We brought fresh peas -- sugar ann peas, the kind you eat raw, pod and all -- to market this morning. Market opens at 9:00 a.m., and I think we sold out of peas at 9:04 a.m. CSAers each got a nice big bag too.

Here's a photo of a later planting of peas coming along nicely. Thanks to the Cub for the lack of weeds!

The weather's turned beautiful again. Dry, sunny, warm. I thought it might be a good afternoon to work the bees a little. The cold, wet May had delayed far too long a basic hive inspection, cleaning the bottom board, and reversing the supers. Reversing the supers means switching the two boxes full of hive frames, so the bottom one is on top and the top one is on the bottom. The queen really prefers to go up to lay her eggs, and I had noticed that all the bees already seemed clustered near the top, so I thought they might like a super reversal.

Anyway, the bees did not seem in a mood to be worked. I remembered in the beekeeping workshop I went to a few years ago, the teacher said that if when you work the bees, after you smoke them (which helps calm them and warn them you're coming) and have done things slowly and properly, they still fly right in your face and buzz angrily, you may take that as a sign they really don't want to be worked right then, and come back another day. Anyway, I worry that its just that I'm out of the habit, but the bees in my face persuaded me to just reverse the supers and call it a day.

The photo above I took after I worked the bees. There're still a bunch of bees flying worriedly around outside, too upset for me to get too close with the camera, but I'm sure even by now they're well on their way adjusting to the switch and getting all in order.

Our friend Tam is coming in July, and I'm hoping when she's here she'll help me do a more thorough inspection of the bees. From what I saw today, the hive seems still relatively small and with relatively few honey stores, which is understandable given their late start last year and the cool wet spring. But they seem to be working hard and thriving, so I'm optimistic they'll have a good summer.

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.

We've switched this year to a morning harvest. That's Laura cutting baby arugula above, and Peter and Cat below.

Last year we harvested in the afternoon. But, especially by the end of the season, we would run out of light at wash time, because we could not start harvesting until the heat of the day was gone.

Now we start harvesting at 6 a.m., and get all the vegetables in while its still cool, and then have time to wash afterwards. So far, it seems to be working well.

Morning harvest also makes Friday evenings less hectic for us as a family, though it still seems that things come up that need to get done Friday night. Like Peter's on his way to the market in Waitsfield right now, to drop off some things. (Since our truck is in the shop, a friend (and CSA member!!) lent us his truck. It's a little smaller than ours, so Peter's making an extra trip to make sure everything else will fit in the morning.)