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!

Walk in cooler

Kat working on the walk in cooler. It will basically be a well insulated box, with a recycled air conditioner modified to use to cool it off. We'll use it to cool and keep veggies post harvest. On the topic of refrigeration, we really need a glass fronted refrigerator for the farm stand -- like an old snapple cooler or something. If anyone out there knows of a good deal on one, please pass it on.

Greenhouse #2!!

Wavy and I spent some time planting sungold cherry tomatoes in our new greenhouse #2 the other day. We have dumped a lot of time, sweat, and dough into this second house over the last six months, so this is a very satisfying day. Very exciting stuff!

And then Wavy went on patrol in greenhouse #1 to inspect the earlier tomatoes and peppers in there.

Greenhouse #1 is on!

Peppers!

The new container culture system (plus Wavy's tractor).

Mud season is here a little early this year.

Hello!

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. It isn't that we haven't been trying, it has just been crazy around here lately. Today is a good example. We came back down from the field with a truck and tractor bucket full of winter squash. We all thought it looked so nice that Kat said, "Let's take a picture for the blog." So Laura gets the camera set up on auto-shoot, she hits the button, the little light starts flashing, she runs over to climb on the tractor, and in all the shifting and picture posing commotion, the bucket lever gets tripped, and the front bucket of squash gets dumped just as the picture snaps.

Well, we all had a good laugh, so it worked out Ok.

But we will keep trying, and sooner or later we will get some more posts up, including some photos from Wavo's recent birthday party. Our little girl is two already! Oh well, more on that later.

Not all fun and games

Well, I haven't been posting much because it has been an absolutely brutal spring. First, it was so cold and rainy that all our crops are still, literally, 3-4 weeks behind schedule. Then, we are having a disease problem with the greenhouse tomatoes we worked so hard on. It seems that the disease problem is a fluke thing, most likely brought on by some bum seeds, but still, it will significantly reduce our tomato yield this year, and it is a blow. Then, our truck had some engine trouble requiring a four-figure repair. And then this past week it has been so hot and humid, it is hard to sleep, let alone work outside all day.

So instead of writing a post solely about how crappy it has been this spring, I decided to wait until I had something positive to add, and I came up with this post about our new-to-us Farmall International Cub.

Ours dates from the early 1970s, which makes it almost brand new, at least by Cub standards. It is a cultivating tractor, which means it acts as a huge mechanical hoe to physically disturb the soil and uproot weeds. Cubs were the standard cultivating tractors for about 50 years because of their high-clearance and off-set engine design.

Our Cub has two sets of hydraulics (rear and belly mounted), which raise and lower racks of metal tines. The tines can be adjusted to match up inversely with the rows of veggies in each bed, and then the tines are lowered slightly below the soil level. As the tractor moves forward, the shovels and sweeps attached to the bottom of the tines disturb the soil and kill the weeds. The off-set engine allows the driver to clearly see the rows of plants below the tractor, which makes it easier to keep the tractor on line.

Here are the rear tines set up to get weeds in the rows between each bed.

We are only at the very early stages of figuring out how to use this machine, but already, the implications are a little staggering. This tractor will radically improve our weed control, and radically reduce our weeding labor.

So, the Cub is something positive this spring, and I am sure the summer and fall will have more positivity to balance out the rough patches. Now that I am thinking about it, another positive is the awesome farm crew we seem to have put together, but I guess that will need to be another post some other time.

Heating up

The weather has been beautiful lately. But the warmth means that we have had to put the roll-up sides on the greenhouse in order to lower the temperature on sunny days. When we put the plastic on the house back in February, there was no need to vent the sides, so we just battened down the plastic to the baseboards. But now with the warmer days and stronger sun, we need to reduce the daytime solar heating in the house, so the lower parts of the side walls roll-up.

Basically, the roll-up sides are just pipe laid alongside the house and attached to the bottom of the plastic. Then we roll it up using a handle, secure the handle, and presto, instant ventilation. Ahhh, just like a cool summer breeze.

More greenhouse news

Peter put the cross ties up on Sunday. Those are to trellis the tomatoes. They hold Peter pretty good, so I figure they will hold up a lot of tomatoes.

Dana worked with us this morning to plant out the first tomato seedlings.

More logging photos

Cornelia, Waverly and I went to see the logging on Wednesday. (We've gotten a ton of snow since then!) I think Cornelia was a little sad, in a Lorax kind of way, at the loss of trees. But she enjoyed watching Terry and his skidder at work just the same.

Warming up!

So in that last post, Maryellen was referring to the fact that the greenhouse plastic has gone up!

The greenhouse house has two layers of plastic, each of which are 48' x 96'. The plastic comes in these big rolls that weigh between 200-300 lbs. The way you get the plastic on the house is to hoist a roll up to the top ridge pole on the frame, tack one end of the roll to the endwall, and then two people climb up on the frame (like a jungle-gym), and walk the roll along the length of the ridge pole (all the time balancing your body on the purlins), until the plastic is unrolled. And then you do it again with the second roll, which is a little harder, because you have to try and work on top of the first roll. Once both the rolls are unrolled, everyone pulls the plastic down the sides, and battens it down to the hip boards and baseboards.

If it sounds a little hairy, well, that's because it was. Our friends Richard, Kurt, and Tom (of Tom, Dana, Ethan, and Emma fame) came over to help, and it wouldn't have happened without them. Richard has eight of his own greeenhouses, so he largely directed the operation and he kept our confidence up. Kurt and I were the ones climbing across the top with these heavy rolls, and Tom and Richard secured the ends and bases.

Afterward, I covered the endwalls in plastic and put a door in. There is still a lot of work to do (i.e., putting in heat, thermostats, vents, etc.). But I have to be honest -- for some reason I am surprised each time this project moves ahead another step. I am just psyched that we have even come this far.

Greenhouse people

The Peacham Historical Association put on a wicked fun Groundhog Day Dinner last night.

Though it seemed odd to me at first, it is very socially appropriate at town events to ask new acquaintances where they live. In fact, people often offer up that piece of information. Oh I live in South Peacham, the house with the big wraparound porch, across the street from where the Johnsons used to live.

Anyway, used to be that when we explained to folks where we lived they'd often say, oh, you live in the old Shaw place. That's why we named the farm Old Shaw.

Now we more often get identified as the people putting up the new greenhouse. As in, oh, yours is the place with the new greenhouse. How big is that thing anyway?

This one's for Billy

The logging has begun. Waverly and I, with our friends Deirdre and Elliot, went out and watched Terry Williams, our logger, at work. It was awesome. One of those times I am glad to have a small child to give me an excuse to watch mighty machines at work!

Here are some photos of the skidder from Sunday, when Terry wasn't working. This end of the skidder he used to push the logs around. We watched him use it to move around and build up the piles of logs.

This end of the skidder he used to pull logs.

We watched Terry pull logs out of the forest down to the landing, where he was stacking logs to get them ready to be trucked out.

We also saw him pull a log down out in the forest. I think it must have been cut through at the base, but still propped up by the other trees around it, and we saw Terry pull it down from the bottom with the skidder.

Here Terry is cutting the logs to length on the landing. He cut through them like they were butter.

Walking through the woods, you can definitely tell they are being logged, but they are still beautiful.

Hip boards

Peter's hustling to get the last hip boards up. I think I heard him say two more to go, and I think once those are up, it's ready for the plastic. Then the guts of the greenhouse, heating system, etc. go in. It's hard to believe, what with it snowing out there as I type, but there is starting to be time pressure to get the greenhouse ready for the season.

Putting on the purlins

We put the top three purlins on the greenhouse today.

My office was closed today in observance of Veteran's Day, and Waverly was still scheduled for daycare, so Peter took the day off too so we could get done some of the greenhouse work that Waverly couldn't help with.

The purlins run the length of the greenhouse connecting the ribs.

You bolt them to the ribs.

Figuring out how to get up there to do the bolting took some creativity.

And there is a fair amount of play in the ribs, so it took some pushing and pulling to get the purlins on. But we got them all on.

Rushing to beat the freeze

We ran into a problem getting up the new greenhouse. We found a giant rock right where we needed to put a couple of ribs.

It was too big for us to dig out and move with our tractor, but we got John to come and move it. The delay put us precariously close to the ground freezing. So this weekend saw some major hustle to get the greenhouse skeleton in the ground before it froze.

This is what we woke up to Saturday morning.

It melted as soon as the sun came up, but it started getting colder, and this week is supposed to be colder than seasonal norms, like in the teens at night.

Waverly came out on her tractor to help.

The first rib up.

Susannah came by and helped on Sunday afternoon. Thank you Susannah!

The last task was to dig a trench all the way around so we could put in baseboards. The ground was starting to freeze as we dug. And it's flurrying out as I type. But we got the trench dug!

There's still a lot of work to do to get it operational, but it looks like the work that had to happen before the ground froze is done, and not a moment too soon!

Closing up shop

Today was a truly beautiful day. We have been blessed with an unusally dry, mild, and long fall up here. And after our rainy, wet, cool, non-summer, it has been a welcome stretch of weather. Today it had to be in the 50s with sun and no wind. As long as we kept moving (and stayed in the sun) we could wear short sleeves this afternoon. It's the little things that keep you going . . .

But we got a lot done around here today.

We broke down the "washroom". Now the tubs are resting safely in our barn.

Took the irrigation system down.

And stored the pipes in the hoophouse for the winter.

Pulled up a lot of remay.

And here is Susannah with some of the last turnips of the year.

The new greenhouse is here!!

Early this morning our new greenhouse frame arrived!! We are planning to put two real professional greenhouses in our field south of the barn. The first one arrived and will go up this fall. We aren't sure if we will get to the second one before the ground freezes, in which case it will go up first thing in the spring. The single layer, unheated, hoophouses we have built have helped us extend the season, but they cannot match the season extension, reliability, and consistency of a real, heated greenhouse.

This is the field before the pipes go up.

This is Ed Person from Ledgewood Farm and Greenhouses, delivering our frame. Ed is a vegetable farmer, but he has developed a separate business building greenhouse frames for other veggie farmers. He is THE authority on greenhouses in northern New England. And he was here, today, hanging out on our farm! He is kind of like a veggie farmer rock star, and it was great to meet him and work with him. He is wicked knowledgeable and spent a bunch of time with me making sure I had some small inkling about how to get the frame constructed once he left.

Uhhh . . . where are those directions???

We still have some site work to do, but we will keep you posted as this one goes up. I can almost taste those early tomatoes now . . .