Late June Update

Well things have been very busy over at Turtle Bend Farm this month. The top picture is Mecca and her niece, Alyssa, in the field of blooming buckwheat at sunset. The bottom picture are the freshly staked and tied heirloom tomato plants.

Adam has working sun-up to sun-down this month to get the farm running and he has succeeded! The plants are about to catch up with us, but until then, here's our mid-June farm update:

Irrigation

Despite the fact that the rest of the continental United States has received record rainfall for the month of June, Northwest Georgia has not. East Tennessee, North Carolina, and Northeast Georgia have been hammered with afternoon thundershowers, while 50 miles to the south Turtle Bend Farm has seen no June rain. The farm field has literally received 0.3 inches of rain for the month of June in a month that normally gets around 4-5 inches of rain. To make matters worse, temperatures have remained in the low to mid nineties everyday. Needless to say, irrigating our two acres of vegetables has become a time consuming task. Fortunately, the drip irrigation that we have installed beside the tomatoes, peppers, and beans conserve labor, time and water. The dry conditions have forced us to water crops such as corn and sorghum, which can usually be drought resistant. We do not have a good system for overhead watering yet, so Adam has been moving the tanks and the water pump around the field in order to irrigate with overhead sprayers. If we continue without rain the irrigation system will have to be revamped so that it is not so time consuming and laborious. The creek levels have dropped from the lack of rain but are still maintaining their summer flow.

Harvest

Even though we got a late start in our first season, everything looks good and we are fairly close to our first big harvest. We are planning to attend our first markets next week, possibly on July 4^th. The heirloom tomatoes look good and are tied to tobacco sticks we picked up while visiting family in North Carolina. It was a time consuming task so hopefully it will support the weight of the tomatoes. We will have to figure out a better system for next year, when we anticipate doing twice as many tomatoes. Our bell pepper plants are heavy with green peppers and some are starting to turn their beautiful shades of yellow and orange. We will likely bring some green bell’s to sell next week while we let most of them ripen on the plant. We will also have a good first crop of green beans, squash and zucchini. Our black-eyed peas are looking extraordinary with their dark green leaves and yellow flowers. We aren’t sure if we will have the time to actually shell the peas for our customers or if they will just have to do that on their own. We have considered investing in a pea sheller but we have heard that they can damage the delicate peas.

Planting

In anticipation for our fall season we ordered plenty of winter squash like butternut, pumpkins, and spaghetti so they can be ready in October. Winter squash are planted in the summer and stay on the vine till it dries in the fall. They are called “winter” squash because they will keep through most of the winter. We have also been keeping up with our successions of green beans so that we can have tender, young green beans for our customers throughout the entirety of their season. We have also recently planted a crop of sorghum sugar cane, which will hopefully provide a small bit of molasses and a good seed crop for next year’s larger sorghum patch. If we have any extra molasses we will pass that on to our customers this year, and next year we plan to have a larger quantity.

Local Harvest Website

We have created a listing for our farm on a website that has been successful at creating a database of local farmers, farmers markets and restaurants that produce, sell or buy locally produced foods. Local Harvest is a good tool for anyone looking for sources of local food. You can see our listing here and view the list of crops we are growing and see when and where we will be selling them at farmers' markets around our area.

Early June 2009

Irrigation:

Our system is set up and is complete with two 275 gallon water tanks, a gas powered pump, drip irrigation, and cool spring-fed creek water. Special thanks to Morgan Hardware, of Rockmart, and their friendly staff for helping us with the proper PVC pipe connections. (wow, that was confusing). Another big thanks to Chaz Holt of Holt Heritage Farm & Supply in Euharlee, GA for his help with ordering our drip irrigation set-up. There were a lot of unknowns when it came to the amount of pressure coming from our tanks to the drip lines but, it is up and working without a problem. So basically the water is pumped into the tank and then gravity and the weight of the water pushes the water through the drip lines which are at the base of each plant. If only we could eventually find an affordable solar powered water pump we would not be using any fossil fuels to irrigate our fields. We will post pictures soon.

Planted and Planting:

We got a late start this year because of the move from Alabama but have been busy to get in everything that we can. So far we have about 300 heirloom tomato plants that are looking really good, 150 sweet and hot peppers, 2 varieties of green beans, various southern peas, sweet potatoes, summer squash, zucchini, cucumbers, black beans, silver queen corn, several types of melons, and swiss chard planted. We got our second round of seeds in yesterday so we are really enjoying watching the rain fall today. We have yet to plant our pumpkins and our sorghum sugar cane. We also have a good crop of buckwheat coming in- we are just using this for a cover crop but we might try to harvest some of it depending on how difficult and laborious it might be without the proper equipment.

Harvest:

We just harvested our first crop of Turtle Bend Farm: Garlic. It is planted and the fall and matures in the late spring and early summer. Most of this garlic will be cured, dried, and used for seed garlic next year so we can have giant harvest and have some for sale. The varieties were artichoke and creole which are suited for warm weather. Special thanks to our first summer intern of the year and long time friend, Zack Pozebanchuck. He is pictured in the bottom photo weeding the garlic plants and Adam is in the middle photo.

Our Standards for Production

Adam and I believe in following sustainable agricultural practices. Although what is considered "sustainable" may change over time, we are committed to constantly learning about new and existing ways to produce healthy food that help preserve our surrounding natural resources, promote ecological diversity on and around our farm, and protect the food we produce from any harmful substances. Although we are currently undecided on whether to become certified "organic" or certified "naturally grown" or not certified at all, our customers and neighbors can rest assured that our agricultural practices meet or exceed the requirements of these certification programs. Simply put, that means that we will employ natural methods for building soil fertility, such as cover crops and organic or natural soil amendments. We will never spray crops with harmful pesticides or other chemicals that have not been approved by organic or naturally grown certification programs. We will encourage biodiversity on our farm in order to promote natural processes of insect and disease control and we will rotate our crops to discourage disease. Although Adam and I have a lot to learn about agriculture, we are committed to providing our customers and our community with the cleanest, highest quality fruits and vegetables possible. We are also committed to transparency and we are happy to address any suggestions, questions or comments that you may have. We hope to bring high-quality, nutritious foods to your table this season.

Turtle Bend comes alive!

The farming has officially begun!! Adam and I finally put some seeds and plants in the ground on Friday and Saturday as the rain held off until dark on Saturday night. Our tomato starts look wonderful- all 300 of them! We have a great assortment of heirloom varieties. We did buy about 45 organic tomato starts from Melanie Hernandez at Youngs Mill Plant Farm in Kingston, GA because we were unsure about how ours would do- but it turns out that our method of seeding in soil blocks (prescribed by Elliot Coleman) made beautiful, strong tomato starts. We will have the following varieties: Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra, Yellow Brandywine, Arkansas Traveler, Roma, Aunt Ruby's German Cherry, Principe Borghese, Kellogg, and one more I can't think of at the moment. Get ready to have heirloom tomato sandwiches, salsas and more!

We also planted about 100 pepper plants. We have a good mix of sweet peppers and hot peppers. We planted eggplant (2 varities) and basil. We seeded our first successions of green beans (2 varieties), black eyed peas, sweet corn, pickling and eating cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash. Oh, and we planted about 90 sweet potato slips! Next weekend we will be putting in our okra, along with more corn, peas, squash and more! We also finally took some pictures of our area, although we still need a panoramic shot of the field.

Adam also got the fence up and running. Now we just have to install the gate and get another charger to increase our voltage. The fence will hopefully deter the deer from eating our crops! The other good news is that Adam only has one week of teaching school before he becomes a full-time farmer! He spent every waking hour this weekend tirelessly working on the farm and loving every minute of it. He used our new tiller and my dad's tractor for the first time this weekend and really transformed our field into beautiful beds of rich soil. We also planted 1 acre of buckwheat for a cover crop. We are competing with some aggressive grasses (Johnson Grass) so we are trying to introduce some healthy competition!

The pictures from top to bottom: Those are our sweet potato slips freshly planted; my brother, Jordan, and his daughter, Alyssa on my dad's Ford tractor; a beautiful storm cloud headed for us; our first bed of tomato plants; Mecca seeding flats of tomatoes about a month ago.

Irrigation blues

One issue that we have had the most trouble figuring out has been irrigation. We decided early on that we were going to irrigate from the creek using a gas-powered pump because there is no well closeby and no electricity run to the field (yet). We contacted our local NRCS office about applying for a cost-share for irrigation and to learn about how to set up our irrigation. We got good news and bad news. The good news is that they have engineers who can design a system for us since we qualify as "small-scale" producers, but that wouldn't be ready for several months. The bad news is that we can't get any cost share until we clear $1,000 of farm income, and even then, our application wouldn't go through until next year. So, we were on our own. After scouring the internet and coming up short on technical information, we finally figured it out ourselves with a little help from random people who sold different pieces of our irrigation system. We bought two 250 gallon tanks from a guy who listed them on craigslist. Then we went to Tractor Supply and bought a gas-powered water pump, hoses and other fixtures. We finally got a good farm boy who knew something about moving water and he was a big help. The last piece was the drip lines. Because we are going to run a low-pressure system, the drip lines are our best bet. We are lucky to have the Holt Family Farm Supply in nearby Euharlee, GA. Charles Holt is a dripworks distributor and he is ordering our drip lines and other fixtures. We hope to get this system going this weekend and I will post some pictures of that as well. Whew! Water is important! One thing we have realized in trying to figure out everything from straight fencelines to pumping water is that there IS a use for that math we learned in high school! If only we could remember it!

Weekend Farmers

Right now we are weekend farmers. We have been traveling up to Rockmart, GA from Auburn, AL every weekend for the past month or so to start working our field and getting the farm ready. Initially, we thought we would go work on some other farms this summer and start our own farm next year. My dad plowed the field for us because we were going to plant a cover crop of buckwheat to start preparing the field for next year. Once we saw that beautiful soil and beautiful surroundings, we decided to go ahead and start our farm this year. We figured that half of learning how to farm is learning at the particular piece of land you are farming with. Plus, we just bought a small house across the road from our field and just couldn't imagine going to live somewhere else with a perfectly good house sitting there. So, that's why we are currently farming on the weekends, but only for another two weekends. Adam's teaching job will be ending in a week and a half and after that he will be on the field full time. Mecca still has to finish up her master's thesis, but she will still be able to spend more time farming this summer.

So, last weekend we made some progress. Although it was still too wet to till and plant, we made some headway on our fence and will be able to finish it up this weekend. Unfortunately I forgot to bring the camera, so pictures will be up next week.