After a bit more rain and some cold nights, the weather is finally starting to warm up. This means that we're in the final stages of getting things ready for planting! The chile plants will come out of the greenhouse next week to harden off and start acclimating to life outside. Cross your fingers we don't get insane winds like we did last year during this time!
I've been busy sorting our beans for seed for the second time, making sure there aren't any split beans, extra plant material, or a pesky different variety of bean mixed in. On Tuesday I dropped off bean seed to our friend Sammy Tookey of Tookey Farms in Healdsburg so that he can grow an acre of beans for us again this year. We're grateful to have farming friends that want to help our farm grow in different ways.
The strawberry plants are flowering and are starting to form green berries. The olive trees have flowered and I'm hoping that Monday night's rain didn't knock them all down. All the bits are falling into place for the growing season ahead. We hope things are falling into place for your spring, too.
What Preparations Look Like
Getting the fields ready for planting is quite a bit of work. First, the winter cover crop is mowed and turned into the soil. We send soil samples in for testing to determine what amendments are needed.
Compost is spread on all the fields and mixed in along with other amendments. Generally our soils need agricultural lime in order to increase their pH. The ag lime helps the plants develop better roots, be more tolerant to drought, and absorb nutrients in the soil better (like the calcium and magnesium provided by the lime). The lime also works to improve soil texture, separating the hunks of clay and improving drainage. The fields are tilled again to break up the soil so it is easier to work with.
Then, we use a bed-making implement that forms the bed, lays down water efficient drip irrigation lines, and covers the bed with plastic weed barrier. While I'd prefer to not use plastic, this ground cover helps us is so many ways. First, chiles need warm soil to thrive in. The black plastic absorbs heat during the day and retains the heat in the soil below, providing better growing conditions. It blocks the ability of many weeds to grow, allowing us to farm 7 acres of beans and chiles with a very small team.
The coverage helps ensure that irrigation water remains in the soil instead of evaporating away on the soil surface. It also keeps things a bit cleaner around the crops when its time to harvest. We've seen better germination rates for our beans and overall faster and better growth from our plants grown in the weed barrier than those grown without it. Last year, we trialed a section of beans without the weed plastic and after a few weeks we pulled everything up, laid down weed barrier, and replanted to beans because the first planting was so overcome by weeds and we didn't have the capacity to hand weed them all.
Next, all the irrigation lines get connected and we irrigate the fields just before planting. This year, we've got a new implement, a water wheel transplanter, that will hopefully help us plant out the chiles faster. Two of us will sit on the back while the implement makes holes for each chile plant and adds a bit of water to the hole and we will pop a plant into each hole. A few people will follow behind, adding soil to each hole to stabilize the plant and ensure it stays upright. We've got our work cut out for us over the next 3 weeks!
