Tiny Farm Gear

This gear really works! Bug clothing is made of a fine polyester mesh that forms a formidable barrier between mosquitoes (and black flies!) and your skin. It’s a simple concept. I’ve had a set, jacket and pants, for a few years now (the link is to Lee Valley, where I got mine, but I’m sure it’s available elsewhere as well). I don’t think I’ve ever worn the pants, because I’m usually in the field in overalls or jeans. But I can recommend the top. With hood up and zipped, it’s light, loose, and soon forgotten about, as are the biting bugs. In fact, only the mesh over your face takes a few minutes getting used to before you stop noticing it. Just don’t spit!

This compact weather station is one handy and entertaining little item. Some may consider it no more than a toy, or even a waste of money, but at under $15US, you really can’t go wrong. You mount it on a pole, set it out in the field, and it measures wind, rainfall and temperature. I use separate rain guages for rainfall, and various analog and digital min/max thermometers in different locations for temperature, so what’s left is wind direction and speed, which is what I like about it. Specifically, I like being able to check wind speed, and watch it fluctuate. You read the speed in miles or kilometers along the curved edge, as the indicator flaps up and down on the wind. For me, being able to attach a reference to what I feel is kinda useful, like, “Oh, that’s about a 20 mph wind!” :) I’m not sure of the particular brand, this one is from Veseys, and I’ve seen very similar or identical ones in the hardware stores.

A 7,000′ reel just like this has been sitting in the drive shed for a while now, waiting to be tested. Ro-Drip, from John Deere, is one brand of drip tape. I can’t speak to how it compares with other drip tape, but I have heard it highly recommended. In any case, drip irrigation has serious advantages over other methods—watering with a hose, soaker hoses, sprinklers—for any size garden. It is super-efficient, the usual figure being 70% better water use than sprinklers. It also operates at low pressure, from under 10psi to around 20 max, so it can even be gravity fed from a raised container, a barrel or something much larger. It can be used on the surface, or buried. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re growing organically, floating row cover is practically indispensable for insect protection, and as frost protection, it’s an easy, inexpensive way to extend the season at both ends. It’s made of spunbond polyester, a porous fabric that lets rain through just fine, and comes in different weights for different applications. Weights range from the ultralight, for use as an insect barrier only (it doesn’t do much against cold), to super-heavy, for frost protection up to around 8°F (4.5°C). There is a protection trade-off: the heavier, the less light transmission. I’ve been getting by with just one weight, the medium-light AG-19 from the Agribon line, which provides up to 4°F of frost protection, and 85% light transmission. With Agribon’s heaviest, AG-70, only 30% of the light gets through. The edges are typically buried or weighted (heavy rocks work) against the wind. The lighter weights can be supported by most transplanted seedlings (leave it loose enough to accommodate growth), and heavier stuff is no problem for mature plants in fall (that’s the “floating”). For seedlings, letting the cover touch leaves can allow cold burns, especially if the fabric gets damp and then freezes (this can be fairly damaging, but I haven’t found it to be fatal so far). In this case, you can stick short, non-pointy stakes every few feet to keep the cover up. I use Agribon because it’s the only brand I’ve found in smaller bulk quantities (e.g. 1000′ roll) where I am in Canada, and it’s worked great, but there are other brands of floating row cover, like Reemay and Agrofabric, which probably perform the same. (In the photo, we’re covering mid-season squash transplants to protect them from cucumber beetles.)

Sure, there are thousands upon thousands of calendars out there, lots of ‘em FREE, but they aren’t built equal! This is my third year with the At-A-Glance Monthly Wall Calendar, and I swear by it. It’s perfect for field notes, with ample (but not excessive) daily space for critical jottings, and a matt surface for easy writing with any pen or pencil you have at hand (glossy calendars can be a pain). I use it for the field basics: planting dates, rainfall and other weather notes, irrigation, repairs, and so forth. The dimensions are perfect, tall and narrow, to fit backs of doors and other narrower bits of wall. The wire binding is stiff and allows easy page turning. It comes in four sizes, up to 20″x30″ (I use one size down, 15-1/2″x22-3/4″).

Not the most elegant bit of garden gear, but it could be a winner. This strap-on stool comes from the dairy world. Suppliers are listed on the linked page.

At double the price of the Troy-Bilt “Big Red” Horse, the top-of-the-line professional series BCS 948 walking tractor is quite the market garden machine. I haven’t tried or even seen one of these, but I’d love to. BCS is the biggest of the European 2-wheel tractor manufacturers. They have a full line, including a Horse equivalent. The walking tractor is an order above the North American big rototiller, they’re built as full-on agricultural equipment. The 948 is a true small-scale tractor, the difference found in the engineering, construction, and range of add-on implements. On this tiny farm, the Horse and the Kubota compact tractor cover the BCS from either side, to get an even wider range of smaller to larger jobs done, but the 948 could replace both for all of the most critical market gardening tasks, like tilling, cultivating and clean-up for several acres.

The Troy-Bilt Horse walking rototiller is a machine to swear by. I’ve had mine for four years and it’s gone through a lot. I bought a mid-1990s model, used, in mint condition. For a couple of seasons, it was the main tiller on two acres of market garden. I’d sometimes run it non-stop for an hour or more at a time, and for the better part of a day. No problems to date.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the original Eliot Coleman broadfork design, made by Johnny’s Selected Seed in Maine (US). Johnny’s carries four in all, differing by the number of tines.

The ho-mi digger is an odd tool that I’ve had for three or four years and still haven’t gotten around to figuring out. It’s a traditional Korean farm and garden tool, around for 5,000 years, according to one source, so I guess it’s time-tested! It gets quite the write-up wherever I’ve read about it, which is why I bought it: weed, dig, make furrows for seed. Versatile! All-purpose! It may be the only garden tool you need. Just now I found this page of impressive testimonials. Well, guess I’ll be sure to really try it next season. It comes in long- and short-handled versions. I’ve seen it in a few catalogs, Lee Valley has one (where I got mine) that’s actually made in Korea!