Say Hi to Eeyore!

Nice to see you! My name is Eeyore. I'm a miniature donkey, and I've lived at Trim Pines since 2010. Until then I lived for 11 years with a fun family of kids who have since grown up and gone away to college. They called me Number 7 - you know, after the donkey in Green Acres.

I love grass and corn, oats and wheat. Parents can help children feed them to me. I plan to hang around here for quite a long time - mini donkeys can live 25-35 years. My "hee-haw" sound is called a bray...and around here, the family and crew can hear me almost a quarter of a mile away!

Mayhem in the Field

It's a relief, being able to sit here and type a blog post after the power outage we experienced on Thursday. I was worried it would last days, like the ones in the residential neighborhoods where some of our friends live. Fortunately, the first real storm of July 2012 only knocked out the farm's power for about seven hours. That meant we could keep our plants alive through the heat that's continuing over the next several days.

In the meantime, we spent three of those hours hurriedly looking over the storm damage and preparing to be without water - the most important thing our electricity provides us - for a couple of days. We gathered generators, water jugs; evaluated water and air storage tanks, and started to determine where to go to fill them up. One generator was dedicated to the refrigerators so our CSA members' produce would stay fresh for pickup Thursday afternoon.

Of course we also discovered some damage in the fields as we slogged ankle-deep in mud in some of the freshly tilled areas. The market garden and sweet corn field sustained the worst of the wind damage. The 15x150ft shade tent that we built over the pepper plants on Tuesday didn't make it through the storm. Of course a lot of the fabric landed on plants, but most of the plants had been laid down by the wind already. Thank goodness the shade cloth isn't terribly heavy - as we moved it off the plants, we realized that not many of them appear to be severely damaged.

It's been very interesting to watch the vegetable plants return from their wind damage. I wish I'd gotten some photos of the "before" to show how they were leaning over. But now the green beans, broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, as well as the tallest sweet corn are all standing back up again, with just a few exceptions. Only time will tell how this affects all these beautiful plants that we've worked so hard to nurture. The one category that doesn't seem to have been much affected is the cucurbits: the cucumbers, watermelons, cantaloupes and squashes all seemed to be standing tall or if they're vines, lying in a healthy-looking pose on their rows.

So we've pushed on, watering where it's needed (because the storm didn't end our drought by any means) and trellising and pruning those plants that are long and leggy like tomatoes and cucumbers. Now all that's left to clean up from the storm are a few sections of plastic mulch in the zucchini field that were torn, and finish re-erecting that pepper tent...just as soon as enough of us are in one place at the same time. And we're grateful that our storm damage was truly minimal, compared to what others have experienced!

Hot, Dry Weather: Tree Check Reminder!

I know life is busy, so here's a reminder to head outside and spend a few minutes of quality time with your new trees! Check the moisture level in the soil to see if they need some water.
Here's the quick version:

• Dig down a few inches into the root ball.
• If the soil is wet, head back inside for a cool drink of your own.
• If the soil is only damp, or getting dry, give the tree a long, slow drink instead.

The longer, more detailed version is at your fingertips on our landscape tips page.
You can also check our our moisture monitoring tutorial if you'd like to learn more about it. (This one's a downloadable pdf file)

A few things to remember about transplanted trees and water:

• A tree can be considered "new" for the first three years, or even four, after it's planted
• Rain is usually insufficient for transplanted trees, so be sure to check on them even if it's rained.
• Mulch is important for helping a tree to settle in to its new home.
• Keeping the soil completely saturated all the time can suffocate roots or cause disease.

Organic? But what about those bugs?

This past week I was admiring all that's happening in the gardens and Hoop House 1 (as I've come to call it now that Hoop House 2 is about to go up). I was admiring the bok choy with its beautiful green & white leaves almost ready to harvest; thinking about thinning the garlic and adding some to the first week's CSA boxes...and being relieved that my carrots have finally started to come up and I can see some of them. Still didn't have any lettuce up in the bed I planted a month ago, so I did a germination test. The seeds seemed ok. It must have been me: I didn't have enough water on the bed the first time around. So I replanted in another space and left the first one for now. I want to see if giving the first bed some more water will bring those stubborn seeds around!

My poor bok choy were eaten to half their original size!

This morning - Saturday - I wander into the hoop house to check on the temperature and you could have knocked me over with a brick! The beautiful bok choy were half eaten! Top to middle, the whole bed had been chewed up by insects...my cute little row of turnips, too. We won't be having bok choy in our menu this week, but I hope the organic measures I took today will allow those babies to recover by next week. Almost 14 days? We'll just have to wait and see.

This is how I hope they look when they recover

All this has me thinking about the first time we tried Bok Choy a couple years ago. The pretty little plants got to a nice 8 or 10 inches tall, and they were eaten. That first time, I just let the planting go because I didn't have anyone counting on it and we were learning a dozen other crops at the same time. Now, I'm setting my sights on finding out how to handle this and the pests that attack our other cabbage-y friends.

The better news about the veggies is that the onions, beans, peas, radishes, peppers and a handful of tomatoes are all off to a great start. On Thursday Mike and Mike laid three rows of plastic mulch in the main garden, plus one looong row of plastic where we'll grow zucchini for the food bank. As soon as the ground is dry enough to walk on we can start planting! As Scarlett said, "tomorrow is another day."