We are at the end of the season. Reflecting on things, I think we’ve really turned a corner. This is our fifth season vegetable farming on our own, and up to this point each season seemed like a huge battle. I typically get all anxious and stressed by July and completely burnt out by mid-September, but not this year. I think this has happened because we’ve let past seasons get ahead of us, so we’ve played a lot of catch up, which is very frustrating because in vegetable farming you never catch up. We have gotten into the catch-up game because we’ve not had the equipment, set-up, or general organization to stay on top of things in the past. One example is cultivation, where you mechanically kill weeds by tilling the soil. In past seasons, we ended up doing a lot of hand weeding or cultivation with a wheel hoe because the weeds got too tall or we simply didn’t have the cultivation equipment set up in time or on-hand. This year, we cultivated most plantings twice at the right time, so we had a lot more time to spend on other things which needed attention. Add this to all the other little improvements we’ve been making over the years, and that’s why I say we’ve really turned a corner from a farm start-up with all the problems that entails, to a somewhat established farm, where, as long as you keep up with a routine day-in and day-out, the season works out.
Other accomplishments have been building and starting up the farm stand and getting into a few new crops like dried flowers, a new mix of winter squash, and some oddities like broom corn, daikon, and some new heirlooms. A lot of the fun of what we do is trying new things. Some are good, and some are terrible, so we keep the best for next season and drop the rest. We also try new techniques to improve how we do things. Like this year I rigged up a new way of trellising where I use a big spool of twine set in a school backpack to make the task go quicker and with less frustration. We also used some remay cover cloths more to keep out bugs and get a crop to grow better, which made a real difference. Also this is the first year we’ve successfully used a cover crop of rye and vetch, so we’ll see what difference that makes on the fertility of field next year. Like vegetable varieties, we keep what works and keep fine-tuning production.
