Picofarms Produce: A {tiny} Little Slice of Heaven

We had a sudden thunderstorm roll through last night around midnight.  The wind was blowing and the thunder was crashing and the lightening was flashing!  The rain pelted the house with a crazy fierceness for about five minutes until the fast-moving squall line stormed on through and left us be in peace.  We didn't get much out of it in the way of rain.

But it gave me an idea.

I've always hated strong storms since I was very young.  I was lying wide awake in bed, quaking a little inside from the ferocity of the storm and wondering if the neighbor's gigantic elm tree would finally land on my roof once and for all.  (It did not.)  I worried for my newly planted fruit trees on my tiny farms.  My so very tiny, minuscule farms.  Very tiny, indeed.  In fact, I don't think all of the plots put together would make up an entire city lot. 

My wired-up brain started free associating a bit as it is wont to do when under stress.  Small farm?  No.  Mini-farm?  Nope.  My places aren't big enough.  Micro-farm?  Doesn't feel right either.  So I went further.  Nano-farm!  Naw...that sounds like a place on Ork or maybe someplace where tiny robots are made.  Besides, that still seems a bit large for my really tiny Little Slice of Heaven.

All due respect to Mr. Williams.  Nope.  This will never do.

So what's smaller than a nano-something? A pico-something!  I did some quick math and determined that we have less than a quarter of an acre actually in production. Yeah, I told you it's small.  When the average privately owned farm is more like 1100 acres, my 0.19 acres seems to-tal-ly mini-scule.  Or, maybe, pico-scule.

See what I did there?

Anyway, tl:dr, I decided during a raging thunderstorm to call my place Picofarms.  Picofarms Produce.  If you follow me on facebook, you might notice the change.  In my heart, it will always be my tiny Little Slice of Heaven.  But that's kinda long on a business card.

See you at the market.

Coming out of Hibernation

Wow.  Winter has been brutal this year.  The storms have been vicious in these parts.

This morning as I got out of my car in the parking lot at work, I saw two big, fat robins bouncing around in the dormant grass.  It was a refreshing sight.  Winter winds have been whipping and screaming around my little haven for a couple months now.  I’ve spent a good portion of those dark, winter evenings surfing gardening blogs, enjoying the offerings on Netflix, crocheting a ton of baby things for my Etsy page Curiosity's Piqued and making lots of cool costume stuff for Tadasana Tribal also on Etsy.  It’s been a productive winter.  I can say with all frankness and sincerity that I’ve had just about enough of that.  It’s time for spring to get here.

It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve managed to distract myself from the biting cold and drifting snow with seed catalogs and planning my garden, like any normal gardener would do. A few weeks ago I set up my seed-starting light rack and now there are dozens of little seedlings emerging from their little pots or peat pellets and stretching towards the light.  It’s a very restorative sight for me.

So far the emergent seedlings have been tomatoes, peppers and some flowers I’m toying with this year.  I’m also trying out some herbs like spearmint and chamomile for the first time from seed. I admit it.  I probably got a little carried away.  Maybe more than a little.

I really can’t help myself.

There are four kinds of tomatoes:  Roma, Beefsteaks (leftover from last year), Rutgers (a new variety for me) and Super Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes (also leftover from last year’s seeds).  They’ve all germinated nicely and little bitty, leggy seedlings have emerged.  Maybe I should up the wattage on my lights.  Mmmmm...cherry tomatoes!  I can't wait for them!  I started several plants so we'll have plenty to dry for next winter.

 

The peppers include: Jalapeno, Sonoma Sunset Sweet, California Wonder and something called Chili New Mexico.  We’re going to have peppers coming out our ears if we’re lucky.  It’s a salsa-making year, so I hope so.

There are also numerous flowers: Pinks, moonflower, 4 kinds of marigolds, corn poppies…and many others that I would have to get up and find my notebook to remember.  I write it all down, of course.  I’m turning 50 at the end of the month and I trust very little to my memory anymore.

Of course, there will be more soon.  I’m planning to start all my squashes and gourds inside in the little newspaper pots I’m trying out.  I'm hoping for better germination of the gourds.  And I have plans in the works for those squash plants and my nemesis, the squash vine borer.  A POX ON THE MOTH!

 

Good Friday is coming up so that will be potato planting day. After the smashing success last year growing potatoes in containers, I’m ramping that up from last year’s 4 little pots to 6 big plastic totes and 3 different varieties:  Yukon gold, Kennebec and a red that I've forgotten the name of.  They say the Yukon Gold doesn't keep very well, but we had the last of ours at Christmas and that's pretty darn good to me.  I’ve also got three kinds of onions in the standard red, yellow and white varieties and plenty of each of them.  I discovered last fall that drying and storing onions is an imprecise art form.  I hope to improve this fall.

I have plans to try many, many new things this year.  I finally got myself a pressure canner this winter and I'm anxious to give it a try canning some of those things I've never been able to can before.  A whole new world of canning awaits me!  Also,  I splurged on a Victorio food strainer and sauce maker  on the recommendation of another blog and I wish I could remember which blog it was.  That food mill looks like a dream come true for sauce and salsa making.  I also got the 4-piece accessory set to use for things other than sauce.  I expect this single purchase to take much of the tedium out of canning season.

But the very best thing for this season?  That's the subject of an entire blog all on its own, I think. 

It feels like there should be pictures of all this stuff, but I don't have them ready.  I hope to have some pictorials of all these goings on in the coming weeks.  It’s going to be a busy spring and summer...aaand fall at Almost An Acreage.  I can hardly wait.

A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall

This is what I awoke to this morning.  The picture was actually taken this afternoon. But I think you get the idea.

Rain.  Lots of it.  Coming down in buckets.  It has been so long since we got any substantial rain, that I rushed outside to see it up close.

I stood under the cover on the patio and gaped in awe at the torrent coming out of the downspout and wished I had gotten the rain barrel project started this summer.  We would have had several barrels worth.  It was, in a word, spectacular.

It was so spectacular that I slipped from the relative dryness of the patio into the onslaught and spun in circles in the rain.  It was freezing cold and delicious!  My bare feel splashed in the grassy puddles on the lawn beside the garden.  I was drenched in a matter of moments.

All of the plants in the garden were soaking wet.  The gourd flowers that I had so patiently awaited, were tattered and windblown.  The pepper plants were sagging heavily with the weight of wet peppers and leaves.

This is the rain gauge from my back garden.  It's kind of hard to see, but we got more than 3 1/2 inches of rain in just a couple hours' time.  What a blessing.  By 5:00PM, I swear everything looked greener already.

We took a drive up the highway to check out the local creeks and rivers.  Most of them have dried up almost completely.  Many of the rivers had a small stream running and some of the smaller creeks were full to the brim with freshly fallen rain.

The biggest river in our neck of the woods, the Platte, has been completely dry for weeks.  I had hoped that this would help restore the water flow.  Unfortunately, I think all the rain was south of the river basin.  The riverbed was still bone dry.

Seeing something like that is a little frightening to me.  I've seen the river low before, but I've never seen it dry up and turn to dust.  The local farmers assure me that this has happened before and the river will be back before I know it.  Some have even gone so far as to tell me that it's not dry from the farmers irrigating their corn and soybean crops.  All the irrigation in this neck of the woods is from ground water.  Anyway, we won't run out of water.  It can't happen.

I remain unconvinced.  I have just enough water science in my training to understand how hydrostatic pressure works.  Sure, they might not be irrigating right from the river, but they've pulled so much water out of the underground features that there isn't anything left to go downstream. The farmers poo-poo me and my scientifical leanings.  After all, I'm not a farmer.  What could I know about it?

A little, maybe.

I know that water rights have been a bone of contention since the American Frontier got out to these parts.  I know that water, or the lack thereof, was a prime mover in the Dust Bowl years.  I know that the Dust Bowl is the reason for all the trees in the windbreaks in the Great Plains. 

I also know, because I'm seeing it with my own eyes, that those windbreaks are slowly being dismantled.  Every summer a few more trees are torn out to make room for another half an acre of corn or soybeans.  Every year, another windbreak is taken out.

This is also frightening to me.  I've read the accounts of the people who lived through the dust storms.  About how they couldn't keep it out of the house no matter how many rags they stuffed in the cracks.  I read about how when the wind finally stopped blowing and they were able to pry their doors open and shove aside the mounds of sand and dust, the farmers found their livestock suffocated, choked to death on dust, in what was left of their fields.

It's frightening to me because once this very summer a dust storm blew through our little town.  We went into the house and turned on the scanner in time to hear the local cops making comments on the 'huge wall of dust' that just came through and how creepy it was coming up out of nowhere all of a sudden like that.

It puts a knot in my throat and a stone of fear in the pit of my stomach.  We have made so many dreadful mistakes.  We have much to atone for.  We have much work to do.  How can we just stand by and let people forget the lessons that history has taught us? 

Can this be fixed?  Or will that hard rain fall after all?