The first half of this year – from late April to early July – was pretty smooth sailing. The crops looked and tasted good, we were hitting our revenue goals at the farmers market while more or less managing to keep our sanity.

Then the heat came.

When it’s this hot and dry nothing happens. Seeds don’t germinate, greens go to seed and if you don’t rise at the crack of dawn good luck working outside for more than an hour or two. We’re growing on a small amount of space and we don’t dedicate much of it to fruiting crops, since they tend to sprawl out and take more time thus limiting their earnings potential on a square foot basis. What we do grow a lot of – all sorts of greens and root crops – have a hard time in the heat and we’ve been suffering along with them.

Our frustration peaked this week when we got back to our packing shed to wash and store the harvest. I was in a foul mood, seeing how little was growing in the fields. In an attempt to wake me up, Virginia turned from her carrots and sprayed me with the hose. I picked up a handful of salad greens and hurled them her way.

It got ugly.

Earlier in the week I built a compost screen that fits on top of our garden cart. Using a couple designs on the internet and lumber laying around the farm it was a satisfying project that only took a few hours.

After the salad greens hurling incident I ventured into the afternoon heat to test it out with a compost pile we built in early spring. No matter how many times you’ve witnessed the magic of finished compost it never gets old.

Last night I started reading a book called Topsoil and Civilization, which links the rise and fall of history’s great civilizations with the degradation of their soils and food production capacities. This is why ancient civilizations that produced enormous cultural achievement and agricultural surplus are now desert wastelands subject to archeological excavation. Makes sense to me.

I mention that because in the swing of our day to day it’s too easy to forget that life on land comes from the soil. So perhaps the most spiritually fulfilling and practical act we can take is in its regeneration. At least that’s what life feels like with homemade compost running through your fingers.

Last night a big rain came and from the looks of the forecast it may have taken the last of the deep summer heat with it.

We can always dream.

Back in October we planted about 13 beds – or about 650 row feet – of hardneck and softneck garlic. The hardneck variety “Music” faired the best in our trials, it grew vigorously and produced the largest heads. The softneck faired the worst, with relatively poor germination. Perhaps it was mulched too heavily?

Check out the full album here.

The most obvious difference from last year is that our customer relationships are growing more intimate, dedicated and valuable. When they can count on us being there each week, we can count on them too and that benefits both our bottom line and our happiness.

This week we finally had enough variety to try out an “L” shaped table setup. It opens up the tent a bit and gives our stand more of a shop feel with room to walk in and browse our offerings. Not a big change but a gratifying one.

This was the first week for both chard (that old stand-by that just keeps on giving) and butterhead lettuce (which Virginia isn’t crazy about but between me and our customers she is outnumbered.)

Once again we sold out of just about everything.

We had a great first market on Saturday. It was a beautiful day and just the right temperature which made for a perfect season opener. As we drove down to Peninsula we had arugula, spinach, salad mix, scallions, radishes and green garlic packed in the back of the truck, within two hours we had sold everything and had the pleasure of driving back to Cleveland without any produce.

We tried a couple of new things that seem to work well so far:

1. We have a new banner printed on biodegradable vinyl that we hung in the back of our tent. Not only does the it give us a bit more professional cred, but it seems to make us more visible. Although our original homemade sign holds a special place in my heart.

2. We changed our pricing system. Instead of having a 2 for $5 deal we sold everything for $3 each. This seemed to work really well and we didn’t have to repeat our semi-cheap line about how “everything is $3 dollars each OR you can mix and match any 2 items for $5.”

3. Peter made laminated “crop cards” which give a short description of each product with a few recipe ideas. We put one in front of each basket. The green garlic crop card was a lifesaver. Everyone seemed to need a bit of guidance about what to do with green garlic.

4. Due to some mature plants we were challenged by our spinach harvest so we decided to try and sell bunched spinach with roots. We made bunches similar to those found in the grocery. No one seemed to mind.

It felt great to be back out there with everyone and to have one year under our belts. We are looking forward to returning this week and promise to take some more photos. Big thanks to Alex who helped us harvest and prep this week.

We’ve now harvested both beds, and since our market doesn’t open for another month the first went to Fat Cats and the second to the Flying Fig. The new screen table made it’s debut and performed like a champ.

In addition to the spinach our garlic, shallots and scallions made it through the cold without a hitch and are thriving. And boy is the compost cookin!

But after all this is a farm blog and our farm in February isn’t much to write about, at least not yet. Granted we could be posting pictures of snow-covered garlic and spreadsheet screen shots but to be honest we’re enjoying our winter recess.

So here we are in Cleveland in February: seeds ordered and stored in a cold closet, planting schedules calculated and re-calculated, a foot of snow still on the ground.

And I’m beginning to get a little stir-crazy.

So to break the spell we’ve made a couple of acquisitions and started a few projects that we hope will make this year’s efforts to scale up a little easier.

First we finally found a truck cap that fits our trusty ‘96 Nissan pickup. No longer will we suffer the embarrassment of being the only farmers market vendor to roll in on a rainy day without one. But more important than weather protection, we’ll now be able to stack our bins two-high, effectively doubling the amount of produce we can bring to market. Cha-ching!

Second, we bought another reach-in cooler off of craigslist – this one from a pizza shop fire sale. Ideally we would be building a CoolBot walk-in in our basement or garage, but alas we rent both our house and our post-harvest garage so used reach-ins are an inexpensive – yet less efficient – way to go. Doubling our cooling capacity means that we can stretch out our harvest work across the week and keep everything cool for our Saturday market.

Third, we built a simple screen table for washing and drying the harvest. For only $40 in materials and about an hour of labor it’s a good investment that will give us more space to spray-wash root vegetables, drip-dry greens, etc.

Pics:

All in all everything that isn’t planted in garlic is under plastic, a pretty agressive strategy that we hope will pay of with late season greens and an early start to next year.

We decided to test the quick hoops on the new plot we prepared last weekend, which we prepped and planted with cold hardy crops that will either mature for a mid-winter harvest (spinach, chard, etc.) or  over-winter for a harvest early next spring (carrots, onions, etc.)

After bending the half-inch electrical conduit we sunk each end into the ground every five feet down the length of our beds (25 feet). With a little muscle we were able to fit three 2 foot wide beds between the ends of each hoop. Then we rolled out our row cover fabric (Agribon AG-19 in our case), fit it snugly over the top of the hoops and secured it in place by resting sand bags along side of each hoop. It worked great!

In about a month we’ll supplement the row cover fabric with 4-mil greenhouse plastic which will take us into the really cold months. We’ll see how well the conduit – and the crops – stand up the cold and snow. Check back later this winter and hopefully we’ll have some pictures of a bountiful winter harvest!

UPDATE: While the Quick Hoops Bender is available through the Johnny’s website it was actually developed by Lost Creek Greenhouse Systems. Thanks to Loy from Lost Creek for filling us in (see comments below).