Rutkowski Farm

Completely unrelated hazy pic. The garlic field from 4-20

Today I planted a 300 foot row of onions  (all the gory details are here).  You may ask…what is he thinking. Yeah, I don’t know.  Last year was, to a degree, a failure (with a fair amount of success mixed in).  I didn’t really know what it would mean to have a little one running around, and despite all of the public pronouncements about scaling back, I probably planted as much as I did other years.  The primary difference this past year was that we didn’t engage our friends for help and also lost Kathleen as a dedicated farmhand altogether.  She’s a great mom, and I have no doubt that we will involve our little guy in the fun as soon as this summer.  Still, there will probably be only one person working at a time.

The best way to approach all of this may be to build resolutions, so here goes.

• Spend more time with family.
• Work smarter, not harder
• Get ahead of the weeds.
• Trick Engage friends for help.
• Be generous with those friends.
• Constantly re-evaluate what is working, what isn’t.
• Put up a hoop house.

It’s here!  And as usual, I don’t quite feel ready.  I’m very excited about the upcoming season and just hoping that I can keep up with whatever we decide to do.  Our little guy is now 18 months old and is keeping us running all the time.  I have to somehow teach him what’s a weed and what’s not and get him to work.  The kid loves repetitive tasks.  His focus tends to drift, but yours would too if the world was that new and interesting to you.

One thing I’m excited about this year is that the projects on tap for this year should get the infrastructure to a point where I’m going to stop worrying about things falling down.  That’s not to say that things won’t fall down.  They will.  And that’s ok.

And now on to the 2nd meaning of spring.

Late last fall, something went wrong with the throttle on my Allis Chalmers D17.  A slight pull on the throttle bar on the steering column opened up the carb all the way and resulted in a red lined engine.  NOT GOOD.  Well, I stopped by the house of Sam, a fellow member of the Milton Grange, yesterday to look at his old D17 and he asked if I had the spring.  Now…this is definitely not stock or even something that Allis Chalmers ever intended, but this little spring provides just enough resistance to keep things from getting out of hand.

My theory is that the fundamental design of the governor isn’t all that good and this compensates for that.  Sam stated that the spring had been there as long as he could remember.  Works for me!  So SPRING!!!!

So today I finished mulching the garlic for the winter months.  All in all, I’m really happy with how the field prep went for the actual planting. All my beds were uniform and straight, and there wasn’t a lot of organic material (ie plant stubble) in the field to wrestle with.  In short, I corrected a lot of the mistakes I made last year.  I’m hoping that I can carry that forward in the spring and do an additional mulching once it’s popped up.  I really need to do a better job of keeping the weeds under control this go around.

So, what did I learn this time while planting?

• The dibbler does not reach the ground when it’s mounted on the tractor.  I had the brilliant idea that I’ll pull the dibbler behind the tractor, so that my rows would be very straight.  I went as far as buying additional parts for the dibbler to adapt it to fit on my hitch.  Unfortunately, I mounted it and it just spun in the air. Doh!
• Any task that I’m going to ask others to help me with has to be done first by me.  I spent a good deal of time measuring and remeasuring to get more accurate numbers of what I was planting.  Because I spent the time, I have a great deal more confidence in my counts this year.  I’ve noticed that when I have others working for me, this kind of information gets lost.  I always appreciate the help, but I now see that I need to develop a methodology on my own before bringing others into the task.
• I can manage the whole process on my own.  That said, given my current task load, 10,000 head of garlic is a pretty realistic maximum.

As a side note, I’m hoping to make a batch of garlic powder soon.

I have more to write about garlic planting, but for the moment, I just want to throw out a reminder/notification that we’ll be at the Ballston Spa Indoor Farmers Market this Saturday from 9am to Noon.  We don’t have a ton but here’s the rundown:

• Garlic
• Garlic Braids
• Sprouts
• Potatoes (White and Blue)
• Butternut Squash
• Sunchokes (aka Jerusalem Artichokes)

We hope to see folks there!

Here’s a map for those that don’t know where…