MAY 3, 2004

Too much of a good thing

The past couple of weeks have been tough on the garden. Last year, our raised-row tomatoes and peppers survived near-flooding conditions in July when we received 4-5 inches within a week (a large-scale tomato grower who sells at our farmer's market lost his whole crop); this year, we decided to plant right at ground level, and have had 3 inches of rain in the past 7 days.

The result, in our poorly-draining clay soil, is that seedlings cannot breathe and seeds rot in the ground rather than germinating. After heavy rains the weekend before last, the tomatoes began looking sickly, their bottom leaves yellowing and their stature wilted; a few small but leafy bell pepper plants gave up and died on the spot, and the rest of the peppers grew weak, dropping leaves here and there but soldiering on. Of the three varieties of beans (about 60 row feet in all) only the runner beans came up; our four rows of corn (120 row feet), and the melons, which are emerging with their first plump leaves, are the only seeds that seem no worse for the wear.

On a walk down Chick Lane on Friday we spoke with a neighbor across Leonard Road as clouds gathered for another weekend of certain rain. We had been watching his small garden plot with curiosity, as it sat more or less empty, with only a few tomato seedlings, then with a few okra cotelydons emerging. He explained to us that he had seeded the whole garden with okra and beans, but that very few had come up, and that he had finally given up and replanted the whole thing. Now with more rain on the way, he said, he wasn't sure he would fare any better.

"Oh well," he said. "It's good exercise, anyway."

I spent a couple of hours Thursday and Friday evenings similarly exercising myself in advance of this weekend's rains.On Thursday I planted forty or fifty feet of okra, and the sweet potato slips (starts) we ordered from a Northeastern seed company a month ago finally arrived, so I planted those in raised rows on Friday, plus several rows of gourds and some more bush beans.

Beyond wondering if your seeds are going to come up, the most frustrating thing about heavy rain during the planting season is that it completely throws off your planting schedule. Planting before it rains, if the rain doesn't last for days, is perfect, but after a heavy rain it is too much work, and bad for the soil tilth besides, to try to plant for several days afterward. We were busy at the same time preparing for our baby shower Saturday, which we had planned, in a fit of masochism, to hold at our house, and which required a lot of cleaning, reorganizing, and general sprucing up. But I was concerned to get seeds in the ground before the second straight weekend of rain, because I had been unable to plant throughout the early part of the week due to the previous weekend's downpour, and we are nearing the end of the practical window for planting. So Jenni handled much of the indoor work, with my help for the heavy lifting and a little cleaning, while I worked in the garden.

One great lurch forward was made when I finally figured out how to handle a hoe in planting. There are a lot of things that seem simple enough until you try to do it, and without someone around to show you how it's done you can do things the wrong way for a long time without knowing it. Such was my seed-planting method. But a light bulb went off sometime Thursday and I nearly tripled my planting speed by digging furrows with a hoe that I then dropped seeds into and backfilled with the same dirt. This is a vast improvement over any method that involves the creation of individual holes to drop seeds in, and I will gauge its acceptability by this round's germination rate. Fifty percent is good enough for me, and would more than justify the savings of time, which is at a premium for the part-time farmer.

On the same note, we have decided to go ahead and buy ourselves a garden tiller. Based on our knowledge of the local market for the much of what we are growing and the scale we plan to grow them on, it seems that such a tool will be both a major asset and a justifiable purchase. We are slowly accumulating the modest tools of our trade, limiting ourselves, at least in theory, to portable equipment, and will treat that as this year's major farm purchase. After hiring a tax adviser this year to help with our much more complicated earnings this past year, we realized that while we did not make a profit from farming in 2003, relative to our expenses, the year's work left us with assets equal to the loss, and that this should be the year for us to turn the corner and make a small profit, even including the purchase of a tiller, our current irrigation system, and a tent for the farmer's market. This is just the position we need to be in for the future.

We have also been doing a lot of healthy brainstorming that could lead to diversification within our farming activities, not in terms of crops, but in terms of the use of our skills to earn money in areas related to farming. I am realizing that this is what diversification really means for a small-scale, first-generation farmer: Not simply growing a variety of products but utilizing all of one's skills and resources to enhance the value of what is produced on the farm. The end goal is to engage all of one's skills and talents in activities that keep farming in mind. We will share some of these ideas as we implement them over the next year on this website and on the ground.

Saturday morning brought the rain that was promised, and while assisting with final preparations for the shower by Jenni, her good friend Erica, and Karen, I also found time to plant three seed flats with okra, which I will try to start indoors and then transplant into the garden. The germination rate may be slightly lower, but they should transplant fine and it is our best chance to get a strong crop into the ground as quickly as possible in spite of the vagaries of weather.