So, I was tilling under the last of the fall kale Saturday, just after planting thousands of tiny new seedlings of kale and collards. Tilling those kale plants in was so hard to do when I had come to know them so well. And, there were still edible leaves on them, although every time I harvested, the leaves came back smaller as the plants kept putting more and more energy into bolting! What a beautiful sight with the tall, tall yellow flowers reaching up above the nose of the tractor and bending back and lending their energy back into the earth for the new crop as I passed over them. No pictures taken since I was concentrating. Such a bittersweet day.
Apparently, that feeling distracted me as I hopped off the tractor to move some layflat (irrigation) out of the way. And so instead of gracefully exiting the tractor, I stepped into a hole with my right foot and rolled over, twisting my ankle. Fortunately, I was able to keep my cool. I curled up in a ball and just lay on the ground howling for what felt like several minutes as a gut-wrenching pain washed over me. Poor Anthony heard me from inside the house (!) and ran down the hill at top speed, worried I had sustained one of the very real, very serious, and all-too-common tractor injuries. After a few more minutes of me howling and whining with my face in the dirt, I was, with his help, able to put myself back together enough to realize it really was nothing more than a twisted ankle.
I here would like to thank my mom, a former physical therapist who made sure to teach all of us how to fall as kids - protect your head, get anything in your hands out of your way, and just go ahead and fall and don't be scared. And probably some other pointers too that are ingrained without me knowing it. I gave into the fall and wasn't scared. I let myself roll and didn't sprain or break my ankle. And, in light of the coming rain that afternoon, at the end of it all, I was able to get back up on the tractor and finish up the last of the tilling I needed to do for the Swiss chard transplants. Otherwise, it would have seemed I worked and hurt in vain. And even though I loathed leaving the field and the tractor and my other tasks that have to be done on a nice dry day, I came inside and iced my ankle. Still sore a day later, but I was able to run some errands today.
I am glad much of the transplanting pressure is off for this week. There are many things to catch up on and wrap up as I "take it easy" till the next round of seeds and transplants are ready to go in.
I love you, Mom!
-Mollie
Monday, May 2
Thursday, April 21
Progress!
So we have certainly been busy!
But first we had to hurry up and wait on a tractor part to be manufactured for us - we wanted to rip our field (dig a thin line as deep as we could) to help with drainage. This is our 9th!!! year of field production, and after tilling and running the tractor across the field for that long, the soil can become compacted and form a "plow pan." This is where the soil you till seems fluffy but underneath everything is getting harder and more solid as it is compacted by heavy equipment. This happens even though we try to use the tractor in the field as little as possible. So, it's about time.
Then....we spent pretty much most of a recent Sunday trying to re-orient the garden in perfect north to south rows.
Why, you ask? Because over the years, our perfect original alignment has strayed from true north as the boundaries of the field have snuck? sneaked? outward.
Why else, you ask? It exposes the plants to the most sun as it runs across the sky east to west. On a side note, I once heard that cattle align themselves north to south as well. I wanted to disbelieve that, but a drive across the US through Texas to Colorado demonstrated that most cattle within a herd do indeed, at any given point in the day, seem to point north.
No, really, why did it take so long to set 12 flags in the ground, you ask? Well...., I'll tell ya'. Since we didn't have any cattle on hand, and I couldn't remember where I last stowed our good, or even our not so good compass, I tried the compass app on Anthony's phone. Please do not use your phone as a compass if you are lost in the wilderness of Saluda and are trying to head to Charlotte. You may just as well end up in Delaware, or South Carolina, or perhaps you would actually get to Charlotte after all. Turns out I finally remembered where the good compass might be, and lo and behold, there it was. It was in my dresser I have no idea why, but it went back there for whenever I need to find it next time!
Is that really all? Well, no. Because to the north line I needed was longer than my 100-foot tape measurer. It was 166 feet, to be exact. So somehow we had to extrapolate a correct line. In the meantime, the kids got bored, went to check the chickens, and started hollering because one poor chick was getting his foot pecked by all the others. After an impromptu break (this was a different break than the one for lunch and nap) during which I cleaned up the blood and put Blue-Kote on the wound with the help of my calm and collected, willing and concerned, confident and gentle in-house vet tech, rehoused the bird by himself with food and water, it was back out to the field to wrap it up. Except during all that, I misplaced the good engineer's compass my older sister gave me so many years ago! Aaarg! So.....while I was counting how many times the thought "if I just drive the family 20 minutes into the next town and hunt down a new compass, we will have more fun AND save time" had crossed my mind during the day, we finished off the task amazingly rapidly by calculating the hypotenuse of the two sides of a rectangle we had already established, checking it against the other direction of the same rectangle, and extending the line from there. Eureka! And yes, I did find the compass as we finally drug ourselves back into the house, It was right by the front door. Of course.
So, Yay! Straight lines!
We need those straight lines. Because after that we put in over 300 asparagus plants which I do not intend to dig back up and straighten out anytime soon. Straight lines make weeding between the rows with the tractor (cultivating) easy. And any other work with the tractor is easier too, We have exciting new implements this year, which have already saved us days of backbreaking work.
Friday, I dug up all the rhubarb I could find, and all the lovely, mild elephant garlic collected from Mexico by and bought from my fellow grower/market friend Carolina (who is also a parol officer!) Saturday, Anthony tilled up a portion of the garden. Sunday we lined up the rows. Monday, my good and one of my first friends from the area, Shoko, came and helped replant the Then Anthony set all the rows with the subsoiler (lifted up a little bit to not be so deep as when we ripped the field) according to the flags. On Tuesday and Wednesday (today) my good neighbor-friends Jenai and her son Tukki have been coming over for the past couple days and voluntarily helped plant the asparagus, 40 pounds of seed potatoes and 10 pounds of onion sets. At the end of the morning of planting and fertilizing - and I can't believe it didn't take longer! - being able to bring the tractor down to cover the rows with the new hiller/bedder discs without having to hoe the rows closed is absolutely amazing! Well, except for the first day, but there is a learning curve for every implement!
Honestly, I am extremely grateful. To Anthony, for selecting a tractor and implements, getting them running and keeping them that way. To Jenai and Tukki for helping plant! And to Simon and Carina, for their patience and cooperation.
Last year, Simon and I planted half the amount of potatoes and onions. It took us a whole day to get each of 6 rows planted, at 1 row a day. That is a week of planting potatoes and onions. Granted, the kids were each a year younger, and I seem to remember it as being colder and grayer. But this time, we planted twice as much with the help of two friends and a tractor...in just 2.5 hours. Wow! I finished before noon, and went to make lunch, close enough to on time for little stomachs. My main thought was, for that much work, why doesn't my back hurt?
So while it seems like the planting was so fast, it probably really did take a week of work. Just an easier work.
But we aren't done yet! I just got our trays of transplants from our fellow grower and market friend, Mr. Richard. I like to call him Sir Richard because he is always so gentlemanly and kind. So....now we have to plant like mad to keep these tiny transplants in good shape. Yes, it is much more economical to buy a tray of 288 or 406 seedlings in a plug tray than to buy them in 6-packs. IF you can get them in the ground fast enough from the prime greenhouse conditions. And keep them watered and weeded. Here we go!
We'll be planting head lettuce, pac choi, kale, kale, and more kale, and swiss chard, Seems like I am forgetting something but I will remember it when I water tomorrow!
Later, we still have to plant sweet potato slips, which we have yet to pick up, and our winter squash. We are uncertain whether we will attempt the enormous quantity of butternut as we did last year. Time will tell though! Oh, and I have to finish inoculating the last about 100 of somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 mushroom logs. The end is in sight!
In the meantime, my library books are overdue and I will bake cookies for anyone here who will kindly dress out of the clean clothes pile for the rest of the week.
I better get some sleep.
Thanks for reading!
-Mollie and the Crew
But first we had to hurry up and wait on a tractor part to be manufactured for us - we wanted to rip our field (dig a thin line as deep as we could) to help with drainage. This is our 9th!!! year of field production, and after tilling and running the tractor across the field for that long, the soil can become compacted and form a "plow pan." This is where the soil you till seems fluffy but underneath everything is getting harder and more solid as it is compacted by heavy equipment. This happens even though we try to use the tractor in the field as little as possible. So, it's about time.
Then....we spent pretty much most of a recent Sunday trying to re-orient the garden in perfect north to south rows.
Why, you ask? Because over the years, our perfect original alignment has strayed from true north as the boundaries of the field have snuck? sneaked? outward.
Why else, you ask? It exposes the plants to the most sun as it runs across the sky east to west. On a side note, I once heard that cattle align themselves north to south as well. I wanted to disbelieve that, but a drive across the US through Texas to Colorado demonstrated that most cattle within a herd do indeed, at any given point in the day, seem to point north.
No, really, why did it take so long to set 12 flags in the ground, you ask? Well...., I'll tell ya'. Since we didn't have any cattle on hand, and I couldn't remember where I last stowed our good, or even our not so good compass, I tried the compass app on Anthony's phone. Please do not use your phone as a compass if you are lost in the wilderness of Saluda and are trying to head to Charlotte. You may just as well end up in Delaware, or South Carolina, or perhaps you would actually get to Charlotte after all. Turns out I finally remembered where the good compass might be, and lo and behold, there it was. It was in my dresser I have no idea why, but it went back there for whenever I need to find it next time!
Is that really all? Well, no. Because to the north line I needed was longer than my 100-foot tape measurer. It was 166 feet, to be exact. So somehow we had to extrapolate a correct line. In the meantime, the kids got bored, went to check the chickens, and started hollering because one poor chick was getting his foot pecked by all the others. After an impromptu break (this was a different break than the one for lunch and nap) during which I cleaned up the blood and put Blue-Kote on the wound with the help of my calm and collected, willing and concerned, confident and gentle in-house vet tech, rehoused the bird by himself with food and water, it was back out to the field to wrap it up. Except during all that, I misplaced the good engineer's compass my older sister gave me so many years ago! Aaarg! So.....while I was counting how many times the thought "if I just drive the family 20 minutes into the next town and hunt down a new compass, we will have more fun AND save time" had crossed my mind during the day, we finished off the task amazingly rapidly by calculating the hypotenuse of the two sides of a rectangle we had already established, checking it against the other direction of the same rectangle, and extending the line from there. Eureka! And yes, I did find the compass as we finally drug ourselves back into the house, It was right by the front door. Of course.
So, Yay! Straight lines!
We need those straight lines. Because after that we put in over 300 asparagus plants which I do not intend to dig back up and straighten out anytime soon. Straight lines make weeding between the rows with the tractor (cultivating) easy. And any other work with the tractor is easier too, We have exciting new implements this year, which have already saved us days of backbreaking work.
Friday, I dug up all the rhubarb I could find, and all the lovely, mild elephant garlic collected from Mexico by and bought from my fellow grower/market friend Carolina (who is also a parol officer!) Saturday, Anthony tilled up a portion of the garden. Sunday we lined up the rows. Monday, my good and one of my first friends from the area, Shoko, came and helped replant the Then Anthony set all the rows with the subsoiler (lifted up a little bit to not be so deep as when we ripped the field) according to the flags. On Tuesday and Wednesday (today) my good neighbor-friends Jenai and her son Tukki have been coming over for the past couple days and voluntarily helped plant the asparagus, 40 pounds of seed potatoes and 10 pounds of onion sets. At the end of the morning of planting and fertilizing - and I can't believe it didn't take longer! - being able to bring the tractor down to cover the rows with the new hiller/bedder discs without having to hoe the rows closed is absolutely amazing! Well, except for the first day, but there is a learning curve for every implement!
Honestly, I am extremely grateful. To Anthony, for selecting a tractor and implements, getting them running and keeping them that way. To Jenai and Tukki for helping plant! And to Simon and Carina, for their patience and cooperation.
Last year, Simon and I planted half the amount of potatoes and onions. It took us a whole day to get each of 6 rows planted, at 1 row a day. That is a week of planting potatoes and onions. Granted, the kids were each a year younger, and I seem to remember it as being colder and grayer. But this time, we planted twice as much with the help of two friends and a tractor...in just 2.5 hours. Wow! I finished before noon, and went to make lunch, close enough to on time for little stomachs. My main thought was, for that much work, why doesn't my back hurt?
So while it seems like the planting was so fast, it probably really did take a week of work. Just an easier work.
But we aren't done yet! I just got our trays of transplants from our fellow grower and market friend, Mr. Richard. I like to call him Sir Richard because he is always so gentlemanly and kind. So....now we have to plant like mad to keep these tiny transplants in good shape. Yes, it is much more economical to buy a tray of 288 or 406 seedlings in a plug tray than to buy them in 6-packs. IF you can get them in the ground fast enough from the prime greenhouse conditions. And keep them watered and weeded. Here we go!
We'll be planting head lettuce, pac choi, kale, kale, and more kale, and swiss chard, Seems like I am forgetting something but I will remember it when I water tomorrow!
Later, we still have to plant sweet potato slips, which we have yet to pick up, and our winter squash. We are uncertain whether we will attempt the enormous quantity of butternut as we did last year. Time will tell though! Oh, and I have to finish inoculating the last about 100 of somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 mushroom logs. The end is in sight!
In the meantime, my library books are overdue and I will bake cookies for anyone here who will kindly dress out of the clean clothes pile for the rest of the week.
I better get some sleep.
Thanks for reading!
-Mollie and the Crew
Monday, March 28
Second Mushroom Inoculation Clinic
Back by popular request - and the fact that we still have a good many logs left to inoculate! If you are looking for more of last weekend, or you missed the first clinic, come on out this Saturday to our 2nd mushroom inoculation clinic. Bring your questions - I will do my best!
Sunday, March 20
So...it's the first day of spring! What is going on at the farm, you ask?
Well, it is a busy, busy time of year here!!!
We have weeded and fertilized the kale that made it through our warm winter. It is looking beautiful and is about to take off again! Now to remove the hoops for the row cover so we can go through and cultivate between rows with the tractor....
We have ordered potatoes and the onion sets have already arrived. Sweet potato slips should arrive in May. Our transplants for kale, swiss chard, pac choi, and our first rotation of lettuce is already sown and will be ready for the field in early April. It will only be a few thousand seedlings....anybody want to help plant?
Oh yeah, but first we have to finish removing the irrigation lines from the fall crop and rip and rotovate the soil, space the rows correctly for our tractor, put the irrigation lines back down, and purchase the fertilizer for these transplants.
And among...we are still inoculating a few hundred mushroom logs for shiitake, golden and grey oysters, and a reishi "stumps" which have to be buried. Any help is greatly appreciated! There will be two opportunities this week to come out and experience what it is like to inoculate mushroom logs - and it is not that hard! We take all that part out for you, you just get the fun part! See the flyer below for more information.
That's all the projects I can think of tonight. More that I have forgotten will come to me as I fall asleep, I am sure!
The kids seem most interested in their latest "mud lake" they have created in the front yard, complete with a bridge to provide safe crossing out of reach of the alligators. And they are also in our new chicks that arrived in the mail a couple weeks ago. The chicks are a mix of roosters for the frying pan, and last year's roosters got old and grew up to be not so fun, so we expect to be able to process them when the time comes. For now though, these chicks get to be carried around in baskets, taken out for exercise and training in the chicken tractor they will later inhabit, zoomed around individually like airplanes (complete with added sound effects), and fed only the finest collection of gluten-free home-ground grains, kiddo leftovers, dried mealworms, and scrounged up grubs and grasshoppers. They are all pretty happy really - chicks and kids alike.
Wednesday, August 26
Current Availability - October 2015
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| Left to Right Front Row: Hooligan Delicata, Grey Kabocha, Acorn, Hooligan (again), Spaghetti Middle Row: Red Kabocha, three Butternuts, Buttercup Back Row: two Delicata, Red Kuri
Prices for winter squash are as follows:
40 lbs or more, or recurring restaurant or wholesale orders: 80c/lb
Less than 40 lbs: $1/lb
Currently availability list:
butternut
acorn
delicata
red kuri spaghetti squash - sold out! **new as of October 11** - buttercup and in limited quantity, pumpkins and grey kabocha Things coming that we have recently planted for our late fall harvests: sweet potatoes (harvesting now, still need to cure) pac choi - red, green head lettuce salad mix Elizabeth's tasty late fall salad mix (our farm's custom blend of mescluns and Asian greens) broccoli cauliflower - white, orange, purple cabbage - green, red mini cabbages - green, red spinach - green, red hopefully also (weather dependent) - beets, turnips, radishes, daikon radishes
We are happy to provide delivery. Deliveries within the Saluda/Columbus/Hendersonville area are free. Anything delivered beyond 25 miles will have a flat $5 fee. Pickup at the farm is also available by appointment.
We are actively looking for restaurants and other recurring wholesale orders, so we are happy to set up new arrangements. We expect to be able to deliver from now through December or January.
Please feel free to contact me to place an order. You are welcome to call or text, which are the best ways to reach me. Email orders are also welcome, but my internet access is limited to evenings and weekends, so please allow for that turn-around time.
Cheers!
Mollie and crew
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