I don't do a lot of farming these days. I know because when I look through my photos for email content I see a lot of serial numbers, price tags, broken parts, and the occasional cat photo. Also I know because I see the crew running around hauling things to and fro and remember the seasonal nature of the work. Mine is a lot more, is it raining today? I'll build something inside, is it nice out today? I'll build something outside. Real farmers do not have that luxury and this year my job is to make sure they can do their job. Right now I'm working on our second walk in cooler in order to preserve all this great fall food Brittany and our awesome crew (Jess, Avery, Haley, Morgan (who abandoned us yet again), Joella Mary and the work for shares) are bringing in. Don't worry we've got plenty of cabbage. Pictured above is Jess and Avery pulling them out last week, they are happily tucked away in the cooler now. The cabbage, not Jess and Avery.
Occasionally we ponder a little here and there about the imminent fall of civilization and what we will do if (when) that happens, cabbage is always in the equation. Plastic for greenhouses is not, don't worry we can still use the frames to trellis tomatoes and we can always put on old plastic, which we never throw away, for shelter. The tractors won't work without diesel fuel unless we convert some of our land to sunflowers and start making biodiesel so we'll need a lot more people power and digging forks to get the job done.
Anyway, there's a lot of cabbage and the sweet potatoes have done well enough so we're pretty much set, what else do you need to survive the winter? Hot sauce! Which our good friend Kenneth is making for us again so don't worry there's more of that on the way.
We managed to get away this weekend, thanks to Haley and Alix for tending the market and Jess and Avery for babysitting the farm. A close family friend of Brittany's was married up in Portland ME at a very nice outdoor wedding. Harvey made sure to tear up the dance floor and spend some quality 60 degree days on the beach. At one point he looked up at a small-medium roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach and said to Brit, "Mom, that's the ride of my dreams!" Which is fun because I don't know if he knows anything about rides yet.
The crew has also been flipping tunnels like crazy these days. I guess that's what happens when we keep building them, we need to manage them too. They transition from a summer state of mind (tomatoes) to fall and winter (greens) in a matter of days thanks to some serious attention from the crew. Pictured below and to the left is Morgan and Jess erasing the tomato high tunnel before forming beds and adding compost, below and to the right. Thanks to the compost, nothing goes to waste. We only have one more high tunnel to build in order to meet our goal of 9 greenhouses built just this year.
