2019 - The Farm

TrentL · Mar 14, 2019

next...

TrentL · Mar 14, 2019

Last 5 tables...

The fan covering this table was set to low instead of high, these guys got a little sunburnt.. yellowed all of the middle ones from the heat. Thought at first it was a nute issue until I was watering, and realized.. hey, there's no airflow in this corner at ALL...

You can definitely tell the ones I transplanted earliest during the early soil tests, they're much bigger than the later transplants.

TrentL · Mar 14, 2019

Also, I hand watered all of those today. 1/3 cup. Trying to get them evened back out after a rather unsuccessful bottom watering. The pots in the middle got too much water, the pots on the edges, not enough. Seems my 3/4" plywood under the plastic, has bowed a little over time. Going to have to build new tables for next year. These are too bowl shaped to rely on bottom watering exclusively this year; I'll have to hand water the outer several rows of plants, no matter what I do.

Anyway, bending over and giving 3200 plants 1/3 cup of water is no joy. Back hurts. Trying to reach the back of those 3' deep tables with lights that close to the tables, is a real pain in the .. well, back.

karoo · Mar 14, 2019

Looking great!
Good luck !

BDASPNY · Mar 14, 2019

such incredible pics. the sheer size and numbers is impressive.

TrentL · Mar 14, 2019

BDASPNY said:
such incredible pics. the sheer size and numbers is impressive.

Thanks. This year I personally stuffed every one of those plants when potting up.

My wife isn't "feeling it" with the farm this year, after a long couple nights discussion, looks like I'll be solo out there this year. Rather have a happy wife than an unhappy wife, even if it means extra workload.

I'll do the best I can, that's all I can really do.

BDASPNY · Mar 14, 2019

rough start to a new year, but sounds like you've still got a solid plan. from what I've seen you accomplish it.

Ruid · Mar 14, 2019

This year looks like it'll likely surpass the last.

ShowMeDaSauce · Mar 14, 2019

Just a FYI

Trents Big Brown Bhut seeds had excellent germination rate. I got 8 of 10 to pop in wet paper towels.
https://lawrenceproduce.com/collections/seeds/products/seeds-brown-bhut-jolokia

m1hagen · Mar 14, 2019

TrentL said:
Thanks. This year I personally stuffed every one of those plants when potting up.

My wife isn't "feeling it" with the farm this year, after a long couple nights discussion, looks like I'll be solo out there this year. Rather have a happy wife than an unhappy wife, even if it means extra workload.

I'll do the best I can, that's all I can really do.

I wish you luck my friend! That is a metric shit ton of work for one man. Hopefully you can find some reliable help this year. We'll be watching

TrentL · Mar 15, 2019

26 tons of CA-11 delivered today for the isolation house floor, 15 tons of CA-6 yesterday for repairing parking lot.. Get to move a lot of gravel this weekend if it dries up enough!

Gotta pick up rest of greenhouse stuff today, should be getting it all done next week, lots and lots left to do before it's really ready.

Got Joe busy building tables

legs

Our stockpile of wood is shrinking, and damn it's muddy out

A few inside pics from yesterday

Last year's graveyard dirt still doing well, haven't done any wet fertilizers at all this year so far

Damn thing has forked out like 4 times already, hard to tell since it's such a compact plant

Boyan · Mar 15, 2019

For over a year I have been following your progress (outside THP)
I hope admins forgive me (I promised myself this entry) - first post I want to express my gratitude to you. For your meticulous work, mind and inspiration.
You are my hero)

TrentL · Mar 16, 2019

Boyan said:
For over a year I have been following your progress (outside THP)
I hope admins forgive me (I promised myself this entry) - first post I want to express my gratitude to you. For your meticulous work, mind and inspiration.
You are my hero)

It is much appreciated, your words of encouragement! Some days are rougher than others, and this week has been especially grueling. The next couple of weeks, probably even moreso. It's very easy to get discouraged when faced with such a mountain of work, but .. just put one foot in front of the other, finish (not half-finish, not sort-of-finish, but REALLY finish) each task so you can put it behind you, so problems and workload don't stack up, and keep going.

This week ended on kind of a down note, so much done, but so much left to do, and the weather is NOT being cooperative here.

Anyway, thanks for stopping in and saying hey, this sort of stuff means a lot more than you'd think. So often it feels overwhelming, and I can't even begin to count the number of times I've wanted to fold, give up, quit, curl up in a ball and wish it all to go away, but I keep going back day after day, and over time, things get a little easier. Bit by bit, each improvement I finish, each lesson I learn, each new time saving technique... it all makes it just a little bit more bearable.

Much appreciated!

TrentL · Mar 16, 2019

I haven't posted a sprout room update in a while, most stuff had been germinating.. but here we go.. SHAZZAAAAAAM.

Everything popped up yesterday. Like, all at once. And the lights.. they came back on.

Cabbages... (many trays of these, just a representative here)

Leeks (still missing one type, zero germ so far..)

THE DUKE

(I just about really screwed up there, I overwatered him BADLY on accident (kind of forgot I watered him, and watered him again...), and he got transplant shock real bad from the new shoes.. I poke aeration holes in the soil with a ball point pen, to help dry the soil medium back out faster, and today he's back to looking good!

Proof that my problems at the farm with yellowing and stunting are most definitely, 100%, absolutely caused by light intensity being too high (along with relevant heat this causes)... I need to raise the lights to 20" (currently at 12"), as I'm stalling peppers out. My lights at home are 20". Ambient temp in both rooms stays right at 80F, but the closer lights at the farm just really bake the hell out of stuff. I put a lux meter under the center of the lights today where the yellowed peppers were the worst, and it showed 48,000 lux.. the peppers along the table borders are doing great, no problems, perfect growth, light there was showing ~10-12k lux.

Anyway, it don't get much prettier or healthier than this.

Some of our saved seeds... pulled from the same packets we shipped to fill orders from:

And the rougher mundane parts of farming, just hauling crap from point A to point B..

$8,800 in that damn truck. Wiggle wire track (about $3k worth of it on the trailer and buried in the bed of the pickup), wiggle wire, mesh screen, shade cloth (2400 sq foot of it), 33 4 cu ft bags of perlite, clips, and a big ventilation system for the isolation high tunnel.

The boxes closest to the cab have 2x 30" motorized louvered exhaust fans and 2x 42" motorized intake louvers. This will let me move 12,800 cubic feet of air per minute through the isolation high tunnel, giving me a complete air change every 120 seconds, keep peppers alive in there when the temps outside hit 100+F. Otherwise, in minutes, the plastic covered high tunnel would cook them like an oven.

Also have 10,800 3" pots in those six smaller boxes, 18 per sheet, 100 sheet per box, 6 boxes.. think I'm doing the math right.. that's for the Annuum, watermelon, tomato, canteloupe, and other sprouting that'll be going on directly in the high tunnel proper soon.

We'll have 1,280 square feet of table space in the high tunnel, if my math is correct (24 3x8' tables, 22 4x8' tables), so plenty of room for sprouting plants, isolation peppers, etc. I will have 5 removable / rollback panels of 50% shade cloth overhead for hardening off. 120v wiring through conduits for fans which are thermostat controlled (and override capable, so I can shut them off if there's a nearby farmer spraying herbicide to protect the plants from intake). No more lugging plants around in to shade, in to sun, in to shade, back indoors because a big thunderstorm popped up out of nowhere, etc... god that sucked last year. I had one worker full time managing frigging plants. This year I put them in the high tunnel and turn a valve to water, and that's about it...

That gives me room to hold 11,520x 4" pots, 20,480x 3" pots, 1,671x 3 gallon pots, or 601x 15 gallon pots, or whatever combination thereof I happen to need.

Hell of an upgrade.

There's enough materials on site now (framing, plastic, etc) to build two additional 24x96' high tunnels, all I have to spend $ on are concrete (24,000 lbs each of concrete, for pillar footers), some cedar posts for end walls, and of course, labor. Those high tunnels will be in-ground production only, meant for more sensitive crops, but I am setting them up identically to our isolation tunnel, so *just in case* I want to use them for full isolation greenhouses, I can in a pinch. Enough 50 micron mesh on the way to do it.

That'll expand my isolation capability to 6,912 square feet outdoors, and 2,244 sq foot indoors.

In addition, I now have 1800 row-feet of floating row covers on hand, and conduit benders for EMT for doing low tunnels, so I can isolate another 1800 linear feet of entire rows if I need to.

That insect screen was EXPENSIVE. I mean, EX-PEN-SIVE.

[SIZE=12pt]Proteknet "Biothrips" – 10' x 820'
Insect Barrierhttp://enews.johnnyseeds.com/q/EIIV...KPevNPZcOJdHJlbnRAbGliZXJhdGlvbnNvZnQuY29tw4g[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]1[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]$1,234.00[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Size: 1 Unit
ID: 7232.0
In Stock
Shipping surcharge: $34.00[/SIZE]

One 820' roll of Proteknet was $1,234....

I also got a 1,000' roll of Agribon for comparison testing.

TrentL · Mar 16, 2019

Anyway all told I guess I'll be ending the year with somewhere around 16,436 square feet of total isolation capability, or 0.37 of an acre; or, put another way, about the same size as an NHL ice hockey rink.

If I can't make a viable supply of large quantity, isolated seed with that, y'all can kick my ass out of here as utterly incompetent.

DWB · Mar 16, 2019

That's the same perlite I use.

TrentL · Mar 16, 2019

This stuff kind of pisses me off. I mean .. damn near everything from justin germinated great (couple of strike outs, but hell, there were 80+ varieties I got off of him).

Yet here we are again. I wrote Buckeye off last year after so much stuff was 0 germ.

Didn't expect Refining Fire to have so many 0 germ varieties.

And pepperlover.. man. On top of what's shown I have one other tray with absolutely NOTHING sprouted. Zip. Nadda. Zero. 24 different varieties, all seeded 4 per cell, 288 seeds in a tray, with not a single damn pepper popping up.

All of that was cash, I spent, and all of those blank cells is just money flushed down the toilet.

If anything, this cements my resolve to push forward with seed production, and to try to convince Justin that we need to work together. He's got the store, I got the isolation capability now.. and we live like a half hour from each other.

nmlarson · Mar 16, 2019

CDNmatt said:
.

I have an issue with a cat that has lived under our house off and on for the past 2 years...It is completely wild and thrives on its own hunting and foraging skills (my garbage cans) and toughs out the cold winters we have here. I just don't have the heart to shoot the bugger and it has evaded every attempt at trapping the thing we have tried.

Last year it dug up the garden a few times when the plants were first put in and for some reason chewed the tops off a bunch of bell pepper plants, even after that I still could not bring myself to shooting the bugger.

I also had one nesting under a sunroom, where she gave birth to 3 kittens. Couldn't trap any of them. Until I read somewhere they can't resist KFC. So I hung a drumstick in the back of the trap. Caught all four in two days. Rehomed two of the kittens. Mom and son were spayed/neutered and returned here and have been earning their keep with mouse and vole hunting since.

nmlarson · Mar 16, 2019

TrentL said:
And what does the farm have in ultra-abundance?

Iron. I had to run a couple of buckets through before I could even water them the first time out there because the water was BROWN. I mean, like you couldn't see the bottom of the bucket, brown.

We installed a 5 micron filter at the farm today - restricts my water flow to 5 gpm, but should filter out the worst of the iron.

Good luck with that 5 micron filter. We tried filters, until our pipes ended up so clogged with sediment, they had literally a pinhole in the center for the water to travel through. We ended up with a "precipitation" system...some sort of media the water travels through that locks up the iron, which is them backwashed out of the media.

nmlarson · Mar 16, 2019

TrentL said:
This is what's left to transplant out of the first batch, based on last full inventory I did 2/17 (so there may be more, I didn't take a count this sunday)

Row Labels Sum of 2/17/2019

Grand Total 2402

WOW! I hope a labeling machine is in the budget for next year!