2024 Farm Log
By Ben Morelli in Blog
April 5, 2024
4/5/24
Early April, about six weeks to market and there are plenty of plants in the ground. They always look really small at this stage and it is hard to imagine them sizing up for May 12th, but days are getting longer, plant growth accelerates, and somehow they do. The propragation house is full of plants and transplant season is about to start in earnest. Hopefully this weekend I put plastic up on the second greenhouse and then my first tomatoes of the season go in the ground. I do 3-4 monthly successions of Siletz - a very tasty, reliable, determinate red slicer - in a year. And I don’t treliss or prune them at all.
The workload is feeling manageable. It is nice to realize that in the absence of special projects, of which there are many, late March is a manageable time. Anything I can do to sneak in days or half days off before the farmers market season is a win. My main goal for coming seasons is to increase my profitability per hour. I would love my farm time to pay me $20 an hour. I think it is a reasonable goal.
One of the best things about working outside is catching those transitional moments when magical things happen. It is one of the things I love about backpacking too. The moment when the rain stops and a beam of light hits a branch just right or a clear dawn after snowfall. They are easy to miss.
Peak raab season. A mix of mustard raab and purple sprouting broccoli.
2/18/24
Today it feels like the 2024 season has really kicked off. I planted my first in ground bed 2 weeks ago and today I seeded 5 trays including early tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, head lettuce and chicory. My earliest trays I start in the basement under lights on heat mats. From here on out I will be watering trays and caring for baby plants until September or so and planting something almost every week. The rhythm of the season begins to kick in now. This is despite the fact that for the first time in the farms history I harvested veggies in January. While it feels good to take full advantage of the food that I have available, it is also nice to disconnect from the farm for a bit. In reality harvesting and transport is only 5 or so hours a week, but it maintains a mental thread that needs 2 or 3 weeks to sever. Preferrably longer. This past winter I think I got a 2 week break around Christmas, one week in January and one in February. In total, I worked 53 hours in January.
One of my main goals for future seasons is to increase my hourly wage. Limiting hours in the winter is key to achieving this goal. This includes time spent on special projects, spring clean-up and really anything not related to planting, harvesting and market.
Looking out on the farm now, I feel good about what I am seeing. I still have baby kale, cabbage, beets, cilantro, chard and small quantities of a few other things that survived the cold snap a few weeks ago. Two of my 12 field blocks (each block is 10 beds) are in cover crop, two are mulched and ready for no-till planting, 46 of my beds are under tarps of one sort or another to kill weeds and dry out the soil in preparation for planting. The mature weeds are dying more slowly than I would like under the tarps, but even if some survive the tarping they will be a lot easier to remove.
A couple of other goals for the season are to better document the success and timing of my early season plantings with an eye towards decreasing the frequency of my planting as much as I can get away with, especially in the shoulder seasons. I also want to develop a better crop by crop understanding of what is profitable. And continue to develop new systems for keeping the farm more organized.