We had a wonderful visit with Kay Johnston today.  Kay isone of the four Shaw children who grew up in the heyday of this farm. Maxine, how old is Mrs. Johnston now?  I'd guess her early 90s. 

Seeing her again made me so glad we kept the Shaw name attached to this farm.  This place has a wonderful history and goodness to it, and I'm so glad to be a part of the line of people who've loved it!

Before Mrs. Johnston came, I was running around like a crazy person trying (hopelessly) to straighten up and worrying about how dirty and messy she'd think the place was.

Of course when she did come, I was happily reminded of how nice and gracious and warm she is, and how she couldn't care less about the dirt or mess.  We visited for a bit, but Mrs. Johnston insisted on not even troubling me enough to get out of the car.  She knew how busy we must be.  But Mrs. Johnston was adventurous enough to try the farm road and drive up top to see the farm fields (and to eat a melty chocolate cookie Henry insisted she have).

Of course the kids were thrilled to meet someone who'd been a kid, like them, in this house, wanting to know which room had been hers, and who had lived where.  (Henry's room belonged to Mrs. Johnston's brother, at least for a while). 

Henry asked Mrs. Johnston what she had liked to do around the farm.  Mrs. Johnston said driving the horses.  She said she'd raked wtih horses on hot days like this. 

Thank you so much for coming Mrs. Johnston!  And to all who made the visit possible!

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!

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.

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.