Farm Update: Planting Complete!
It's a rainy day in early June, keeping me out of the fields. Time for a blog post!
It has been a few months since my last post, so I thought I'd bring everyone up to speed with how TCBC's inaugural planting went. We'll start from the very beginning. In order to plant strawberry plants using my system, you need to begin with dry, finely rotovated soil. Sort of like this:
This is what a little more than an acre of tilled soil looks like. After the tillage phase is over, we switch machinery and go into 'bed prep' phase, where rows of raised beds are shaped down the length of the field. This took a whole lot of tinkering, head-scratching and aggravation, but after a day or two I ended up with this:
Not perfect by any means, but not too bad for my first year! After beds have been shaped it's time to lay plastic. Another machinery switch; this time we use a piece that puts down drip irrigation line, plastic mulch, covers the mulch sides with soil, and punches holes in the plastic at our specified plant spacing all at the same time! It's a finnicky process indeed, but once you get the hang of it you can lay down plastic very quickly. You can see a zoomed out version of the freshly laid field at the top of this post, but here is a closeup:
If you look very closely you can see our head of security working on his stealth tactics. After plastic was laid and irrigation was hooked up, it was finally time to plant. This is where things got a lot worse before they got worse. If you've been keeping up with our instagram or facebook feed, you've probably seen pictures of the fancy solar-powered field cart I built and named REAPR- the Really Easy Automated Picking Rover. Here it is shortly after construction:
Pretty cool! Unfortunately that smile on my face did not last long. While I got the REAPR primarily for harvesting, I could also use it for other tasks like planting and weeding. Within 24 hrs the factory shipped electronic harnesses were not connected properly and drained the battery past the point where the solar panels could recharge them, and the speed control board was defective. Everything has since been fixed, but it took the REAPR out of commission for about 2 weeks. That meant the entire planting- about 16,000 plants- had to be put into the ground by hand. This was also conveniently during the time a few weeks back when MN decided to pretend it was mid-August and blast us with 90-degree days in mid-spring. Fortunately I sucked it up, begged for help over social media, and was graced with the help of more than a dozen volunteers over the course of six 14-hr workdays. Here are just some of them:
Look at those champions! We put the last plant in the ground at 9pm Friday, and promptly celebrated and fell asleep. Strawberries are not planted by seed- you order bare-rooted clonal cuttings and plant them with popsicle sticks. Here is what they look like immediately after planting:
Not very impressive; they almost look dead! However after about 7-10 days of sunshine, fertilizer and water they start looking like cute little baby plants:
That picture was taken two days ago. From now until first harvest I'll be busy with weeding, fertilizing and replacing plants that died in the initial planting. Then the real fun begins. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated, so stay tuned!