I planted onions in the spring… So apparently I’ve been having a blond moment for the last several weeks now. I’ve been excited to collect seed from whatever garden plants I can. My onions sent up nice big flowers that now have thousands of seeds in them. I thought great, yippee, I get to save some onion seed. Ummm, no. Well, yes, I get some onion seeds. But no freakin’ onions!! I pulled them up today and the aren’t much bigger than the sets I planted.Duh, I guess I should have thought about that. Apparently onions are not supposed to flower in their first year and if they do the bulbs will be very small. The bulbs also won’t store well since they have been pierced where the flower stalk pushed up. The only explanation I can find for this is extreme temperature fluctuations during the growing seasons. Yep, we’ve got that going on here in Michigan. So what do you think? Has this happened to you? Am I missing something? Is this more likely to happen when you grow from onion sets? I’m so bummed.
Continue readingCategory: harvest
My Take On Forward Contracting
This is a little more technical than most of my posts and refers to grain farming. Not sure how many readers raise grain but this is something I learned about that I’d like to share. So basically, we grow the corn, we take it to the elevator, and then we either sell it right away (if prices are good) or we start to incur storage costs on it and don’t sell it until prices come back up. Supposedly, this is the first year in the last 10 where a farmer didn’t make money by storing grain until after the 1st of the year. Of course that would happen during our first harvest year, why not!? So since we are beginning field work and need $$$ to buy fertilizer and seed, we really need the money from last year’s corn. Plus, we don’t want to pay to store it much longer. However, prices are still low enough that I’m not convinced they will even cover the cost of growing that corn. So, there is another option available: forward contracting. Basically, we sell the corn today and a check is mailed to us. The check is for the current price ($3.42/bushel) times
Continue readingHarvest, My First Farm Meal, & Pictures!
Okay since my memory card is full I think this is going to be picture week around here. I tend to snap pics with the intent to share and then never quite get there. But first – guess what!!? We harvested our very first soybeans on the new farm! We had 30 acres of them and they went 61 bushels to the acre. For those who aren’t familiar with farm terms: 1 bushel = 60 pounds 61 bushels to the acre is a very good yield, we haven’t heard any higher in the area so far, but there are lots of soys left to come off. I can’t help but think of the part in Omnivore’s Dilemma about yields increasing astronomically in the past 100 years. I am breathing a big sigh of relief because the payment from them will cover about 1/2 of our mortgage this year. If all goes well with the corn we should be just fine. So Saturday since Brian and the guys were working on our fields I felt obligated to make dinner for them. Normally the senior farmer’s wife provides meals for everyone who helps in the field. These meals range from ordering pizza
Continue readingPickle Farming – Part 1
Yesterday I was lucky enough to head out to the beach with a friend for the first part of the day. My fiance, Brian, was working for our friends that grow pickles so when I got home I decided to go ride in the semi with him. He was driving a semi with doubles behind it. That means it has 2 separate trailers behind it. The whole rig from front bumper to rear hitch is 70′ long. The set of 2 trailers is also known as “trains”. They aren’t too hard to drive but they are very tricky to back up. Brian drove the same setup for 4 years at an excavating company so he does great with them. I’m so proud of him! 🙂 Anyway, enough bragging, on to the story of pickles… Pickle farmers try to schedule their planting so that they know exactly what day the pickles will be ready to harvest. If it is 90 degrees and humid out the pickles can grow very fast. They can be too small to pick in the morning and too big to pick at night. Our friends had a 30 acre field ready to be picked on Saturday and
Continue reading