Roots Email Got Hacked!

Okay folks, so if you didn't already hear about it, Roots Farm email got hacked and phony emails got sent out in our name saying I was in the UK and had a sick relative and got mugged and needed money sent Western Union to me. IT ISN'T TRUE. I'm here in the U.S. of A. and no family of mine is elsewhere, nor did I get mugged, nor do I need you to send me $2000. I mean, I always take donations, but it's not an emergency and I'm not in dire need. My sincerest apologies. Jeeze louise.

The rat bastards who did this deed also read old emails and specifically addressed folks on my behalf requesting money. And they created an account called rootsfarms@hotmail to which replies were getting sent. And they locked me out of the account so I couldn't do anything about it.

The result of all this is that a lot of stress was created for both us here on the farm and our friends and customers. I REALLY hope no one sent money anywhere for my sake. And, any emails that anyone tried to send us in the last two days have disappeared into the unknown.

WHAT TO DO:

• If you got a phony email from us, please check and make sure that rootsfarms@ hotmail --that's farms with an s-- is not where your replies are now going. You can block any incoming messages from this sender through the security options that your mail provider offers.
• DO NOT send any money to us via Western Union or anywhere else. In fact, always verify this kind of request by calling friends of the person possibly in need and making sure the info is valid. Try contacting through varied channels--phone, email, alternate email, facebook, call friends, whatever. See if the reports check out before money leaves your account.
  
• NEVER, EVER, EVER give out your or anyone else's password via email. If you get mail from "hotmail" or "windows" that looks official and says they're going to close your account if you don't provide the info, IT'S A LIE. Hotmail, windows, and all those folks will NEVER ask you for your info via email. Don't do it! It's a phishing scam. Save yourself, your co-workers, your friends, and your customers a headache and disregard this crap.
• If you do make this mistake, IMMEDIATELY get back to your account and change your password. If you're locked out already, go to your provider and verify your id and request a password change through the channels they have available for dealing with these issues. Do this ASAP! My gratitude goes out to windows live and hotmail for getting us back in action in a timely manner.
  
• If you tried to contact us via email in the last two days, try again. I can now receive and reply to your messages.
  
• Please be patient. We're trying to manage the damage while in the midst of our first week of harvests, so things are a little hectic around here.

Again, my sincerest apologies to anyone who got the phony crap and worried, or who has been trying to reach us unsuccessfully, or who just had to deal with the fallout. Bummer. Lots of rocks on the office side of the road this year. But on the positive side, the fields are looking GREAT! More food coming in Friday . . .

Revelation

Well, it was one of those days. One stolen weed whacker, two dead batteries, and three flat tires. Last week was the week to get the hoop houses finished so we could finally transplant some squashes that desperately wanted to get in the ground. So on Monday, I go out to get the weed whacker to whack some cover crops so we can till them and finish the edge and low and behold, the weed whacker is missing! AWOL. No one loaned it or borrowed it that we know of, so it's absent without permission. Stolen! Yikes!

I like to believe that the Roots Farm is a bubble of safety, insulated from things like transgression. I mean, don't the positive vibes we create generate like a force-field that those with malicious intentions are repelled by? So I thought. But no. That was a nice weed whacker. An essential tool. Part of me is ranting and raving that tool thieves should just burn in hell, and how am I going to get my work done? I wanna smack this disrespectful, irresponsible person upside the head. Another part of me recognizes that whoever stole it probably didn't realize how much we need it, how essential it is in our operation. And if they did, either they wouldn't have taken it, or they were so desperate they took it anyway. How do you solve social issues like this? Economic issues? If they're that desperate, how do we help them? If they're just disrespectful and socially irresponsible, how do we educate them? I have a lot of compassion, but I also need my tools to stay put. I want to help, but not necessarily invite untrustworthy folks into my world. What to do? In the meantime, I walked over to Jim's house and borrowed his weed whacker for the day. God bless good neighbors. God help the ones who are not.

The two dead batteries came into play later that day. The lawn mower was number one, not surprisingly, and the lift to the dump trailer was number two--bummer, but solvable.

And the three flat tires were all associated with the lawnmower. Poor mower. The two front tires deflate if you look at them wrong. And to blow them up you have to add air while pressing on the sides to create a seal so it'll inflate. Which usually involves stepping on it or wrapping a rope around it and pulling or some other inventive solution.

Let's just say that Monday was a difficult day, full of challenges to my equilibrium.

Tuesday, I went to fetch compost for our farm from a new supplier. We're still working out the kinks on that one, but there's hope.

Wednesday was AMAZING. I love volunteers! We weeded and thinned, mulched and weeded, thinned and mulched! Wow! All this work that I didn't think we'd have the time to accomplish got done, and done well. Yay.

We also harvested the last of the kale that was beginning to bolt. I've never seen kale bolt before since I usually plant it in the spring and it dies before coming around into another spring, but yep, it will indeed bolt. The flowering heads looked like broccoli, so we picked the leaves and the heads and cooked some of it up for lunch. Who knew--a new delicacy! Flowering kale looks and tastes like broccoli raab. Yummy. Eat it with butter.

Thursday and Friday were more hoop-house related days. We finished mulching the last big hoop house (yay despite the slimy leaf mess). And we got to see 3 baby rabbits in the process. I think they had a little nest (do rabbits nest? we found an indention lined with fur) near the leaf bags and while we were moving them, they ran, but not far. We got to see a couple of them up-close. Did you know that baby rabbit ears are really small! Small! Tiny little ears. These fluffy bunnies were cute as cute can be. And right before Easter. Cool.

We also finished (3 out of 4) the endwalls with doors. Halleleujah! Finally! We installed more u-channel, also called wire-lock, to the undersides of the end hoops and cut big pieces of plastic for the doors to hang from them. The plastic we salvaged from our old hoop house that came down in the snow last year. These are in the same location, so it seemed fitting that the old house is still playing a part in our fields and farm. Plus hey, we're recycling! So yeah. 2 doors for each end wall. They're open in the middle and attached to poles so when we pull the sides back it looks like someone has drawn the drapes open. And those are our new houses. Finally. Next week, we transplant . . .

Leaf Bags & Pipe Threads

March 27, 2010

Farm update:
Let's see, last week we were industrious as usual. Built a gravel-based processing area so we don't have to stand ankle deep in mud while we're washing carrots and radishes this spring. Worked on constructing end walls for the new hoop houses. A task which, after a while working on it, we decided to defer until after we re-convened on how they should be constructed. We also decided to ride over to fellow farmer Jay Payne's place, Cedar Grove Farm, to see his hoop houses, which are quite similar to ours, and get some ideas. Jay sure does have some lovely lettuce mix growing in his houses right now, not to mention a spinach patch that could make cabbage patch kids all over the world green with envy. Always nice to visit a fellow farmer and see yet another way it can be done. I've heard it said that there are as many ways to farm as there are farmers farming, and I'd have to agree. The diversity of nature is reflected in those of us working with it.

In the realm of plants, we direct seeded turnips and cut lettuce mix (which I noticed today had already germinated only 5 days later) and transplanted over 100' of head lettuce starts. We also potted up tomato seedlings from 2" blocks to 4" pots. I can already tell they like it. More cukes got seeded and the garlic got weeded.

We also accomplished a nice chunk of work in the hoop houses that I had been putting off because it just wasn't an appetizing task. Mulching. Which, ordinarily isn't unpleasant, but after the leaf bags have sat in the rain for almost 2 months, becomes a bit of a slimy challenge. Yuk. But we prevailed. We hauled wheelbarrows and cartloads of leaf bags, we heaved and hoed, and in the end, one hoop house had all its aisles full of leaf mulch, ready to suppress weeds, retain moisture, and provide a ready supply of bed mulch for the crops to come. Only one more house to go . . .

And speaking of that one more house, we spent time this week re-working the beds to get them just right. Now is the easiest time to do tractor work in the houses -- the ends are open and there are no crops to work around -- so now is the time to get it right. And so we did. Painfully. It required a lot of hilling and re-hilling, discing, tilling. I kept trying to save myself steps, and finally I just gave in and did it the way it should have been done to begin with -- with all the implements and everything measured and marked out. It's amazing. Here's a math problem for you: if your hoop house is 28' across and your tractor has a wheel base that's 5' center to center of the wheels, how do you arrange the beds so that you end up with 6 of them that are 3' wide or more, each? The answer is that you make 4 passes with the tractor on the center beds, wheel tracks overlapping, and give the extra feet to the beds on the sides. I took the tape measure out and spray painted marks for my tires to go in--between foot 4 and 5, 8 and 9 and so on, and I did that for BOTH sides of the house so I could make my target line coming from either end. Never have I had to be so precise in exactly where the tires go on the tractor. Each foot is invaluable growing space, and maximizing growing space is what this project was all about. So I did. And now it's done. Thank goodness. Hopefully we won't have to do that again for a while. But hey, if so, now I know the process that gets it right.

On another side of the business, I got to learn more in the realm of irrigation. Did you know that a pipe thread is different than a hose thread? The threads are closer together on a pipe thread than a hose, and the two are definitely not interchangeable. Hmm. Good to know. Leads me to purchase things like adapters that go from one to the other so I can correctly connect my water filter to my pressure regulator to my mainline for my irrigation system. I talked with a fella from the Dripworks company where we're ordering our stuff from for quite some time about what all I needed to get to make my system work like I want it to. At one point I even drew out figures for myself to try and get a visual on what would be connected where and how many fittings of each kind I would need. Schematics. Graphs. What can I say, I like to organize my information visually. So anyway. I learned more things I needed to know, which leads to more things, which leads to more things like it always does. Pipe threads, number of gallons per minute, PSI, mainline, sub-main. Gosh, my vocabulary just grows every day. Kinda like the plants.

And, lest I forget, I also went over to UGA and gave a talk at the Sustainable Food Systems Symposium. I represented the producer side of the system, and it was quite interested to get up in front of the auditorium and discuss what "sustainable" means to me. Quite a lot, actually. Maybe that'll be the subject of my next blog . . .

Frozen Earth, Frozen Carrots

January 7, 2010

A new learning experience: when the ground itself freezes, the things in it also freeze. Okay, so it seems like a no-brainer and perhaps it is, but the idea and the practical implication are just now coming together for me. My carrots are frozen. Actually, it's mostly just the exposed tops, perhaps an inch down, but that inch drastically reduces their marketability. Thankfully, I have a somewhat forgiving market, but this may be a bit of a costly education in paying attention to severe weather. Now my carrots are covered, albeit late, and I'm making a note in my crop folder, "when the temperatures dip into the 20's, cover the carrots!" Who knew that the earth itself would freeze a few inches deep at that temperature? I didn't. But it has been damp, and it is cold, so there you go. A couple of years ago, I would have kicked myself pretty hard for making this mistake; now I simply realize that mistakes are oftentimes how you learn, and the bigger the mistake, the more firmly the lesson sticks. Ah, well. So it goes. January. You'd think with the light returning and the days getting longer now that the heat would follow suit, but this is the coldest it's been all winter. Days and days of 20's and 40's. Yikes.