Tearing it Down, Setting it Up

Lots of stuff going on down here on the farm. Most of my time has been spent fighting with irrigation and trying to get it up and running on the new field. To do that, we had to remove all of the tubing from our field this year and move it to the new field. Sounds easy right? At least until you learn that we have over half a mile of irrigation lines that have to be moved… By quitting time on Friday we were all very ready for the weekend.

On Monday we started hooking up all the individual drip lines. It’s not really that difficult but tedious. There are a lot of them to hook up. We have to start running water into the beds over a week in advance to prepare them for… wait for it… strawberry planting! The beds have to be nice and soft so we can put the plants in but also have to have plenty of moisture for the young plants to survive and root themselves into their new home. Sometimes (most of the time), when you hook up all the little drip lines and start the pump you end up making fountains and puddles rather than nice soft beds. We prefer the term “water feature” to irrigation leak.

Now that the irrigation is all set up it just takes some minor babysitting to make sure no “water features” appear without us knowing about it. Now that the new field is ready for the baby strawberry plants, we have to continue taking down the old field.

We grow about 1,600 tomato plants and have one support post for every two plants. So we have to remove, by hand, about 800 wooden stakes that have been driven into the ground and put them back in the barn. Good thing we decided to do this when the weather got back into the 90’s…

Tearing up the plastic beds is one of the most grueling, and dirty, jobs that we have to do. What we do is till them up with a tractor to loosen them from the ground and then gather them up by hand. It takes a long time, lots of energy, and makes you desperately want a shower when you leave work, but someone has to do it! This year we had 82 rows of plastic; each one was 200 feet long. That’s a lot of plastic to pick up by hand! We will have no trouble keeping busy for the next few weeks.