Chicks are born and Elvis keeps calling

Some of our Apricots.

One Torpedo Onion

Hello again,

Summer is here when you know baby chicks are being born on a regular basis. I went this afternoon to collect eggs and check on the two nesting chickens when all of a sudden my daughter says look here is a broken shell!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with a shriek! Well Chicory our very male rooster did not like that and ran towards her. I warned her just in time and he backed off. He has a problem chasing the little kidlets going in there. Four baby chicks showed their faces

These two last weeks have been so busy with activity it is hard to figure out where to start.

We found out that we have lost thousands of dollars worth of seedlings that we planted out. We did everything by the book . We documented the planting the spacings the pre-plant fertilizers and everything was just right for a promising season. We noticed things were not right until one day the bell rang in my head that it was not "MY" fault. I got an email saying that 4000 onion seedlings were dead and could I send more seed. After investigating the death we were able to figure out that our seedlings had gotten nitrate poisoning on a certain delivery date.

Some of our seedlings were stunted and others refused to grow. The onions took the hardest hit and 3000 sets of our white barletta onions died while 5,000 sets of our torpedo onion from our second planting were dead. The chilies that were part of that lot are stunted but still alive.

Brown Onions

We have been picking our torpedo onions from the first planting and here are some pictures.(at top) The stunted onions are deformed and have weird markings with the roots curled up and growing vertical inside the leaves of the onion. The onions below were part of the first planting and are brown cooking onions. They are doing well and a majority of them can be classified as jumbo size potential. The first planting of Torpedo onions were mistakenly seeded into one per cell or two and three per cell and not per our instructions of 4 seeds per cell. Well the ones that were single cell version grew out to be these huge bloated looking torpedoes. I picked them and sold them to a local fruit and veg shop. Nothing beats a novelty !

Fruit is in "Full Speed Ahead" mode with us battling the Silver- eye birds along with the Port Lincoln 28's (parrots) eating the apricots. We picked about 500 kilos that is 1000 pounds almost for most of you American readers. Last year we had less than a kilo of Apricots.

We have been making jam, stewed apricots giving them away and basically trying to use them up.

Now last but most important on the news front is Boysenberries! Yes those yummy things that grow on vines full of thorns. Normally we get friends to come down and pick the fruit each year but this year they have been late in getting here to do that. So missus farmer has taken it upon herself to pick them all. We cannot wait for the friends to come when they have to so the fruit is going into jams. preserves, and even frozen whole.

There is nothing that tastes as nice a homemade boysenberry jam in the middle of winter.

Now for the final thought for those of you who are wondering about why Elvis was in the title. Well Elvis is alive and well in the form of one man show. You see Elvis is the floor salesman at the Canningvale Markets wholesaler. He sells all of our produce and every time I call him up he says to send him "MOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRE. You never send enough." At times he is hard to understand as his English can get broken up with Vietnamese sounding vocabulary. But at the end of the day everything is sold. Somethings in life are worth waiting for; baby chicks!

Have a wonder filled week.

Onions cause Headaches!

Onions Cause Headaches is the Headlines at Kirup Valley Farms.

Just recently we were ready to plant out 3000 of our torpedo onions when an email came from our seedling supplier saying that we had to bring more seed in to replace the dead ones. Well I thought that weird that 3000+ seedlings were dead.

In the mean time I thought I was going crazy in the head from Onionitus a rare whooping cough of onions. In reality I had the Whooping Cough and not the onions. I was looking at some of the rows and thinking we had some weird onion dieback disease. I was wrong. I could not have done anything that drastic to kill off over 3000 of our white Barletta seedlings. Yet they were dieing and I could not do anything about that. In blotchy areas the same thing was happening with our Torpedo onions. I checked on our gold grape tomato seedlings that were nicely in the ground and almost all of them were either dead or very stunted. I brought this up with our seedling people and eventually heard back from them . I went in for a meeting and verified that all the seedlings from that delivery date where affected. Here "I " thought that I was losing my mind and ready for the looney bin.


Since than we have had issues with germination rates and so our seed supplier kindly express mailed us 27,000 more seeds to sow out. Hopefully that will take up the slack of lost seedlings and such. Our leeks are looking well so far and the 1000 Brown and 1000 red onions are growing exceptionally well.

Since I wrote the post about planting our leeks, onions, torpedos and barlettas, I’ve had a number of emails from people asking about onion harvesting and storage.
The first thing I have to tell them is that in many ways it’s too late to start thinking about harvesting and storage now as many of the decisions have to be made before the crops go in.
So, I’ll wind the clock back to the start of the process and work my way through that before detailing the final means of storage.
The first decision made awhile ago was to calculate how many onions you want to store and for how long.
In our case, we need at least 10 month’s worth of onions. We use about 10 onions a week, which means aiming to have 450 edible onions in storage.
We then have to allow for spoiling – a noticeable proportion will have to be removed early on as examples with unseen rot or damage come to light, then a small portion are removed over the following six to eight months, and finally about one in- four go off in the final couple of months.
It means allowing an extra 20-30% for waste or rotting, to give about 600 onions.
But to harvest 600 onions, you also have to allow for seeds that fail to germinate, seedlings that fail to grow, pests, disease, wind damage, lack of rain (or too much), etc...
In our location and conditions, that means allowing an extra 40% for wastage. That means planting at least 850 - 1000 onions, which is a considerable amount of space and along with a big amount of work. Both of which have except my back aches when thinking about the work part.

The same calculation applies for our garlic and torpedo onions but with different variables.
In the case of garlic, there’s no point in trying to meet our year-round need unless I change our plans and plant several thousand cloves.

Torpedo onions on the other hand, have proved extremely reliable and free of disease for the third year in a row.
Having decided to grow 2000 onions, the next consideration is the varieties.
The best-keeping onions are late maturing onions with thin necks, transplanted from seedlings.
Onions grown from seed have to be sown thickly into trays in August, have their tops clipped to about three inches in late September then be set out in rows in October. This gives the onions plenty of time to grow, develop and mature through the long days of summer.
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Thus far, the plan for harvesting and storing onions is to plant at least 2000 with the majority grown from seedlings and an emphasis on varieties that store well.

The key things to remember with onions are that too little water will result in a much stronger flavour, they must be kept free of weeds and they need the benefit of those long summer days so they must be planted out as soon as possible. We are growing all our onions under black plastic mulch.
Having successfully grown the onions, we now come to the part that I’ve been asked about – harvesting. The usual advice is to wait until a third to a half of the onion stalks have fallen over naturally, and then carefully knock down the remaining tops with the back of a rake.
You’re then supposed to wait another week or so while the onions dry in the ground before lifting them and allowing them to dry in the sun for three days to a week.
But that pre-supposes warm, dry weather. In our case, once about a quarter of any given variety of onion has fallen over, we regard them as ripe for lifting and keep watch on the weather.
As soon as we get a clear, sunny spell with little or no clouds in sight, we lift the onions and lay them out on plastic bread racks we got from a local friend.
The combination of heat from the roof, plus the direct sun gets the drying process off to a good start.

We keep the doors open during the day to ensure good airflow and let the onions cure for at least a three weeks – longer if there’s any green or moisture in the necks. The stalks are cut off to one-inch stubs after the first week.
Once the onions have cured, we put them in net bags and hang them up from the rafters in the shed. The good airflow keeps them cool and dry over the coming months.
Onions intended for immediate eating - our purple torpedos and barlettas- have their stalks cut slightly longer and are bundled into packs of four. These go to the wholesale markets or to the farmers markets we attend. They are popular sellers.
If the onions start to sprout, they’re not wasted as the green tops make a delicious addition to soups, salads and stir-fries in later winter and early spring. Even our chooks like them.
And when we’ve lifted the very last onions of the season in early autumn, it’s time to start planting garlic for the following year and to plan the next season’s harvest of onions .

On a brighter note we have finished planting out thousands of watermelon seeds along with thousands of Rock melon seeds too. Some of you know them as Rockies or Cantaloupes.

We have several rows of white Lumina "Ghost" pumpkins which we liked last season as they had a really nice eating quality to them. Also planted were two long rows of Gem Squash ( a South African delicacy) and two rows of JapPumpkins aka Kabocha Pumpkin. Still left to plant are 1000 gold grape tomato's, a few thousand yellow butter beans and a few thousand of purple bush beans.

Ok I am tired of thinking in thousands. Wait till the time comes to pick all these "thousands"
Another headache yet to come.


Until next time,

take care

Boys and their Farm Toys

Some how I always thought one needed tools and more machines to farm. I was right.
When we first started "farming" we did not know how like most everyone else starting out to work the land. Mind you we had a collection of books but like most other beginners books are great for theory but when it comes to practice it is another story.
A neighbor came by one day and gave us a hand for a few hours and that opened our eyes to implements that would help us. Our region is a fruit growing area and so vegetables on a large scale are few and far between. That friend grows tomatoes for a living.

So finally after planting thousands of transplant seedlings by hand we had built two implements and modified a third implement. The third one was imported from USA and a few things were added to it to make it more efficient. The implement on the left is a plastic mulch layer which uses 1200 mm wide plastic mulch. It has been converted to use 900 mm wide plastic mulch.

It can dispense two rows of T-tape ( irrigation lines) or single row. With the wide plastic we can do our onions and any intensive crop now. Previous seasons we did not use it and lost plenty of money due to weeds and water evaporation.

The transplanter is the large green thing. When this picture was taken it was not finished. Since than it has been wrapped in Shade cloth and can carry 3000 plus seedlings at one time.There are two 200 litre tanks given to us courtesy of James that are attached and with them we pipe into the ground liquid fertilizer mixture for pre-planting the seedlings. We use a blend of Molasses, Liquid Humates and a small amount of natural fertilizer to place the plant into the bed.

With this implement we can plant 3000 onions in an hour while if we had to do that by hand it would take two adults a few hours almost the day in labour to transplant. This way we can transplant 2000 chili plants in an hour or 3000 onion sets in an hour. We can do a entire area in short time. I had custom made transplanter wheels welded up to do 4 rows at one time. We have Pepper,Eggplant wheels, Pumpkin,melon wheels and other various wheel spacings to help us plant to the right spacing.

With transplanting 10,000 chili plants last season it would have taken us a week to do it in this fashion. Now, it can take a few hours to do and still be shaded. Last year the Farmers wife was pregnant and helping to transplant by sitting on the ground and crawling along. This way is a HUGE way better. It will also allow us to plant intensive seed crops like melons and pumpkins along with sweet corn in plastic. Just the other day I commented how I hardly spent any time weeding the onions. We do want to use the bio degradable corn based plastic mulches and we did shop the prices but being twice to three times the price of the normal plastic we did not have a budget to buy them. One of these days when we convert to certified organic we will.

The 3rd implement on the far right is a multi purpose tool. We designed it to carry two people on the back to either hand weed or to harvest onions , or garlic. You could also use it to harvest any ground crop. It can also remove the plastic mulch cut it and dig it out. It wont rewind or wrap the T- tape up. We have the parts to build that one later this year. This winter a friend James and myself spent days of slogging around int he mud removing last seasons plastic mulch and T-tape. This will make life easier. That is the goal for this farmer.

So until next time,

Farmer John going to work the fields

Watermelons are not going to be my Friends

Recently in Japan ( see photo above) a farmer came up with a novel idea of growing heart shaped watemelons. Here at KV Farms all we want to do is just grow plain ol' melons. We love the shape of them but at the price they are selling them I dont think the farmer was growing too many of them. He probably makes more money in a season of growing heart shaped ones than we do working all year.



It wasn't until 1615 however that the word "watermelon" first appeared in the English dictionary. Nutritionally, the watermelon is fat, sodium and cholesterol free; an excellent source of vitamins A and C; and contributes fibre, iron and potassium to the diet. Watermelons also contain an important phytochemical (plant compound) called lycopene. Lycopene is a powerful anti-oxidant. Apparently helps mens prostates and reduces blood pressure. For that part I am not sure it reduces the farmers blood pressure as mine was raised high by the farm help recently.



You see we decided to grow 2000 watemelons via transplants. The idea behind that was to get a headstart on the growing season. Well the day chosen for the work was COLD. Perfect I thought for doing the transplanting as the plants will set better into the soil and take. The two people appointed to plant them did not want to come out of the house as their complaint was it was tooooooo cold. Farmer John being the resident tractor operator was not happychappy.



They eventually got over it and 2000 seedling transplants were put into the soils. Next to them is a funny story about how we trial things here at KV Farms and follow them to a success or to a failure.



Last summer I grew a small row of Bannana Squash, a large watermelon shaped pumpkin like squash. Well we only grew it for our personal consumption. One day Elvis our man on the floor of the wholesale markets asked if I had anything else to send up. I said yes on a joke and mentioned the BS words and he said send them up. I called to see how they were selling the next day and by 9 a.m. they were sold. He wanted plenty more and I sent them up. We ended up have the miserable small ones at the end of season cleaning time. Well this year we have planted over 1000 of these little guys

Dismal year reults and start to a new season newsa

Dismal year 2009-2010 crop results were poor but we closed out the year owing money to various entities which shall remain anon to protect their rights. Many things went right and many wrong. Some of the crops we planted here on the farm for our own consumption turned out to be best sellers. We never got any to eat but that is the life one leads when farming.


This year we are changing our work gears and gearing up for certain crops that we know will give us some better returns. And yes like last season I am planting certain crops for the house and friends, namely Leeks, Red onions and Brown ones. In additions we are planting about 20,000 torpedo onion sets in bunches of 4. Also 20,000 of the white Barlotta Onion which looks like a spring onion with a golf ball attached!


We are in drought mode at the moment as the rainfall we have gotten has been dismal to say the least and not much rain does not help. Our soil is dry and for that reason I am placing more organic matter into the soils . I ordered 80 tons of compost blend to improve the soils and help with moisture retention. This winter I have to plant out a major crop of Green Manures into the soil to help hold the moisture for next season.

We are putting in some different varieties of Grape Tomatoes, Pink ones, yellow pear and 2000 of gold grape tomato.

Bannana Squash is going into the ground as well and sweet corn is getting a late start this year as we were hoping for more rain.

10,000 chili seedlings are going to go into the ground as well, gold ones, red ones, jalapenos and brimstone and elongated fruity Habanero style chili. Hope to see how they perform.

Until next time happy farming