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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. 
 
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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...
 
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Has a 4 stall garage and a horse stable on the property
 
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Probably do my grow room upstairs here after I insulate it
 
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Built some doors for the horse barn and patched the roof last month
 
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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 said:
Hell, I thought about growing it, for my own supply. :)
I've done that before. Mainly for insecticide/repellent (careful with the spray) but I also cured some with diluted molasses in a plant press. Rolled a few cigars with it and found one brave soul willing to try one. I took it as high praise when he said, "You know, this isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be."
 
TrentL said:
...my wife and future daughter in law...
I was going to feign ignorance and confusion and wonder how that would work, but then you said, "they" and took the wind out of my snark sail.
 
So, we're having the "You Knocked Up My Daughter" conversation at this point...
 
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Yeah, that's right. I'm gonna be a grandpa. 
 
Some baby back ribs on the grill. Some with dry rub, then a couple of Amish sauces; one apple, one Jalapeno.
 
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Lots of pods on the annuums now. Sweet anaheims are growing pretty fast. Big healthy pods. A few representative plants here;
 
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Nu Mex Vaquero Jalapeno are kind of hit and miss. Obvious crosses with a likely purple Jalapeno donor plant, and another that's growing long skinny curly pods, so who knows how those will turn out. A few are growing true to phenotype, but mostly it'll be a random grab bag of "what are you?" crosses. I've isolated a couple of the more interesting ones (I wouldn't mind a disease resistant Nu Mex / Purple Jalapeno cross)
 
Skinny / Curly phenotype
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A couple of purple Nu Mex / ?
 
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One of the pods was ripe already, it was tasty, and had a good heat to it. Much warmer than previous purple Jalapenos I grew which were so mild as to be undetectable.
 
One growing to more true genetics
 
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East field, 100' rows of MOA scotch bonnets and Turkish Cayenne. I agressively topped 1.5 rows of turkish cayenne, left the others undisturbed, as a fun experiment.
 
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West field, 96' rows of peppers and cucumbers. The crew is planting out cucumber seeds here, found out my new spiffy manual planter don't like the flat seeds too well... so we're just hand planting them.
 
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We got like 2" of rain last night (FINALLY) so no work at the farm today. Might go out this afternoon for a bit and hand seed some e-z pick bush beans, we'll see. There's a farmers market in my home town I want to go check out first. I'm registered as a vendor there but have nothing ready to sell yet.
 
I also rolled out 20 rows of Royal Burgandy organic beans on Monday, 2000 feet of them, seeded every 6" .. that's gonna be a real mess of purple beans.
 
So far the soil is showing ZERO deficiencies; plants are growing stupidly fast, pods look good, and I see no need for any sort of fertilizer at this point in time.
 
 
 
PtMD989 said:
Congrats on the grand baby! Now you can get your grumpy card [emoji16]
Plants are looking great.
Food is looking good.
Any word on the missing weed blocker?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Funny you should ask that. Last Thursday 12 rolls of weed block got dropped off at the farm. They were in ratty shape, but, well, THERE.  Problem was the 9,000 stakes were missing from the shipment.
 
Friday 9,000 stakes show up. 
 
Figure OK, we're all good.
 
Yesterday, another 12 rolls of weed block show up. Turns up what showed up last week was the missing shipment finally showing up. Well, part of it. The weed block rolls were the original shipment, and the stakes were from the new shipment. They forgot to load the rolls of weed block on the truck that went out Friday. So those got delivered this Tuesday.
 
I wasn't at the farm, my workers unloaded it, guess they thought I'd ordered more for the North field.
 
So now I have 24 rolls of 15.5' by 300' weed block at the farm (111,600 sq ft, enough to completely cover 2.56 acres.... There are still 9000 stakes missing from the original order. But the re-ship showed up at the same time the original shipment showed up, which was shipped out nearly a month ago.
 
Waiting to hear back from the supplier on what they want us to do about it. 
 
PtMD989 said:
Are the weeds becoming a problem yet, after the rain you got?


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Not a problem, YET, but there are a LOT of them. It was a grass & weed fallow pasture I tilled up, so the first couple years I'm "all about depleting the seed bank" at this point. Let 'em sprout, I'll cover them and kill them. No biggie on the pasture.
 
I'm a *LOT* more worried about the north field. No straw yet, and can't really lay it down until I get the staggered planting of watermelons and corn done. 
 
The cultivated soil is sprouting legions of field corn, plus there's the usual mix of crab grass, button weed, and a ton of other crap out there already sprouting. We'll have 1.5 acres to manually weed out there, and no good canopy plants to help hold it all down. Melons are gonna vine out on the ground all over, making mechanical weeding impossible, letting weeds grow up through the vines. The sweet corn isn't going to be dense enough to block light, and the late / staggered planting I'm doing with it will let the weeds get a head start. I'll probably have to re-till right before planting, which will kick up all the corn root balls.. 
 
This year is just unpleasant on a number of levels. Next year should be easier. As long as I can keep the weed seed bank under control and kill stuff off before it goes to seed, should get a little easier.
 
But "zero herbicide" is a damn tough thing. NOTHING can get sprayed for weeds, you can't get approval for anything - supposed to be "systematic preventative measures" to get them under control. 
 
I hear ya about early grand kiddos, my son and his girl friend had one. She was 17, he had just turned 19. LB and I helped until she was 5. She's 16 now and quite the young lady. A junior next year with a straight A average and a good head on her shoulders. BTW, we have 6 G-kiddos now. Welcome to the team!
 
The isolation house "airlock" is framed up
 
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Starting to get ground cover on now that the weeds are all sprouted...
 
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Beginning of a walk down the west side of the field;
 
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All of the trellis is up, we just have to run the top line now (using thick hemp rope for that)
 
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Peppers still doing good. Continuing the walk...
 
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Looking back at the northwest corner
 
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We have about 2,000 feet of trellis for cucumbers, all of which are seeded now.
 
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More peppers...
 
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More trellis...
 
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More peppers...
 
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The weed pressure on the east side of the field is getting intense, we're starting the ground fabric on that side since it was tilled a day earlier and has stayed a little wetter on the edge of the field. Most of the field is just *now* sprouting weeds, after being tilled in late April, that's how DRY it has been.
 
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The roof splashing on to loam made an exceptionally ugly mud pit along the walkway here so we moved over the old 100-150 lb limestone footers that I excavated from an old demolished barn over here. 
 
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Tomatoes are growing well now.
 
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Here's one that I repaired, doing well. It had a broken stalk from wind. After patching the trucks up on those I humped the soil up around it as a cast; makes it easier to identify which ones I 'fixed' - didn't lose a single one on the second batch of repaired tomato trunks! Practice makes perfect!
 
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Bhuter said:
Congratulations on the grandchild!!!! And the farm looks amazingly! It keeps growing! And what's this? You keep bees as well? How great it must be to have pollinators that leave you honey, too. I'm just amazed.
 
The bees are on loan for the season. The folks I went in to a 50/50 on soybeans with just started keeping them this year, so they moved a new hive over to my farm. We didn't have any resident pollinators at my place, so I had to bring some in.
 
We're going to try to establish a permanent resident colony on the property. I don't mind being around bees at all, so might start my own hive or two after I figure out how it's done. :)
 
Native bees can be useful, too. Mason bees, in particular, have a lot of value as pollinators.
 
And planting (in future years, of course) a small patch of native plants attractive to pollinators can encourage both the native bees and honey bees. For example wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa, aka bee balm) is a hardy, easy to start perennial that is a stupendous bee and butterfly plant.
 
I have a lot of info on both pollinators and the plants that attract them that I can provide when (if) you ever get some downtime.
 
This is a SERIOUS pain in the ass with all the plants and dripline in the way. 
 
The 25+ mph winds and lack of any help on a Sunday (doing it alone) was very, very frustrating.
 
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I had two folks working on the shorter pieces yesterday, they used the short stakes, instead of the long stakes, like I'd asked them to use, and put the stakes every 10 feet apart instead of every 2-3 feet apart like I'd asked them (if they bothered to use any stakes at all!) which means I spent the first two hours of the day re-doing the work they did yesterday.
 
Pisses me off when I pay people to do a job, watch them for a while, then they start using "shortcuts" after I walk away (re-using the short 3" dripline stakes for the ground fabric when they should have used the 6" stakes I ordered with it). 
 
I pulled out half a 5 gallon bucket of short 3" stakes and replaced them with the correct 6" stakes on 2-3' centers
 
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