The Birds and the Bees...

Well. the theme of this post could cause many to question what the point is. The point is that agriculture, for the most part, is about reproducing. Most crops produce something that is valuable to someone. More times than not, this is a result of a plant producing an offspring. Here at Farmville, we are in harmony with that concept and it's exciting when the plants have cooperated. The various pictures show the "children" that will become the fruit of all of the labor here at Farmville. Most people never get to see what this looks like.

The first and fourth pictures are small melons. The first is a watermelon and the fourth is an Ambrosia melon. Melons, as well as the squash and cucumbers rely on honeybees to pollinate them. As the bees forage for nectar from the blossoms, pollen grains stick to their legs. Because they visit each blossom, male and female, eventually the pollen finds its way to the right place and the fruit will form. Even seedless watermelons need to be pollinated. They are a special type of hybrid called a triploid, which means something to those who speak genetics talk. I don't, so I'll give you the farmer version. Triploids are self-sterile and can't reproduce. There are no male flowers on their vines. Pollen from the neighboring non-seedless vines provide the needed pollen for fruit to set, but because they are self-sterile, the fruit have no seeds. I know that wasn't much of an explanation and I probably should have just said seedless watermelons are a direct result of magic. That's the depth of my understanding on what goes on in their family planning world.

Those are Yellow Finnish potatoes in the second picture. These were the result of two shovel scoops. I was pleasantly surprised to find this many and they were a very nice size. They were growing fine until about a month ago and the vines looked like they had some kind of disease. I'm a terrible "potato father" and I neglected to have a potato doctor look at them to see what might be wrong. I figured I would just wait until the vines completely died back and see how many potatoes came from them. So far, it looks very promising. I even sliced one up and fried it for dinner. The only seasoning was salt, pepper, onion and garlic. The onion and garlic were from Farmville also. The garlic was a young bulb I pulled the other day and had not formed complete cloves yet. They are pretty good this way, you just slice and dice them like an onion. Dinner was rounded out by yellow squash from Farmville and a tomato from the store. Because this year has been so cold, the Farmville tomatoes are still a good two to three weeks away from being ripe. I drifted a bit off topic there, so back to reproduction. Potatoes are one of two ways the plant reproduces. Each potato has a few "eyes", which I'm sure everyone has had sprout on them when they don't use them up right away. If you cut the potatoes into pieces with at least one "eye" on each piece, the sprout will become a plant. That's dependent on putting that piece in the ground though. That's how these potatoes were planted. I bought seed potatoes at the nursery and cut them up and planted. The above ground part of a potato plant will also form flowers that produce seeds. These seeds can be planted as well. I have never grown potatoes from "true seed" as they call it. Some day, I'll have to give it try just say I did it.

The third picture is what an ear of corn looks like in the beginning. Nothing more than a small leaf cluster. As the main stalk grows, the very top will have tassels with pollen. The pollen needs to find its way to these ears when the silks are growing from the tips of the ears. Each silk strand goes to a kernel on the ear of corn. If the pollen does not make it there, the kernel will never form. When you have an ear of corn with "blanks" instead of fully formed kernels, its due to poor pollination. Corn does not rely on the bees to move the pollen from the tassels to the ears. It relies on gravity and wind. The wind shakes the pollen loose and gravity lets it fall down to where its needed. That's the reason you shouldn't plant corn in long narrow strips. Most of the pollen will be blown off target and the ears will have a ton of "blanks". At Farmville, each of the plantings were pretty much in the shape of a square, so the ears should be perfectly formed.

Hopefully everyone learned something about how these plants try and do what everything else tries to do, make more of their kind. Guess it's a good thing Farmville hasn't moved into animal agriculture yet. I'll need some time to figure out how to tactfully describe some of those reproductive processes. I might have to apply for a "PG-13" rating when we get to that fork in the road, especially if pictures are involved. We'll worry about that later.

Pumpkins and Winter Squash

The final two rows have been planted. I know the picture has three rows, but the one in the middle will be split to make the two outside ones wider. Keeping them narrow for now helps get the water closer to the plants when they are small. The mounds you see are directly over where the seeds are planted. The soil is moist enough to sprout the seeds as long as its covered by five or six inches of dirt. The top one to two inches dries up pretty quickly so the mound over them keeps it from getting too dry. On Thursday evening, I'll rake the mounds flat and if my timing is right, the seeds will have sprouted and be emerging just underneath the original ground level. By next week at this time, they should all be up and growing. Now that the warm weather finally arrived, things get going quickly.

Pumpkins are fun to grow because they are so easy. The only thing that hurts them is powdery mildew and in most years around here, it doesn't get too bad until September and by that time I won't care if the vines die back. The sun is not too intense and very few pumpkins ever get sunburned from lack of vine cover. If any die hard pumpkin farmers are reading this, don't get offended and think I'm capping on your farming skills. But they really are pretty easy to grow. I've probably jinxed this now and all kinds of problems I never imagined will hit the pumpkins this year. We'll keep our fingers crossed. There are four varieties planted; a standard jack-o-lantern type, a small baking type; a white colored one; and a ginormous one that is supposed to get up to three hundred pounds. In this day and age, probably ninety nine percent of pumpkins grown do not end up being eaten. That's kind of sad since they grow so easy and are very nutritious. My personal favorite dish is the good old traditional pumpkin pie. We first cooked a pumpkin and used it for a pie sometime back around 1977. I still consider that the best pumpkin pie I ever had. If you do this, you'll never want to cook with canned pumpkin again. The easiest way to cook them is to cut into wedges, scrape the seeds out, put on a cookie sheet and bake until soft. After they have cooled down, scrape the flesh away from the rind and mash it up with a potato masher. Since pumpkins tend to yield quite a bit, both in size and numbers, my plan is to research other recipes to use them. I've heard they make good soup also.

The super large variety should be interesting to grow. There are many people who grow these to try and win contests for the largest pumpkin. Some of the really giant ones I've seen don't even look like pumpkins. They are more pink than orange and they don't grow in the shape of a pumpkin. They look lopsided to me. This variety I found is described as looking like a traditional pumpkin and the picture on the package looked pretty cool. We'll see how it turns out. I might have to carve them with the chainsaw and use a few pieces of firewood instead of a candle.

Winter squash are always good to plant if you think famine might be in your future. Once they are fully mature, they keep for months without deteriorating. This lack of perishability is what first roped me into growing them commercially back in the Eighties. Everything else we grew was very perishable and if they weren't harvested, packed and sold within a couple of days of peak maturity, their value dropped off the face of the cliff. These types of squash could be picked into bins and packed as sales were made. It was a great way to keep crews busy on slow sales days because they could pack ahead of time, within reason. I say within reason, because like most life lessons I've had to learn, reason can be a hard target to hit sometimes. In 1984, we planted a few acres of acorn, butternut, and spaghetti squash. Being a little too excited about the lack of perishability with these squashes, we came up with the grand idea of maximizing the efficiency of dedicating a crew to harvesting and field packing these. We put around forty people on this job and in about a week, we had over twelve thousand cases packed. We stacked them on pallets and hauled back to the main ranch. One shop was cleared out and served as warehouse for all of these. Double stacked pallets of packed squash filled this building. At this point in time, all we could see were pallets stacked up waiting for orders. For the first few weeks, it was easy money. When an order came in, just jump on a forklift and load on to the truck. Naturally things can't be this easy for too long. It turns out these squash do deteriorate, just not quickly. Not at the same rate either. We started to notice a few cases with one or two broken down squash in them. This meant we needed to unstack each pallet as we pulled them out to fill orders and check each case to make sure they were all of good quality. By the time we got to the last couple thousand cases left to sell, we had to repack into brand new boxes because some of the breakdown had damaged the box to the point of it not being usable. We were lucky the prices were not too bad that year and it still made sense to do all of this repacking. We did learn in subsequent years to be patient and keep the unpacked squash in bins and just pack a few days ahead. Not as efficient as the previous method initially, but more so in long run. For the Farmville Reality Project, there is just acorn and butternut squash planted. Acorn squash are great just baked with light seasoning. They as well as the butternut are also good baked and mashed with saltine crackers. Butternut is actually a really good substitute for pumpkin in pie recipes. Its bright orange flesh makes for better color than straight pumpkin, which can be a little pale sometimes. All in all, if you can include pumpkins and winter squash in your lineup, you will not be disappointed.

Dawn of a New Journey...

Yes, the title does sound a bit melodramatic, but when you think about it, each new journey has a "sunrise". I feel fortunate to have spent countless sunrises outside, walking through fields of crops. No matter how many times you do this, you find yourself excited at the promise of what all of this will produce farther down the road. Being out here this morning made me realize how many things in life are journeys and they all have the promise of producing way beyond what you might imagine at the dawn of each one. You just have to keep moving forward and help everything grow at a pace that matches what each day brings. Considering how unusual each day the previous month was, this pace can be a bit elusive at times. I know some are probably wondering where this post was going and how it relates to the project. It relates to many things, this project being one of those things. The other things are potential material for another blog somewhere down the road. Being out early on a morning such as this is the perfect time to contemplate it all though.

It's been almost two weeks since the last update and if this were any other year, I would be describing growth of the various crops using terms like "amazing". But this is 2010, and in our area, May came and went without topping the ninety degree mark. That is not the usual scenario most years. We even had greater than normal rainfall with all of the limited sunshine that comes with those condidtions. Needless to say, everything is a little bit behind schedule.

The pictures in this post were taken this morning. It really doesn't capture just how things look early in the morning when the sun has only been up a short time. I get the benefit of this view with a cup of coffee in my hand because it's less than thirty steps out my back door. The angle of light is very low so the plants have a certain "glow" about them that only happens at that time. Later in the day, the light is more directly up above and the leaves appear more solid in color. Later, at sunset, the angle is again low, but usually the light appears to have more shadows than in the morning, and the "glow" is spotty at best. When we would check fields in the morning to assess how they were progressing, if we came across one with no "glow", that was a trigger to actually get out of the truck and look a little closer. I realize you're supposed to get out of the truck anyway, but sometimes you get busy and have to cut corners. When a field full of plants lacks the "glow" early in the morning, it means the leaves are limp and possibly unhealthy. It could mean the field is too dry or there may be pest or disease pressures keeping the plants from being at their best at this time of day. At any rate, if they look awful in the morning, when afternoon hits, it doesn't get better. That's why you get out and have a closer look to see what you need to do and if the situation means shifting priorities for the daily work schedule, that's what would happen. Lucky for the Farmville Reality Project, the scale allows me to stay right on top of this and, so far, everything has the "glow" when I check it each morning.

You may not be able to tell from the picture, but the sweet corn has three different planting dates spaced two weeks apart between each one. The taller ones have been suckered, which means the suckers that grow up from the base of the plant have been removed. This helps keep the water and nutrient flow maximized from the roots up to the main stalk, where the ears are formed. If you let the suckers grow unchecked, the ears on the main stalk might be smaller than they should because too many parts of the plant are competing with a root system that can only do so much. The perfect situation with this level of attention is to get two ears from each plant. I haven't yet counted how many plants are in each of the plantings (I know there are a few of you who think I'm not being truthful right now), I'll just accept however many ears of corn we end up getting out of this. One thing I know, they will all taste great.

Regarding the picture of the row of melons, they look pretty small and they are. However, they are on the brink of really taking off. All we need is a few hot days and me to not forget to keep them watered. Because of the fairly cool weather, their leaves are small. They are at the five to six leaf stage, which means the runners for the vines are beginning to form. It's just that the leaves being small, they are very compact compared to what they should look like. If this week brings us some more normal temperatures, then the next update will show this area covered in vines and maybe even small flowers that will become the melons.

All in all, June is shaping up to be a pretty good month for the Farmville Reality Project. It has been interesting though. Truth be told, probably the single most interesting month in my "too many years to count" life, but in a good way. Somehow, that will make everything I harvest even that much better.