Day 37

Today=Hotness, not the sexy kind, moreso the "AH, I got sweat in my eye, where's my water, man I'm sleepy" hotness.

Black Peanuts

The hose won

We finished shelling the black peanuts and got the rundown of today's events! (no exclamation point needed, but it wears me out thinking about today, so a little more enthusiasm in punctuation is needed for me at least). I went to the orchard to check on the grafts we did a few weeks back, and they are looking good, I think they took. I worked with irrigation in the orchard and did battle with a hose going to the small greenhouse. Harvesting asparagus and strawberries was back on the table today; however, I believe we're coming to a close with them both. They'll probably make the CSA boxes this week and that'll be it.

 I learned something today, I learned that if trellising tomatoes were a sport in the Farming Olympics 2012, I would not place. I am making improvements though, when you start to develop blisters, you finally have it tight enough. Daniel interweaves the twine through the plants while Cory pulls straight with just a couple wrap around the poll times. We have a lot of practice ahead too! The lower field is only about halfway complete, but Erica and I successfully trellised the hoop house tomatoes, and those little guys look happy! Well, not really happy they don't like hot weather just warm, which being from South America you'd think they'd soak it up. Anyhoodle, they better man up because it's gonna be hot from now on.

 Also, new edition, this is Sprocket the mouse killer, Erica's cat. As you can see he's been out of the game awhile so we'll be playing the theme song to Rocky to pump him up before he hits the gym each day.

Time for some Kitty Craig

Day 36

Market Day! But the really hard workers stayed behind, me of course ;) Erica and I made it happen yesterday and completed everything on the list, which is just never done. Here's the scoop:
Started off the day with a big helper, Puddy, Erica's dog. Since I love dogs so much you'll have to excuse the excess of Puddy pics.

We did a lot irrigation wise since there's no rain in the 10 day forecast we had to set up drip irrigation for fields and rows that had none and there was new planting. We split up watering the greenhouse's which is no small feat due to lack of hoses and hidden greenhouse plants. Okay, so I forgot about the blackberries under the table, I'm not proud of it but it's done now, happy?

I'm a Mini Truck

Let me introduce you to Mini Truck. She just got a new fuel pump and is ready for action, and action she got! I think she's some exotic European because her steering wheel is on the right side.<correction: Japanese> We had to fertilize Jeff Cook field's onions, so I sat/stood on the back spraying the fertilizer while Erica and Puddy drove.

Next to the onions are Burge's heirloom elephant garlic found native to the plantation growing in the fields. Ricky and Cory decided to grow more and sell them at market. The plant is beautiful because it flowers out on top. Elephant garlic is like it sounds, large! I haven't tried any yet, but I'm excited to.

After lunch we set up more irrigation by Main House field where I'm terribly allergic to something, so I wore one of those Sars masks, took an allergy pill and loaded up on Kleenex (take that field). We then journeyed back to the greenhouse and Erica weedeated while I watered with a sprayer backpack. Also, this just in! Black Peanuts!!! The shell is normal but the peanut part is black, how awesome! So we are shelling those tonight.   

Day 35

Pea Pickin

What time is it? It's pea picking time and even nature knows which is how a "P" ended up on that leaf by the peas! Crazyness, I think some bug was marking it for his friends (I'm no Nancy Drew but I'm sticking with that story).
We have two different types, the sugar snap peas and English peas. The interns were left to our own deductive reasoning on how to trellis the peas, and we (of course) did it wrong, so Erica was trying to coax them towards the trellis while I picked them. We are using the English peas for the bicycle pea sheller at market tomorrow; intern Jason will keep the rest of us updated on the response.
Today for Friday fiesta I cooked everyone Veggie burrito's consisting of red and green bell peppers, squash, from the farm spring onions and garlic with cumin, coriander, and salt in the enchilada sauce. Next was the Guacamole Bean Dip out of my favorite recipe book The Kind Life: refried beans, guacamole with lime, Tofutti sour cream with taco seasoning, olives, and diced tomatoes on top. For dessert I wanted something from the farm so beets, with sweet potatoes and carrots cooked in brown sugar with cinnamon and nutmeg. Not bad for a vegan eh? Everyone loved it and the dip was a big hit! 
After lunch I helped prep 250 onions for a store pick-up Farms on Floyd, a cute local store that sells products from their own farm and from local ones like ours. Then I helped Cory prep some rows for new plants to be a planted. Before finishing out with harvesting my old friend asparagus.

This moment of silence brought to you by veggie burrito

Day 34

Hoop House Hooplah! Mondays and Thursdays are our "farm days" now since Tuesdays and Wednesdays are CSA harvest/delivery days. Man, we worked...hard and accomplished so much in one day. First off us interns weeded and cleared out some beds, easy enough right? Wrong.

Planting Fennel for Dad

Clearing out a bed consists of removing the previous vegetables, weeding...and repeat. Coming through next with a wheel hoe claw which makes the soil deep and porous. Then sprinkling compost on top and raking it into the soil mixing it together. That last part was hellacious challenging and reminded me that I'd been taking it easy these past few days.
I planted Okinawa Spinach which will stay in the hoop house permanently, so no mess ups. After that Erica and I finished planting some flowers she'd been planting before. The fennel we planted was a bit more challenging because the drip tape irrigation hadn't been set up. Once we were done there we set up the seeder for Cory to plant radishes (see pic).

Okinawa Spinach

Lastly, we went to Jeff Cook with Daniel and planted corn, broccoli, and komatsuna. So we both got a nice fish gut shower before quitting for the day.
Erica's making us her strawberry recipe and then I'm making the beet, carrot, sweet potato recipe (both linked on Erica's Recipes for the Farm). I have to get ready to prepare lunch for everyone tomorrow!

Day 33

Ended. 9:00pm is a new kind of late when you start at 8 in the morning. CSA happened. We kind of had enough vegetables. Well, here's what went down...
The plan was to have two bunches of turnips, red and white, only we didn't have enough so it became one bunch, and some not so great quality. We ran out of asparagus so some boxes had two pints of strawberry. Also, there's a swap box for customers, if you don't want a veggie and see something in the box you like more, you swap! Swap Box real time update: no one swapped, the last guy wanted to buy the whole swap box, Cory gave it to him.
Alright Kathy, whatever, how'd you guys pack that many boxes? Good question, we went assembly style and had people at each station. I started the boxes on one end and put in the red cabbage and onions, Jason did the turnips and garlic, Erica the kale and I can't remember, Erica did you only put in kale, geez! <correction Erica put in the herbs too> Cory put in the strawberries, asparagus and lettuce while Daniel closed boxes and put them in the cooler. 
On a sad note, we didn't get any turnips in our CSA box. So we had another pint of strawberries to supplement. Until Chef Andrew came and asked for some...no more second strawberry pint, and to think I wanted to meet him and he stole our strawberries! Cory said next week will be even more scarce so we may have to buy some vegetables from Nicholas, we might end up with a box of lettuce for ours next week.
Erica, Cory and I went to all the drop off points and met the members, explaining what was in the box and how to use it. The box ended up including: Strawberries, Asparagus, Hakurei and Red Queen Turnips, Red Cabbage, Kale, Bulbing Spring Onions (Vidalia), Green Garlic, Red Lettuce, Romaine, Herb Medley of Sage, Mint, and Catmint.

Yes Please!

  I thought I would impart some of my farmgirl knowledge giving you the inside secret's revealed scoop here to help out with your farmer's market visits, so prepare to be impressed ;)

Best Practices for Picking out Organic Fruits and Veggies (Season 1):

• Strawberries- Think Large We put the large ones on top to psyche you out into thinking they all look like that (ahem, variety Cory calls it), but small ones are on bottom kids so make sure at least the top ones are big and check out the rest while you're at it. If they are too ripe they can turn a pink color, Just say no to mush. You want the entire strawberry to be red, the green parts are too hard. Also, Check for bug bites! And always, ALWAYS wash your fruit. We rinse them, but that doesn't get everything and organic isn't like a sterile grocery store. You won't get chemicals and pesticides in your food but you might get some sand with your fruit if they don't get a strawberry bath.

• Asparagus- If these guys are budding up and separating from the stem (flowering), it's too late, we're not here for a show Asparagus, keep it together. The saying is true with these dudes, size matters, bigger the better. The small ones are more fibrous, more chewy and by chewy I mean you can chew on it until 2024. If your asparagus is bendable, it's expendable (who knew I could come up with catch phrases at 10pm, not funny ones, but I'll take it).

• Turnips-  Check the roots for bug damage, if you see any imperfection chances are it's from a bug and shouldn't have made it to you. Size here again, look for larger turnips which signifies a healthy crop and that the farmer could successfully let them mature. At farmer's market not everything is weighed exactly perfect, so get there early and pick out the most bountiful bunch!

Day 32

CSA start-up Day! Which stands for Community Supported Agriculture, or let me give you my money and we're all going to hope for the best, fingers crossed.  

How it works is, a farmer plans out his season and anticipates what he will harvest. Then he figures out how many units of food he can supply a family or individual with each week during that season. Say it's 100. He opens up 100 CSA Shares for purchase before the season starts. 100 people pay that farmer upfront to get a share of the harvest for that whole season. What this does is gives the farmer capital to purchase seeds and supplies for the season without breaking the bank and provides the share holders with a bounty of the freshest, in season, produce every week.

Vidalia Onions

Some Farms operative and rely heavily on CSA's. Ours also sells to restaurants and at the farmer's market, but CSA is where it's at for Burge, muy importante. We had around 80 people sign up for shares, which is down from last year, I hear.

There is also a level of risk sharing in a CSA, and between you and me...I didn't think we'd make it. We've been selling a lot to restaurants and haven't left much for CSA. Right now we are in an in between stage when crops are thinning out and when the new ones are producing. Last year they didn't have enough so Cory bought from other local farmer's to supply the boxes, but you have to see that coming well before the day you deliver. Also an email goes out to the members telling them what's included in their box and recipes, so if you change something, they need to be notified.

And I'm low-key, chill, farmgirl ain't scared, until you tell me 5 people are on their way and we don't have their boxes together at all or enough turnips and kale to fill the ones tomorrow while murmuring it'll work out let's listen to some music. Music? Will the music magically make enough vegetables for 80 boxes of food? Will music help my pending heart attack? Will music...

What just happened I blacked out. Okay, so today was a little rough, but I'm going to trust that tomorrow will all work out and try this optimistic approach. Speaking of the up side, I'll be getting my veggies tomorrow as well!

Side story: these are some preserves chef Andrew (Burge's chef) canned last year with the interns.  They canned strawberry preserves, spicy catsup, sundried tomatoes and spicy pickles :)  Makes me one happy girl!

Day 31

That's right. I quit farming to become a ghostbuster. There's fertilizer in the tank, but the whole time I was spraying the theme song was in my head, only "Ain't afraid of no bugs" "Ain't afraid no weeds", what? don't look at me like that.

Today was windy and chilly, and everytime the weather changes so do our plans, so no transplanting today, too rough on those little guys. We started out with harvesting strawberries and fyi people tend to harvest faster when it's cold outside. Once we were done pinting up around 67 we moved on to check on those grafts from a couple weeks ago and they are budding up quite nicely!


Next we tackled weeding in Jeff Cook Field around the broccoli. We always try to get the weeds when they're barely coming up so the wheel hoe can just graze the top layer and cut them off under their roots. I know it looks like I'm doing some kind of farming yoga pose, but if you step on the weeds you just uprooted you inadvertently replant them with your feet.  

My next task was the fertilizer, but not just any fish guts and seaweed. This pack had to have a special addition:

Deer Stopper! Also called Deer Off! Makes you wonder how many of these are out there; Bear Off, Mouse Stopper, People Off? I guess people off would be like pepper spray.
Anyhoodle, Deer Stopper is made of Putrescent Whole Eggs, Rosemary and Mint. Although, I think they put in those last two for our sake, but that's like misting perfume on a sewage plant. This time of year we are seeing more and more deer as well as armadillo droppings. I didn't even know there were armadillo's up and about eating things, I thought they just slept on the sides of roads.

We finished by trellising the fast growing tomato plants, inter-weaving baleing cord around the T-Posts and plants. We'll probably have to redo some of them, Daniel gave mine a laugh, said the words "too loose" and "it's okay" all in one breath!
PS, Daniel's "It's okay" is like a "Bless your heart" if you know what I mean.

Day 30

Ricky 

Foraging Day! Ricky works for Burge on different projects and is part Native American, so he's good at gambling, I mean foraging! (he'd laugh at that, don't feel guilty ;)) He's quite the character. To give you an example, he sold tomato plants (he said Cory got from family in Italy) to several friends in exchange for various plants. Nice right? Nice except the said tomato plants are actually weeds he picked at Burge. He told them they might look funny growing because they're special heirlooms.

Spiderwort

Tulip Poplar

Wisteria Vine

Ricky took us on a hike pointing out edible plants and info like you can chew on pine needles for vitamin C and make them into tea. We were foraging for lunch and ended up with poke, a poor man's spinach. If cooked incorrectly it's toxic, adding that much needed danger element to lunch. Ricky told us that tulip poplar flowers could be used in pies, so I ate a petal, not going in my pie. There's another flower called a Spiderwort which can detect radiation and turn pink! Then we looked at wisteria vines and he said that you could weave them into baskets if you needed something to hold your food, or a rope, etc. Ricky also told me you could feed a chicken glass and it's stomach would grind up the glass and when it pooped it out you could make it into a necklace. Okay, so maybe no one needed to know that, but everything else was useful.
Our lunch was poke salad, poke sauteed in olive oil and garlic, and jalapeno cornbread! Whewwee! It was delicious. You don't get a meal like that everyday!

Once lunch was done we finished harvesting for market peas, zucchini flowers, sunflowers, collard shoots, spinach and chard, red lettuce, bulbing spring onions (Vidalias transplant), red cabbage, green garlic, asparagus, strawberries, Easter radishes, beets, kale, scarlet queen and hakurei turnips, mint, sage, and catmint. Watching Daniel and Cory concentrating so hard on putting these bouquets together was a highlight to my already highlighted day!

Day 29

Baby Sunflower sunning up the place!

Guess what I did this morning? Yep, harvested strawberries and asparagus. Also got in some quality learning time, priceless. But if pressed for a price I'd say $119.00 worth of learning.
For starters, I recommend everyone that can grow asparagus and wait a couple years for it to establish, do. I stared at one, turned around, and I swear it grew 3 inches and was already bragging to its friends before I could turn back around. They grow so fast and are so good for you, besides being delicious. You can harvest asparagus for 5-8 weeks. Plus those little guys can come back for 50 years! That's older than Madonna! (it's not but you had to think about it didn't you)  
In strawberry land I learned about runners. The plant sends out a runner, a horizontal stem that reminds me of something from the movie Alien. The runners test the land around to see where it wants to move to find more suitable growing locations for their strawberry kids.  This allows them to find better soil or areas of better sunlight. Once established, the runners will dry, shrivel, turn brown, and eventually separate leaving two independent plants: the original and the clone. We can then pot up these plants and keep them for strawberries round 2, the sequel.
However, the strawberry plant only wants to eat, grow, and reproduce. Wouldn't we all? Get back to work strawberry plant! So, the propagating energy used up in sending runners does not go into production of strawberries. Therefore, we cut them off.

One plant can grow 30-50 runners

Moving on to bugs. We saw a few ladybug larvae and they look so different then what you'd think, like a little blue and yellow crocodile. These guys are so beneficial they can feed on up to 50 aphids a day. Watch out for the hungry lady!

I'm good

Now what you've all been waiting for: I caught the mouse!!! I'll spare you the details, just know it came down to an epic battle and I won! One down!

In other news, Erica found a tick on her yesterday and swallowed a bug today. I don't know about you, but I'm nervous for her tomorrow.

Day 28

Creeper van keeping it real since 81

Restaurant Deliveries!!! I got to deliver yummy veggies to our peeps in Atlanta and pick up some supplies today as well. The van had some challenges starting up at times, I still have no idea if I popped the cap or just used brute force, and I might have taken out a few curbs backing up, but we talked it out, hung in there and made it happen. The pictures are of the restaurants I visited today, oh and King of Pops who uses our too ripe strawberries for popsicles or as we call them seconds, and Avalon catering. For deliveries I saw a lot of the backs of these places and talked to chefs, my visits were low key and pretty chill. I had a good time seeing the type of places that serve our produce and care about where it comes from...better than delivering to say Applebee's. Whenever I make fun of a restaurant I call it Applebee's, nothing against them except, well everything. Back to business, so when I finished with the deliveries I picked up some of those vented pint containers you get strawberries in, which come about 650 in a case and costs $85. Now pick up 4 of those and add tax and you get one nervous girl whose hand shakes giving over the farm check card. I guess you don't really think about prices when you package, but if you are going to start your own farm or business I think it's surprising how the little things add up. And that my friends, was an Organic Food for Thought moment, free of charge (but that's only until I set up a Paypal account on here).

Barcelona

Barcelona outside view

Empire State South, oh and there's bocce in the yard!

Holeman & Finch

H&F Bottleshop bought our organic herbs

Some styles should've died with this guy

It is also important to note the owner of the Bottleshop has a tent besides ours at market, that's not important, what's important is that his facial hair looks like this: