Ryan and Kara Start A Farm

What have we been up to?

2011-03-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

Well for one thing, we named the farm! Thanks to our friend Ean High who suggested Evening Song Farm nearly a year ago. After much farm name brainstorming and careful fermentation, we went with the first suggestion we got, so meet Evening Song Farm, and check out our new website www.eveningsongcsa.com set up by Kara's older brother.

We have done a lot since last updating the blog, not the least of which has been taking shamlessless cute pictures of our puppy, Echo.

We also experienced out first farming bummer in our new location. Though there didn't seem to be a lot of snow on our caterpillar tunnels, Ryan took the time to clear off the snow from one of our tunnels. We intended to clear the other one the next day, but instead part of it collapsed! Bummer!

We use these to start early carrots, and then once the carrots are established we move the structure over our tomatoes to get them started early. Alas we spent a grumpy day clearing the collapsed section and then temporarily mending the broken hoops.

Now it looks fine, but when the snow melts we will have to replace the broken hoops and patch the ripped plastic.

We finally headed to Pennsylvania to retrieve the last of our belongings from the Sterling valley-- our goat, Lmno, our inoculated mushroom logs, and some other goodies. I threw a tarp and some hay in the back seat of my car, and Lmno had a goat palace in the back.

Though while I drove she was more interested in navigating.

We got a buddy goat for her. The new goat's name is Zeah ("Zee-uh"), and she is a Nigerian Dwarf goat, small with high butterfat.

Around the farm, we finally put the roof on the wash station shed, hung a door for the greenhouse, started our hotbed (with horse manure) to provide heat for our greenhouse starts, started our first round of plants for this spring, built many seeding tables, and myriad other winter tasks of season planning, marketing, and other construction needs.

Winter Update

2011-01-18T06:52:00.000-08:00

Despite the change of work pace the winter brings for vegetables farmers, we still find ourselves occupied with work. (That is our best excuse for neglecting the blog, sorry!) Since our last photo managerie, we have worked on a few infrastructure building projects, focused on putting out a few "fires" in our old farmhouse (a leaky roof patch, a new gas line, moving a door to a new spot, patching wall, energy audit...), invested in an alternative deer fence, attended a marketing conference, ordered seeds, mapped gardens, worked on marketing plans, and enjoyed the winter. (Sorry for some of the sideways pictures, but the computer or blogspot is taxing my technological patience, just turn your head sideways a bit.)

Moving day!

Kara setting up the caterpillar tunnel hoops

Covering up our onions and leeks to overwinter

Our friends Mim and Ira came to visit and they helped us pull the plastic over our hoophouse. Thanks guys!

The toughest part is getting the large piece up and over the structure with two sets of hands, so it was great timing to have our friends drive by the farm and lend a hand. The wind wasn't too bad, and then Ryan and I set to work fastening the plastic to the greenhouse.

Triumphantly taking a break after fastening the end wall plastic. It's important to get the plastic tight and even to get the longest life out of this petroleum product.

It's funny how seemingly simple things can take a long time. Ryan's dad came to help us start our wash station roof, and it took the three of us quite some time to figure out our design and throw up this ridge piece against the barn wall to connect the roof to the barn.

Getting the beam up for the rafters.

It's difficult to see, but right when we put the beam up an awesome rainbow appeared right over our heads.

Here's a better photo of it

Meet Echo! Our little German Shepherd mix is the newest member to the farm team. His primary role will be to patrol our veggie fields for deer, groundhogs, etc... any of the unpaying vegetables customers that like to take a bite out of our living. On his free time he enjoys being ridiculously cuddly.

Kara built the stud walls for our walk in cooler. All we needed to do next is put up the insulation and install the modified air conditioner. Our friends Liz and Matthew came to visit (which was grand fun to talk farming for two days straight!) and they helped us realize that a different spot in the barn would make it much more efficient for us to move vegetables to and from the cooler. So we've taken down the studs and we're getting ready to move them to the upstairs of the barn. It's a little bummer now, but will save us a lot of back pain over the years. So, thank you to Liz! This picture was taken right before we took the cooler structure down.

Many Happenings

2010-10-24T12:19:00.002-07:00

Alas, we have neglected our blog!! This post is a pictoral tour of the last 4 visits to our property that we've made since the previous entry. We will be moving up there permanently very soon! Enjoy the photos.

August 31st-September 2nd

This was our first trip up to our new home once the sellers had moved out. Here we are brushing our teeth.

And unloading the metal pipes for our greenhouse

Kara wasted no time tearing up the old dusty carpet in the living room. After a brief but emphatic session of destruction, her dad finished the job on the next trip up. (Note the the classy object in the foreground, some people call that an "upside down bucket" but we call it "dining room chair.")

Sept 18th-20th

Mowing buckwheat on the south field, which will be planted to garlic later in the fall

We then raised beds in the same garden after the buckwheat was mowed and incorporated.

Kara, Malaika, and Jim working on setting up the greenhouse

The house feels so much nicer after Kara's parents deep cleaned it.

The living room, carpet free with upgraded dining room chairs.

Our sink is at the end of a dead-end hallway. Funny.

Upper field after it was mowed.

The tall grass in background is sudangrass. The foreground is an emerging cover crop of peas and oats.

Our greenhouse, partially set up!

October 2nd-4th

Our to-do list, with inspirational artwork, written on whiteboard.

David fixing our sink. Hooray!

Kara mowing down our sudangrass cover crop: it grew to over 5 feet high! We accidentally let it grow a little too long, so that it started to form seed pods, which could germinate in the soil as a weed in subsequent years. Since Sudangrass seeds will only germinate in warm weather, we may try to use this section for early spring crops or late fall crops to avoid weed pressure from sudangrass.

Field of oats and peas as covercrop

Closeup: oats and peas

Closeup: oats and vetch

We transplanted onions and leeks (along with David) that we will attempt to overwinter.

On this trip we picked up 200 bales of hay from our neighbors 1 1/2 miles up the road. We managed to fit 60 bales in the manure spreader: hooray! Here it is parked in the garage next to our soil preparation equipment

And the rest of the hay was stacked in the upper floor of the barn next to our tractor.

The next three images are intended to be a panoramic view of our vegetable fields (left to right), but I couldn't figure out how to stitch them together. The hill that you see in the first two photos is Hateful Hill, apparently so named because it blocks the setting sun.

Next Trip: October 16th-20th

Planting Garlic, yahoo! Many thanks to all the garlic helpers: Wes, Jo, Angela, Jean, Colleen, Lindsay, Tom, Michaela, and Parker. We planted 190 pounds of garlic (9 1/2 165 foot long beds) and mulched it with 180 bales of hay.

Gaea, queen of the haywagon

The finished beds on the left and right will be for our caterpillar tunnels, which we will set up soon and cover with greenhouse plastic. All four beds will be seeded to carrots in late February for an early carrot harvest.

This is the beastie that dug a trench to put in a waterline to our washstation and greenhouse. It also dug out an area where we would pour a concrete pad for our washstation.

We got a load of gravel dumped off where we were going to put our concrete pad. We leveled it off, installed a form for the concrete, and the concrete truck arrived that afternoon to pour our slab.

What a trip! Our upcoming projects are putting up our caterpillar tunnels, covering our onions and leeks with plastic for the winter, preparing a shed and fenced area for Kara's goat, finishing the construction of our greenhouse, putting a roof over the wash station, installing our wood stove into the house, and updating our blog more frequently. Thanks for checking it out!

Spreading Compost

2010-08-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

On the weekend of August 9th we arranged for our garden helpers to sell our vegetables at the farmer's market in Honesdale, PA so both of us could scoot up to Cuttingsville and work on our land. Our two big projects for the weekend were to begin cutting and splitting a load of firewood that we had delivered, and to spread spent mushroom substrate (or mushroom compost) on our garden plots.

Spent Mushroom Substrate is a byproduct of commercial mushroom production. To grow mushrooms, producers make a mix of animal manure, bedding, spoiled hay, and gypsum that they allow to compost in large windrows. They then move this material into their grow rooms, sterilize it with high temperatures, and innoculate the compost with the desired mushroom species. After a certain point, it is no longer profitable to grow mushrooms on that particular batch of compost, and they move it out of their grow rooms to make room for another batch. This waste product is a valuable source of nutrients for the soil, as it is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, and many other trace minerals. It has a high organic matter content and a near neutral pH, and because it was brought to a high temperature before innoculation, it is free of weed seeds.

After doing some research, we decided that spent mushroom substrate was the most economical way to add nutrients and organic matter to our fields, which tested low in many macro and micro nutrients. Doing some math with numbers from our soil test results and information on the levels of nutrients in mushroom compost, we decided to spread 30 tons/acre of mushroom compost. With three acres plowed up, that means 90 tons of spent mushroom substrate, or 4 tractor trailer loads.

This is the last of the 4 tractor trailer loads dumping off our spent mushroom substrate by our gardens. The 4 loads were trucked from an organic mushroom producer in Pennsylvania. The compost itself was free, but we had to pay for a company to truck it to Vermont.

Spreading the pile on our fields got off to a slow start, as it took us a while to work out some kinks in the used manure spreader that we purchased. That part was challenging: it's stressful to have such a limited timeframe to do a job and run into unforeseen difficulties along the way. But fortunately, with a little tinkering from Ryan's Dad we got the spreader figured out it went smoothly the whole way through.

Loading the pile into the spreader

Spreading a load on the field. The white cloud is steam coming off the pile as it's spread. The pile was rich with microbial activity, with the temperature in the middle reaching well over 120 degrees F.

These pictures below show a field of buckwheat shortly before mowing, and then after being mowed and composted. This particular field will be planted to garlic this fall. We also plan to experiment with overwintering leeks and onions in this field, too.

And this picture below shows a field of sudangrass, planted as a cover crop. We decided to let the sudangrass grow until it is killed by the fall frosts, and we spread compost over it without mowing it.

Firewood being delivered

David adjusting chainsaw

Firewood cut and split

We weren't able to seed our fall cover crops like we planned, but fortunately David went back this past Friday with his neighbor George to disc in the compost and seed peas, oats, rye, vetch, and buckwheat in the fields. This fall we'll test the soil again to see if other amendments are needed to grow healthy vegetables. We plan to get our greenhouse up and ready by this fall, as well. We staked out the four corners in the photo below.

What a doozy of a weekend! Many, many thanks to our wonderful neighbors Dave and Allison for putting us up for weekend and helping us stay clean and well fed. What a blessing.

How did this happen?

2010-07-14T05:06:00.000-07:00

After college we lived in northern VT, where's it's cold and dark and full of lovely people.

Then we moved to Journey's End Farm in sunny Pennsylvania, where it's also cold and dark and full of lovely people.

At Journey's End the Curtises let us start up a small CSA on their property.

(The adventure of those gardens is documented at www.journeysendcsa.blogspot.com)

Journey's End Farm is an incredible place and we learned so much from living there and growing vegetables for market there. The experience led us to feel called to grow vegetables for a living, and we decided to look for our own land all over the northeast. So this winter we wrote a business plan and started looking for properties via farmer-to-farmer land link organizations, for sale by owner listings, word of mouth, realtors, and signs by the side of the road. In March we took a weekend to travel to Vermont to look at properties, and after an unsuccessful trip we traveled south to visit our friend Tom in Rutland. On our way out from the detour to Tom's place, we spotted a "for sale" sign and pulled over to check it out.

Beautiful open field between barn and river

1820s timberframe

barn

Mill River

We had a nice impromptu tour of the land and visit with the owners. We liked the place, and it seemed like it would meet our business and personal needs. After a long discernment process, a few visits to the property, some research into the local farming community, farmers markets, co-op, Quaker meeting, etc... we realized that we felt called to make an offer on this property.

After much paperwork and phone calls, we became the owners of a Massey Ferguson 135 and the property June 23rd!

Picnicing by the river after becoming landowners. Weird.

Many thanks to the people who made this move possible: Terri and Dave, our generous loan officers who believe in lending money to young 20-somethings to start a farm (hooray!). Sandy, Kara's grandmother who also believes in loaning money to young farmers. Our agent, Julie of Equine Homes, who bent over backwards for 2 months or so. Otis. Robert. Colleen, our friend over at Fidelity. Tom, who lived in the right place at the right time. Lindsay and Scott, who introduced us to the Rutland area. Our third farmer, Ryan's dad. Not enough thanks to all our parents, our aunts and uncles, Sarina, and so many other friends and family members who have helped to provide us with the needed support to start making our dream come alive. Thank you.

Ryan and his dad figuring out how to get a plow off his trailer. A local farmer, Greg, generously lent his plow for the day.

First few plow passes

3 acres plowed up

view from a corner of the property

Mill River in June

So after plowing, Ryan's parents gave us the gift of hiring our new neighbors to run their discs over the fields. Some fields are now in summer cover crop.... And that's how this all began.