Field crops for the harvest yesterday were all protected by row cover; one of our most valuable season extension tools.
This time of the season is amazing and terrifying. Some days are seventy degrees, and some nights, like last night, are forecast for 31 degrees but end up at 21 instead. We’ve been row covering in shifts since last Friday, as we follow the forecasts multiple times a day, but we woke up in terror. What would have been okay with a single layer of frost cloth at 31 might need two layers to survive at 21. Could all of our work, literally 15-20 hours of covering crops (in shifts, since Friday) have been lost? It wasn’t quite, but it was yet another wakeup call that while we have a huge part-time harvest crew here, nothing replaces full time, qualified farmers. If anything defines this huge season for us, it’s the need to get a good solid full-time team at our farm and figure out how to get our packshed up. Since our main building team left, our farm has required so much management of the harvesting that progress on the building has ground to a halt (except a final power connection, a big wrangle with permitting, and some final excavation work for drainage). Okay, I guess that’s a lot. Also, we pulled an emergency shift at our grower’s cooperative to help pack 500 CSA boxes last week since they had a major worker shortage due to a covid case and exposures.
As part of a deal, Sabrina worked Sunday to help do crop protection and harvest a couple pallets of one of our fall and winter cabbage waves. As part of the deal, she has Wednesday and Thursday off.
As Mary and I inspected our tunnels of winter greens this morning, which mostly weathered the frosts oaky, we could literally feel the stress mounting: the tension this year between managing part time crew and getting them sorted to the complexities of the root washing and noticing issues in the field has nearly too much to bear. The packshed should make many of these procedures so much easier, as well as preventing what feels like endless hours today (and last week) running stuff across town to a rental space that we are grateful for, but trust me, it’s terrible knowing that we’ll be moving 7,000 pounds of carrots, a few thousand pounds of cabbage, many hundreds of pounds of beets, and many other things more times than we need to. Our shop is a rubics cube of pallets and macro bins in temporary cool storage: onions, squash, gourds, potatoes, and now garlic. We are delighted to have grown so much, but at the moment there is only one free pallet-sized square on the floor space, and everything will have to shuffle with the pallet jack in carefully choreographed chess-move sequence in order to get some of it stacked, more of it accessible to load up for market, and open up some space for actual work in the shop. With that, with calculations of what can to where, projecting how much winter salad mix is needed to supply an eager chef and a winter farmstore, given variables of weather, daylight, planting times, and a giant unpredictability factor….so many details, it’s no wonder that Mary almost blew her lid when one neighbor said farming ‘isn’t rocket science.’ Luckily Mary was safely back in the barn and the innocent neighbor was not subjected to full blow post-market exhausted farmer rage.
It’s not rocket science, but this dance between seasons, as we put the fall to rest and prepare for full-time winter farming, I say this:
Managing the sequence of the day, knowing each day we could lose it all, wrestling soil moisture and understanding the tradeoffs of this season against next, transplanting timing, seeing issues early on the field (now instead of next summer, when it’s too late), monitoring for pests (those aphids, we are on top of), all the micro-controllers that help run our farm that we’ve programmed and wired, the background accounting, understanding what to harvest now and what to hold in the field and what to hold in what kind of temperature, the solar setups on our chicken barns (don’t worry, one flock will be out of molt soon). It’s not rocket science, but, as Sabrina says, ‘it may be brain surgery.’
Even in the toughest of times, our farm is always innovating. Here, we stretch 80psi poly pipe over rebar (that we use for other farm trellising) to help protect winter crops. Providing we wrangle enough labor, one of our moveable caterpillars will be moved over to these beds as soon as possible.
All the management books tell us not to share the stress that has been adding up over the season, with our core team. Or maybe anyone. All farmers should probably be in therapy. Sometimes we wish we had time. We’ve had a ton of wins, but a huge number of disappointments as we work to right the ship, work to grow food for our community and work towards growing a farm we love — with story, food, community, and love. Those are our core ingredients.
With that said, we harvested 7 kinds of baby greens yesterday, including a new cooking mix, spinach, arugula, and salad mix. We brought in more carrots, and the root washer has been running as much as possible. Potatoes, beets, a small mountain of cabbage, and most of our carrots, mostly by wrangling tons of people (for our scale) have been being harvested right on time.
Even though one of our chicken flocks is molting (220 of them), they are molting right on time and with the egg production slowly picking up and a new flock due to start in about a month, we will be setup for some of the best winter egg production we’ve ever had. Organic alfalfa, as part of their feed ration and our pasture management, has been secured. Eggs will still be tight at the farmstore for several weeks, but we expect to have well over 20 dozen eggs per day this winter.n Pullet eggs should start in about a month. Enough for everyone. This photo was made this morning, right after the most recent move of three of our four mobile barns. The new three ton grain bin, also mobile, was a new addition to our chicken infrastructure this year. Without that one piece of equipment, we would not be able to keep up on our feeding chores with limited crew this past season.
We are still loaded with tomatoes, along with peppers and more. Unlike other Tuesdays, there is simply too much to do to protect from tonight’s freeze (forecast at 21, so it could be 10), so we aren’t hosting the farmstore today, but it’s all set up and totally loaded. We’ll be out in the field, not quite with our lab coats, but with boots, work gloves, tractors, chattering on our radios to do it all. And, behind the scenes we are working on all kinds of other stuff. Winter farm memberships will be announced soon (all of our current farm members will have first choice), and we in the middle of doing hiring for next year, which includes inviting those from farther afield to come meet the team (next week), along with planting some late cover crop and figuring just how we will get back to working on that packshed so our farm can continue to work to be lean, productive, and strong.
Finally, we are grateful for you. This year, perhaps even more than others, we couldn’t do this without your support.
Noah and Mary, SweetRoot Farm
We had the best winter squash ever this year and you can find more varieties of winter squash in the farmstore each week as it finishes curing and as other crops, like tomatoes, begin to sellout. If you are just getting to canning projects now, we still have flats of roma tomatoes in the farmstore. Those tomatoes have been well protected in our moveable caterpillar tunnels.