i could lift a smaller one...

As we have 29 - 200ft rows of varietals
(assorted greens
spinach
kale
parsley
swiss chard
parsnips
carrot
turnips
lettuce
broccoli
broccoli raab
cabbage
chinese cabbage
kohlrabi)
going to ground in field W1 within the next two weeks AND because the weather has been too cold/wet to do so AND because we have not had the crop maps until two days ago....
We did ALL of our soil prep for this field (+ 10 rows of W2) today.
As E has been under the weather for the past couple days
(she worked hard in the greenhouse all day)




it was up to D and I to tackle the field. As I was perpetually in motion, I unfortunately didn't get that many pics. So? To the list...

8:15-10:00 - Continue and finish spreading compost on W1 (New Holland Tractor). Got much more comfortable with front end loader. Nice.
10-11am - Hand raked uneven piles of compost to spread them over the beds.
11-12pm - Pulled last year's pepper stalks/roots from a 200' bed (as they are rather woody and would not till well back into the soil). Done pretty much all on one's knees.
12:30ish - 2:45 - Spread fertilizer over all of W1 and 10 rows of W2 (Cub Cadet). Wind was a little blustery at times, so I had to stop in the middle of the bed and wait fairly often. The fertilizer mix is rather like sand. The lightest material of the mix is nitrogen (a coarse dust) which happens to be the most important. Dust + Wind = (a terrible song by Kansas...) Waste of good (and not so cheap) fertilizer.

D (using the new John Deere) chisel plowed all of what I had fertilized. Looking like this.


As one might imagine, LARGE rocks "surface" after tilling so deep. So..
2:45-3:45 - Collecting large rocks from chisel plowed field (There was one roughly the size of your average pillow that I absolutely could not pick up. I rolled it. Visions of Bill Murray for some reason...) and depositing them in the front end loader for later drop.
3:45-4:20 - Pulled up a 100'+ bed of last year's kale. Same story as the pepper stalks. Way too woody to be beneficial to this season's soil.

4:30 - Gather tools, close field gate, tractor back to barn, done for the day.

Tomorrow morning, first thing, we'll be using the rototiller on W1 & W2.



From there we will be spending most of the day hand planting 10 rows of onions/leeks. They were actually to be going to ground May 1, but they've arrived early. If we were to wait on grounding them, they would probably go bad within the next week.

One more pic for the day.



The "pets" on the farm followed me (I was taking 10year old beans) to the compost pile in hopes of getting the "table scraps." They were ultimately unhappy with my contribution to their buffet...

To rest now. Dig...