Down on the Farm

,Henry

I liked Henry's choice of reading material the other night.

In other news, after a week plus of gorgeous, even hot weather, we're back to more seasonal weather. Even a few flurries today but still sunny and nice. The cold got a bunch of our sungolds in the upper hoophouse last night, which was a major bummer, but we will plant more. In happier news, the bumblebees in the first greenhouse seem to be thriving. The kids and I watched them pollinating tomatoes this afternoon.

New workers

Our greenhouse tomatoes are starting to flower, but it is too early for there to be dependable pollinators flying around our farm, so this year we bought some bumblebee hives to live in the greenhouses for a few weeks.

A somewhat bee-phobic Peter carefully opens the hive

If this works it means our first flush of tomatoes will be earlier and bigger. We are excited to see how this works!

Sigh

View of the upper field on Wednesday 4/16

It has been a long winter. We had the most snowfall here since they have been keeping records. And this has pushed our season back by at least a few weeks. You see, in order for us to get on our fields, the snow needs to melt, the ground needs to thaw, the field needs to dry, and then we need a couple of days of tractor work to prep that field for planting. And then we can plant.

Some years we are already planting at this point. But as you can see from the above photo, our upper field is still covered with snow! Now in fairness, it is supposed to be 70 degrees today, and that snow won't last long, but there is no way we will be planting that field until early May.

Lower field on 4/16

The lower field is in better shape. The snow is gone and the ground has started to thaw. But as you can see from the standing water, it still needs to dry out a bit.

One of the things that we have learned is that the weather will always throw us curveballs, but it all evens out in the end. I suspect we will be in for a hot hot summer, which would be nice for the tomatoes. But it doesn't look like we will have much for our first farmers' market on May 17!

Eastern Cowboy

Our neighbor Don Davis runs a dairy farm. Sometimes in the evening, Maryellen and Waverly and Henry will go for a walk up to visit the cows. If Don is around, he will often come out from the barn and chat and let Wavy and Henry pet and feed the calves. All of this has made a huge impression on Henry. All he talks about is cows, and his favorite video is a Vermont classic about life on a dairy farm.

I saw Don at the general store one day and mentioned to him that Henry dreams of being a dairy farmer. Don thought this over for a minute and said with a grin, "Well, I am not sure if it is a dream or a nightmare." Dairying, you see, is not the easiest way to get rich.

But now that it is mud season, Henry has these mud boots he loves because they look like the barn boots that Don wears. He calls them his "cow boots".

Which reminds me of a song called "Eastern Cowboy" by Alan Greenleaf, folksinger and Peacham resident. Here is the chorus:

He's an Eastern Cowboy
He herds Holstein cattle
He ain't got a horse
And he ain't got a saddle
His range is kind of woody
But the snakes they don't rattle
and his boots are rubber and warm . . .

By the way, you can get Alan's songs on iTunes.

The turn of the tide

It was 50-something degrees out today! I think we finally have broken the back of winter. We still have 1-2 feet of snow on the ground, but that is down from 2-3 feet last week, and it is supposed to be (relatively) warm this week.

Of course, the warmth really means one thing -- no, not spring -- mud season! Which means everything is slush and mud during the day, and frozen ruts and bumps at night.

The "road" from the first greenhouse, in front of the barn, and down to the house.

My foot ankle deep in mud.

In other breaking news, children grow up quickly. Compare this:

With the last photo in this sequence. Wavy doesn't even fit under the greenhouse tables anymore!

In a couple more years she will tower over them.

Henry Griffin . . . two year old zen master?

Or an alternate title might be, "Ask a silly question . . . " A conversion around the kitchen table at snack time today:

Papa: So Henry. What do you want to be when you grow up?

Henry: A dinosaur!

Papa: Uh, . . .

Waverly: (laughing) You can't be a dinosaur!

Henry: No, no! A butterfly! I be a butterfly.

Papa: Well, . . .

Waverly: (Still laughing a little) He likes the sound of a butterfly flying.

Papa: The sound of what?

Waverly: You know . . . (starts silently pantomiming a butterfly in flight around the table).

Henry: Yea, yea. I be the sound of a butterfly.

Farm thinking

Tomatoes in the greehouse

Sometimes we don't talk enough about the less fun aspects of farm living. So here is a good story.

Last night, as is my habit, I went out to check the greenhouses before I went to bed. We have alarms in the greenhouses that make a phone ring in the house if the temperature gets out of range, but I always go out and check in person, just to make sure. Last night it was about 20 degrees out at 10:30pm.

The first greenhouse was fine.

However, the second greenhouse seemed too warm when I opened the door. Sure enough, the thermostat said it was 74, which is not hot enough to trigger the alarm, but a lot warmer than the 58 degrees that we set the furnace to at night. So something was wrong. Our furnaces will heat the greenhouses to about 54 degrees above ambient, so if it was 74 in the greenhouse, and 20 outside, I knew the problem was that the furnace was going full bore, and for some reason it wasn't shutting off when it got to the set temp of 58.

But that is as far as I got troubleshooting it on my own. So I was faced with my first farm thinking problem. The non-farmer in me was tempted to say, "Well, I don't know anything about furnace repair, and furnaces seem kind of big and hot and scary, so I can't do anything here, except maybe watch the furnace overheat to the point of malfunction while burning of a zillion gallons of oil." But given that there were $10,000 worth of tomato plants in the greenhouse, and it was cold outside, that didn't seem like a good plan. So the developing farmer in me said, "Well, I guess I need to learn about furnace repair, right now, and I need to figure out how to fix this thing quickly."

The second thing farming has taught me is that even if you don't know how to do something, if you physically stare at the problem long enough, ideas will come to you. If I was sitting at the kitchen table thinking, "How do you fix a furnace that won't shut off?", I wouldn't have any ideas. But staring at the furnace set up in the greenhouse in the middle of the night, ideas started to come. Eventually I decided that either the thermostat switch wasn't working, or there was some kind of cross or short in the wire that ran from the furnace to the thermostat, and this cross was keeping the circuit open when the thermostat switch was trying to shut it. However, the thermostat switch actually showed it was shutting off at 58 degrees, and there were no obvious defects in the thermostat line.

Not knowing what else to do, I went to the shop and stared at the work bench for a while, flipping through the furnace manual at the same time. For some reason I saw a coil of thermostat wire under the layers of workbench debris. I didn't know it was there. "What if I replace the line going from the furnace to the thermostat? Either that will fix the problem, or tell me that the problem really is the thermostat switch." The second thought that came was, "Hmmmm, I hope this left over coil is long enough. . . ." The third thought was, "Hmmmm, I wonder how you replace the thermostat line on a furnace . . . "

Back to the greenhouse. What to do first? A good starting point seemed to be to shut off all the electrical current to the furnace system. As a non-electrician, I was glad that step occurred to me. The next step seemed to be to memorize how the original wire was set up, and do exactly that, with the new piece of wire.

A while later, the line was replaced, the power back on, and the furnace was shutting down at 58 degrees. Yay!

So what are the lessons here? (1) Don't rely on the greenhouse alarms, (2) when something goes wrong, stare at the problem until a solution presents itself, and (3) even if it is not obvious what to do at the outset, just keep moving forward, and assume you can figure something out as you go.

Now I need to go check the furnaces . . . goodnight!