For those of you who can't make it on Wednesday, here's an introduction to one incredibly important piece of CSA equipment:
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| The Kubota at rest after a long day |
After we've plowed in the spring using one of the haying operation's more heavy duty tractors, we use the Kubota to disk harrow our fields. This breaks up clumps of dirt and debris while also beginning to smooth and flatten out the field. If we are putting down organic fertilizer for a crop, we hook up our broadcast spreader to the Kubota to evenly spread the pelleted fertilizer around the fields. Next, we follow with our Perfecta, which incorporates any fertilizer we've put down and also makes the fields smooth enough to plant into. If we are seeding directly into the ground (which is how we seed carrots, beets, greens, chard, spinach, rutabagas, turnips, radishes, sunflowers, beans, cilantro and dill), then we hook our roto-tiller up to the Kubota to fluff up the soil and make a completely flat, debris-free seedbed. If we are transplanting seedlings from the greenhouse, we skip the roto-tiller and either hook up our plastic mulch-layer, or hook up our waterwheel transplanter to the Kubota. The plastic mulch-layer is used to lay down a thin layer of biodegrdable plastic that keeps down weeds and warms up the soil for crops (we use it for onions, tomatoes, eggplant, sweet potatoes, watermelon, cukes and summer squash). The transplanter dibbles holes at the desired spacing for us to transplant into. If it's dry out, we can also fill its tanks up with water so that the transplanter drops water into each hole. The transplanter has two seats on the back so that crew members can sit on back and plant while the Kubota is pulling the transplanter down the field.
As you might imagine, all this field preparation keeps the Kubota pretty busy, but we have plenty of other tasks we use the Kubota for. The Kubota is also used for cultivating with our Lillistons and Reigi weeder. The Lillistons are set up to kill weeds in between our two-row crops. The Reigi weeder is a fantastic device for weeding one-row crops, and it also can get some of the weeds within the row, saving us some hand-weeding and hoeing time! (Most tractor cultivation implements can only kill weeds in between crop rows, and we have to come through afterwards to pull out weeds by hand that were left within the crop row).
We also hook up our potato digger and under-cutter bar to the Kubota to aid in harvesting root crops. The potato digger cuts under potato plants and then drops the potatoes back on top of the soil. The under-cutter bar loosens up the soil beneath carrots, parsnips and sweet potatoes to speed up harvest. Without either of these implements, we'd have to go through our fields with pitchforks and loosen these crops by hand.
Finally, we use the Kubota to mow around field edges and to mow in crops once we are finished harvesting them. After we've mowed in crops, we disk harrow again with the Kubota to break up debris, and then hook up our broadcast seeder to spread cover crop seed. One final pass with the disk harrow or Perfecta incorporates the seed into the soil and we then leave the field alone until next spring when we begin the cycle all over again.
As you can see, the Kubota is essential to our daily operations. We try to have it running any time it's not wet out. Someday I dream of getting another similarly sized tractor so that we can carry out two of these operations at the same time, and so that we can give our Kubota a rest occasionally!
What's in the share: Lettuce, Carrots, Ailsa Craig Onions, Scallions, Kale, Summer Squash/Zucchini, Cucumbers, Eggplant, Green Peppers, Potatoes, PYO Herbs, PYO Flowers.
New this week: Escarole, Red Slicing Tomatoes, PYO Cherry Tomatoes.
*Apologies to Monday/Tuesday folks who came in last week expecting Marini's sweet corn- there was an unexpected delay, but we will do our best to make sure you get the same number of weeks of sweet corn as Thursday/Friday folks. The wet spell we had last month has not only created challenges in our fields, but also at Marini's - hence the difficulty in predicting when corn will be available to us this year!
