TL;DR

We seeded lettuce, spread black landscaping fabric, hoed in the high tunnel, and planted the last of the onions. I had to leave a little early, but today is also a short day on-farm due to the 4-6pm weekly pop-up market in Essex.

Always Seeding Something

Today, I seeded 17 trays of various lettuces. While seeding slows down in early summer here, it never stops entirely until the late summer. There’s always something being started though the greenhouse gets too hot even with fans in the summertime. I enjoy what I call “playing the soil piano” which involves spreading potting mix into a tray then making dimples with ‘piano fingers’ (all lined up together) in the filled cells. At this point, I can make about 10 trays in 10 minutes but I’ve seen better from more seasoned folks.

Reuse of Landscaping Fabric

I wrote about this last week, but it bears repeating: landscaping fabric is a reasonable compensating approach to their policy of using NO herbicides or pesticides. Some other local farms use more, some use much less but not at this scale, and no one gets away with zero plastic in farming period.

We finished covering the top middle main field with fabric and stapled it. We ran out of staples and had to…liberate…more from old bunches of other fabric around the field to make sure this one was tacked down sufficiently for the wind gusts that frequent costal farms in New England such as this one.

Hoeing in the High Tunnel

There is a high tunnel in the main field between the raised flat area where the new greenhouse is and the first of two other plots ending in the lowest area of the field. This tunnel grows early greens such as kale and spinach which aren’t susceptible to flea beetle like the cabbage and choi in the lower field is on the early side of the season.

It sounds like we may harvest some of the high tunnel growth for the pop-up market since so much of the CSA stuff is still establishing in preparation for Week 1 in June. In my own garden I have more than enough volunteers from the greenhouse growing…kale, chard, and lettuces…that I don’t think we’ll have any issues making salads by next week.

The Last of the Onions Planted

Finally, it happened. We reached the 150-tray goal planted out in the field. There’s always some loss…seeds not germinated or runt-size starts that just don’t make it when planted…so the total of 13,500 planted requires some excess trays. We also sell and give out leftovers as well as host some special runs of other things in the greenhouse.

But after 4+ weeks of planting onions (and many other things), it feels like a small seasonal milestone. A small amount of the varieties are planted at the top of the main field, but most are planted in the lower dry field. I have never had such love-hate feelings for a commodity crop, but anticipating equally mixed feelings about other staple veg as we work through the year.

Me and My AI Are Equally Starving for Context

With all this farm work, I like to think that I’m helping friends with their season at minimum wage, but really I’m just in learning mode and trying to keep up with the physical nature of the work required to do the former. I could buy a fancy GPU to add to my Kubernetes cluster for LLM-related tasks, but I also like to put hardware to work to pay it’s rent. Currently, my homelab costs $2.00 per day, the cost of a light bulb continuously running for 18 hours (~100 watts).

The thing my LLM and I are equally starved for is context. I don’t provide enough to it in order to expect the “New Things Not Yet Encountered” section of my template to be predictably accurate. I plan to solve this with some Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline tricks…possibly with LangChain or SourceGraph (which I have an early intro interview with later today). I also need the time to play and prototype with other approaches, which between the farm and consulting work, then also family and personal time, is a tight ask.

As it stands and with the time I do have, my LLM can only guess as to the interpersonal nature of my farm work, and results in this today:

Main Themes:

• Farming activities, including seeding, hoeing, watering, and loading produce for market
• Equipment and tools used, such as landscaping fabric, staples, and a hoed
• Crop management, including planting onions, lettuces, kale, spinach, and scallions

Activities performed by the intern:

• Seeding 17 trays of lettuce in the greenhouse
• Spreading and stapling down landscaping fabric over main fields
• Hoeing in the high tunnel (kale, spinach, and early lettuces)
• Loading produce for market (onions)
• Watering the greenhouse

New things not yet encountered:

• The term “98 cell tray”
• Using landscaping fabric to manage weeds in the high tunnel

Questions and future areas of research:

• Why was seeding 17 trays considered a significant accomplishment?
• The purpose and impact of the high tunnel on weed management
• How do the onions being loaded for market relate to CSA (pop-up farmers markets) in Essex?

Suggested Actions:

• Discuss benefits and challenges of using landscaping fabric with farm manager or experienced farmers
• Research methods for seeding 98 cell trays, such as optimizing tray layout or specialized tools
• Investigate types of weeds encountered in the high tunnel and their potential impact on crop yields
• Improve water conservation strategies in the greenhouse.