Happy September! What beautiful, cooler weather.
So we've had some rain...thank you Mother (Nature). We are working on setting up a more permanent and efficient water collection system here on the farm. Hopefully our 2 - 400 gallon tanks will be up and pumping for the farm tour on October 19th! We are cleaning tanks and gutters, fixing pipes and hoses, calculating psi and calibrating pumps now...woo hoo.
Farming is hard work and it's work we all enjoy and believe in. But there are some jobs that we would like to make easier. One of them is the bulk harvest of things like potatoes, sweet potatoes and winter squash. With these crops we are harvesting hundreds of pounds at a time. Check out our first You tube video-the link is on Facebook this week. Annie, a good friend and super helper made the video. It shows how we harvest potatoes. We do use a plow to bring them to the surface. Then they are collected in crates, put in the bucket of the tractor and hauled to the barn. We cut squash and put them in crates in the field then haul them to the truck where we haul them back out into the tunnels to cure. It's a lot of handling and a lot of up and down movements.
I enjoy time on the tractor but I love the diversity of the work on this small farm. Being able to change up jobs and how we are using our bodies is what I like about our scale of farming. We have a variety of crops to harvest and many different types of jobs to complete. Finding where we can make jobs easier without adding a different kind of stress is a good creative challenge. So we're always working on being more efficient. Increasing efficiency is in our winter planning!
Have a great week!
