Mehaffey Farm Blog

 The sun has shone steadily for over a week, and we are now in full swing with our farming routines. We’ve figured out our harvest schedule and processes for CSA distribution on Mondays and also for the Farmer’s Markets on Thursday afternoons and Sunday mornings. Gloucester market has run three weeks now, but the Rowley market started only this past Sunday. This week was our first full week. It’s been hectic, but gratifying, this new life. In between, we’ve fit in succession plantings of new lettuce, kale, chard, choy, spraying all crops with organic fish and kelp emulsion, and believe it or not, irrigation (for a change.) It’s amazing, with all the June rain, how quickly things dry up.

Maggie and Peter spray fish and kelp emulsion on the crops.

The garlic has been harvested and is now drying in the barn. In it's place, we've planted more lettuce, chard and kale.

Farmer Mike

Lovely Oscarde lettuce, one of the many new varieties we’ve planted, and coming soon to your plate!

Bill, staking up the tomatillos.

On top of all this activity, we finally got most of the first cutting of hay cut and baled, and safely under cover, a feat that required at least three solid days of sun. This is the first year of cutting the hay ourselves, with the assistance of Dave Sanderson. His alpacas are the beneficiaries of all this grassy goodness.  He and Bill had quite a time quizzing out the complexities of properly threading the baling twine through the new (to us) New Holland baler that Dave got from Connor Farm in Danvers. It’s about like threading a sewing machine, with similar results if not done right… Until they got it to work, instead of the neatly tied squares we expected, the baler kept spitting out great gobs of untied hay every third or fourth bale, which meant re-baling, much scratching of heads, and reading the manual. Persistence paid off. The baler works great, just in time for a second cutting in August. We expect this one to go more smoothly, provided the weather cooperates. Add to all this, teaching a jewelry class on Wednesday for Maggie and you get the idea of how busy our summer can get!  (Oh yeah, there’s also all the September wedding planning details that are going on simultaneously, behind the scenes.)

Thirsty farmers need an iced-tea break, delivered by Grammie.

"The Peanut Gallery" Charger and Suchi supervise the activities from a shady spot.

Charger, our new farm dog has only been with us a month, but seems like he's always been here. He fits right in!

Well, we’re not building an ark yet, but we’re looking at plans… Seriously though, we are gardening IN the rain. But it’s nothing a slicker and a pair of “Wellies” won’t take care of. Today was harvest day for our CSA customer shares. When we got to the garden and started picking, it was just a slight drizzle. “This isn’t bad,” I thought. We began field washing the lettuces and greens on a makeshift screen and tub and table Michael constructed. Charger, our new farm dog ran around with a stick, sniffing out woodchucks and bounding through the wet grass thoroughly soaked, joyously begging to be chased. He doesn’t mind being wet.

By the time we finished washing,  it was pouring straight down, but we were already wet to the skin, so we kept on going until it was done. Finally, we moved the whole operation into the barn and packed up the bags for our customers. It was actually quite a lot of fun. We joked and laughed and felt invigorated. If you want to be a farmer, you can’t mind the weather.

The hive is getting much taller. Now it has two brood boxes and a honey super, which means we'll have honey to sell, if all goes well.

In farming, it’s always too something: too hot, too cool, too dry, too wet.  We worry about it being too cool for the tomatoes. Then its too hot for the lettuce which wilts, then bolts. The tomatoes get invaded with hornworms. The sun comes out. It goes back in. The heat comes. It thunders, then hails. That’s farming. You make the best of the conditions and keep on plugging.

Now, dressed in a clean set of dry clothes, a cup of hot tea and a good lunch inside me, I look out my window, and it’s raining harder than ever. It’s not supposed to clear until after Wednesday. We’ve had at least 3 inches of rain since yesterday, and it’s only Monday. Yesterday was the first day of summer, but it sure doesn’t feel that way.

Delicate pink and magenta flowers grace the peas. Soon, we'll be enjoying the edible pods!

It rained on Friday too, when we worked in the garage constructing two new honey supers for the beehive. They had to be assembled and painted, and on Saturday, the only good day of the weekend, we put the first one on. Just in time, too. We  soon learned that our bee school friends Maggie and Phil’s bees had swarmed the next day. All the wet weather and rapidly growing colonies resulted in a number of swarms at local hives. The bees are “antsy,” because of the weather, according to Vin Gaglione of Crystal Bee Supply, one of our mentors.

The good news is the peas are blossoming and growing so vigorously, they’ve knocked down the trellis and we have to put up a new one. The brocolli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, tomatillos and cabbages have doubled in size since we planted them two weeks ago. I’ve got one ripe tomato on the vine and a bunch of green ones coming. There are blossoms on the tomatillos and hundreds of tiny bean plants are coming up. Everything is green as green can be. All is well in the garden.

“Success is the sum of small efforts - repeated day in and day out.”  Robert Collier

Some of the early crops: lovely lettuces, greens, and radishes planted in late April and May are now ready to be picked, and will show up in your first CSA distribution this week.

It has been a somewhat slow start, due to a cooler than normal spring. A couple of nights we scrambled to cover crops to prevent frost damage using every square inch of tarp and cover we could get our hands on, including trash bags, paper cups and bedsheets, working by car headlight until nearly 11 p.m. (Bill recalls his father talking about past summers when there was a frost in every month except August. Please, no!) In spite of these challenges, we’ve kept right on planting, and by the end of this weekend, just about all of the crops will be in the ground. After that’s done, we don’t exactly stand back and watch them grow. Now, we turn our efforts to tending the gardens in a daily round of watering, weeding, mulching, foliar sprays of compost tea, organic pest control and succession plantings.

It’s taken real teamwork to accomplished all that has been done here so far, and the result is nothing short of a small miracle. Out of a 100′x75′ rectangle of raw, plowed field,  a second, larger new garden is now surrounded by electric fence, and filled with orderly beds of hearty plants that will provide us with delicious vegetables all summer. Tackling a new garden, especially one this size is daunting. The sheer physicality of what lies ahead could stop you in your tracks. But thanks to many hands and talents of family and friends who bring diverse skills and knowledge to our garden, at the end of every day incremental progress is made, (and we sleep very well.)

After long workdays framing a house out in Lincoln MA, Ross and Mike come home to more heavy lifting – building structures, hoeing up new garden beds and tending strawberries.  After work, Bill tinkers with the irrigation systems and has engineered some truly remarkable solutions that will make the task of watering the gardens much easier this summer. Maggie is here every day, dawn to dusk, planting, planting, planting, and is joined by Desire and Acacia who’ve given up days off to pitch in. Peter shows up on Fridays and weekend days bright and early, ready to do anything asked of him. Marcia comes by to weed, and helped us install fencing. And we must not overlook the contributions of Grammie, who sustains us with goodies from her kitchen, like home made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, rasberry squares and rhubarb pie! There’s a contagious energy on this farm that draws people in. We’ve had visits from friends who come to see our progress and cheer us on and even new friends, like Gertrude who arrived with offers to weed during the week on her way home after work. Truly, we are blessed by all of these amazing people!

After a cool start, one or two frosty nights and some very warm days, the early crops are doing well with lots of attention from the gardeners.  All of the seedlings planted directly in the garden are up, and we’re planting succession crops weekly, of lettuces, greens, peas and other early veggies. The baby shoots benefited from a foliar spray of organic fish emulsion and kelp, and since last week, they’ve nearly doubled in size. Yes, the garden smells like fish, and it’s a good, earthy smell of nutrients delivered directly to the plants and soil. 

Gardening requires the engagement of all of the senses right down at the macro- and micro-level of things. At the macro level, (things that can be seen with the eye,) good gardeners develop the ability to differentiate between a weed and a new shoot. They attend to and record the daily temperature and wind direction, and watch the weather report like an avid fan tracks their favorite baseball team. They wait for rain, (not too much and no hail, please.) As no gardener can depend on the rain, they irrigate. Our system can deliver nearly a thousand gallons of water in a couple of hours, directly to the plants’ roots via soaker hoses strung along the rows.

At the micro level, organic gardening requires a basic understanding of the soil-food-web, and a basic respect and nurturance of the very foundation of the  food chain — the soil. Good soil is much more than dirt and is very much alive. Good soil requires a delicate balance of pH, organic matter, beneficial bacteria and micronutrients, boosted by the presence of worms who work the soil for us.  To help this process, our next foliar spray in a couple of weeks will deliver a nutritious brew of compost tea.

Recipe for compost tea: Get a big barrel and fill it with clean water. Place one or two shovelfuls of organic compost in an old nylon stocking and tie it closed. Add a generous dollop of sulphured molasses, and a couple of glugs of fish and kelp emulsion. Stir twice daily. The resulting brew is laden with good bacteria and other beneficial organisms, delivering a shot of immunity. Strong plants are better able to withstand onslaught from the many undesirable insects.

Meanwhile, a big box has arrived, containing hundreds of little parts, spools of braided rope and a very cool solar operated energizer for the electric fence that will surround the big new garden, and hopefully keep out the deer, woodchucks, racoons, and rabbits, all who would very much like to share the harvest. In one intense afternoon, and with the help of many strong hands, the system is nearly ready to power up. Soon, it’ll be us vs. all creatures great and small, as we establish a clear boundary between what’s theirs and what’s ours.

We’ve brought home the seedlings that were started in the greenhouse in March and April. Over the next few days, they will undergo the hardening off process, exposing them incrimentally to the harsher elements they’ll experience in the garden. The next couple of weeks will be an intensive effort of preparing beds, planting, mulching and watering to get everything established and growing. Here’s where all of our planning comes in, where the rubber meets the road, and we’re ready for it!

This time of year, there’s more work to do than hours in the day and we’re taking advantage of this early spring weather and the lengthening days to get all the gardens ready for planting and irrigation. The days (and nights) so far have been perfect for farming. Periodic rain with sunny breaks. Just what we need to coax all those newly planted seeds to sprout. Most of our labor pool is available on weekends, so aside from an hour or two before the sun goes down at the end of a long workday, the weekends are when we do most of our farming. Saturday was a busy day that didn’t end until supper at about 9:30 p.m.! In the morning, we checked the beehive and found three frames filled with nectar, pollen and a strong pattern of capped brood. This means a healthy working hive. The queen is actively laying and new bees will begin emerging from their larval stage very soon. More bees means more workers when it comes time for the first major honey flow in June, which translates to more vegetables for us!

Bill, Ross, Mike, Pete and Marcia weeded the asparagus bed and top-dressed it with good, organic compost. They planted the rest of the potatoes, and finished putting newspaper and mulch down between the raised beds to keep weeds at bay. On Sunday, Maggie put in another succession planting of lettuces. Bill constructed a manifold system for the drip hose fed from a 300-gallon gravity-feed tank, which Ross and Mike built a platform to hold. This will collect rainwater diverted from the roof of the shed, or when it hasn’t rained, we’ll fill it from the well.  It works great! At the end of the weekend, we stood back to admire all that we’d done. Mike dug out some old wooden chairs and put them against the back of the shed next to the new tank, a stump table between, creating a cozy, gracious place to sit in the heat of the day, a cool retreat in the shade of the apple tree from which to survey the garden, the newly planted cherry trees, and the beehive on the hill.

Next projects: Build a makeshift cold frame with hay bales and old window frames to harden off the greenhouse plants for about a week before planting. Hardening off means they need to be gradually exposed to the elements before they’ll survive outdoors on their own. And we’ll be planting the onions this week.

Apple blossoms frame the rhubarb and asparagus beds

 We’re not there yet, but we’re working toward a change — eating all of our food from local sources. It doesn’t hurt to live on a farm, where, over the past year, we’ve been engaged in a completely life-altering lifestyle shift. It blows my mind to see how far we’ve come in a year, and how incredibly real is the power of intention.

It’s early May, and we’re eating rhubarb and asparagus from the garden and eggs from our hens. Pretty soon, we (and you) will have lettuce, chard, spinach and peas and so much more. The asparagus bed is new, and isn’t yielding much yet, but it’s graced a few incredibly satisfying meals at our table. Enough slender shoots are coming up to promise a better crop next year, and beyond. The rhubarb is abundant, and we’re exploring other ways to eat it beyond the delicious rhubarb crisp that is Michael’s culinary specialty. Rhubarb sauce over chicken? Delicious. Rhubard bread, rhubard muffins? How about rhubard salsa? Definitely rhubarb jam. A few jars of it from our pantry shelf will appear on our breakfast table throughout the winter, not to mention in holiday gifts to friends and family. Last year in their gift boxes, our friends got little packages of sun-dried tomatoes, green tomatillo salsa, and grape jelly from our kitchen, and we were eating canned tomatoes in January that still tasted like August.

Soon, there will be strawberries. At one time, I didn’t even hestitate to throw strawberries into my shopping cart when they appeared in the produce department in January. All that juicy and delicious Chilean redness – like a Siren song, beckoned from the display, triggering a calculated response aimed at every shopper’s need for a surrogate Spring. They’re a poor substitute, aren’t they? A bland-tasting, card-boardy imitation that always disappoints, picked before full ripening to survive that long journey. And imagine how much oil it took to get them here! I know better now, and there’s nothing like the juicy, ripe strawberries we pick at Wheelerbrook Farm in Georgetown every June. Those, we know enough to eat today, or freeze them, or by tomorrow, they’re past their peak. So greedily we consume them, popping them in our mouths as soon as we get into the car, hardly waiting for the shortcake they’ll smother later that evening. Strawberries epitomize the experience of seasonal eating.  This year, Michael has taken on the task of planting a new strawberry bed so that next spring, we’ll have them to enjoy. Alongside the strawberries, we’re planting Sugarbaby Watermelons and Cantaloupe. The place he’s chosen is perfect for these fruits — a south-facing slope with sandy soil. If the vegetable and weather gods are kind this year, these melons will appear in your share packages.

Last winter, my family and I read Barbara Kingsolver’s book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” and Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food,” and we’ve never looked back. Last summer we revived the gardens Bill’s father always lavished with such care. We started flats of vegetables on the windowsill, and produced enough vegetables to supply the family and a small amount to sell at the Rowley Farmer’s Market on Sunday mornings. We had a blast, making friends, exchanging recipes and farming methods with other local farmers, and supporting the local community by buying things from the other farmers. Each week I made a commitment to buy at least one item from each booth at our market, doing our share to support the locavore movement. We’ve never eaten better.

So I’ve quit my day job. My new occupation: farmer/manager/marketing specialist/jewelry artist and teacher. I’m already talking to local chefs and restaurant owners, and Whole Foods market, all of whom are clamoring for local freshness. Not all of it will hapeen this year, but certainly the opportunities are there for the picking. The time is ripe (pardon the puns) for a new kind of farming. And at Mehaffey Farm, we’re ready to grow with it!

A row of sugar snap peas

This weekend’s nice weather enabled us to put in the first planting of cool-weather crops: three varieties of peas, seven kinds of lettuce, spinach, kale, bok choy, beets, and shallots, and a whole new flower bed.

The new asparagus bed, planted last spring got some much-needed attention: weeding, and a nice compost top-dressing. Asparagus is a crop that requires patience– new crowns that were planted last spring still need a couple more years before we get any significant crop. 

We also weeded and fertilized the rhubard, which is growing so fast, you can see it!

Fencing was at the top of our to-do list this weekend. It’s us against the resident woodchuck, who is just waiting to sample the smorgasbord of delicious veggies in his front yard. Sorry little guy, those  veggies aren’t for you! Over 400 feet of fencing has been  installed so far, all designed to keep our vegetables away from hungry critters.

On the agenda for May: electric fencing around the big garden where all the late May plantings will go. And irrigation. We will tap two wells on the farm that will allow us to pump water and irrigate the crops. Bill and the boys are building a water tower with a 300 gallon tank, part of our new gravity-feed irrigaton system.  We are also planning to install a whole rain water collection system.

Peter arrived early on Saturday morning with a very special birthday present for Bill…our new Mehaffey Farm mascot/not-so-scary-scarecrow. She still needs a name…any suggestions?

Welcome to the Mehaffey Farm Blog, where you’ll find regular updates on what we’re doing on the farm.  It’s a very busy time of year for us, lots of things are happening, and every day brings something new.  We’re excited about what we’ve accomplished so far! With this blog, we can share our progress with our CSA members, friends and family – our successes, challenges, and stories.  We look forward to your feedback!

During the past nine weeks, Maggie, Bill, Ross, and Mike went to “Bee School.” It was an amazing experience and we learned enough to start raising our honeybees.  There’s more to learn, and we’re told to let the bees teach us.  But we’re lucky to have several wonderful mentors in the area– experienced beekeepers, willing to help “new-bees” like us. We’ll definitely be calling on their expertise!

We got the bees primarily to help pollinate our veggies with the hope of an added bonus of  delicious honey and other products from the hive.  So on Sunday afternoon, we finally installed ours in a hive perched on a Southeast-facing hill on the farm where the warmth of the early morning sun will get the bees up bright and early to start gathering pollen and nectar.  

Bees are truly amazing creatures with an incredibly organized and complex societal structure.  A bee package containing about 14,000 bees arrives with a new queen safely enclosed in a tiny cage (otherwise, they’ll sting the unfamiliar queen to death!)  The cage gives the bees time to get used to her pheremones, or scent. She was put in our package  just before the long ride up from Georgia, where our bees were picked up last week by Vin Gaglione of Crystal Bee Supply.  The queen’s cage is sealed with a candy plug that worker bees eat through, and it takes them about three to five days to free her.  In the meantime, other worker bees get busy building the nursery out of wax comb where she will lay her eggs, eventually up to 2,000 a day! 

Here are some interesting bee facts:

Honeybees are responsible for pollinating approx 80% of all fruit, vegetable and seed crops in the U.S.

Honeybees communicate with one another by “dancing” different dances that give the direction and distance to flowers and fruit trees.

A single hive contains approximately 40-45,000 bees.

To make one pound of honey, workers in a hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers.