2018 - The Farm

Well, I've been gone a few years from the board, and away from growing peppers, but looks like life is pushing me back that way again. 
 
I recently (last month) closed on a 25 acre farm in Central Illinois with some primo soil, and I'm going to give a commercial grow a test run. 
 

 

 
From up on the roof, when I was doing some roof repairs on the outbuildings. Not much as far as the eye can see, but cornfields...
 

 
 
Has a 4 stall garage and a horse stable on the property
 

 

 

 
Probably do my grow room upstairs here after I insulate it
 

 
Built some doors for the horse barn and patched the roof last month
 

 

 
 
Anyway just dropped a cold grand on seeds from pepperlover and buckeye, going to hit a greenhouse supplier up for other materials next week.
 
Have plans to build a 30x72' greenhouse in the spring, and a ~1200 sq foot dedicated grow room. Too late really to help with this year's grow, but next year it'll save me a lot of hassle on hardening off. 
 
The greenhouse, I am going to do a piped infloor heat slab, with a horizontal loop geothermal system (I own a mini excavator) that is solar powered. So heating should be nice, uniform, not create heat / cold bubbles, and not dry out plants like forced air would. I build circuit boards in my day job, so I will also build a microcontroller to handle the automated watering system with soil moisture monitors and actuated plumbing valves on the water supply.
 
Also plan on building a "deep winter" greenhouse for year round production. Got blueprints I made from a couple of years back, those are walled on three sides with heavy duty insulation, with the glass wall side angled to face winter solstice, so you can grow in the deep freeze months of the north. In the summer, those get hot enough to use as a natural dehydrator, replace the tables with racks for bulk drying.
 
Only doing a half acre or so of peppers to start with this year, the balance will be put in corn. I can't manage more than that with the labor I have available. (When you start talking thousands of plants, simple tasks like up-potting grow in to hundreds or thousands of man hours...)
 
Going to hire some local kids to help, school has a good ag co-op program for high schoolers, they can get school credit working on local farms. Since the plant out and harvest doesn't conflict too badly with corn, shouldn't have a problem finding labor around here.
 
Anyway, that's the plans.
 
We'll see how it goes.. er.. grows.
 

 

[TrentL]

Today we direct sow some melons and sweet corn at the farm.
Prep the first high tunnel for suspended irrigation lines and finish side walls.

Compact aggregate for a 10x10 slab that we formed up yesterday.
Call in a concrete truck and pour a slab.
Pick up a 2,000 gallon water holding tank.
Build a mobile cart for drip line.
Try to find a source for a few hundred bales of straw.
Set some 4x4 posts. Buy more 4x4 posts.
Mix up potting soil for isolation plants...
Tomorrow we ..
Build a support wall for irrigation piping manifolds.
Plumb in irrigation.
Get drip line run and plumbed in, and test my plumbing contraption.
Receive 52,000 sq foot of ground cover, and start covering the field.
Mix more soil for isolation plants...
Friday? we...
Drive t-posts and suspend trellis for cucumbers
Plant peppers, direct sow cucumbers.. okra.. beans... sweet corn
Run one mile of drip irrigation. Test the irrigation zones
Plant an acre of watermelons..
Pot up isolation plants.. mix more soil...
Think we'll get it done by Friday? haha.. HAHAHAHA yeah right.

 
There's a dozen things I'm forgetting, too. 

Like.. uhh.. stringing a few hundred tomato plants. 
 
Finish building the gravel access road.
 
Finding a high flow water pump for the tank that can push 80gpm 
 
Ordering fish hydrolysate and soluble rock phosphate
 
Getting my field map done for MOSA organic certification, plus some other paperwork like tracking down the old owner to get him to sign a sheet saying he never sprayed anything on the horse pasture.
 
Paying the neighbor for tilling up the north pasture
 
Ordering a pressure regulator for the first cold frame building, along with clip on drip emitters for the isolation potted plants
 
Figuring out what other plumbing stuff I need for the mix tank and how I'm going to agitate the soluble ferts in it
 
Picking up a mess of 4x4's and T-posts for stringing plants and hanging trellising (got 3200 feet of trellising on the way for climbing stuff)
 
Ugh
 
I'm tired.
 
But there's so much more to do.
 

 

[TrentL]

Bad luck continues.
 
The well ran dry today.
 
I'm in trouble now.
 

 

[Genetikx]

Trent man, you're only fnck up is that you didn't film this sh!t from the start. You couldn't write a farming story better than this. You have any idea what the sindication rights would be??? Damn dude, get a friggin camera crew over there asap

Seriously tho, what's the plan? I will say when I was young and we had well water and had to drill deeper, that new water was awesome! Further down u go the better it gets I think!

 

[TrentL]

Well yesterday we poured a slab to start building the irrigation out. Plan is tomorrow we stick a 2,000 gal holding tank on it and start trucking in water.
 
Was working good until the well ran dry... and I was only running one zone out of 8 planned!
 

 

 

 

 

 
Pics from yesterday. I got that road built too, yesterday. The ladies planted some melons out. And we got those sidewalls and tracks mounted.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

[PtMD989]

That sucks about the well drying up. How deep is the well?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[nmlarson]

Wow!  What a trial!  And a huge coincidence.  I wonder if it's just something else breaking and the well not actually going dry.  Fingers crossed!

 

[TrentL]

We picked up a pair of 1550 gallon holding tanks today.
 
Filled 1300 gallons today out of a garden hose, no hiccups. Let it sit a few hours.
 
Filled 75 more gallons out of the wide-open irrigation feed, before the well started belching up air.
 
So it can push 25 gallons a minute.. for about.. oh, 3 minutes, before it's tapped out and shooting out air bubbles. 
 
But it can run 5 gallons a minute out of a garden hose all day long, it seems. 
 
So just a supply problem, not a dry problem. 
 
I've got a well driller coming out tomorrow to give me an estimate on drilling a deeper, bigger, better well that will be able to deliver a target of 80 gallons per minute. The linear drive pump alone will cost over $5,000 for that one. But it'll scale flow from 10gpm to 80gpm depending on what zones I have turned on.
 
In the meantime we'll keep these tanks topped off and use them to irrigate off of. Another $700 spent on 2hp pump assembly today (which we test soon-ish), and $900 on two 1550 gallon holding tanks.. and just over a grand in cedar posts.. and another thousand bucks (200 t-posts) to support the trellising..
 
The money bleed continues.
 
In the meantime I have a MOUNTAIN of paperwork to fill out for MOSA organic certification this weekend.
 

 

 

 
We'll be moving the pump itself in to the stables in to the old tack room after we test it and tweak it, boring 1.75 and 2.25 diameter holes through that 6" concrete stub wall will be an adventure.. Tack room will become "irrigation control center" lol. 
 
Keep the rain off the motor and cutoff switch stuff, anyway.
 
 

 

[karoo]

Love your glog.
 
Always beautiful to see what hard work ( and hard cash ) can do.

 

[TrentL]

The saying I've been using lately, with some frequency, has been "this looked so much easier on paper"
 
I haven't posted pics of them recently but the peppers are all still alive. Rootbound as hell, but still growing.
 
We stemmed them last week (picked off old wind damaged, sunburnt leaves, leaving new growth) so they have also been ugly as hell for a week. And boy I mean UGLY. But the nodes are sending out new shoots so they'll be happy again soon. They got a good dose of Alaskan Fish Emulsion 5-1-1 last week which will help them recover their growth; gave them another dose this week. 
 
Some of the annuums (ones which have not yet forked) will get topped after they recover from the first pruning.
 

 

[TrentL]

Well, the ground cover shipment is still lost in space somewhere, but... screw it. Stuff has to get planted.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
What is this? 
 
Peppers?
 

 
PEPPERS?
 

 

 

 
To date:
 
6x rows (267 plants) Nu Mex Vaquero Jalapeno in the dirt!
 
3x 55' rows of Okra seeded.
 
5x 55' rows of pickling cucumbers seeded
 
3x 55' rows of Divergent cantaloupe planted (approx 50 transplants, rest seed)
 
2x 55' rows of Edens Gem melons planted (approx 30 transplants, rest seed)
 
3x 200' rows of watermelons seeded (plus 80 transplants)
 
15x 96' rows of tomatoes planted (amish paste, rose, ace 55, cherry tomatoes, moscovich)
 
 

 

[TrentL]

Going to have to order more dripline. I screwed up when building my zones, I didn't realize the 4 spring 2" pressure regulator I got requires a certain flow to actually work right. That Netafim regulator won't regulate properly until it's seeing like 22 gallons per minute. First zone I ran was only using 6.48, second one slightly less. So I doubled up the drip line to bring it up to 12.26 and 12.20 on those first two zones. Together it will meet the minimum, although my well can't even supply ONE of them right now, reliably. I'm getting enough water on to keep stuff alive, but it's just a matter of time before I burn out my well pump by sucking air. To keep the pressure from blowing out lines (one blevied early on) I had to double up the lines in the first two zones.
 
New well is in the process of getting engineered, permitting app should be done Monday. Linear drive system that can supply 80 gallon per minute at 40 psi. 
 
We've run 5,592 feet of dripline (1.02 mile)
 
 

 

[TrentL]

Watermelons were dying in the north field. The "big rain" we were supposed to get today (.6 inches) blew south of us, we got a couple drizzles that left three WHOLE drops in my rain gauge. Not enough to even settle the dust.
 
So I had to work today to save the melons.
 
Ran 420' of 2" flattube up from the irrigation manifold to the north field.
 

 
Since we'd planted 3 viable watermelon transplants in the first 19 rows and 2 in the 20th row, but only seeded 2 rows so far, I ran the dripline E-W. As we plant out, I'll rotate it N-S. That way instead of slicing up my dripline in to a bunch of little pieces I just used 3 longer ones that will eventually feed a full 220' row.
 

 
The watermelon patch is 120x220' this year. 20x 6' row spacing by 220' length. It'll use up 4,400 feet of dripline, at .45 gal per minute / 100 ft, which is 19.8 gallons per minute of water when it's fully populated.
 
The organic pasture is divided in to 4 irrigation zones.
 
Zone 1 is tomatoes (mostly, I did plant some ultrahots there today), and weighs in at 2,880 feet of drip irrigation (12.96 gpm); doubled drip line in 15 rows of 96'. 
 
Zone 2 is organic melons, okra, some pickling cucumbers, jalapenos, and there'll be three additional rows (brain strain, and two others I forget off hand, my notes are at the farm.) It has 24 rows of 56.5' of doubled .45 gpm drip line which is (24*2*56.5) 2712 feet of drip irrigation, or (2712 / 100 * .45) 12.2 gpm of irrigation. 
 
So Zone 1 + Zone 2 is 12.96gpm + 12.2gpm = 25.16
 
Zone 3 will be the south west zone, sized 88' by 166', 55 rows @ 3 foot spacing at 88' long. It will have single drip line per row, skipping 3 rows for walkways, for 52 rows at 88 feet. That's 4,576 linear feet of dripline, or 20.52 gpm.
 
Zone 4 is will be the southeast zone, sized 99' by 120', 40 rows @ 3 foot spacing at 99' long. It will also have single drip line per row, skipping 2 rows for walkways, for 38 rows at 99 feet. That's 4,356 linear feet of dripline, or 19.6 gpm. (There will be another little area driven off this zone as well which will bring it up to about 22 gpm.)
 
So that's the south pasture; 
Zone 1+2 25.16 GPM
Zone 3 20.52 GPM
Zone 4 22 GPM
 
North field
Zone 5 19.8 GPM (watermelons)
Zone 6 TBD (remaining space is 100' by 220' at 3' row spacings, which would be 33 rows at 220' long, or 7260 feet of drip irrigation, 32.67gpm. I'll probably subdivide it in to two zones.)
 
 

 

[TrentL]

26,184 feet (4.95 miles) of dripline
120.15 gallon per minute of water, 7,209 gallons per hour at full blast.

I'll probably need to run the zones an hour a day for the doubled zones (1,509 gallons) and two hours for the single line per row zones (11,398 gallons), during the heat of summer when the crops are full sized if there's no rain. So we'll use up over 12,907.80 gallons of water per day. (The ground cover fabric and straw will help with this as we will have less evaporation loss; at least cut our water consumption in half vs. if we didn't have it)
 
Going to pick up some parts for circuitry once it's all plumbed in. I'll add electronic control valves in line with the manual hand valves, open the manual valves, and let the circuit control the irrigation. (The "fun" phase of automation is "soon").
 
Then wire in irrometers, so that the system "knows" when a zone is dry, so it can release the floodwaters.... fully automated, will shut down irrigation if we get a rain, turn it on automatically when it gets dry.. one more thing I don't have to worry about.
 

 

[TrentL]

Almost ashamed to post these next pics. Wind and sunburn were BRUTAL on these plants the last few weeks, while they sat in 4" pots in full sun. They dry out daily - we actually water them twice a day while they are in 4" pots now, because they dry out so fast - and when the wind kicks up it does mean things to the leaves.
 
Most have had all of the older damaged leaves plucked and they were given a lot of fish emulsion the last 2 weeks to get them to bulk back up.
 
But they still look very sad. This "show row" of plants features some one-offs that I will probably cage and screen in the field for isolation.
 
Anyway enough moaning.. here's some specimens from about 14 different varieties. I put these along a walkway path so I can show people examples without having to march around the entire field looking for "this one" or "that one" to show them.
 
Tekne Dolmasi and Sweet French Bell
 
I have a bunch (over 200!) of the Tekne Dolmasi plants, but the sweet french bells were a germination disappointment. 
 

 
 
Cayenne (f) and Sugar Cane (r)
 
Note: I ended up with *ONE* viable Cayenne from 4 trays (216 cells) of pepper lover's seeds. Just couldn't get them to germinate.
 

 
 
Matay
 
Another germination disappointment, out of 2 trays, I got 9 viable plants. 
 

 
 
Thai Orange
 
What a bushy little bastard!
 

 
 
Aji Dulce
 
Another germination misery - I got *3* viable plants out of 2 trays.
 

 
 
FM Scotch Bonnet
 
These germinated well. I set down 2 trays with seeds that Justin sent me and got about 150 viable plants out of it. They are WAY behind my MOA scotch bonnets in size, but they should still reach maturity this year. They were seeded in late March, so I'm pretty happy with where they are at. (The MOA disaster was seeded early Feb, I had < 20% germination rates on the seeds from Pepperlover; Justins were > 90%)
 

 
 
 
A ratty looking MOA scotch bonnet. These bigger plants were absolutely BURNED by sun, and beat to death by wind. 

 
Yellow Fatalli
 
These all nearly died before plant out - suspected they got a dose of something, they shot up super tall and fell over limp. We plucked all of the damaged leaves off of them and they're shooting out a lot of new growth now, thanks the to high nitrogen fish emulsion doses. About 80 were salvaged from that trainwreck.
 

 
Moruga Scorpion Red
 
Yet another germination disappointment - I got 3 whopping viable transplants out of 2 trays of seeds.
 

 
7-Pot Primo (front), Moruga Scorpion Butch T (rear)
 
You can see how hard the wind was blowing here - 40mph steady wind, but the peppers are fully hardened and have strong trunks.
 

 
Bhut Jolokia Brown
 
Sole survivor. I had 5 seedlings, out of 216 seeded, and only one viable transplant.
 

 
Brain Strain (red)
 
Only have a couple of these. Seeded an entire tray.. but .. the theme this year was "bad seed supply"...
 

 
Moruga x Reaper
 
These sprouted relatively well, have about 120 viable transplants.
 

 
Carolina Reaper
 
I have approx 120 of them waiting to plant out. Mixed results on seeds, purchased from 2 vendors, and also had some old stock I'd got off Ed a few years back. My old stock, unsurprisingly, was much better at germinating than either pepperlover or buckeye.
 

 
That's it for today.
 
I feel bad that they've been beat up so bad, but damn, mother nature has been brutal this year. Those babies have withstood 60mph wind gusts, extensive sunburn, and root bound existence, but they're in the dirt now and should take off!
 
 
 

 

[Bhuter]

Tattered plants are always a part of growing. But they're resilient. They can take a flogging and a caning by the wind. Lol. So, did the ground cover arrive? I'm unsure. If so, will it be difficult to lay it down where you've planted? I love ground cover. Hate weeds.

What the flip was going on with your germination rates? I'd be so upset at the loss of time and hope. But your planting looks terrific and your farm is spotless, as always. Very nice!

 

[TrentL]

Tattered plants are always a part of growing. But they're resilient. They can take a flogging and a caning by the wind. Lol. So, did the ground cover arrive? I'm unsure. If so, will it be difficult to lay it down where you've planted? I love ground cover. Hate weeds.

What the flip was going on with your germination rates? I'd be so upset at the loss of time and hope. But your planting looks terrific and your farm is spotless, as always. Very nice!

 
Bad seeds. Justin's stuff sprouted 95%+ across the board, except for one variety of Aji (goldens never popped).  But I had miserable rates with a lot of buckeye and PL stuff. Some of their stuff sprouted 95%, some of it... nil. Like 4 trays of habaneros from Buckeye, not a single seedling emerged. Meanwhile their moruga x reaper was 92%.
 
Ground cover is not in yet.  We are going to cut the 15.5' by 300' rolls in to 15.5' by 3.5' strips (or 6.5' for the 6' row spacing). Then lay the strips down between rows, overlapping them between plants, leaving a slit for each plant. I did the same thing in my garden one year, and had zero weeds. It'll be a pain in the ass to slice up all the fabric, much easier just to unroll it in bulk, cut holes, and plant out, but whatever. It's just another thing that needs done.
 
You gave me some inspiration in your glog on a strategy for that weed cover, too. Just popped in to my head a few minutes ago. Since I want to run a cover crop I don't want a billion seeds laying dormant in the soil, waiting for their chance at sunlight. So I'm going to intentionally let the weeds sprout, but then cover and kill them before they go to seed. That way I deplete the seed bank in the soil by like.. a few billion seeds.
 
Should make the cover crop less 'weedy' when I pull the fabric and sow it this fall.

 

[Bhuter]

That really is a great idea! I should try that in a different area of the yard. Just lay the plastic over a bunch of unseeded weeds and don't even bother to plant anything there. Maybe the weeds will break down into the soil. Very interesting!

What kind of cover crop do you have in mind? All one thing?

 

[TrentL]

That really is a great idea! I should try that in a different area of the yard. Just lay the plastic over a bunch of unseeded weeds and don't even bother to plant anything there. Maybe the weeds will break down into the soil. Very interesting!

What kind of cover crop do you have in mind? All one thing?

 
Haven't decided yet. Going to do a soil test in late September or early October and see what the soil is deficient in, then go from there. We'll throw something down second half of October and probably do a very light till-under next Spring before plant out. 
 
Eventually I want to get the field so I can grow greens, carrots, and other stuff that's "not ground cover friendly" but I have to get weed seeds killed off and the sod clumps have to be gone, before I can even try. If I grew fragile direct seed stuff this year, without cover, it'd be a weed disaster. Couldn't find enough people to handle it. Tried that once in my garden - doing onions, garlic, carrots, lettuce, etc the first year after turning sod under is a frigging DISASTER. SO I didn't even try this year.
 
Goal next year is to have good cultivated soil that's free of weeds - or at least at a level which is manageable by a couple workers - so we can grow some of the more profitable crops; greens, etc. Greens are one of those things that are the workhorse cash crop of organic grows, surmounted only by a brief window of tomatoes. A well managed Organic grow should see $350-400k per acre, each year, if it's done right. 
 
But to do that you've got to have weeds under control, and I mean WELL under control, or it will be a disaster. You can't use much of ANYTHING to control weeds on an organic grow. Ground cover, cover crops, mechanical or manual removal, that's about it as far as your arsenal goes. Other stuff, like spraying 30% vinegar to burn them down, can work but screws up your soil pH badly.  

 

[Sawyer]

Sucks about the poor germination rates. I had similar issues with a couple of varieties from the same vendor. Maybe too much demand and insufficient stock?

I like the idea of germinating weed seeds then killing the plants before they go to seed. And for cover crops, I'm a big fan of working with natives, chickweed, henbit, dead nettle... they all germinate in early spring thickly enough to suppress other weeds. Then by plant-out time, they are dying back and leave behind a natural mulch. Of course, that's not a good option if you're double-tasking your fields with a profitable winter crop like barley for the local micro-breweries.

Sounds like you're far enough down the new well road that these won't be of much use, or more likely you already know of them, but the IL state geological survey has some relevant resources:

http://www.isgs.illinois.edu/research/hydrogeology/locating-groundwater

http://www.isgs.illinois.edu/research/hydrogeology

http://www.isgs.illinois.edu/ilwater

 

[Bhuter]

That's a large sum of money for little land space. Monetarily speaking, organic grow is the way to go! But headache-wise, it's a vise. So much red tape, starter fees, and precision with everything...AAAHHHH!!! I can't imagine. Then stuff starts to break on you...lol

You're definitely a guy who plans ahead and learns from the past. I really didn't know until recently that there were winter crops. I just never really paid attention. I hope your ground cover shows up in-full soon.