What I Want to Be If I Grow Up

I took the week between Christmas and New Year’s off from my Joe job so we could do some mud wrestling at the farm.  Dan took Monday and Tuesday off and was up at 5:30 am to go back to work.  All in all, we got a lot done in a short amount of time, which is our habit of necessity.

Yesterday we woke up at the farm to finish off the tree planting.  Then we drove the 160 miles home and did some field planning for 2011.  I went to band rehearsal and came home again at 11:30 pm to do the seed purchase with Dan.  This is all part of my training to grow up to be an astronaut-doctor-veterinarian-horse-riding-faery-princess.   Consciousness is a terrible thing to waste.

Rewind<<

After giving each other thoughtful and romantic in our own way farm-related Christmas presents (Dan gave me a weather station and I gave her a compound bow.  I know.  It’s so sweet it makes your teeth crack), we collected and planted 43 fruit trees.  This was about 4 weeks ahead of plan, but a good move given a.) our son Dave is home from school to help out, and b.) it will rain continuously from now until the sun turns to dust.  We sprayed the trees with neem oil concentrate to protect from shot hole fungus and leaf curl before it gets a chance to start.  We’ll hit them again later in the winter to keep safe.

Each tree represents a significant investment with the tree itself, gopher basket, tree guard, 6’ring of deer fence, and irrigation line.  Losing trees to fungus or anything else is a real heart breaker.  The deer are so intent on eating them in the summer that it plays like a scene from the movie Zombieland.

A few weeks back we put up a PVC hoop house in the veggie field.  We pounded re-bar into the soil as anchors and reused the stucco lath tomato cages we made for sides.  This will keep out the rabbits and deer and provide a frame for shade cloth in the summer to cover the larger tomatoes that don’t like all the direct sun the cherry tomatoes like.  While we plan to put in 5 more this year, I am concerned that they won’t scale.  They are cheap and should be very effective, but will not cover very large areas.  This is actually a tomorrow problem since we have some time to spend yet figuring out our crop plan in the smaller area and 6 hoop houses will do just fine for now.  First we’ll get good with 2,400 square feet, then expand if it makes sense.

Our veggie plan covers four seasons but cuts way back in the summer when there’s no rain and we have to share the water with the trees.  Dan and I found a cool application to help us with our vegetable plan called the Vegetable Garden Planner from Mother Earth News.  It helps with crop layout, succession, rotation, plant/harvest calendaring, companions, and a bunch of other things.  One of the pictures going by shows what our field will look like in February.

So while I was at rehearsal last night, Dan was finishing the plan and making the seed shopping list.  Still sore from the long day, she says, “You need to go back up.  We have to get started right away.”  So I get to mess around today, then go back up for another couple days to get things ready for the late January planting.  Poor me.

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