High Dry Farm, Sultan, Washington….Certified Organic
When my pea crops stopped producing, I allowed those pods that had become to mature to dry on the vine. When shelled, this yielded 3 lbs of snow pea seeds and 2 lbs of shelling pea seeds. I will use these to produce microgreen pea shoots over the winter. This amount of seeds purchased commercially would cost $80-$100 including shipping.
The first tomatoes are finally ripening in my high tunnel. This is Slava, a dependably early variety.
Half of the bed of potatoes was harvested last night. The bed was rototilled, covered with 200 lbs of compost mixed with 1 lb of bone meal, and planted with transplants of lettuce, various members of the cole family, endive and kale (lacinto and red Russian varieties). To help the young plants along I laid down new drip tape.
The first fruit to ripen this year are Washington Cherry (left) and Bloody Butcher.
Tomatoes and melons in our new high tunnel are thriving with many green fruit on both and the first early tomatoes beginning to ripen. A few tomato varieties, such as Debarao have 7′ tall vines.
Basil in the garden is coming on beautifully. I pinched off some tips that were threatening to form flower buds and the leaves from these, pictured here, made beautiful pesto.
Starting in January, we covered the construction site with a tarp to kill the grass.
The site was then rototilled…
We built the hoophouse roughly according to the instructions provided by Johnny’s Seeds. The hoops for the high tunnel are just top rails for chain link fence (1 3/8″, available at Lowes). We bent these using a homemade pipe bender, fashioned by cutting a 7′ radius arc into a 2″x10″ board.
The hoops were mounted on posts driven into the ground, and then covered with 6 mil UV-resistant green house poly film.
Part of the job of preparing beds in our newly constructed high tunnel hoop house is removing more than a few large rocks of varying size lurking just beneath the surface of the soil.. I pulled this one out last night. It is, by no means, not the largest rock I have extracted.
A glacier really did a number on our Skykomish river valley during the last ice age. Our top soil, ranging in depth from 1′ to 2′ in thickness, sits on top of a concrete-like layer of sand and gravel compressed by the huge pressure of the passing glacier. Sitting on top of this compressed layer are rocks ranging in size from soft ball size to automobile size.
