[dominiquer60]

Liz,
Pay no mind to this wise guy, besides eventually you will all smarten up and find yourselves with a pair of steers:) Though I may wise up to a single chunk someday, you never know.
Erika

[dominiquer60]

Andy,
If you ever work Bell or Fava Beans into your rotation they can go in early as well, but I have yet to find a seeder in which they fit, I should email my old mentor how he did it. We only do a few by hand and hoe, but they make an excellent cover crop if you can cover more ground with them.
Erika

[dominiquer60]

Just another thought on cold soil germination.

This year I planted carrots in a hoop house on Jan 20, I did not notice any seedlings until March 2 and today on the March 11th, there a few more, just enough to get my hopes up. I planted beets on February 14th, and noticed the first ones popping up on March 2nd with more vigor than the carrots. Usually beets will germ faster than carrots given the same conditions. In this case they both needed the right soil conditions, and that came well after the beets were seeded. I realize that these are different crops than what Andy is aiming for, but the lesson is the same, jumping the gun and seeding early can lead to slow germination, no matter how quick you are they will wait til the time is right.

You may ask why bother? market gardening is as big of a gable as one wants to take. $14 of carrot seeds in a different year with a January thaw, or unusually warm weather may have yielded faster germination and plants with their first true leaf already. Last year our January carrots did well and we were selling bunches of carrots with green tops the first weekend in May, it was also such a hot spring that we were wearing shorts that day as well. So you never know how the winter growing season is going to go, but if you don’t get seed in the ground, you’ll never how good it could have been.

With that said, I like to wait with lower value field crops until the soil has had a chance to dry and warm up a bit, but it has taken me a lot of rotten peas to be convinced:)

Erika

[dominiquer60]

Welcome Liz,
Ask away and someone will answer. I look forward to hearing more about your lads and your perspective from across the pond.
Be Well,
Erika

[dominiquer60]

I have planted peas on March 15th up here in NY, I think that we even had to irrigate that year just to get them to germinate. After years of trying hard to get garden peas in ASAP, it is just easier to wait a little while for the soil to warm up. Even if I can get them in early, the weather is generally not done with winter yet. Once in a while it works out, but often the cold wet soil leads to slow poor germination. Often I can plant 2 sets of peas 2-3 weeks apart and they flower and pod within a couple days of each other. Depending on what your goals are it may just be worth a little wait for a better stand. That is my experience with spring peas.
Erika

[dominiquer60]

Welcome Thecowboysgirl!

I think that there are a couple FL folk here somewhere. We just missed each other, I used to work winters in Palm Beach at the horse shows, this is my first winter home in NY in several years, and my heavens what a winter to come home to. I wish you folks lots of luck with your endeavor. There is a lot to read about, even on threads that might not catch your eye at first. The best part is, if you can’t find a certain topic, ask away and don’t be surprised if you get answers from all over the world:)

Best Wishes,
Erika

[dominiquer60]

Thanks Tim,
I know just what you mean about the pasture. Last year I had my beef team on grass as much as possible, they are runts and they certainly grew well on the green. I was always careful to move them often but not too often if they were on lawn mowing detail tethered to equipment. When I had an area large enough I would fence the perimeter with a single strand of hot wire and use net fence to give them a new small portion of the field every other day or so. I really liked this method, I adapted it from a sheep farm that I used to work on.

We have Selenium deficient soil so we give all of the cattle a mineral salt with Se in it already. The only straight alfalfa we have on the farm is mixed into the chicken feed. We have one field that was straight alfalfa 15 years ago, but you know what it looks like now, orchard grass haven, but all of that gets sold to horse hay customers. Much of our hay is timothy, brome and red clover, that is what we seed under our oats in the rotation every year.

I did have a good scare last week when my hog of a roan calf was found consuming a large quantity of the the dairy pellets that I feed them. He laid down most of the night, completely uninterested in his brother’s pellets at feeding time, and was fine and “deprived” the next day.

I am certainly glad to find that I am not overdoing the feed. The cattle here mainly get fed grain in the creep and small amounts for training purposes and ease of handling. To the Dale and his father the amount that I feed seems like a lot, without weighing it, I would guess that they are getting about 1.5 pounds a day (19% CP dairy grower pellet). I don’t need them to be huge, but I would like them bigger than the beef at their age (beef are 2yo now and ~850, got to love my runts). Looks like I am heading in a good direction.

Thanks,
Erika

[dominiquer60]

I am all for trying it at the annual meeting this year, but I don’t think it will meet the FDA’s new food safety standards:)
Erika

[dominiquer60]

That’s some great coverage, especially from Fox and Friends:)
erika

[dominiquer60]

Goodish news,
since NY Farm Bureau supports Certified Raw Milk, so does the Farm Family Insurance company. They wanted desperately to have nothing to do with raw milk, but since they want to be affiliated with our organization so badly, they bend to our policy, at least for this year:) They will have nothing to do with milk coops, cow boarding, and unlicensed raw milk dairies, but if you are one of the 34 in the State’s Certified Raw Milk Program, you are still covered, for now.
Erika

[dominiquer60]

I don’t see these distance requirements meaning squat. Here we are lucky to have a few dry places out of 300 acres owned/rented that actually grow alfalfa. If it happens to be next to the only place that the neighbor can grow alfalfa, it would be difficult to separate the fields more than the width of a hedge row and have any room left for alfalfa. Small irregular shaped fields make enough challenges, try to move it 900 feet and you are in the next town over in between a rock shelf and a swamp. Besides the fact that bees can travel miles and even though they do not prefer alfalfa flowers, chances are likely that they will aid in contamination.

It is all hog wash, no that could be useful, it as worthless as hen sh!t on a pump handle, sorry again that has value, it is about as meaningful as an elected representative, I’ll leave it as that.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

I don’t get the RR Alfalfa, especially since I can’t seeing the need to spray it, we’ve been doing alfalfa for years and the worst enemy we have are the wet spots, sure it is not off the truck from the west perfect, but it doesn’t need to be.

“farmer’s responsibility to protect themselves from the environment” How does the government and Monsanto expect us to protect ourselves from something that we have no control over. If we could protect ourselves from pollution by pollen, shouldn’t we be able to protect ourselves from tornadoes, drought, acid rain, drunk drivers and the emerald ash borer? It is a weak excuse for legal greed if you ask me.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

On the farm that I used to live and work at, we would build temporary hoop houses out of 20′ soft core schedule 40 PVC. This length would cover 2 6′ beds with room to walk under the peak. We sere in sand, all we had to do was use an old post hole digger to dig a 1′ hole for each end of the pipe. We would stick one end in a hole and bend it right over to the corresponding hole on the other side and fill and tamp the holes full. Next we used nylon rope staked at each end of the house to form a temporary ridge pole. We would drive 2′ rebar stakes along the sides, one between each hoop. We used both 1 year and 4 year greenhouse plastics on our houses, and I know of some folks using floating row cover for some applications. Once the plastic was on, we secured it with nylon rope from stake to stake between each hoop. The result looks like a giant segmented worm, so we call them caterpillars. To vent the sides we just lift the plastic up and hold it in place with clamps. If we wanted to secure the sides we shovel soil onto the edge of plastic. These were simple, easy and cheap as far as hoop houses go, sometimes they lasted through the winter, sometimes they didn’t, if there is any doubt the plastic can be taken off for the winter.

The hoop houses that we have at the farm now are all metal hoops and either purchased used, or in the case of our 30×96 purchased new.

This is just one way to do it, I hope you find an idea on this thread that helps you toward finding what works for you.

Be Well,
Erika

[dominiquer60]

I am impressed with both the modified seeder and the abundance of bare ground:) I hope it works as good as it looks and I look forward to hearing more about it as you start to use it.
Best Wishes,
Erika

[dominiquer60]

Tim,
I purposely put the 2 yo team on the wheel as they can pull the load no problem. Abe and Will are only 6 months old, and yes, almost as tall as the beef team. I really did not see the need to push the young ones by putting them on the wheel, especially not having a proper set up.

Abe and Will were out front more as an exercise to drive 4 while working only 2. I was glad that they kept the slack out of the chain and maybe eased the load for the wheelers, but it was not my intention to have them do much work. I knew what I was doing was not proper to work 4, but in the end my goal to drive 4 was certainly met without stressing any of us out. I was very happy with the results, and now realize what I should do in the future if I were to get more serious about working 4.

Thanks for the tips, I know that I have read similar info else where too, that is probably how I had heard about the evener. They certainly make sense and I hope to incorporate it all in the future if the opportunity arises.

Erika

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