New chicks arrived last week! We get new day-old chicks in the mail about every four weeks. The boys-- and Hazel now, too!-- love to be a part of picking them up from the post office and helping them get settled into their new home of the brooder house. They help ensure the chicks have food, water and are warm.

The kids ride in the truck to pick up the chicks, bring them home and help unload. We sometimes use the baby stroller to get the boxes from the driveway to the brooder house. (Baby tools are used for all kinds of things around here!). Then the boys help open the boxes to get the chicks safely into their new home.

They recently have started wanting to have a pet chick. They've "adopted" three chicks so far. It usually lasts for about a day, where they bring one up to the porch and make a special home for it in a large box, with grass, water and food. They've actually been doing pretty well taking good care of them, being super gentle and ensuring they have everything they need. Hazel squeals when she pets them. After a day or so, they start to forget about checking on it, so we put it back with its family in the brooder house. Farm training has begun!

Every farm has different challenges, based on so many factors. Geographic location, microclimate, how many trees are on the property, the direction and angle of the slope of the fields, etc.  Some things can be both a challenge and a blessing, depending on the context. One challenge/blessing we have is our soil holds water.  In drought years, this is great, because the soil holds onto moisture longer than fields just down the road from us. But in wet seasons like we've been having, it's a challenge.  Without doing anything to mitigate the situation, root crops like potatoes and carrots can rot in the field, it takes longer to dry out to be able to plant new crops, and harvesting can get pretty sloppy. 

We've been experimenting with many different ways to help with this situation. One of the first things we've been doing since beginning to farm has been raised beds. We mound up soil into beds for the rows, and have sunken pathways to walk between the rows. This helps the water drain out of the area where the crops are growing. However, in times when it's wet for weeks like we've had this and last week, that isn't enough.

The soil type we have is silty loam, but we also have a fragipan of hardened mud about 2 feet under the top soil that keeps the water from fully draining away. Roots can't penetrate it, and there's even a story of Adam's great grandmother getting in a hole they were digging, trying to get at it with a screw driver, and even that didn't work. This is unique to our little area in Rhodelia along the Ohio River. Farmers just 10 miles away in Brandenburg have well-draining soil.

In Adam and Rae's short farming history on this land, some ways we've been working with this are using raised beds, planting cover crops that get plowed back into the soil to increase organic matter and build the soil, and positioning the slopes of the beds so the water drains out toward the edge of the field instead of getting trapped in the middle. About three years ago, we also started using plasticulture on the raised beds, which is basically using a layer of plastic as a mulch to help limit weeds and better control water conditions of the soil. It helps the soil from getting too wet, and also keeps moisture in the beds in the middle of August when it's typically dry.

In October 2017, Adam read some new research out of the University of Kentucky Extension service that was showing that a particular type of Rye grass was having success in breaking through fragipan, so we've been experimenting with this too. Now, this is a little embarrassing, but we've never once since we've been farming had a good potato crop. ("A farmer who can't grow potatoes? What kind of farmer are you, anways?" That's how it feels).  This year, we used plastic mulch on a raised potato bed, and planted rye grass in the walk paths.  The rye grass is digging deep into the soil helping create pathways for drainage, while also sucking up excess water. The potatoes are able to access the water they need, and the soil under the plastic is moist but not wet.  It looks like we're going to have an excellent potato crop this year. We started harvesting this week. The plants are loaded, and the potatoes are looking great.

There's no silver bullet solution in organic farming. It's a lot of experimentation and trial and error to figure out exactly what works, and how to use natural elements to help challenges become blessings.

​Harvests have been lush!  Even though it's been hot, the early fields of greens still look great, with broccoli and cauliflower on the way!
 
We've been planting a lot!  With the days still getting longer with the summer solstice just three weeks away, the rush is on to get as much as we can in the ground. In mid-May, we direct seeded carrots, arugula and turnips.  This week, we used the new vacuum seeder to plant sweet corn, okra, dry beans and sorghum.  (See photos below). That was about 1.5 acres total.   We also planted an acre of winter squash: butternut, spaghetti and delicata.   This last week was very hot and dry for us, so got the irrigation system up and running a little earlier than usual to water to get those seeds to germinate, especially the ones planted in mid-May.  So the unexpected rain on Sunday was perfect timing for the vegetable fields!  

It was really fun to use the vacuum seeder and think of all the people who contributed to helping us get that this year. It made that work so much quicker, and will be such a boon come weeding time! It also is wonderful to be doing this work for such a supportive community.  Thank you!

On Sunday, we also had our annual "3 sisters" planting of corn, beans and squash.  We plant heirloom seeds that have been shared among friends and passed down from generations past.  The corn is rainbow colored... white, red and purple kernels to grind into cornmeal to make cornbread. We plant this as a community patch, where folks from Sustainable Agriculture Louisville come out to work together for the planting. We plant by hand, the old-fashioned way. The "3 sisters" work together in a symbiotic relationship.  The corn grows tall, the beans climb up it, and the squash covers the ground with a ground cover to shade out the weeds. There are one or two weeding days before the winter squash leaves cover the ground, but once they are established, we don't have to do much else to it until harvest time in October or November.  On harvest day, we share the bounty with who is there. What is harvested from this patch is never for sale, it's only meant to be shared. It's a special tradition we've been doing for eight or nine years now. On Sunday, we were finishing the very last row when the rains started. It felt like such a blessing on our little community, and the work we had just completed together.

It's our first year making maple syrup. We partnered with a young Mennonite boy to tap trees, and we're using our sorghum cooking pan to cook it.  We've collected four batches of sap now.  We collected yesterday and got 180 gallons of sap.  The run before that we got 210 gallons! That 210 gallons made about 5 gallons of syrup.

It's a long process, but the syrup is delicious! We've only given some away as gifts so far, and Adam's aunt said, "this is the best syrup I've ever poured on my pancakes!" We think it's awfully good, too. It's really fun to add half-cooked sap into your tea or coffee.

The first 120 gallons of sap we collected just before the January cold spell. When we tried to transfer it to the cooking pan the next day when the temp had plummeted, the valve broke, maybe because it was frozen, and all the sap spilled onto the ground! It took us about a half a day to recover emotionally, but we finally started to think of it as an offering to the Earth. Round 2 went well, when we figured out fire temperature, cooking process, when it was done, and how to finish it off. We made a great batch of syrup! Round 3 in progress now! Now we need to keep making a few more batches and figure out how to bottle and label it so you can enjoy some too!