A Photographic Tour of My Farming Operations: September, 2022

Putting my photos where my mouth is.

As many of you know, I’m a hobby farmer on the side. With September here and summer almost over, I wanted to offer an overview of my operations this past summer, where I’m at, what I’ve produced, and the mistakes I’ve made.

This year was our biggest operation yet because we planted a garden of nearly one acre on my in-laws’ property. When you plant at scale, the work and production increase exponentially. Between that and weeks spent dedicated to writing my latest book, Take Control of iOS 16 and iPadOS 16, I dropped the ball on many tasks here at home, and my poor lovely wife had to take point on much of the garden work later in the summer, as well as handle all of the preserving.

My poor beleaguered wife making squash relish.

Home Garden

At home, I have six raised beds, each roughly 4-by-8 feet. I started with four beds from last year and added two more this year. Most of them are filled with compost purchased from local farms.

This year’s home garden was both a tremendous success and an enormous failure. Let’s start with the successes.

Earlier in the season, my two big successes were lettuce and kale. The kale had been planted last fall and survived the winter frost to grow to around six feet tall. I planted several varieties of lettuce in two different ways: some far spaced as heads and others in tight bands. Both did well, but I prefer the crunch of the head lettuce. Unfortunately, kale and lettuce don’t last long in Tennessee's summer heat.

I planted several varieties of tomatoes in the two new beds, including my first cherry tomato. I have three key strategies for planting tomatoes:

• I start most of the plants myself from seed, beginning about February (last year) or March (this year). We did buy a few starts from a friend, and I bought our cherry tomato plant at Walmart as an impulse buy.

• I plant them deeply, at least a foot. You know the little hairs on tomato plants? They will grow into roots if buried, which makes the plant stronger and more productive.

• I throw two things into each tomato hole: a Tums and an aspirin. The Tums provide calcium which prevents blossom end rot. Aspirin is supposed to prevent other diseases.

The tomatoes were an enormous success. My wife produced over 20 cans of tomatoes just from our raised beds, plus we had plenty to eat all summer. I lost very few to disease or insects.

If you want to grow tomatoes, I highly advise starting with cherry tomatoes. This was my first year growing them, and they are fun. They’re low-maintenance heavy producers, and the tomatoes we produced were delicious. Like eating candy.

One thing I haven’t mastered with tomatoes is plant support. This year, I tried cages. I bought cheap cages from Tractor Supply. Big mistake. The wire is too thin and the plants fell over, cage and all. I propped them up as best as I could with tobacco sticks, PVC pipe, or whatever I could find.

Alongside tomatoes, I grew:

• Marigolds (to discourage insects)

• Pole beans (I thought they were bush beans — anyway, they add nitrogen to the soil)

• Basil (also to discourage insects, plus it goes well with tomatoes)

• Onions (to discourage insects)

The companion planting worked great. I only had to spray with BT a couple of times.

Bean production was pretty poor. I need to check on my onions but I planted them primarily for insect repellant. Onions are hard to grow and don’t produce that many calories. Just not worth it for food.

The basil did great. I finally pruned them properly for once. Trim the plant just above where there is a pair of leaves. The plant will bush out and produce even more. My wife has several bags of dried basil for winter.

Other things I grew this year:

• Oxheart carrots: These are shorter, tougher carrots that do well in harder soils like mine. We harvested around 30 of these stubby carrots. They took about three months to grow. I don’t think they’re worth the trouble, but I was happy to finally have a successful carrot crop.

• Peppers: I don’t do well with peppers. I only get a few and they tend to be small. I only grew them because my son used to be obsessed with raw sweet peppers. I may not grow them again.

• Sweet potatoes: These did great last year but most of my slips died in the ground because I was primarily focused on the motherload I planted at my in-laws’.

• Seminole pumpkins; I’ve harvested three of these so far. I’m not sure I’ll grow these in raised beds again as they started taking everything over once they got established, and production has been fairly weak.

• Various herbs in pots; This was my wife’s project and it did well until the drought hit and we forgot to water them.

• Raspberries: I planted these two years ago and they exploded this year and are taking over our yard. We ate a ton of these little things, but they only produce for about a month. I desperately want some blueberries because they start producing about when the raspberries end. Ideally, I want a series of berry bushes to produce fruit from spring until fall.

• Grapes: I planted six muscadine grape plants in the fall. One died and Star Bros. gave me a voucher to buy another. I surrounded these in weed paper and woodchips and they seem to be doing well even if they’re not producing.

• Gooseberries: I planted four early this spring. Sadly, all but one have vanished into the weeds because I didn’t have time to trim. I put woodchips all around them, but I’ve learned that woodchips alone aren’t enough.

• Apples: I planted a dwarf apple tree alongside the gooseberries. It’ll be a while before it produces, but the tree seems happy.

• Garlic: I filled a bed with garlic last fall, harvested in early June, and let them dry in our building over the summer. We produced over 70 heads total.

Chickens

This spring I had every intention of ordering 50+ Cornish Cross chicks from McMurray Hatchery to put in the freezer. Then McMurray Hatchery got hit by avian flu (which seems to have disappeared now?). To avoid that risk, I bought an egg incubator and hatched 17 chicks from eggs collected from my chickens. The chickens are all mixed breeds, which has produced some interesting combinations.

I have about eight roosters and nine hens from this flock. My original plan was to put all but three in the freezer, but egg production has been spotty this summer. Some days I get 12 eggs. On other days I get 5. Or none. So I’m thinking I’m going to keep every hen I can, and I’ll probably process some of the older ones (old hens are full of fat and make amazing soup or dumplings).

In fact, I’m due to process those birds in a few days. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of time or a good plan right now so I don’t know if I’ll get to it on time, but it must happen soon. Before long, the roosters will be fighting. Already, I have hens missing wide swaths of feathers from constant mating.

To house these new birds I bought another 100 feet of electric net fencing from Premier1 and connected it to the 100 feet I already had. This reduced the voltage by half, which has been reduced to practically nothing because I’ve let weeds grow up around the fence, grounding it out. Oops. Amazingly, I haven’t lost any birds to predators, probably thanks to my small army of roosters.

Rabbits

The rabbit operation has been hit or miss from the beginning. I’ve had some breeding issues (one of my older does only produced one kit last go around and it died), and I’ve fallen woefully behind in processing. Early last week, I had nine bunnies that were over three months old. I processed four, then was notified I had to do more work on the book, so I have five left to do. In another cage, I have six baby bunnies that need to be moved over.

The rabbit cages are a mess and I desperately need to give them all a good cleaning. I also need to get better at developing my automatic watering system. I had set one up for one set of cages but just haven’t refilled the thing. I started on the other and got distracted.

I think over the fall I’m going to process some of my old breeders that are underproducing and replace them with fresh stock.

In-Law Garden

Now for the big kahuna. We convinced our in-laws to let us plant a big garden on their land. My father-in-law purchased a Super C tractor from the 1950s to support our effort. He and my wife worked to clear off a spot and then he tilled up about an acre.

This was very much a traditional row garden. It’s 2/3rds organic. Unlike my rabbit-poop-fed home garden, we twice fertilized this plot with 17-17-17. However, we resisted using chemical herbicides or pesticides, though we did spray lightly with BT occasionally to ward off bean beetles.

Rows we planted, from memory:

• Bush beans: These did not produce well, probably due to a month of drought, but we did have some fresh beans and a few bags in the freezer.

• Onions and yellow squash: I still need to dig onions but they didn’t do well.

• Yellow squash: We planted way too damn many of these. We’ve had squash running out our ears.

  

• Potatoes: An entire 100-foot row. Mediocre production, but still my most successful potato crop yet. I wish I had a scale to quantify the results, but it was a lot. They’re currently curing in a basement. Very few rotten potatoes, and we were able to salvage quite a few of those by trimming the rotten spots and eating them ASAP.

• Sweet corn: Two rows before sweet potatoes and two rows after. We thought had a problem with raccoons eating the corn, but it turned out to not really be a problem because we ended up with way more than we knew what to do with. I’d hate to think how many nights we spent shucking, silking, and stripping corn. We have more than 60 bags in our freezers.

• Sweet potatoes and zucchini: The jury is still out on sweet potatoes, but I’m optimistic since there are vines sprawling everywhere. The zucchini did well, and I wish we’d planted twice as much of that and less than half of the yellow squash.

• Lima beans: I’m never planting these damn things again. By harvest time they were overgrown with weeds so we had to pull each plant out of the ground into a wheelbarrow, then strip the pods, and then finally break the pods to extra the lima beans. I think we got four quarts of the little bastards.

• Sweet corn: The two additional rows I mentioned earlier.

• Delicata squash: I had a ton of seeds saved from last year’s CSA, so I planted a whole row. We harvested some too early and they tasted like zucchini. We thought they’d crossed with zucchini somehow, but no, they were just too young.

We had planted — or attempted to plant — two rows of field corn. Nothing came up after two weeks and we couldn’t figure out why. We observed the field long enough to realize the crows were eating our seed! The sweet corn we’d planted was coated with a poison pink powder, which is why it survived and germinated.

The Pumpkin Patch

For the last few rows, I went nuts with cucurbits. I sowed them with:

• Cantelope

• Cucumber

• Butternut Squash

• Pumpkin

• Watermelon

Nothing came up for a few weeks and we assumed the birds had eaten the seed again. But then — slowly — the plants sprung up. Now they’ve taken over that entire section of garden and then some.

This has been by far the most fun I’ve ever had gardening. Earlier we harvested hundreds of cucumbers — enough for over 24 jars of pickles. Sadly, we let many get too big to eat, but you can only handle so many cucumbers.

Now, we’re harvesting delicious cantelopes, ripe watermelons, and hundreds of butternut squash. My wife is freezing cantelope and watermelons.

The butternut squash have an absurd shelf life of a year or more after you cure them in a hot humid environment for a couple of weeks.

The work has been fun and we’re well supplied for the winter, but it has been exhausting and overwhelming. But we’ve learned a lot of lessons and will have smarter approaches for the next season.