ag
Welcoming everyone's casts and discussion about agriculture.
@brixbounty
when you spend all vacation week having fun with the family, get home and put on a headlamp to do a bit of last second storm prep and repair.
Our most exposed fieldhouse (to NE winds) has a few tears in the roll up sides, so we scab some poly on, tuck the base in with snow, and hope the accumulation buries the side before winds ramp up.
Home & relaxing now….
39 replies
1 recast
163 reactions
@jawa
Avocado fun fact: U.S. consumers eat on average 9 pounds of avocados a year if they live on the East or West coast. It’s about 3 pounds a year for the middle of the country
4 replies
0 recast
9 reactions
@brixbounty
Delivery of our potting soil for the spring today.
We have a great ag supplier a little ways away that delivers with a flat bed tractor trailer and has a well equipped all conditions fork.
Didn’t even have to swap my bucket for forks on the tractor; which was nice considering said forks are buried in a snow drift at the moment.
Will probably start seeding later this week or next depending on rhythms.
One pallet not pictured included smaller bags; cause these slings are good and frozen.
14 replies
0 recast
71 reactions
@brixbounty
Many, many tractor buckets later…
Cleaning the briar, porcelain berry, and mugwort off a couple of old truck beds that haven’t seen the light of day in a decade.
All goes well they’ll get dragged away and chopped for scrap and we’ll have a much better circulation zone around our small prop house.
And less woodchuck habitat which will be appreciated, as last summer they were going full ninja mode climbing up tables in the prop house in August.
11 replies
15 recasts
248 reactions
@brixbounty
Started flipping a house we didn’t push through the winter today.
40s outside, 70 inside with a single layer of greenhouse poly (it was 80 inside the smaller prop house).
Pulling the remnants of old spinach, cilantro, chard, and kale.
Don’t typically have empty space early January, yet will probably hold off on planting til sometime in February unless we see a significant warm trend late month (haven’t seen yet).
Our “fieldhouses” are 30’x96’ or 10m x 32m - ~3000 sq ft or 300 sq m
3 of them will be in production later this spring. All are unheated, passive solar yet give us a nice early and late season micro climate.
9 replies
16 recasts
146 reactions
@mooneymillions
The absolute best arugula, paired with the absolute best red butterhead lettuce.
Incredible combo.
0 reply
1 recast
3 reactions
@jawa
https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2025/12/usda-unveils-700m-regenerative-agriculture-program/
0 reply
0 recast
2 reactions
@jawa
Mulch report! Our first mulch delivery for our younger lemons planted 3-4 years ago. This happens to be citrus mulch. I hope the trees don’t mind 😱
2 replies
1 recast
6 reactions
@brixbounty
Volunteer tomato seedling still holding on; though will get zapped on Thursday night when forecast is for 14 degrees.
Swiss Chard post harvest and pac choi from a fieldhouse this afternoon.
Just about wrapped up with harvests for 2025. Not pushing deep winter production this year; so we’ll have a gap until harvests pick up again in mid April.
4 replies
1 recast
26 reactions
@ventra
So many seedling these days 😜
1. Cucumber
2. Bitter Gourd (one variant)
3. Bitter Gourd ( another variant)
9 replies
3 recasts
18 reactions
@jawa
A cautionary tale on producing expensive hardware for an industry in decline: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/19/monarch-tractor-preps-for-layoffs-and-warns-employees-it-may-shut-down/
2 replies
0 recast
4 reactions
@jawa
It’s awesome to see our settling ponds this full so early in the season. When we are lucky enough to have rains a significant portion of that water is directed into ponds like these all throughout California.
Our agricultural wells near these pumps have seen a significant rise in water level as we recharge the aquifers with rain water. It’s not possible to store this much water above ground but there’s tremendous natural storage below.
2 replies
0 recast
10 reactions