Category Archives: newsletters ’13

Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #18, 6/5/13

What’s been going on!

OMG the Blueberries!  We saw this train coming and haven’t been able to get enough folks to push the car off the tracks fast enough.  Now I will admit that the organizing of the blueberry picking crew is free form but has always worked out with enough hands.  It is hard to both accurately predict when and how many berries there will be and with only a three week season, it is equally hard to get people who will organize their whole lives around a part time, mornings only job.  But for years we would have a few key folks who would then bring their friends and others would show up for a day or so and it has worked.

This season we have the key people and they have tried to shake their networks but it has resulted in just a few extra pickers.  Combined with one of, if not the biggest, crops we have ever had and it is now all hands on deck to try and get the berries off the plants before they hit the ground.  When all of us, including Betsy, are picking berries every morning you know we are in trouble.  Fortunately the weather is also not blistering hot and ripening the berries even faster.  This too we will survive but the resulting lack of attention to the other chores on the farm means there will be repercussions we will have to deal with in the weeks and months to come.  Oh well there will be good eating in the meantime.

Farm to Fork Picnic coming up this Sunday, still time to get your tickets as it is not quite sold out, yet.  Delivered the turkeys to Nana’s last week so they could get on with making the Smoked Turkey Sausage.  Tomorrow we will take them the vegetables for the Early Summer Vegetable Crostini and the Quick Fennel pickle that will top the sausage.  The weather looks really good for early June and it should be a great afternoon as always.

Picture of the Week

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More berries than leaves and Liz picking as fast as she can

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #17, 5/29/13

What’s been going on!

The glorious weather is gone but it was amazing to be in the high 30’s on Saturday morning this late in the spring.  We took great advantage of the last coolish days to give the blueberries a final weed eating and hand pruning, ready for the pickers.  The first small batch of berries were harvested on Monday, second pass through today, they look great!  With the impending heat it will be all hands on deck next week for sure.

Almost all the peppers are now in the ground, Jennie and Liz did a great job, helped by the soil moisture being just right for cutting the furrows in the no-till area which resulted in maybe the best planting conditions we have ever had.  There are many difficulties in working with small scale no-till most of which are equipment related.  In large scale no-till they have the advantage of bigger tractors, more horsepower and heavier steel to manage the cover crop and to put plants in the ground and of course in conventional farm systems, herbicides to kill the cover crop.

In our system we have a small, light, tractor and lighter cutting disks to cut through the thick cover crop and open the planting furrows.  The biggest problem we usually have is that the massive cover crop sucks all the water out of the soil making it so hard that the cutting implements can’t open the soil well.  Not this year, following last week’s 3 inches of rain, it had dried out just enough to work beautifully yesterday.  It makes the hand planting of the peppers twice as fast.

We are getting painfully close to finishing up the building project with the septic system finally going in this week (held up by too much rain) and the bathroom floor and fixtures being finished up by the end of the week too.  All that leaves is trenching in the water line and the electrician finishing up the plugs and lights, we can then call for a final inspection and get the power turned on.  Can’t happen soon enough, we have no business working on a building project during the busy spring season.

Picture of the Week

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Happy pepper plants in no-till left and landscape fabric right

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Peregrine Farm News, Vol. 10 #16, 5/24/13

What’s been going on!

Last wholesale delivery of lettuce yesterday, after another three inches of rain this week I told the produce managers that if this was a prize fight I would stop it now, so I did.  A record short season for lettuce deliveries to Weaver Street, only three weeks but when it starts late and then it rains two or three times the average something has to give.  It was the lettuce.  That doesn’t mean we are done with lettuce for market, just not enough good looking heads to fill the large orders.  Oh well, time to move on, blueberries are calling.

Farm to Fork Picnic coming up in two weeks, June 9th.  Apparently a lot of folks think that it is already sold out, which it always does but not quite yet, still time to get your tickets.  Not only is this a great food event pairing some of the area’s best chefs with the best farmers to create amazing fresh flavors and food but it also more importantly supports new farmer training programs at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) and the Breeze Farm in Orange county where the event is held.

34 pairings this year plus the artisans tent, bigger than last year.  We are excited to be working with Scott Howell from Nana’s in Durham, his first time participating but not his first time at the rodeo as one of the finest restaurants in North Carolina.  We are working on something with turkey (a turkey salami) and of course a vegetable dish hopefully with the first tomatoes of the season.  Don’t let this opportunity pass.

So the rain has held us up on the big job this week, second only to tomato planting week is pepper week.  The beds for the specialty hot and sweet peppers have been prepared with irrigation line and landscape fabric and the cover crop on the no-till beds have been rolled and crimped.  Hopefully it will dry out enough today to plant the fabric beds this afternoon and the forecast looks as if we can get the rest tucked into the no-till area on Monday or Tuesday.  The plants look awesome, at the perfect stage of growth to hit the soil running, let’s hope we can get it done soon.

Picture of the Week

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Thousands of pepper plants raring to go

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #15, 5/17/13

What’s been going on!

Glorious weather the last few days but we knew it had to end and so it does, going from the 30’s Tuesday morning (even found some ice on raised exposed surfaces) to the high 80’s the next day, ugh.  We did take advantage of the enjoyable conditions to get a lot done.  Planting is caught up and nearly so with cultivation and weeding.  The mowing is relentless this time of year but the incessant growth should slow down with the heat.

We have been working on the pre blueberry picking clean-up of the patch with hard mowing and then cutting out the bird volunteered small trees, honey suckle and other vining things including poison ivy.  The problem with perennial plantings is sooner or later all kinds of weed seeds are deposited by wind and birds that perch in the plants.  Unlike an annual planting which you can turn under and kill any sprouted plants, here the unwanted can get a foot hold and hide from mowers, weed eaters and pruners.  After 23 years in the ground we have some crafty invaders.

After nearly two inches of rain last week we are now racing around getting the last of the irrigation set up to try and reduce the shock to the crops that have been luxuriating in the cool spring weather.  Add to that covering two more Big Tops, whole sale deliveries of lettuce to Weaver Street Market and snatching spare time to try and finish up the building project we have officially hit the busy season.

Despite that we did have two “family” moments this week.  First we did race up to Burnsville to help Rett clean up his fields after last week’s flood, picking river rocks out of the planting areas, pulling up sand covered row covers and debris filled pea trellis.  Eight hours of driving for four hours work but we just had to go help.  Monday Elizabeth, worked for us six years ago and is getting married in two weeks, came out to have her wedding dress photos taken out in the fields.  Always non-traditional the shots in the onion field certainly will be different from your normal bride pictures.

On a final note, Dalton Zachary one of the long time vendors at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market, a neighbor of ours and a continuing inspiration is turning 90 tomorrow and will be at his market stall, as always, with his family.  We are always amazed at how he does it all.

Picture of the Week

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Jennie and Liz harvesting radishes

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #14, 5/8/13

What’s been going on!

So I was talking to a dairy farmer the other day and he was asking if we have had too much rain because he couldn’t get a number of chores done until it dried out some.  I said not too much yet but we sure could use some sun.  It has been a long time since we have had a really wet spring, the kind where you have water standing in the fields and you wait for weeks to get anything done.

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s we had a number of years when it rained like hell, particularly in early spring, and we many times wondered if we were ever going to get anything planted or weeded.  This is when we developed our system of raising our beds up the fall before so they would drain and warm up fast come spring and heavy rains.  We even had a number of floods in our creek bottom field that finally made us stop using those fields (even though it is the best soil on the farm) in the regular rotation because we couldn’t afford to lose crops, then after Hurricane Fran in 1996 the tap turned off.

We can’t remember a flood in the bottom since Fran and have slowly begun using that field on a more regular basis but still not for our major crops: lettuce, peppers and tomatoes.  They are way up on the hill, safe from high water but certainly not immune to multiple other kinds of plagues that could hit them.  As I always point out to new farmers, bad things will happen but you can learn a lot from those situations.

One of our graduates, who is now farming a beautiful farm on the banks of the Cane river north of Asheville, had a huge flood this week which carried off not only much of what he had planted for this spring but a lot of his topsoil as well, replacing it with river rocks.  He will lose the use of that area for some time to come but is planning on picking up all the rocks he can to start the process.  The reason that creek bottom fields have rich soil is the same reason they flood, sometimes there is too much water and the stream deposits it there.  So the answer to the dairy farmer is no we haven’t hand too much rain here but lots of other folks have, wish we could go help pick rocks.  Come on sun!

Picture of the Week

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A June flood in 1993 which took our whole tomato crop

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #13, 5/3/13

What’s been going on!

What is the bright orb in the sky?  Nearly a week without sun, bad for the psyche and some of the crops.  Unfortunately it looks like it will not last long, maybe through the first part of Sunday.  We will have to move fast to get more things planted, especially the big planting of winter squash.  We have had an erratic history with winter squash but this year we are screwing ourselves to the task of doing an excellent job so we can have plenty to sell through next winter if possible.

We have had many kind words about the article this week in the N&O about our former staff who have gone on to run their own farms.  Many great people have passed through the farm from our first real employee Greg Dusenberry to Liz and Jennie now on staff.  We never set out to train new farmers, we just want to equip them with the information they need to do a good job for us and to treat them as well as we can.  This business has so many moving parts that for them to understand why we do things the way we do and consequently want them to do them that exactly way, we have to teach them about the whole business not just how to pick turnips.

We are proud of all the “full season” employees we have had even the ones who decided that farming wasn’t for them, as that is a more important a thing to learn than how to trellis a tomato.  We have been very lucky to mostly hire people who already had worked on other small farms and had a real desire to have their own farm someday, not just something to do for the summer.  Mostly we were just fine tuning their skills, in many ways we have been their last stop before they actually jumped off the dock and swam to their own operations or went on to graduate school.  Farming is not an easy business and you have to really be committed to doing it, there are many reasons why we are less than one percent of the population.

One good thing about the drizzly weather, it made it easy to go inside the building project and work on the sheetrock.  Great strides in that direction, another few days and we can roll on some paint and call the electrician in to finish it out.  Whoopee!

 Pictures of the Week

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Our awesome staff harvesting Broccoli Raab, Jennie in front, Liz in the distance

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Almost there

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #12, 4/24/13

What’s been going on!

Tired today or at least a bit sore.  Two mornings of splitting firewood and two afternoons of hanging sheetrock in the new building.  Not too many jobs have as many awkward moves and lifting of heavy things.  There always seems to be a period in the spring when we have to spend a day or two tying up projects that didn’t quite get finished over the winter.  This spring no exception and the workshop project of course will continue to take a lot of time and attention for the next month.

The firewood is of course a perennial project, we heat the house with wood, always have.  We now have “heat on the wall” but only use it when we go away and don’t want the pipes to freeze.  With fifteen acres of woods there are always trees that need to be cut up from storm damage or just dying.  This year of course were the four big trees that came down in the big storm last July that blew down the Big Tops.  With so much going on we haven’t had time to finish cutting them up until the last month.  It is nice to have the front yard unobstructed again and as a silver lining to the storm damage, a years’ worth of firewood “in the dry” as my brother would say.

The main job this week continues to be getting the big planting of tomatoes in the ground.  Jennie and Liz have all the irrigation and fabric on the beds and today will get all the trellis built.  Tomorrow, in the cloudy and showery weather, will be the perfect conditions to transplant the big plants so they will have very little transplant shock.  Still need to sucker (prune) the early tomatoes and move the peppers up to their bigger containers, hopefully by end of Friday.

For the second year in a row we will not be on the Farm Tour this weekend, just too much going on.  If you go, have a good time, we will be hanging sheetrock and other fun pursuits.

Pictures of the Week

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Tomato beds ready for trellis

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100’s of plants ready to go in the ground

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #11, 4/19/13

What’s been going on!

One of those a chicken on a hot plate weeks with lots of things going on that needed to coordinate well.  I would say mostly successful.  The main task was to get the last few parts of the tomato Big Tops installed and then pull the plastic cover over the bows.  In the rebuild we are using some new techniques and materials but it went smoothly.  In our second year together as a team, the four of us have the covering dance down to a well choreographed ballet.

Jennie and Liz start by finding the lead edge that will be pulled over the bows and “fluff” the rest of the plastic so it will follow easily.  With me on a 10’ step ladder I lead one corner over one thirteen foot high end hoop with a rope tied to it, handing it to Liz who then pulls will almost all her might while Jennie pushes the plastic up and over the top webbing with a long handled broom.  As Jennie gets near the halfway point I run to the far end and climb another ladder and pull the other corner over, with rope, hand it to Betsy and then I begin to move down the side of the tunnel flapping and pulling the edge down.

Corners tied off I use the ladders at each end to clip a piece of wide webbing onto the end hoops that holds the ends of the plastic to the frame while Betsy feeds one of the ropes, that actually hold the plastic onto the frame, down the leg row to the far end.  With two of us on each side we pass the rope back and forth over the top, two people managing the rope and two tightening and tying it down to the top to the legs.  Rinse and repeat with another rope and we are done.  40 minutes elapsed time.

The rest of the week consisted of cultivation, weeding, trellising peas, planting and getting ready for planting.  The tomato beds are all ready for covering with landscape fabric and trellis building, might start today, depends on how crazy the weather is this afternoon with the next front moving in.  Always extra-curricular activities like teaching class, insulating the new building, Farm to Fork picnic meetings and on, must be spring.

Pictures of the Week

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Way too much time on a ladder

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Beautiful spring cover crops and freshly turned peppers beds, the Big Tops cresting the hill in the distance

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #10, 4/12/13

What’s been going on!

Spring definitely sprang this week!  It is always amazing how in a day or two it goes from winter gray to all things green.  Of course days of temperatures in the high 80’s doesn’t hurt, other than the sweating brows of the folks in the field.  I hope we can slip back to more of my temperature range of the 60’s and 70’s, not quite ready to go to air conditioning weather.

While we are still pumping to fill the upper pond before the trees fully leaf out and start to suck all the water out of the ground, the weekly rains have been just about perfect for planting.  In years past we used to pace around waiting for it to dry out enough so we could rush out and poke some plants in the ground before the next rain came, three days was all we needed to be able to till and sometimes that was difficult to get.

Spring planting now is all about watching the forecast so we can time our big planting days just before the rains arrive that way we don’t have to water the plants in or set up irrigation.  It is all just a delay tactic as we will eventually have to set up irrigation on everything as soon as the temperatures consistently hit the 80’s.  It is a familiar dance now of cultivating out the newly germinated weeds as soon as the soil dries out enough, maybe picking up the bigger rocks now exposed by the rain and then preparing the next beds for planting.

Yesterday we planted lisianthus, the first zinnias, second round of sunflowers and the last succession of spinach and radishes.  Cool season crops giving way to warm season ones.  Next week is tomato preparation week, have to get the last bits of the Big Top reconstruction done so we can pull the plastic over and begin bed prep and trellis building.  Hold on here it comes!

Pictures of the Week

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Shrubs blooming, trees leafing out, lettuce glistening after the rain

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 10 #9, 3/29/13

What’s been going on!

Jennie keeps asking “what is with the wind?”  I reply it is always windy in March, just the spring battle of the jet stream as it begrudgingly moves north.  Combined with what appears to be the 5th coldest March on record and it is irritating.  I think that because 2012 was the warmest March ever it is even more noticeable.  I always find some comfort in knowing it could be worse like 1960, the coldest March ever, when the average temperature was a full seven degrees colder than this past month at 37 degrees and it snowed 14 inches!

Big week, we slid the little tunnels over the beds that will be home to the early tomatoes and cucumbers.  With the help of a few students from the Sustainable Ag. Program at CCCC the six of us pulled the 16’X48’ hoops to their new positions for the year.  A week behind schedule but still OK considering the weather.  We closed them up tight to heat up the soil as much as we can before we transplant the tomatoes on Monday.  Always good to get that job behind us.

With the winds the soil has dried out nicely on top and it is a good time for us to get the first cultivating/weed control done for the year before we have to set up irrigation.  We pulled all the floating row covers off and Liz ran the wheel hoe through the first lettuces and spring vegetables.  The sad part is with little real rain in the forecast we will soon have to fire up the irrigation system.

The building project is getting closer to complete.  We passed all the rough in inspections and insulation is nearly done, the sheetrock arrives today.  Any day now Duke Power will show up to trench in the new power line and soon thereafter a new septic system will be installed.  A little sheetrock mudding and paint and we can call it done (mostly).  Whew, just in time for the busy growing season.

Pictures of the Week

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Liz with the cultivation tools, wheel hoe and stirrup hoe

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