A Windy Time on the farm

The start of October saw a heat wave and now the beginning of November has brought strong winds to show the change in seasons.

The last few days of wind with the gusts reaching over 40 miles an hour have not been fun to deal with while at the farm. It dries out everything quicker and stresses them out so the plants are focused on surviving instead of thriving.

With a small wind we can do pretty much all the tasks we want but with such strong winds we have to change up what we do on the farm until the winds die down.

One of the reasons that we are feeling the stronger winds on the farm this fall is that the walnut orchards next to us were removed last year. They had provided a small windbreak for us that reduced the wind unless we were above the trees which never happened.

Having such windy days also means that we have had to postpone some of our lettuce transplanting even though they are ready to go in the ground. All transplants cannot handle much stress right when they are being planted so to help them survive when transplanted we have pushed back when we plant them.

Hopefully we will get them planted tomorrow along our overwintered onions since we have a busy week next week with limited time to plant.

While not able to plant we have been spending a lot of time weeding the more recently planted fall veggies. The weeds have been growing a little bit slower with the shorter and cooler days but we don’t want to delay the weeding because the veggies need to have free reign of all the water and nutrients around them instead of competing with weeds.

After this weeding the goal is to not have to weed the lettuce again before it gets harvested and for the bunching greens hopefully it won’t need another weeding for until January unless it stays warm.

Despite it being a little challenging in the wind we have been pulling up the drip tape from all of our summer veggies.

We try to reuse as much of the drip tape as possible but pieces where the holes where the water comes out are completely blocked up and animals have chewed through multiple parts of it we have to get rid of.

Getting the drip tape out from underneath the plants is necessary before we decide to mow the veggies down.

We are waiting a little bit longer to mow everything down but since we got about half an inch of rain last week they don’t need any more water.

Having the plants be ready to be mowed down is also important to reduce one step when it comes time to plant cover crop seed before the first big rainstorm we get.