A piece of the puzzle

Not all of my 'jobs' are glamorous like pulling weeds or thinking up new ways to chunk pumpkins. I'm also chief errand runner.  Today I had to go to Agri-Supply in Greenville (I could have gone to Garner, but I hate that store and I hate going to Garner) for plow parts.  I hate going to parts stores.  First off, you get there and the place never looks quite on the level.  There's never anywhere to park.  There's a minimum of two doors, neither of which are clearly marked.  Then you get in and the place has this smell.  It's difficult to describe, something between grease and oil and diesel fuel and mixed with thirty year old dirt and dust.  Every single one smells like that, regardless of you're going to pick up a starter or plow points.  Even the chains like Advance.  Inhale deep next time you walk in one.  You'll see what I mean.

Then comes the worst part of all.  You walk to a counter surrounded by men that you just know are looking at you like a complete idiot and attempt to tell them what you need.  I learned the hard way, I now request specific descriptions (this in itself is perilous for those of you who know The Husband.  He is the king of long, rambling stories that end up confusing more than informing.  Especially about something I know nothing about so I am completely dependent on his knowledge.  Yeah.  Scary.).  Still though, they never fail to ask a question I never anticipated and I end up saying words like 'thingy' or using phrases like, 'I think it's the thingy that goes on the end of the thing' and sounding like the exact stereotype I try to avoid.  

Finally, after at least two phone calls (because he never fails to not answer the first one) and a lot of blank looks on both our parts, I have the part and I'm praying it's right.  Today wasn't so bad.  I had a diagram to show the guy at the parts desk and he went exactly to the right place and loaded up my cart.  The place did smell like the grease-dust-oil combo, and there was perma-dirt on the floor, but everyone was very nice and helpful (much better than the one in Garner) and I think we were in and out of there in twenty minutes.  All in all it was one of my best part store experiences hands down.


So this is probably not one of the most illuminating blogs ever, but it does go to illustrate a point. A puzzle is made of many pieces, we needed the plow parts so the plow would work correctly and the ground would be right for the vegetables we're going to plant and grow for you to eat.  Getting the plow right was just a piece of that larger puzzle.

Veggie Tales

This past spring was the first spring we had strawberries on our farm in a location that we could have you pick, and the most common question asked was "will you be having other vegetables".  In 2010, we had a landowner that raised other vegetables, and we had spring cabbage to offer along with our strawberries.  Last year it didn't work out that way, so all we had to offer were the strawberries.  We decided right then that 2012 was going to be a lot different.  We were idiots for not maximizing our potential.  People are coming, why not offer more?  Maybe if they were coming back for cabbage or potatoes or squash they'd buy more strawberries.  It works in theory anyway, right?


When we were at the ANA conference last year I heard about CSA's (Community Supported Agriculture).  It wasn't a term I was familiar with.  When I was growing up, everyone I knew had a garden.  My parents had one, my aunt and uncle had one, my grandparents on both sides had one.  If we had too much or if they had too much we'd give it away and share it amongst (not quite sure how to spell this, and spell checks not helping) ourselves.  The idea of going to a fruit stand wasn't even something I was familiar with then.  Why would you buy vegetables when you can grow your own?


But as Dylan says, the times they are a'changing, and this society we find ourselves living in is a lot different than the one we had twenty years ago.  Most people don't grow up on farms, they have a modest back yard that they use for recreation.  Even if they had room for a garden, who has the time?  They're always needing something...spraying or tilling or picking or something.  And when it comes time to pick it has to be done right then, regardless of the clothes that need washing or the kids that need to be taken to dance or baseball or that vacation you've planned.  It never fails, you plan to go to the beach and that's the week your corn will be ready.  Then there's the weather to deal with.  Last couple summer's it's been very hot and very dry.  This year is another La Nina year, which means it's probably going to be another very hot and very dry summer (hopefully not, forecasters are saying that right now it looks weaker than last year, but I like to plan for the worst).  So then you spent all that time getting your land right and planting and spraying for nothing, because nothing will grow if it doesn't have moisture, and not everyone has the money or water availability to irrigate.


However, people still want vegetables.  We need vegetables.  Most people like vegetables (I say that because I have a very discriminating palate, and do not enjoy the consistency of most vegetables).  And people are starting to realize that the ones they can buy from the farmer down the street are a lot better for you and taste abundantly better than the ones you get at Wal-Mart.  Sure, you can get a quart of berries for two dollars, but how are they going to taste?  And what is their nutritional quality if they aren't ripe when they're picked?  


Enter the CSA.  For a season long fee, you get a 30-40 lb box of vegetables every week (depending on the size of share you sign up for).  You don;t have to plant a garden, you don't have to weed or spray a garden, you don't have to pick anything.  All you do, is come to our farm and I'll load the box in your car and you get to go home and savor the deliciousness.  I first mentioned this as a good idea to The Husband then, but he comes from a row-crop tradition, and it wasn't until we seriously started talking about this this fall that I was able to talk him into trying it.  Hey, what's the worst that can happen?  If it's not successful we don't have to do it again.  But I hope that it is successful, because one of the things I enjoy most about this job I've found myself in is having happy customers, and seeing them over and over and getting to take part in in their lives too.


So if you're one of those people who want quality produce at a reasonable price and a chance to actually know where your food comes from (seriously, I'll take you to see the place it was picked even), check us out.  Even if you don't sign up for the CSA we'll have produce for sell every day out here.  Come see us!

The Experiment: Chapter One

Anyone who's ever read this before knows I'm a bit of a weather fanatic.  Pretty much anytime I get online I check my favorite weather site, forecast.weather.gov aka the National Weather Service.  I like their site because it's easy to use and I love their radar.  They also have links to local climatology, which I look at every now and then to see what they see trending as far as temps and precip for the coming seasons (FYI, this is another La Nina year, so expect more hot dry conditions just like last year through at least August.  Gotta love climate change!).  


But just because it's my favorite...doesn't mean it's the most accurate.  Last winter when we had our frost scares with the strawberries, I learned just how much difference one degree can make.  There's a fine line between a frost and a freeze, or a frost and nothing.  Mostly it depends on the dew point, which is the temperature at which dew/frost begins to form.  However, since a) no one predicts dew points and b) it's closely related to temperatures, I decided to take the path of least resistance.  


I decided then I needed to do some kind of experiment with a couple different TV stations and a couple websites, just to kind of see who happened to be the most accurate as far as temps go for our area, Goldsboro.  Almost a year later, I finally did it.


I chose my fav of course, the NWS, as well as weather.com, WRAL and WNCT.  I chose to do it last Mon - Fri.  I looked at the forecast high for the day at 8 am and the forecast low at 5 pm, since these sites tend to change their forecast throughout the day.  Then I recorded it in a spreadsheet (I am also the queen of spreadsheets.  I have one for everything, sometimes two for the same thing even.  Part of that is The Husbands fault, but that's another blog for another time...).  Then I recorded our actual high and actual low as measured by the thermometer in my backyard.


The results were surprising.  The overall winner for accuracy was the weather channel.  I usually don't check their site, because I hate it.  There's so much information I don't need on there and advertisements and all I want is the weather, plain and simple.  They nailed the high for Monday and low for Tuesday, and came the closest three out of the other four days.  WNCT and WRAL were the closest on Wednesday.  And my favorite, well, only came close one day when everyone was just a degree off the actual temperatures.  It's also worth noting that no one was wildly off, everyone was a couple degrees one way or another from the high or low.  We are talking about weather, no one is going to be spot on all the time.  There are just too many variables.


I plan on doing another one of these in a month or so.  I'm sure different sites are closer different times of the year.  I feel like unless I try it again and see which site consistently performs the best I don't have an accurate picture.  So check back, I'm sure I'll have a chapter two to report on soon.

Latest pics of the strawberry plants (mostly because I hate not to include a pic, but no one wants to see my thermometer)

Have a Happy New Year everyone!!!  (I don't mean it unless I put at least three exclamation points apparently.)

Two Front War

Please forgive me, I've been a slack blogger.  It's not because we've been doing nothing, it's because I've been a little stretched out fighting a two front war with strawberry planting/planning and everything happening at the same time the corn maze is going on.  And I have to say, because I always mistype (not to be confused with mispell because I do in fact know how to spell the word because.  It's chunkin' that apparently I have a problem with) the word because, that I love Google Chrome because they underline the mistypes like Word does and I don't have to do all that copy & paste stuff.  

On the corn maze front.  Obviously we shut her down Nov. 5 with a few remaining groups left until Nov. 12.  We had a great year this year.  I want to thank all of our staff, you are all awesome and we love hanging out with you.  Huge thanks to everyone who came out to support us and have fun on our farm.  I loved having you out and seeing some returning families.  It's fun to watch the kids grow every year (as long as it's not The Boy, who has to remain 3 forever).  That's kinda my end goal with this thing is to be a place people come every year to play around in the corn and chunk a few pumpkins (or gourds, because those little suckers will FLY).  I would love to have my farm be a part of someone's family tradition. We'll be back at it next year, hopefully with a few new things to do.  I want to add another pumpkin chunker, I'm thinking about having a trebuchet as well as the slingshot.  We also want to have a different pumpkin patch where people can cut their own pumpkin from the vine.

On the strawberry front:  We got them planted the first weekend of October and they are growing fast.  The lack of cold weather is causing them to grow like crazy, and causing them not to go into dormancy.  Last week we noticed some blooms even.  We are hoping for some cooler weather to come on in and slow them down and it looks like after today we'll get it.

First Blooms - notice how the center is dark, that is due to frost damage

One more new (exciting!) thing we are planning on bringing to you this spring is more vegetables on the farm. We want to start offering more produce throughout the spring and early summer.  We want you to be able to come here and get all the delicious vegetables you need, for you to be able to walk on the farm and see where it comes from and meet the guy who grew it and know exactly where it comes from.  

So, that's what's up with us.  I wish everyone a good holiday season and a happy new year!  My resolution: being more attentive blogger.

Jeepers Creepers

I don't like to be scared.  I've never liked horror movies, although I did used to read ghost stories.  I was a little obsessed with aliens there for a bit.  But seriously, Unsolved Mysteries would keep me up at night (yes, I just admitted it).  So needless to say I never went to haunted houses, trails, mazes, insert correct noun here.  Never.  Until I started running one.


Last year, we had no idea if it would take off or even be something people would come and do.  So we went out there with our shoestring staff and family and tried to rock it best we could (after night one I was relegated to The Stand.  I would run out at people and scream and halfway through I'd burst into laughter.  I just can't commit to purposefully looking like a complete idiot.  On a regular day I do it all the time but that doesn't count apparently).  I think we did a good job with what we had to work with.  People went away scared and they had fun so I think it was a success.  


Now, this year, we knew we wanted to expand.  We put up more elaborate props (I heart fog), played around with sound (last night I heard a deer in the woods blowing and snorting and I almost came unhinged, we have to get that somewhere in there), got some more players (the crazy guys from SJAFB, the creepy girls from CBA, and some of our family + staff including Red Robin who's scared me to death at least three times, even after I reminded him that I signed his check and cut off Dr. Peppers) tried to organize a little better (huge thanks to Cousin Alvin, without whom this haunted maze would have never existed).  The result is pretty good I think.  It's creepy and scary and a lot of fun.  This is my favorite thing that we do here at the maze because it is just as much fun to scare you as it is for you to be scared.  So come check us out.  We'll be open all next weekend, including Halloween night starting at 7 pm.

The Players

Punkin' Chunkin'!

Over the past winter The Husband and I were having one of our usual nightly arguments about what to watch on TV, (see, he likes to be constantly changing the channel and it drives me insane, because just as soon as I get into something he turns it.  He also likes to watch bad reality TV, you know those shows where they argue, gripe, and complain more than anything, which drives me insane.  Nine times out of ten I give up, hand him the remote, and pick up a book or a computer.) when he decided to watch the pumpkin chunking tournament on TV.  It was in the middle of this show the light bulb went on.  What if we did punkin' chunkin' at the corn maze?

Every year we want to kinda do some different things, add things, improve things, keep it interesting.  What is more interesting that hurtling a pumpkin through a field at 75 miles an hour in the hopes of watching it smash into pumpkin goo against a target?  That would be totally awesome.  No one else around was doing it.  It seemed like a no-brainer to me.  (Plus, and I don't know what this says about me, but hearing the sound of pumpkins smashing against the targets is akin to popping those sheets of air bubbles used in shipping on the soul satisfying level).

So all spring and summer I nagged The Husband about this (because apparently to him it was not a no-brainer) because I was determined we would be doing punkin' chunkin' at the farm this fall.  Persistence paid off (I WON!).  The last weekend of September he built the chunker (essentially a slingshot on a frame) and last weekend we had our first guinea pigs, a birthday party of twenty nine-year old girls (yikes!).  This weekend Cousin Alvin brought targets which is great because before they had to be cracked or in a state of decay to bust on the soft ground.  Now they whack against the target and bust which always results in cheers and claps.  

Yes, The Husband did build this all on his own

I'm really wanting to have a tournament Nov. 5, where everyone can come help us get rid of the old pumpkins and see who is the mightiest chunker out there.  Eventually I'd love to have a sort of tournament where maybe people brought machines, catapults and trebuchets and all (nothing as big as what they do in Maryland, but maybe a smaller scaled Goldsboro version).  It's funny to me (I'm sure no one else cares) that these machines that people used to hurtle rotting corpses over town walls in the middle ages to infect the townspeople with diseases during sieges are now being used to hurtle pumpkins across fields for mindless entertainment.  Welcome to the twenty-first century!

P.S. It is totally awesome!  Check out our you-tube channel for video:

http://www.youtube.com/user/odomfarmingcoinc

Oh yeah and P.S.S.  For those of you who saw the sign I painted, I can in fact correctly spell chunkin'...but chunin' got you lookin', didn't it?

Plugging Along

So, I promised a blog on plugging strawberries. I thought it deserved its own little post, since it is a bit of a process, and no one has thirty minutes to sit there and read a blog (okay so I promise it won't take that long, but when you combined it with everything else I was talking about last post it was a little lengthy).  I did a video blog about this, but I have to learn to hold the microphone on my camera a little further away because you can hear me breathing.  It's really bad. 



We got back from the mountains Tuesday night and first thing Wednesday we had the help here ready to plug. We got 20,000 tips from Darnell Farms in three varieties. You know when you're out there picking strawberries and it's been real hot, and the plants have started running? Well that's what a tip is, those runners that have been cut off the plant. Thursday we got 29,000 tips from Fresh Pik and they come from Nova Scotia. So we had 49,000 tips to plug asap.

First things first though, we had to get the trays ready. This is an extremely dirty process (not to mention the trays are a thin plastic so it's really easy to cut your hands like a paper cut, then they get filled with dirt, it's not pretty). Last year The Husband, Luke N (I say that since I have 2 Lukes now), my father-in-law and I filled all the trays with dirt on what felt like the hottest day of the year. This time since we were in so much hurry we had part of the help filling them. Basically it's the easiest thing in the world to do. We get these trays that put 50 plants in them and fill them with the equivalent of potting soil. The problem is that you can't pack them too tightly or you won't be able to stick the tips in them.

Getting an early start

After you have trays, it's time to stick the tips, or plug them.  The tips are usually shaped like a hook and you just put them in the dirt end of the hook in first.  Once you get the hang of it, and get in a groove you can plug a tray in no time.

Tips looking for a home

Then we put them in the ark beside our house.  We mist them with water every minute and a half for 12 seconds all day long.  It will take them a little over three weeks to be ready to plant, and over that time we slowly back off on the water a little.  Ours have been stuck three weeks now and they are looking good, growing new leaves and roots and some are even running just a little.  Next week they'll be ready to set out and provide me with another blog topic.  It's great how that works out sometimes :)  

(Almost) Finished product