Apparently we managed to fence in one of the rabbit holes.  We came out a couple weeks ago to find about 8 of our ~60 tomato plants chewed on by the soft, cuddly vermin.  The regular work plan was blown for the day and I hopped in the truck to get replacement plants.  Dan and I ran through options via cell phone about how to foil this latest plot as I drove.  Hands free, of course.  I only risk my life on ladders, not in trucks.

The final plan was to create smaller tomato cages from stucco lath (Think heavy chicken wire).  They stand up by themselves and can protect 2 plants at a time.  That way if one is breached, we only lose two plants.  They can also serve to support the plants as they get bigger.  The wire is galvanized, so we can use them over and over.

This was not a cheap solution, for one season.  We spent $180 for three rolls of lath and had a half roll left over.  We’ll use it when we finish the interior of the cabin.  Still, we’ll have to keep them over a few seasons to get them to pay for themselves.  Our solutions are often more expensive since we have to depend on them when we are not around.  Larger tanks, timers, redundant fences, etc.  It will make us less cost competitive, but allows us to farm and keep off-farm jobs.

We also replaced the bleached out irrigation riser flags.  We have 7 risers on 60’ centers, so we mark them with the colors of the rainbow (ROYGBIV).  The orchard is up near Red and the veggie field is at Yellow.  We have a wash station down at Violet.  The ones in the middle don’t have assemblies yet and won’t until we expand to that part of the field.

The scythe is great for small jobs, but we have 20 acres of grass, and 3-5 of them need to be cut.  That’s too much for a scythe when you have other things that need to get done.  So we went and got a John Deere LA 115 riding mower from Home Depot for $1,749 plus tax (There’s your farm financials for the month).  Cutting the grass down does a lot of things for us.  Here are a few:

1. It provides green and brown (depending on when you cut it) for the compost.  We need 15 cubic yards this year and 5 cubic yards every year thereafter even if we never expand our 2,400 sf veggie field.

2. It reduces the fire hazard.  We don’t have livestock to take the grass down and don’t want to let our neighbor’s cattle in because we don’t want to put heavy wire fence around our growing areas.

3. It lets us see the snakes a lot sooner.  Here’s a picture of a snake skin Dan found.  Since I’m 8 feet tall, this snake must have been about 6 or 7 feet long.

4. It’ll give the varmints less cover so they can be picked off by predators.  Punks.

The tomatoes and apricots are coming out.  We are controlling the leaf curl and shot hole fungus on the peaches with neem oil concentrate (OMRI approved, of course).  It sprays easy and is not scary stuff to us bipeds.  We saw some spider mites and the water and neem took them right out.

The heat is coming up now, and the insulation on the cabin is paying off.  We have one more day’s work on that and we’ll be done.  We put some radiant barrier over the windows (kind of like silver Mylar over bubble wrap) and the joint was 10 degrees cooler already.  This will be a vast improvement over last year’s adobe oven.

We’ve been working on Orchard 2, the second of our two existing orchards, the past couple of weekends.  The soil is right for digging and our gypsum amendment has had some time to work into the soil, so although we trampled our still-infant cover crop a bit, the time was right to put in this year’s new baby trees. Here’s a picture of Orchard 2, its fledging cover crop, and the new trees. We had a lot of fun with this planting, because we waited for the right time to dig, plus the… Read the rest of this article »

Last week I posted about our peach tree.  It was clearly sick but I could not be certain what was wrong with it.  The top 4 disease candidates each required a vastly different treatment, so I asked for help from blog readers in diagnosing the trouble more definitively. Thanks for the posts with suggestions, info, and links!  Several comments suggested peach leaf curl, which is the most common disease to affect peach trees and thus statistically the most likely to be what’s afflicting our… Read the rest of this article »

We just had to run down to the farm and put lots of stuff away into the greenhouse, as there were suddenly large rain drops falling from the sky…  It was cloudy all day, but the weather report said no rain until Sunday, and I foolishly trusted some all-knowing meteorologist rather than my own eyes.  I think it’s over now, but it rained enough to make a difference. As far as fungus goes, I really want to learn how to inoculate our soil with this miracle fungus tea that Billy learned… Read the rest of this article »