CSA Signup Time! The Growing Season is Starting!

Spring is here on the farm! We've been putting in quite a bit of time into the field recently, as you can see below.

Also, if you haven't already done so, it's time to signup for our CSA! Being part of our CSA is a great way to get chemical-free, fresh, local produce each week all summer long. We still have shares available for this season and would love to have you be part of our farm. To get more info and see the short video CNN did on us, click here.

It's time to till up the ground! This spring warmth and dryness has been especially early, making it nice to plant.

Timothy secures the irrigation tape on the plastic mulch layer so we'll be able to water th plants in the summer if needed.

I'll have to admit, my younger brother, Philip, lays a straighter plastic row than I do, so I usually have him do it, which he of course likes.

We used to do transplanting by hand, but that was before we started renting this machine!

Instead of pushing yourself along on the ground, all you have to do is sit back in your "easy chair" and put the plants in the machine made and watered holes. Well, it's not all that easy, but it's a world better than most of the other alternatives!

We can plant 2000-3000 plants an hour with this!

On this particular day we planted around 3000 heads of lettuce.

Yes, technology, if  used properly, is a great thing!

We also planted 300lbs of potatoes (nearly 1 mile of row) in 1/2 an hour.

(Photo from 2011)

We're raising our own pigs this year! Hogs are a lot of fun to raise, though they eat you out of house and home if you let them.

So, to help compensate with this, we're trying to feed them as much of our scrap produce as possible. Another benefit of this system, in addition to healthier pork, is all our leftover and scrap vegetables can be turned into great tasting bacon and sausage!

A few of our seeds...

Elise loves to help where she can!

Our family - I love them!

So thank you for supporting us in the life we love - being a family and farming!

Hope to see you before long as the produce grows and the CSA gets under way!

The Cattle Are Here!

"For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills." ~ Psalm 50:10 (KJV)

In addition to growing vegetables, we also raise 5-6 beef cattle each year, and we love it!

Cattle (and animals in general) are so different from plants, and they tend to find ways to spice up our lives - like when they get out and run all over the neighboring farms and can't be found for several hours. They all seem to have personalities of their own. Some are very calm and others are skittish, some wander up and down the fence every day looking for ways out. Some are leaders and others are followers, and the list goes on. So, can you imagine now why cattle make our lives more "interesting"?

Enjoy the opportunity to take a little part in our farm through this blog!

On Tuesday, we bought 5 beef cattle from a man in southern Lancaster County, who also delivered them.

Cattle are bought/sold by the live-weight pounds. We weighed the truck with the cattle loaded on it, and after the cattle were unloaded we weighed the truck again to figured figure out how much the cattle weighed.

Their average weight was 732 lbs.

Aren't they beautiful?

The cattle were very nervous about me at first and stayed as far away as possible.

We got a whole mix of breeds this year!

The breeds are (L-R): Charolais, next two Angus/Hereford crosses, Red Angus, Hereford. There's one more steer that isn't in any of these photos because it's at another farm right now, but it's a Black Angus, and it'll be here soon.

What are you looking at?

The spinach crop this year has been slightly delayed. I planted a bed of it a couple weeks ago, and soon after it rained really hard, and when the ground dried it crusted over. Only a few plants were able to come up through the packed dirt - not even enough to be worth the space it was taking up - so I tilled it under and replanted it. Because of this, the spinach will be a little late coming in;

it'll probably be ready beginning of June.

Also, this past week, I've been trellising the peas.

The first thing I do is drive the stakes in the ground.

Secondly, I string line between the stakes, and...

...thirdly, loop it around each stake so it doesn't come loose.

Competelion...a wonderful feeling!

The onions are growing quite nicely. They're approximently 4-6 inches tall now.

The first CSA pick-up day is only about a month away! For those of you who live in Wayne, your first day is Tuesday, May 25th, and for you CSA members in Lititz the CSA will be starting Saturday, May 29th.

The produce is growing a little slower than I hoped it would be for the beginning of the CSA, but we'll have plenty as long as we get a fair amount of warm weather.

Also, remember our open house coming up on Saturday, May 22. We'd love to have you come to it, and it would be a great way to expose yourself and your children to farming.

Hope to see you in less than a month!

~ Jonathan

"Instant" garden! The benefits of transplants!

Here in Lancaster County, PA, the weather's been beautiful lately!

Over Wednesday and Thursday (the 14th & 15th) we've been able to accomplish a lot of work in the garden like transplanting, planting seeds, weeding, tilling, etc.

Today's post mostly covers the work a friend from Allentown and I did on Wednesday. Enjoy!

The day dawned early with very heavy fog.

Notice how the fog is only rising off the corn field (further away),

which has bare dirt exposed, and not the hay field (the closer, greener one)?

My helper, Daniel, arrived ready for work with his sister who spent the day helping my wife in the house.

He has his own publishing company (Salem Ridge Press), with which he publishes a lot of great books!

We planted lettuce, broccoli, and cabbage from these trays,

which hold 125 plants each.

There's a lot of open space to fill yet - one plant at a time!

Plant it properly...

A romaine head at approximently 3-4 weeks.

The garden looks so lush right now with the everything growing so well.

I love spring!

It's time to turn the rye into the ground as fertalizer.

The nieghbor came over and mowed it down for me,

and I later rototilled it into the soil.

We planted two very long rows of green, yellow, and purple beans.

Those little seeds look so innnocent right now, but they're going to turn into

plants that will take hours and hours to pick!

The day's been a very profitable one!

We planted approximately:

850 Lettuce Heads

900 Broccoli & Cabbage Plants

 Thanks for checking out our blog and feel free to leave a comment if you enjoyed it!

~ Jonathan Einwechter

Planting Potatoes

Over the past week, or so, we've spent time cutting up the seed potatoes (getting them ready for planting), and waiting until the ground drid out. Well, the rain finally stopped, the sun came out, and now it's time to plant potatoes.

Alright, Philip, it's 4:00 PM,

and we've got a lot of work to get done before the day is over.

All these potatoes got to be planted - 5 types 350 lbs.

Okay, this is how you drive the tractor...

 

You're doing a great job tilling the ground!

While we were working, a killdeer kept running around us,

calling "killdeer, killdeer". 

It's finally time to start planting the potatoes...

...and it's getting late, so we got to hurry!

Farming is an industry that when something needs done,

there's a small window of opportunity, and it must be done right then.

This planter, which is probably over 50 years old,

is an amazing time saver.

It makes a shallow furrow, drops the potatoes certain distences apart,

and covers them.

We finally finished planting the potatoes around 9:30 p.m.

The potatoes are all in the ground now, where they will stay and grow

until sometime in June, July, or August, when they are harvested.

It's been a good day in the field.

Thank you for your support of our farm!

The Produce Season Has Officially Begun!

With the arrival of spring we find ourselves heading out to the field. The winter break from farming was restful, but to tell the truth, near the end Jon and I were starting to get antsy - it's time to get back out into the field and start the new season. Jonathan spent some time 2 weeks ago cleaning up some things from last year and tilling the ground in preparation for planting. Over the winter he's been reading a book, recommended to us by a friend, Nate Thomas, "The New Organic Gardener", by Elliot Coleman, which he has been enjoying. One element he has decided to implement this year is to divide the ground into long beds, about 5 ft wide.

Philip busily pours the onion sets out into a box for ease of planting.

What we're planting now will be harvested for spring onions/scallions.

Monique and Jonathan planting together

Monique and Philip

You must plant them exactly upright, or you'll get twisted scallions.

They remind me of Hershey Kisses!

Beet seeds

Our brother Philip Einwechter, who will be growing part of the vegetables, starts off his year, too, by planting three types of beets.

Garlic that we planted last September/October

 

It's been a lot of fun getting out and working in the field together as a newly married couple.

We were married August 8, 2009.

Thanks for being a part of our farm and keeping up to date with what's going on "down on the farm"!

~Jonathan & Monique Einwechter

FirstWatch Farms