Bootstrap @ Rippling Waters – Swales

Last month I gave a few examples of how we battled with the elements all season here at Rippling Waters. I am going to keep with this theme and wrap up the remaining challenges I faced here in Southern Maine and how we are going about fixing them. The earth challenge, the soil challenge; everyone’s soil seems to give them one issue or another, if it isn’t the structure it’s the weed bank, if it isn’t that it’s the calcium levels or the acidity,... Read More

Bootstrap @ Rippling Waters – A Study in Elements

 We are elementalists; we are students of force and flow. We watch water fall and rush then rise and float in the heat of the day. We observe magnetism in the soil and encourage the mineral balance of the earth to better facilitate our crops. We feel the breeze with our faces and hands and know what it brings in spring and what it brings in autumn, what it means for the massive seed head, and what it can tell us about the future. Our life as farmers... Read More

Bootstrap @ Hartwood – The Best Laid Plans…

Well, many areas of New York received some good drenching over the last few weeks.  Unfortunately, we were not among them.  We did get about ¾” between 3 rainfalls, and that helped us have a few days off irrigating and kept our pasture and cover crops alive longer, but it didn’t touch the pond level (that’s now down a few feet), didn’t restore soil moisture, and isn’t nearly enough.  The tally now for our site is just over two inches... Read More

Bootstrap @ Hartwood – Dealing with Drought

We planned to write more about farm finances, but were sidetracked by a lack of rain so bad that the corn fields around us are curling up to look more like grass than corn. The weird thing is in our area, if you weren’t trying to grow anything, you probably didn’t notice the dryness.  There were days where it almost rained (and seemed like it rained just one town over), days where it threatened rain, and days where it pretended to rain (with... Read More

FarmHack Projects: Paddlewheel-Powered Pump

A drawing of a Wirtz Pump from 1842 Here is a great video made by Jeremy Smith of a water pump built by Cappie of Pangea Farm in Spearfish, SD. The pump, which is a “Wirtz pump”, uses a coil of hose and a scoop which are turned by a waterwheel in an irrigation ditch, pumping water 30′ or more vertically into a holding tank, from where it can then gravity-feed into livestock tanks, drip irrigation, etc.  This version pumps about... Read More

Report back from FarmHack@MIT

We had a great time at MIT, where we brought farmers, engineers and other thinkers together to invent things together. Here’s a play-by-play live blog of the day; here’s the video of the presentations of the day’s inventions. After pitches of about 15 ideas, we self-organized into groups to work toward prototyping six projects: an electric assist, super garden cart, multi-functional for tasks ranging from lie-down weeding to compost... Read More

FarmHack Tools: Back-flushing irrigation water filter

*Haga clic aquí para leerlo en español* Project is for: Vegetable and fruit growers who need to filter irrigation water Range of cost: $325 – $450 Skills / tools needed: Pipe wrenches, ability to glue PVC fittings together Summary: When using drip irrigation, it’s important to have a good water filter system, especially if you are using surface water (from a pond or stream).  At Hearty Roots Farm, we pump from irrigation ponds that... Read More