Plastic pipe, wood, wire:
A new home for the chickens.
But where are the eggs?















Last year they raised pigs
Now the ground's too hard to till
Forking breaks my back

Sore throat, cough, stuffed up
NCIS entertains
No farm work for me

Blackberry Dave disks
Saving us a week's labor
Worth every cent
















Oops, there goes a pipe
Could the doggies be to blame?
Off to Home Depot

The weeds grow like mad
Undoing hard work so fast
Hope the plants grow, too