Silence

Today the farm is eerily quite. The walk-in cooler and greenhouse fans are finally shut off, the fields have all been harvested, tilled and seeded to cover crops, and the greenhouse beds are empty. The food bank crew came today and harvested what little was still left in the field.

The farm feels like it's the end of October, but the thermometer reads about 85- so that can't be right. If you have been following this blog you will know that Tammara and I are taking the second half of the season off to take a long needed extended vacation (sabbatical). Our plan is to drive across the country to camp and hike in National Parks in both the US and Canada. To find out more about this trip visit our new travel blog at Vagabond Farmers http://vagabondfarmers.blogspot.com We plan to start making posts to the site in the near future.

We must admit we were quite nervous about the reaction our customers would have toward this plan. We need not have worried, everyone we have told about the trip has been very supportive and genuinely happy for us. Granted, there is typically a brief moment of anguish when they realize there will be no Minglewood tomatoes and they will have to find a new source for salad greens and arugula, but then most people say "Good for you" - and then start telling us about all the places we have to visit.

We would like to thank all our dedicated customers for their understanding and assure them we will be back in the spring of 2011 with renewed energy and enthusiasm for farming. We would also like to thank this years superb crew both at the farm and at the market. With the reduced number of crops we were trying to manage the farm never looked better, and despite having less variety available at market, our sales were still 10-20% higher each week than in previous years.

Enjoy the rest of the summer, and stay in touch.

Hot, Hot, Hot!!!

Wow! What a hot spell we had last week. Temperatures were well into the 90's with hazy sunshine and no rain - these are not good conditions for a lettuce farm. Actually, the lettuce managed okay, at least compared to the spinach and and baby mesclun greens. There is a reason these greens are sometimes sold as a 'Spring Mix', because spring weather conditions are when these greens really thrive. In the heat they get very stressed out (much like the farmer), and just want to bolt, or go to seed. There's not much you can do about the weather, but we did get the irrigation up and going again. I don't think I had needed to use it for at least the month previous to last week. Watering helps, but really is no substitute for a good shot of rain. It seems that no matter how much you water, the ground is dry again within a day. We did get a brief downpour on Saturday morning, as we were loading the truck to go to market, of course, but it cleared up later that morning. This was good for the market - not so good for the vegetables.

If you think it was hot outside, you should have checked out the greenhouses. It had to be at least 110 degrees inside, reminiscent of a sauna, but with 99% humidity. It was literally hard to even breathe in there, let alone try to work. We did manage to get the week's salad greens planted in the greenhouses, but it was so hot many of the beds had very poor germination and had to be re-seeded later in the week.

To try and cool things down we covered the greenhouses with shade cloth. This is a woven mesh that goes over the whole house and blocks out a percentage of the light. Some seasons I have not had to use it, but when it gets into the 90's there really isn't any choice. It does make it a little cooler inside and you don't need to water as often, but on the down side, the greens tend to stretch for the light and become a bit 'leggy', and there is also more tendency for 'damping off'.
It's always an adventure to get the cloth on... that really was one hot tin roof!

Believe it or not, things have started to wind down on the farm. With only three weeks until we leave on our sabbatical, the last of the lettuce and other transplants have been planted and the final seeding of greenhouse greens went in last week. So for now it's just weed, water and harvest. Oh yeah, I guess there is some cleaning up that needs to happen too.

The selection of produce at our farmers market table is still going strong, but we have probably seen the last of the peas and radishes. Spinach is holding in there, but just barely. Lettuce and salad greens, scallions, escarole, boc choi, and sprouts should continue to be abundant.

Solstice Crops and Organic Inspections

Happy summer! I guess it's now official as of last week, although it certainly feels like it's been summer for some time now. All the rain and warm temperatures have continued to push the season right along and all the crops are growing like bonkers. Our perennial gardens around the house are in full bloom; iris' are just about done, but the day lilies and cone flowers have filled in. Tammara planted a new bed last year and it has been a joy to see new blooms nearly every morning. Here's one of our favorites- a peach colored double day lilly.

Escarole is one of the new crops we have started to harvest in the past week or so. For those not familiar with this green, it is a wonderful Italian cooking green in the chicory family. It looks a lot like lettuce, but is generally a bit too bitter to eat raw. Steaming or sauteing it mellows the flavor and makes it the perfect ingredient for traditional "beans and greens".
Scallions are also back on the market table recently. The crop looks good this year, tall and robust, but not too fat. These are great chopped on a salad or added to your favorite stir-fry.

Spinach continues to do well, with no sign of the spinach blight that took it down last year. The long hot days are starting to force older plantings to bolt (go to seed) faster than we would like, but hopefully by planting new beds every week we will continue to have a good supply.

Snap peas have been a bit of a disappointment this year. I planted 400 row feet of Sugar Ann peas and had less than 5% germination. I am convinced it was bad seed and not attributable to the weather or pests. On the same day I also planted 200 feet of Sugar Snap peas which came up fine. So we have Sugar Snaps, but no Sugar Anns. Unfortunately, the Sugar Anns are a much tastier, productive and manageable variety. Sugar Anns grow to about a three foot vine which is easy to trellis and loaded with peas. The Sugar Snaps grow to six or seven feet and are now a tangled jungle mess with far fewer peas. It's quite the adventure just to find a hand full of peas. We use the buddy system when we go to pick them so we don't loose anybody.

Crops which are done for the season include brocollini (Chinese kale) and salad turnips. We will miss them and look forward to eating them again in 2011. We should have most of our other standard crops through to the end of our short season.

On a different front... today we had our annual organic certification inspection. The purpose of the inspection is to make sure all our records are in order and to verify that the farm is in compliance with the federal organic regulations. We have been certified since 2002, so after eight years we pretty much know what to expect and the process doesn't take more than a couple of hours. I've actually grown to enjoy the process - the feedback is generally positive and it's sort of a pat on the back that we are doing a good job.

The process of review has forced us to become better organic farmers. Through our record keeping system we must track every crop from seed to sale. This means you must document where you bought the seed, where and how you planted it, when and how you fertilized it, if you used an allowed treatment for pests or diseases, when you harvested it and where you sold it. It's a lot of paperwork to keep track of, but it's all important information that you should keep anyway and will help in planning future seasons.

At present we are the only certified organic farm selling at the Saratoga Farmers Market. I honestly do not understand why more farms have not gone through the process. It does take a bit of time for the record keeping and it does require a fee (about 1/2% of our gross sales after a NY State rebate), but I believe it is the best assurance to the customer that what they are buying is really organic.

Well, this week looks like more rain and showers. Hope you all stay on the dry side.

Tweleve Step Program... to awesome salad greens

By mid-June the weeks on the farm have fallen into a fairly predictable routine: Monday - get the tractor work done, soak sprout seeds, soak mushroom logs; Tuesday - renovate greenhouse salad beds; Wednesday - harvest and go to market; Thursday - seed flats and soil blocks, transplant, weed if there's time; Friday - harvest all day; Saturday - go to market, come home and collapse; Sunday - sleep, read... catch up on everything you didn't get to during the week.

One of the biggest and most critical jobs on the farm is salad green production. It is quite the process and consumes half a day for two people every week of the season. From the start of our farm we have always produced baby greens in raised greenhouse beds. We feel that the quality and consistency can not be matched growing them outside. This quality does come at a cost, the quantity that can be produced is limited by greenhouse space and it's more expensive in labor and materials for production. However, the advantages include less dependence on the weather, better control of bugs and diseases, and no weeds to deal with.

This system is the key to our salad mixes and is the reason why our greens really are different from most other producers. In the greenhouses we grow arugula, tatsoi, red mustard, green mustard, mizuna, and baby kale. Some of these greens we sell individually and others we mix in with field-grown lettuce for mesclun. Here is our twelve-step program to awesome salad greens.

Tuesday mornings start out by re-cutting any greens that have grown back after the previous weeks harvest. We could increase the yield of this second cutting if we left the bed to grow a little longer, but overall yield in the greenhouse is actually better if establish a new seeding instead.


Next we use a flat shovel to clean out the top inch or two of plant stubble and roots. The tailings are piled outside to re-compost and eventually get spread on the fields.

Next, the old sub-layer of compost left in the bed is loosened and chopped up with a hoe.

Then fresh compost is shoveled into a wheelbarrow to re-fill the beds. Each season we get a huge truck load of compost delivered from the Vermont Compost Company. Their quality and consistency is excellent. We use their compost for the green house beds, as well as, for making our own potting mix that we use for transplants.

A load of compost is dumped in each bed. Each week we renovate 11 beds, which is a quarter of our capacity (44 beds in total).

The compost sub-layer is raked smooth.

Next, we start mixing ingredients for the top layer. This includes compost, peat moss, perlite (a natural mineral that provides aeration) and a natural fertilizer blend (North Country Organics). Ingredients are put in a portable cement mixer to thoroughly combine.

Loads of the mix are dumped on each bed.

And then raked and smoothed evenly over the sub-layer of each bed. If they are not level and relatively free of clumps, it makes it difficult to use the seeder.

A pinpoint seeder is used to evenly and consistently seed each bed.

Beds are then watered,

and covered with floating row-cover. The fabric helps to keep the beds from drying out while they are germinating. After three or four days the covers are removed for full light and air circulation.

If all goes according to plan, after one week the bed will look like this:

And after two weeks, this:

And after three weeks, it should look like this, at which point it is ready to harvest, and then the whole cycle starts again, week after week...

Hey, what do you know, that really is twelve steps!

Well, it's Sunday... where's my pillow?

Selling Out

Wow - what a crazy month! I can't believe it's Memorial Day already. The season has started off with a tremendous bang this year. I guess the local food movement has really taken hold in Saratoga Springs; we've had some of the busiest markets ever. In fact, the past two Saturdays have grossed more in sales than any of our previous markets - ever. We have had a hard time keeping up with demand, selling out of most produce well before the end of market. Fortunately, with all the warm weather our production has finally started to kick in and this past week we at least had salad mix until the closing bell.

We have had a nice selection of spring crops to offer: lettuce, spinach, arugula, baby boc choi, stir-fry greens, salad turnips, radishes, broccolini, cilantro, sprouts, and shiitake mushrooms. We should continue to have most of these crops for the next few weeks, although broccolini may be about done - with the summer heat it all budded at once. Snap peas, scallions, and escarole are still a few weeks away.
Apparently, everyone in Saratoga is also putting in a garden this year. Plant sales have been incredible so far. In the past two weeks we have sold over a thousand tomato plants - which is far more than we've ever sold in the past. Sales have also been vigorous for peppers, eggplant, lettuce, and herbs. We really appreciate and thank all our dedicated customers for coming out and supporting the market and our farm. The market has been crowded and hectic this year, making it difficult to give customers the attention and service that we ideally like to provide - thanks for your patience and understanding.

Back on the farm, things have been busy too. Due to our abbreviated season this year, we have really tried to scale back on labor, to reduce costs and balance out our reduced income. Thankfully, Martin B. has returned for a third season and is doing a great job keeping the farm going. So far between the two of us, we have managed to keep up with all the greenhouse seedings, transplanting, and harvesting. Unfortunately, there has not been much time for weeding, and this has finally started to catch up to us - maybe this week...

Finally today I had a chance to do some much needed mowing. This is actually a pleasant way to spend a Sunday - there is a certain Zen quality to the slow progression back and forth through the tall fields (despite the diesel fumes). Below is a photo of an absolutely beautiful field of flowering vetch, just before I mowed it. This is the same field that was 'frost seeded' to clover and and annual rye in March. The vetch was seeded in the late fall the previous October and I didn't think too much of it had made it though the winter, but wonder of wonders, it all took off later in the spring. I did not find too much evidence of the clover/rye, but that's okay, vetch makes a pretty nice fallow season crop as well. I hated to mow it, it was so nice to look at, but I was afraid to let it go to seed and potentially become a weed problem in future seasons.

Mowing also gives you a chance to see things on the farm that you would not ordinarily see. While mowing an adjacent area I narrowly just missed running over this little guy...

Thank God I saw him in time... the Wood Turtle is one of my all time favorite creatures. They spend some of their lives in water, and some on land, thus the name. Unfortunately, they love to wander around in the tall grass on a warm summer afternoon. We figure this guy we 15 to 20 years old, based on the rings of his shell.

Well that's all for now. Enjoy the summer weather, walk bare foot through some tall grass, just watch out for the mower.

Busy April Days

April has been a busy time here at Minglewood Farm. As soon as the soil starts to dry out and the weather starts to warm, everything seems to happen at once. It's hard to believe that the summer farmer's market season starts in less than a week, on Saturday, May 1. It's always a bit of a struggle to have very much to sell at the early spring markets. Even with heated greenhouses, row covers, hoop houses and such, plants just refuse to grow as fast as we would like them to. Despite this, we will have a bit of salad to bring, along with sprouts and some early season garden transplants. Fear not, it won't be long before we have a full table of produce to offer.

Here's some recent scenes from the farm...

Baby lettuce almost ready for harvest

The full array of mesclun greens to be cut for Saturday's market

Spreading compost early in the season

Fieldhouse filled with lettuce seedlings

Planting the snap peas

In addition to tilling the fields, spreading compost, transplanting and seeding early crops, we spent several days inoculating new logs for shiitake mushroom production. This is quite a time consuming process - fortunately we had help from some neighbors and friends to get the job done this year. Here's what is involved in the project.

After you have your logs cut, each is drilled with 60 to 70 holes. This year I bought an angle grinder with an adapter to drill the logs, which was amazingly faster than using a regular drill.

We buy organic mushroom spawn from a supplier. It comes in a five pound block of spawn growing in sawdust.

A special tool is used to fill each hole with spawn.

After all the holes are filled, each hole is covered with melted bees wax. This helps keep the spawn from drying out and also helps keep wild fungal spores from contaminating the logs.

After this the logs are stacked to a shady spot and left for an entire year to incubate. The next year the logs are soaked in a water tank overnight to stimulate the production of mushrooms.

Hope you have been enjoying the beautiful springtime weather as much as we have. If you live near Saratoga Springs, be sure to stop by to say hi at the farmer's market on opening day.

Blackbirds Return, Sabbatical Planned

The red winged blackbirds have returned to Minglewood... the first true sign that spring is surely on its way. We no longer can rely on the robins and bluebirds to send us this message since they now seem to be here all winter long. Winter has been relatively kind to us in this part of upstate New York - not much snow, at least for the second half of the season, and remarkably mild temperatures for early March.

The farm is slowly waking up from its winter hibernation and activity can once again be seen in the fields and greenhouses. The warmish weather motivated me to do some 'frost seeding' of clover and annual rye while there is still a chance for some frost. This is a great way to establish and early cover crop. Below you can see me broadcasting seed right over top of the winter killed cover crop of oats that were seeded last fall. The freezing and thawing of the soil actually works the seed into the soil where it will lie dormant until temperatures rise to the point to allow it to germinate in the early spring.
We have also been busy thinning out the woodlot to get our oak logs ready for inoculating with shiitake mushroom spawn. We will start the process of 'drilling and filling' in a couple of weeks when it's a little warmer. These logs will then sit for an entire year as the mushrooms colonize the logs, and be ready next summer to produce shiitakes.

Winter is the time for fixing things. One of this years projects has been to repair and rebuild the greenhouse table beds we use for growing baby salad greens. This has been a long and tedious project and I'm only a little more than half done. If I can stay on schedule, they should all be done before I need to start growing in them in another week or two.

The main heated greenhouse was started up last Monday, so the first seeding of lettuce and spinach are up and growing. These will be transplanted out to a fieldhouse or 'high tunnel' in early April and hopefully be big enough to harvest for our first markets in May.

Sabbatical Planned

In addition to all this activity, Tammara and I have been doing a lot of planning... for a big trip from August - October. For those of you who don't know, Tammara leads a double life. When she is not selling vegetables at the farmer's market or doing the farm bookkeeping, she is working as director of a non-profit organization that accredits land trusts, which in its self is more than a full time job. After eleven years of farming, and many more of full time work, we are both ready for a summer vacation. Recently Tammara's employer instituted a sabbatical program that will allow her to take twelve weeks off. With an offer like that, it was too good to refuse - none of us is getting any younger.

So, our plan is to take three months off this year, from August through October, and travel throughout the western US and Canada. We will farm this year, but on an abbreviated season from May through July. This was a difficult decision for us to make, we hate to disappoint our dedicated customers who shop with us all season long. Hopefully, this trip will give us time to reflect and re-energize, so that we can come back and continue to farm with renewed enthusiasm and excitement for many years to come. So take heart - this is our anti-burnout strategy, and will be back for the whole season in 2011.

Feliz Ano Nuevo

Happy New Year and greetings from sunny Yucatan. Somehow those long exhausting days of August seem very far away. Every year at the height of the season I have a mental melt-down and cry "This is crazy - it's just way too much work!". I always manage to get through the worst of it and survive until the late fall and winter. I have to remind myself that there literally is a light at the end of the tunnel - a winter vacation somewhere in the tropics. All those dollars charged to the farm credit card eventually add up to a lot of frequent flyer miles and this has allowed us to take a week or two off some place warm nearly every year since we started the farm.


Most years we find ourselves some where in Central America; it's relatively affordable to travel there and the Caribbean coast is equal if not nicer than most of the better known Caribbean islands. We have slowly been working our way through all the countries of Central America, visiting some of them more than once. San Salvador is the last country there that we have not visited yet.

This year we took off a little earlier than normal, and spent the week between Christmas and New Year's on Isla Mujeres. This is a small island just of the coast of Yucatan, Mexico, about a twenty minute boat ride from Cancun. We rented a place with our good friends Steve and Lisa, and their daughter Allie. We had a wonderful time, doing as little as possible. There was a grand fiesta on New Year's eve, where the whole town turns into a big street party, but mostly we just caught up on relaxing.

Now we are back to our regular winter routine. Tammara is once again busy with her regular job at the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, she unfortunately doesn't ever get much of a break. I am busy starting to prepare for the next season, which at this stage is mostly computer and paper work. There's lots of planning to do including crop plans and budgets. Organic certification updates are due shortly, and seed orders are already a little late.

Coming up this next weekend is a great conference that may be of interest to our followers in the Saratoga area. The 28th annual Organic Farming & Gardening Conference, presented by NOFA-NY (Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York) takes place at the City Center in Saratoga Springs, NY. It runs from Friday the 22 to Sunday the 24. This is a great conference for the whole local organic community to come together. There are workshops on all types of farming and gardening issues and topics. Sessions are geared towards both farmers/gardeners and consumers of organic food. The meals are a real bargain and are prepared nearly exclusively with local ingredients. This conference rotates around to different parts of the state each year, so it's a real bonus to have it right in our back yard. Here a link to NOFA-NY web site for more information,http://www.nofany.org/

Hope you all are having a great winter, maybe we will see you at the conference.