Thoughts on Food

I thought that I would make a brief departure from the normal blog posts that are here to wax philosophically about food and health. One of my Christmas presents from my children to me (I asked for it and made the purchase but they were quite pleased with the outcome) was a book called One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka a scientist, organic farmer, and philosopher published in 1978. The book is a philosophical book about the act of farming by using natural methods and limiting human inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery) and eating according to season. It is less of a how to and more of a mind set about growing according to place and time. It was a refreshing read and it confirmed a few thoughts that I had about where I was going with our farm production and some ideas that were developing in my mind.
He mentions eating according to season in Japan and how different herbs, plants and animals have a season and they are eaten to accommodate that time of the year. He speaks of consumers wanting food products out of season. He espouses the idea that we should eat in season for healthfulness. One of the examples he mentions is the light levels being insufficient in the winter time to produce certain vegetables in greenhouses so the addition of light must be used. They are grown in the greenhouse to make an early entry to the market to get a better price. His thoughts are that now you will need to burn more carbon to grow the vegetables and they will be less healthful when consumed. Another example he gives is chicken eggs. He mentions that the eggs that are bought in the store are nothing more than a man made manufacturing process. The chickens are not out foraging they are couped up, given artificial light, hormones, antibiotics and nutritional inputs. What we are eating is really all those man made inputs using the biology of a chicken and wrapped up in the form of an egg. How is the nutrition of that egg compared to a chicken that actually sees the light of day and can forage on natural foods? Our eggs have such a different taste and consistency (more yellow and stiffer yolk) than store bought. This is as good an explanation as I can find. They might be slightly smaller but I will pick ours over store bought when they start to lay again.
Fukuoka talks about eating according to time and what the place has to offer. I have been thinking about this for some time. I have been thinking that man co evolved to the place of his origins. Lets take two examples, an Irish man and a Native American in the Southeast. Both places have different food items that are available at different times of the year. Vastly different climate, light levels, mineral make up of soils, flora, fauna, water, etc. If you take a plant from SE US and transplant into Ireland or vice-versa they will ultimately do poorly without the constant manipulation of factors to overcome what it would naturally experience in the new environment. Man however is more resilient and can adapt. But these two men lets say 500 years ago would not travel as far afield. Thousands of years have gone into generation after generation for that man to exist in his own place while eating from his surrounds and cultivating what he could. The plants and animals of the surroundings have also co evolved with the harvesting of fruits, animals, and seeds in season. I find it fascinating that each season and each generation man is slightly influencing his local flora and fauna to some degree and that his surroundings were doing the same to him. I often wonder if man might be more healthy if he returned to his evolved origins and drank the water, ate the plants produced in the soils, ate the fish of his native oceans, experienced the climate to which he had generationally been conditioned. I think this might be why I crave salt on my foods as my origins take me to coastal west Ireland. I wonder if certain minerals, food components, or the right mix of foods are present or absent in diets of humans who have emigrated from home. I know that plants show symptoms when they are not given what they should have where they grow naturally. Maybe man is not that different from other biology. Maybe healthful "original diets" designed according to historical place of origins could make a difference in preventative medicine. Maybe I should eat less salt. Maybe I should not blog after reading philosophical books.

Christmas 2010

Things are still going well but slower than normal at the farm. We still have green tomatoes but they are ripening up with some stem end cracks. The cracks usually occur from the uneven growth of temperature or soil moisture. Most likely it is the variation of temperatures from the 20's to the 70's in a few days. The zucchini are finished which is unfortunate as these seemed to be the best performing zukes we have grown. They were from one zuke that I saved last year. I forget to save a few seeds just in case we have a loss of all the plants and cannot harvest the fruit again. We will have to start back from a purchased variety and save the seeds again.
We planted the lettuce in our lettuce plot and I hope that we have a harvest like we did last year.
I started to plant more seeds out directly in the field to eliminate the soil aphids that have been appearing in the transplants and affecting the performance of the plants. I haven't thought much about not using transplants as there are benefits like you can control the growing environment better in the house until they are ready to go in the field. You also can get a jump on the weeds as the plants are about 4 weeks old when they go to the field. But there would be a reduced cost with labor and materials with direct seeding. There would also be less of a transplant shock. We will see how this experiment goes.

Christmas Comes Early

Steed Farms got our Christmas gift a little early this year. We are proud to announce the birth of the newest member of our family farm. Noah Benjamin Steed was born at 3:13 pm on 12/13/10. He was 8.0 lbs and 19 inches long. He is doing great and so is Jennifer. We are all trying our best to make his arrival wonderful, relaxed, and full of love.

This season has been tough on our warm season plants. Surprisingly most of the tomatoes are still alive and still green. The peppers got knocked back pretty badly as well as the eggplants and zucchini. I am not sure my thermometer is correct but it registered 20 degrees at the farm. I was thinking that it was suspect but I heard a report of someone nearby with a reading of 18 F only about 10 miles away. Maybe we both have bad thermometers! That is by far the coldest I have seen on the farm. The other plants are still growing but slowly. The honeybell tangelos are ready to eat and are looking great. I was reading about them and it says they are the connoisseurs choice of citrus. It is a cross between a dancy tangerine with a duncan grapefruit. I must say, I picked one to try and it was delicious with a deep gorgeous orange color. I hope our members enjoy them as much as I did. The radishes are ready as well. I never liked radishes until Cynthia from the Corner Store suggested I slice them and fry them in butter. Now I can't hardly wait for them to be ready. If you have never tried them prepared in that manner I suggest you give it a try. I am sure you will be amazed.

Brrrr!

We got through another week miraculously without loosing our tomato crop. The peppers, zucchini, and eggplants got hit a little harder but the tomatoes still look great. I was driving out to the farm last Saturday when the low was supposed to be in the upper 30's and there was frost everywhere and I was beginning to panic. I was expecting the worst. When I got to the field all the plants had a very beautiful coat of crystallized ice on the leaves and I really started to panic. My first thought was,"What happened to the upper 30's?" My next thought was, "I have got to wash off this ice and protect the plants." I ran for the hose and began pulling it towards the rows of tomatoes when it got caught on the pipe and it snapped off below ground. Now I've got two major problems; frost on the plants and a ruptured pipe. I am really panicking now. My next thought was turn off the pump (because of the broken pipe) and get the 100 gallon sprayer and spray off the plants with water to melt the ice. I run to get the tractor out of the shop and pull out the sprayer and run back over to the pump and turn it on so I can have water to fill the spray tank. After the sprayer is hooked up I drive over to the spray filler and pull up under the pipe. I look back and the spray tank is not behind the tractor. It is about 50 feet behind me. I drive back around to go hook up again and notice that the pin had come out of the tractor because it had bent out of shape. I get another pin and repeat the process. I get the sprayer under the pipe, fill it with water, and try to start the sprayer. The whole time I am thinking that I need to get the ice off the warm season plants as fast as possible. I pull the starter cord and nothing. I pull and pull and pull and nothing. Now I've got no other back up plan except prayers. I drive defeated back to the shop and park the tractor. I walk back over to the plants and walk among the icy leaves. I reach down to touch a zucchini leaf and it cracks and breaks where I touch it. Now I pray; this is my plan C. There is nothing left for me to do but leave everything to a greater power. This is also the first day of pick up so I begin to harvest. I keep looking back over to see how the tomatoes are doing. The first signs of cold damage are a droopy, watery appearance too the affected leaves. It never shows up. I watch as the sun melts the ice off the plants and it changes into dew. Still to my amazement no damage from the frost. After seeing the amount of frost on the leaves and seeing the zucchini leaf crack in half, I thought we would have extensive damage on the warm season plants.

I learned a few things that morning. Ice apparently can form even if the temperature doesn't get to 32 F. Even if the temperature will be in the high 30's I still need to protect the plants. And most of all I learned that small miracles can occur in our everyday lives to which I am very thankful.

We had a smaller than usual pick up this last week. I started planting a bit later than usual this year to avoid some of the higher fall temperatures we were experiencing and now the cold weather has been slowing growth. The oranges will be getting sweeter by the day now with the first frosty weather. I was able to cover the warm season plants with frost cloth and it has been money well spent. It has done a great job of keeping the plants above the freezing point except where the plants touch the cloth. I pulled it off the tomatoes last week fully expecting massive frost damage as my min/max thermometer at ground level read 24F (I am not sure if this is accurate), and to my astonishment only minor damage to the outer leaves had ocurred. I am hoping that we will be able to harvest our beautiful tomatoes. They are the best ones that we have grown and I would love to see them in our members baskets.

Due to the slowness of growth, we had to skip a week. We should have mustards, napa cabbage, and tomatoes shortly. Our tropical roselle plants are frozen out. This was a trial last summer and they worked out nicely. I am looking forward to planting them again in the spring. I just tried the leaves and they taste great too. I can't wait to throw them in a salad with their cranberry taste and reddish color.

Another week few days of freeze this week and the susceptible plants are tucked into their beds with cloth. I hope we can get through it well.

We are also predicting some exciting news for our next post!

Pre-Pickup

We decided to have a pre-pickup for our members for some plants that were going down hill but I still wanted our members to partake of. The squash, and cucumbers are giving up the ghost and we did a few last harvests before I pull them out an replant something in their place. It is fun and exciting to meet everyone this season and greet our returning members after a summer hiatus. Iincluded a picture of the poor looking squash.

Things are look pretty good considering all factors in the field. We are growing the best tomatoes to date. I have found that the variety Celebrity works great for us. It is interesting to note that they responded the best to the addition of our woodchip/horse manure addition whereas the other plants seemed to have no response or a negative response as in the case with the eggplant. A picture is above. The cucumbers are all gone. They never seemed to recover after the 40 F weather we had at the farm in early Nov. The eggplants are still achingly slow and are just now starting to flower with little eggplants forming. I'm not sure that they will make it before frost. The Asian greens are growing nicely aside from the beetle pressure that is unrelenting that we are finally getting a hold of. We ha ve one freak that is growing twice as fast as the others. I included the picture above. I hope to save the seeds from that plant for next season. Herbs look nice. Mint looks better than last year at this time. Mustards, collards, turnips, are lettuce are a little late this year. I held off planting because I was a little nervous that they would have a hard time germinating and growing with the unusual heat this fall. We have bell peppers for the first time. We had germination problems in the past. I just hope that they mature to beat the colder weather up ahead. They have tiny little peppers on the bushes. They jalapenos look about the same. All in all things look pretty good.

I planted a few grain crops to see how they fare. I was surprised at how productive the rye was last year. I planted a plot of hard winter wheat, another winter rye, and a hulless oats. Each plot is about 4x4 foot square and is just to see what happens. I had the idea that we could either harvest for members or use a cover/chicken feed crop.

I think that I am going to add a few more Valencia trees this winter and will begin to add them as time permits. Here are a few pictures from the farm. Notice I also changed the main picture. It was about two seasons beyond the little trial plot we started out with. I thought that I would show how nicely things are looking. Notice how weed free we are!

We are looking forward to our first official pickup this Saturday and the start to a great season; heaven permitting.

Novemeber on the Farm

Well it is hard to believe that it is already November, even with almost a whole year to prepare for its arrival. It might be harder to believe if it wasn't for how busy we are preparing for the season's beginnings. Things are moving along. The red bok choi is looking good, cucumbers are producing, squash are showing up on the plants, tomatoes are forming. The eggplants are just now entering into puberty and reaching a growth spurt. I'm not sure what was causing their delayed adolescents. Beans are still a bit off and I will be doing soil test on fertility levels this week to see if anything is wrong there. Mint is growing, along with dill, and parsley. The sugar cane is doing well and will be nice for a December harvest. Our resident Dixie Chicks have stopped laying while they go through their molting process. Our Rock Band (Jenn calls the new chicks, the Pleiadies, after the Seven Sisters star cluster even though we are now down to the six sisters) are getting larger by the day and it will be nice when we start offering our organic CSA members the eggs. Overall things are looking nice for a good start to the season at our farm.

Farm Happenings

We have just planted our squash, zucchini, napa cabbage, and red bok choy out to the fields. We also planted 10 different varieties of lettuce in 72 cell trays. I had to spray some organic pesticides for aphids and whiteflies. We are also starting to develop some downy mildew on the cucumbers. The cucumbers are coming in early this year; we have already picked about a dozen. I hope they hold up for harvest time in November. Our green beans are looking very yellow and our eggplant seems to be in a holding pattern. This is what happens when you change fertilizers. It is best if you can see how it works on different items and different conditions. We were not able to get our usual Sustane fertilizer and had to go with something else. It is not reacting the same way. We also have not had any rain lately so the fertilizer that is releasing is not making it to the roots. This might explain our yellow beans and slow eggplant.

My youngest brother Patrick has joined us for a few weeks out at the farm. He needed a place to crash and was willing to work in the fields. He has been a big help so far, cleaning up the nursery and planting many of the vegetables in the trays and field.

It's nice to see the oranges starting to turn orange again. They almost go unnoticed during most of the season disguised in a camouflage green. One really needs to look for them on the tree. And then almost magically they start turning the first shades of yellow, and then reappear into view. This is where I start thinking about how good they taste in the wintertime, and about how nice it is to cut one off the tree and eat it while I'm working.

We had a loss of one of the young chicks this last week. Something, maybe a raccoon reached under the hen house and took a bite of one and killed it. We made some adjustments to the pen and hopefully it will not happen again. Nathan and I got it out of the pen and buried it beneath one of the orange trees

Season's Stirrings

We started out planting the field with tomatoes, peppers, beans, eggplants, cucumbers, and pickles. So the season is off and running. I am hoping that we can make the fall season before it gets too cold. We have had virtually no rain in about 4 weeks and things are extremely dry. The plants just don't seem to grow as fast as when we get rain as opposed to watering from the well. I think that the pH is a bit high and the fertilizer doesn't get distributed well. Our beds have horse manure and the cover crops incorporated into the rows. I've also put out some granular organic fertilizer in the beds as a starter.

We had our second volunteer show up and help us out at the farm this weekend in exchange for learning how we do things. It is great to get extra hands for the farm. Work really seems to move along. Thanks to Jennifer for helping us out.

The baby chicks are doing better now that they are in with the hens. They are adjusting to their new life avoiding the Dixie Chicks. I think that I will call them the Rock Band (Plymouth Barred Rocks).

New Season 2010-11

Here we are again, another new season begins. Our cover crop has been halfway turned in. This year I tried iron and clay cowpeas and sudex grass mixture. The cowpeas came out good but the grass didn't germinate as well as I would've hoped. I used the rolling chopper to cut it down. I then disced it under. Finally I incorporated composted horse manure with a Rototiller that was lent to me by one of our CSA member friends. It was working great until I hit a buried citrus tree root and sheared off the PTO shaft. Luckily across the street I have a neighbor who welds and he was able to fix it within a couple hours. I would love to learn how to weld. It would be so handy to have this skill on our farm.

We have already started planting cucumbers, tomatoes and beans. We will start planting a few more warm season plants like eggplant and peppers this weekend. We will then follow up with other vegetable plants in the following weeks. I was hoping to get the warm season plants in before first frost.

We were fortunate enough to be interviewed by the local County agricultural magazine In the Field about our farm. It was a nice story with some pictures. Here's the link if you like to read about us. http://www.inthefieldmagazine.com/www.inthefieldmagazine.com/In_The_Field_Hillsborough_County_September_2010.html

our story is on page 52. I will start to get more pictures in the near future.

End of Season

We wrapped up a fairly successful season. I am happy to take a breather and regroup for the fall and this summers cover crops. It is a pretty intense activity to plan 12-15 organic vegetables each week for pickup for 24 weeks.

I harvested some of the seeds from dandelion, mustards, arugula, broccoli, rye, and cosmos. I hope to get some corn and sunflowers before the season ends. I think that I will need to start over on the cucumber breeding program with so many setbacks.

I have some pumpkins ripening up nicely and I hope that they will be ready for our field gleaning day. We are going to have a final pickup for anything left in the field. We still have some herbs, scallions, onions, carrots, cukes, zukes, and tomatoes as well.

I have also added a few fruit trees to plant this weekend. A peach, nectarine, and three persimmons.

Our one olive plant is producing olives this year. I hope to add a few more of these trees to the farm.

Our peaches did great this year and we are trying to figure how to use about 60 peaches we will harvest this weekend.

Week #7 of the Third Period

We are winding our way down to the end of the season. It looks like the trial of Surround clay mixed with copper is working pretty well on the cucurbits and the tomatoes.

Here is a picture of a zucchini with Surround spray

I have remarkably fewer stink bugs on the tomatoes this year. And they are almost ripening up so I can actually pick them on the plants instead of picking them a the greenish pink stage and holding them. That was a big winner. The sunflowers did well this year and I would like to do more next year. The peaches are ripening up and are still small. But they received no fertilizer this year and are doing better than expected. I hope to fertilize them in the next month with local horse manure.

I was able to get the local forester and the extension agent for forestry out to the property to look at the pines. Nobody is sure why they all died. There was some thought that they were planted too shallow, but even the ones that were planted high died. I think that the ground was too sandy and didn't hold water well enough for them. Now it is on to plan B. Two more harvests to go to the end of the season.

Period 3 Week 4 pick up

Things are going better than expected in some cases and worse in other areas of production at the farm.

Here is a list of surprises good and bad:

The good:

red potatoes--did way better than expected with earlier planting date and minimal attacks from ants.

swiss chard--I did not think it would produce this late in the season.

squash/zucchini--Found some varieties that work; finally.

peaches--Looking good so far!

rye--I still can't believe that I grew a grain at the farm. Harvested some this week. The Dixie Chics love it.

spinach--did better than expected and looking forward to next year.

The bad:

bok choi-- beetles decimated them in one week, late in the season

the cold--ruined peas, corn, peppers, eggplants.

peas-- don't like it cold and don't like it hot.

cauliflower--don't like it hot.

pine trees--had a 90% failure at planting. Totally perplexed. We had great rain and cold this winter. Maybe too much. They should have survived.

camera--Don't let tiny children play with them!

Harvest and pickup continues into our third portion of the harvest season. The beets are finally looking good and the lettuce continues to produce heavily. Our warm season crops are starting to grow after being battered by the winter. We have had a really nice basket the last few weeks. The spinach, mustards, bok choi, some lettuces, and radishes are starting to bolt but we are harvesting what we can. The squash is starting to fruit and I think that one more week we will be able to pick for everybody. There is an abundance of loquats starting to ripen up and we will picking them shortly. This is an exciting time with the produce amount and variety.

One of the very neat things that I tried this year is a little patch of grain I was trying to grow. I planted a small portion of Wren's Abruzzi winter rye. I planted it to see if we could grow a grain for the chickens. So far it is really looking neat. I am very excited to see the small grains forming on the shoots. I strikes something really deep at an emotional level. I am not sure what it is but I really find something extremely fascinating watching the rye heads blowing in the wind and seeing the grains ripening up. It must be something evolutionary that strikes at my core. I hope to expand this for next year if it continues to ripen to maturity. We will be purchasing our camera within two weeks and I will catch up with the pictures.

Easter Break

We will be having a weekend break from our last 8th week pickup and the start of our 3rd season, 8 week pickup. Now is the time to sign up if you are interested in joining the CSA for our last 8 week pickup!

It seems like vegetables sometimes purposefully disappoint. We have some of the best looking lettuce we have grown and it seems like it will be at peak harvest during our break. It is funny how that works out.

Things are going well and it seems like we are starting to find a few core members for our CSA. We get a bunch of trial members but I think that a Saturday pick up and the mix of vegetables available during the winter is not what many people expect.

The chicks have been doing great and we are giving away eggs on a rotation basis on Saturdays. I think that maybe the Easter Bunny might bring some more chicks to add to the flock. It is really great not having to buy eggs anymore. But we have to buy feed. I haven't decided yet to go with more Buff Orppingtons or try some new birds out. I guess it will boil down to what is available at the feed store.

I have started to see a few more beetles showing up and causing some damage. It is finally starting to warm up a bit and now is when the insects start to get nasty.

I planted an olive tree this week end from a nursery that we have propagated for in the past. What is interesting about this tree is that it is flowering in our area this year. We will see what happens.

Second Season, Week 7

I was thinking about our farm and where it is going the last few weeks and it occurred to me that we are the first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm in Plant City! We are certainly not he first farm, nor the first direct sales farm, nor the first organic farm in Plant City. But we are definitely the first CSA in Eastern Hillsborough County. I have run into a few produce buying clubs that grow a little and buy produce to supplement, but no one to my knowledge is doing what we are doing. It is nice to be a part of history and maybe a start of a legacy for the next generation.



Back at the farm, we (Jenn, Grandad, and myself) have planted about 500 transplants last Sat. ranging from kohlrabi, red cabbage, red pac choi, a few experimental Asian greens, and some tomatoes. We have more tomatoes in the greenhouse still growing. Things are running late this year due to the extended cold weather. We've got no melons to come up, as well as peppers, zukes, and a few others that failed to germinate. We planted another round in the greenhouse to see if we can get them going again.



I am watching with anticipation our trials of garlic, potatoes, winter rye, and different kinds of corn. So far the spinach trial has proven very successful. The early planting trial has proven to be a big fat disaster with all the extended frost we have had.



I have planted three more loquats and am watching the peaches start to develop. The loquat tree fruit that is there has started to ripen and size up. We will probably be picking in a few weeks. The stonefruits have had very poor pollination probably due to the lack of movement of pollinators with the cold.



I will be getting ready to propagate and plant some mulberries, grapes, and blackberries when it warms up.



And still no camera! Stay tuned...

Frosty March

This month has started out pretty cold. The last few weeks we are still getting frost in the morning. Our potatoes have been freeze burnt and then grown out three times now. I'm not sure how much more of this weather they can take. I think that I lost a few bean and corn plantings and will need to replant. I was trying to beat the warmth and the pests by a few weeks. We are about 20 degrees below our normal daily high right now. The good thing is that it will extend our lettuce plants growing a little longer in the season.

I planted a few more loquats to see if we could supplement the fruit offering in the early spring. I will plan on planting blackberries, grapes, and mulberries this year to create a wider sample of fruit other than oranges.

We lost one of the Dixie Chicks a few weeks ago. I believe that a raccoon made its way under the fencing and got one of the girls. My Dad got there before me and took care of the carnage. There were feathers all over the place. It looked like someone shook out a feather pillow near their cage. I have placed posts around the cage to see if that will help and it has thus far. The four birds are laying about three eggs per day. We will begin to give them to our supporting members starting this weekend.

We will be planting eggplant, beans, and our last cool season transplants out this weekend. We finally found some Sustane fertilizer and I am relieved. It has been working the best for us. We tried four bags of a competitors brand with different analysis but it was no match for the Sustane. I can really see a difference in the transplant growth.

We still have no camera but hope to get one soon to show what is going on at the farm.

It's Cold Out There!

The weather here as been pretty cold as we have not had this much freezing temps since records have been kept in our area. Plant growth is minimal especially with the rainy days. But, this is exactly what climatologist predicted with an "El Nino" Year...cold and wet. Soil temperatures are about 59 F and might be too cold for our corn to germinate. It is hard to predict; some days it gets almost up to 80 F and then it is near 34 F the next morning.

We had one more chicken start laying eggs. We are at four out of five chickens laying now. It really is great fun to gather up the eggs and bring them home and see the egg container filling up instead of getting empty.

We are continuing to plant some of the cool season vegetables like the cole crops, mustards, bok choi. I planted some chard to see how that would do. We didn't have much luck two years ago. I am also having much better looking spinach this year. I tried the variety Bloomsdale on a recommendation from the feed store. So far it looks like this crop might work for us. We had really bad luck two years ago on this as well. I really think that variety selection and planting date are two of the biggest factors to work with on a successful crop.

The Dixie Chicks Lay Eggs!

Finally! After waiting about 9 months we finally have a few eggs to show for it. The chickens have started laying their beautiful brown eggs. We still don't have a camera so we couldn't take pictures but they were perfect size Grade A and tasted great. Jenn got breakfast in bed with fresh oranges and the kids shared her two egg omelet with fresh picked organic scallions and salami. Nate and Anna gobbled it up and wanted more but I had to tell them that there was only two eggs this time. It is amazing how excited we are over a few eggs, but we are all glad for the Dixie Chicks, as talk was increasing about how tasty they might be if they didn't start laying soon.

We have been planting some corn and beans at the farm this last week. We will be trying about a half dozen varieties and about three major types from fresh corn, popcorn, and flour corn. All these will be grown organically and I am starting early to get a jump on the pests. We also planted Contender and Provider snap bean to see how they will do early on in the season.

Second Eight Weeks Season Starts

We are about to start again on the next eight week harvest schedule. We needed one week to let plants resume growth after the freezes. It looks like things have started to green up again and are finally doing some growth. I have just planted some bean, peas, and sweet corn. I know it is a bit early but I am trying to out grow some of the pests that we usually see. I have been filling some trays for the tomatoes, cantaloupe (which I am going to try again), peppers, zukes, and other squash. I think that we are going to risk the cold and beat the viruses. At least that is the strategy for this season. We will see what happens.

I just put in my seed orders for the warmer weather vegetables from Johnny's Seeds, Southern Seed Exposure, and High Mowing Seeds ( a new company we are trying for the first time). I love to look through the catalogs. It is always easier to grow the vegetables in my mind than in the field. I am trying earlier ripening varieties and plant them quicker in the colder weather and see what happens. Especially the tomatoes and corn. We did corn fine last year, but struggled miserably with tomato and harvested a few green tomatoes. There was no way to let them ripen to red; too many stink bugs poking holes in them. I am trying to see if we can be harvesting when the stinkbugs get up and running. Let's see who wins this race!

I topdressed all the vegetables with Rhizogen fertilizer 3-2-2. It doesn't work as well as the Sustain which I really liked but our distributor is no longer stocking Sustain. So we will adapt, unless I can find a Sustain supplier nearby.

The potatoes are cracking the ground now and this is also another experiment we are trying to evaluate. These are planted about 6 weeks earlier than I normally would plant but I think that they can handle it. Lots of learning to be had!

The New Pine Forest

We are almost done with our pine plantings on about 12 acres of our land. We had to act quickly to preserve our agricultural exemption because our citrus grove was declining rapidly. Sometimes the farming is about maximizing yields and returns, and sometimes it is about tax strategies and conserving your cash. We planted on last Saturday after getting our long leaf pines on the Friday night before. The pines came from Andrews Nursery a state of Florida Forestry Nursery. I opted for the long leaf trees because their habitat has dwindled because of their usefulness to man and the lessening of the fires that they have evolved with for thousands of years. They are somewhat slower than the other pines but catch up in later years and have a higher quality wood timber. We have pushed all the citrus trees over to help them dry out and die and have been working for a few months on the tedious process of pushing them into piles to burn. The heavy work of pushing was done on contract with a friend's dad and then we piled them with our tractor. Mostly my Dad has done this work. Then we disked the ground to eliminate weeds. But we have finally burned the last of the trees in the area we are to plant the pines and will be planting tomorrow.

We had the wonderful help of our friends and family to help plant and everybody came out on the coldest day of the year. A record setting day with sleet in the afternoon. That is one of the coldest days I can remember at the farm. It rained and barely got over the mid 30's. We rented a tranplanter machine that cuts the ground with a rolling blade and has a planting shoe where you place the bareroot pine seedling. Then two wheels pack in the soil around the tree. It was able to attach to the good ole Massey 431.

The good news is that we are planting about 9000 pines which we will now refer to as the Andrew Steed Pine Forest at Steed Farms. In acknowledgement to all the hard work that he has done. That is going to be a heck of a lot of carbon sequestration. It was even done organically! It makes me feel great to know that we are being good stewards of our land. I converse with a colleague at work about the fact that so few people take any notice of the environment around them. I had a neighbor walk through about 6 acres of pines to introduce himself and ask what we were doing with the land. It is laughable and quite sad at the same time. He probably stepped on quiet a few newly planted pines to get to me on the tractor.

The farm looks exceptionally large now and so clean. Bare soil and baby pine trees. I love it. Now just wait 30+ years for the trees to grow!

Snow alert!

It seems that mostly I talk about the the weather in my past posts but it is hard not to talk about the weather when that is probably one of the biggest impacts on the farming outcome. It looks like this week is no exception. We have been having record setting cold this past week and we have thankfully gotten through it for the most part. I have ran our drip tubes at night and covered up what could be covered. The greenhouse has been buttoned up tight and so far we are faring well.

I am not sure how things will look after this weekend. They are predicting some snow around the state. The forecasters say that it happens about once every 30 years. I remember when I was four years old in Ft. Lauderdale we had snow. It looks like it is time again for it to happen. I am not sure how the crops will do so we will see.

The covercrop is doing well and still no eggs from the Dixie Chicks!