It’s that time of the year when plumes of wildfire smoke rise into the Eastern sky and fall in gray particulate layers on our cars and tractors and porches. It’s too hot to believe that we need to make haste in preparing the next batch of crops for our annual trial load.
We have a lull at the end of our grape studies, but the calendar reminds us that a large portion of our seasonal research is just about to start.
A few weeks ago, these quarter-acre blocks were dry and weedy. The sprinkler levies were overgrown. Blank, dirty canvasses awaited a new project. It isn’t exactly art, but much of farming for research is purely instinctual. A little bit of what made last year successful is added to the new problems that this year presents. It’s the kind of thing that can be hard to explain, but you know it when you see it.
We stand and ponder in the field, we plan and scheme in hopes for a good season, we ask questions, we fuel up the tractor and we get to work.
Now, FieldLab is back at it for a summer planting that will yield fall fruit.
Recently, we planted Marglobe tomato seeds in the center of a 5-foot bed. An acre and a half worth of them. It took the better part of a whole week to get the operation running. The heat threatened in waves of triple digit misery, and for this, we’re glad we chose to go with seeds over transplants. The seedlings survive the heat better. They sprout in the damp soil and develop as quickly underground as they do above – no transplant shock, no sudden death from above. Seeding also gives a few extra weeks for the target pests to find the crop before trial initiation. It’s the most natural way for us to do things here, and it’s strange to say it out loud. We hope for strife among the rows. FieldLab is where we cultivate the problem, in order to test the solution.
This summer, we hope to see a hearty population of aphids, a variety of Lepidoptera, and a range of diseases. We will, we can feel it.
Tomato season is one of our favorites. We revel in the joy of seeing barren ground take shape over warm afternoons. Pass after pass as we clatter along on a smoking Italian tractor, too old for its own good. To see the first cotyledons breach the surface and reach for sunlight in their early weeks, it’s fulfilling. Every time.
We do our best to set the process in motion by providing a place to grow and inviting all of the enemies to the table. Overhead water, predator control, a dose of abiotic stresses to suit our objectives. We look crazy to most people – perhaps we are for other reasons, but the natural fact is; where most see diseases and insects menacing, we see a field of numbers asking to be collected.
Before long, we’ll have rows of tall, hearty plants standing proudly as they prepare to load fruit and withstand the barrage of damaging pathogens and insects that we just can’t wait to document.
Somewhere between now and the first frost, we’ll perform all of the applications and evaluations that we’ve been waiting to get done since the summer began.
The real work starts a few weeks from now. We’ll clear the nozzle screens, calibrate the spray boom, refill the C02 bottles and spend many a morning in the stillness of late summer applying material to these plants. Before we know it, early October will see the last of our field trials come to a conclusion.
As 2022 closes in on the holidays, the crops are tilled, the equipment is parked, and the trials are reported. Just like that.
We are FieldLab, and this is how we grow.
