Wintry High Wind

Yesterday winter came storming in. The day started off with thunderstorms-thunder, lightning, heavy rain and heavy winds. By dawn the rain and thunder had moved eastward. The winds picked up so that by 9 am they were howling and we were getting gusts over 50mph with sustained winds around 30mph.

it was farm share day as well but since we were aware that the weather would be less than ideal for harvesting I got in what I needed the day before in cold but much calmer conditions. Eugene, on the other hand decided to get in kale, cabbage, red turnips and broccoli before the big freeze occurred.

Personally I avoid harvesting in high winds as the winds can do a lot of damage to harvested crops, especially to leafy greens if they are not well covered. I use towels to cover the harvest and they are not always easy to secure to the picking crates and will blow off (I have yet to have one blow away). But sometimes you cannot avoid unpleasant situations and this was one that was unavoidable.

So the morning was spent harvesting things that did not have enough protection to get through a 17F degree early morning. By around noon more and more time was being spent trying to keep the plastic on the hoop houses tight. Eugene was also spending way too much time trying to keep the row covers on beds-this will not work unless one takes about every row cover rock we have and puts them all on the 15 or so beds we have covered. Even than a lot of the covers will come open in high winds or rip themselves to shreds. In the past I would simply go and open all the covers and secure them to the ground so they cannot harm the plants they are protecting by being blown around in the wind.

This time I did not do that because Eugene thought it was a bad idea. And he was correct on that. if the covers were removed yesterday right after a rain even they would have ended up folded and frozen to themselves and the ground and would have been useless to use until the outside temp went above 32F. So now we hope that the covers did not blow off the beds and stick to the ground (but it looks like we will be well above freezing in a couple of days so we can use them again very soon)

After lunch (temp around 34F) I got to work putting together the shares for the Winter FSI and Eugene went out to harvest turnips. I could hear the hoop houses snapping and growling in the wind but up until 2:30 they all seemed to be staying together. I went back in the house around 2:30 and thought I had nothing much to do with the rest of the day. I reveled in that delusion up until 3:30 when Eugene came in and said he had to warm up for a while and than go back out and take in the rutabagas.

I looked at him and said "rutabagas? You mean the rutabagas in the hoop house?" he replied" yes the rutabagas in the hoop house". Than I said "I take it the hoop house is no longer covered with plastic" and he replied"pretty much".

And with all that I found a hat and gloves and put on a work coat and we went and pulled and topped rutabagas. it was interesting working in an area that was quite warm under an hour before we got there. The soils were still warmish when we started but but by the time we finished they were freezing up. As were the greens on the rutabagas, they looked so sad. The same could be said for the broccoli in the bed next to the rutabagas that had been coddled and protected up until yesterday afternoon. Fortunately we were pretty much done with the broccoli so its' demise is not a big loss.

And with the plastic off it will make it a lot easier to clean out the beds with dead green beans, dead broccoli and a scant few rutabaga runts. Than we can fill the beds with the lettuce seedlings we have ready to be planted somewhere. I don't know if that is what will actually happen but right now it sounds like a pretty good idea.

Small Farms vs Industrial Farms

For years I have read the argument that Industrial farms are the most efficient way to produce food. That compared to, say 75 years ago a farm could produce food for 5 people, today's farms produce food to feed 125 per farm. That does sound good but I have noticed that this number may not be as good as it sounds

The farms of yesterday were diversified, smaller and I believe fed far more than 5 people as these farms did support the families living on them. And these families averaged around 8 people, not 5. So right there I wonder where these number are coming from? Are they just arbitrary pulled from someone's butt? (you would be surprised how often that happens-the 3 year transition period before a farm is certified organic is one such arbitrary number and really means nothing as it really takes 7 to 15 years to get soils in organic shape, especially if they were subject to conventional/chemical farm management) or did someone do some real research and find that the farms on pre WWII really did feed only 5 people?

I am pretty convinced that these numbers have been hatched by proponents of the Green Revolution and are based on nothing of substance. I say this because I have been running these numbers in my head and what I come up with is that small diversified farms feed more people per acre than the big "efficient" Industrial farms.

For example, lets say a pre WWII farm (that feeds only 5 people) is 100 acres (which is pretty much the average size of farms at this time). Now the modern mono-cropped farm of 4000 acres (pretty much the average size of a modern farm or the combination of all rented and owned land that a Midwestern farmer will work) feeds 125 people. pretty good right? A lot more people than that paltry 5 of the old fashioned diversified farm.

Ah but lets look at how many people per acre these farms are feeding. if we extrapolate the numbers we see that perhaps the industrial mono-cropped does not produce as much per acre as a small diversified farm. For if a 100 acre farm can produce enough food to feed 5 people 40 of those farms would produce enough to feed 200. I believe 200 is greater than 125 and thus we see that smaller diversified farms can indeed outproduce the big industrial mono-cropped farms

Food Inc

This is a must see film for anyone who eats food in the United States (which is everyone). I have not been able to get to any public screenings of this film but a few days ago i was perusing the Millions Against Monsanto Facebook page and found a link that took me to a site that allows you to watch a fairly low quality copy of the movie for free.

So I took 94 minutes out of my life to watch the movie and I was rather shocked by it. And this surprised me as I have been well aware of what is happening to our food system for the past 15 to 20 years which has lead me to eat a basically local diet of food produced by people I know personally. I figured I would not learn much from this film. I was wrong, I learned several new things about our food system and they were not good things to learn.

And if I got new things from this movie that means that 99% of the people out there will have a truly eye opening experience

Link to movie here "enjoy"

The Day After Thanksgiving

We had a lot of people come to the farm for Thanksgiving. My Cousin Jack Showed up with his niece (and my 2nd cousin probably once removed), her baby and her SO, Jeremy on Wednesday from the greater Detroit metroplex. On Thursday My Brother, Scott arrived (from the exact same place as Jack) and soon after my Niece Carrie and her SO, Ivan and her BFF Katrina showed up from Bloomington, IN. Than my Brother in law Dave arrived with the cranberry sauce and later Doreen and her SO, Thad, showed up with yams and Mac and Cheese. Hours later our friend Wyatt showed up with bread that no one wanted because we were all too stuffed on turkey, taters, mac and cheese, salad and wine. Wyatt left us several loaves and they were quite tasty.



These pictures are of the morning after thanksgiving after everyone but my brother had left. We took a walk around the farm and had a small bon fire in order to burn the last of the blighted tomato plants and a bunch of sisal bailing twine used to support the blighted maters.

Eugene and Scott looking at the pond

Nate running towards me

Still looking at the pond

Milkweed

Golden Rod on the 40' pitch

Frosty Kale. Scott thought this would be a great shot. I think the idea was better than the shot

After Scott left for Detroit we went to Trenton to pick up 6 gallons of raw milk at Double J farm and I took this shot of the dairy cows through the barn. Notice the pasture is very green for the end of November and that has translated into a lot of yellow cream on the milk, something I have never seen in the many years I have used raw milk. Usually this time of year the cream is thin and white, barely any different from the milk. But because November has been warm and sunny the pasture has continued to grow

The Fall Carrot Crop

The past two days have been all about carrots. Monday we spent the day digging 4 beds of carrots, removing the tops, getting off the excess mud and putting them into crates. The weather was cool and cloudy with occasional sunny breaks which were very nice as the sun warmed us up. Otherwise we were cold.

Tuesday afternoon was spent washing the carrots. It was a lot warmer Tuesday than it was Monday and sunny to boot. So the job was not too bad, though getting soaked from the waist down in 50F weather is not exactly my idea of fun. But it was certainly more fun than doing this job in 45F or colder weather.

The mud did not want to come off the roots but with enough water pressure any thing is possible and I ended up with 7 full crates of field washed carrots. Field wash means 99% of the dirt is off of them but they are not 100% clean.

We have a primitive wash station. It consists of a hose and a metal stand to put a crate on. Oh, and I use empty dirty crates to put crates full of dirty carrots on so they are not directly on the ground (keeps things sanitary and also keeps slugs from crawling into the crates and eating holes in the carrots). What I do is first spray down the crates full of dirty carrots to get the dirt on them wet. This is a kin to soaking them. Than I grab a full crate of wet, dirty roots and dump about 1/6th of the contents (maybe 10 pounds) into the cleaning crate (which is any empty crate that is on the metal stand) and spray the carrots off, making sue to roll them around so all surfaces are washed. Than I dump them into a clean crate for storage. Repeat that about 40 times and you have 7 crates of clean carrots ready to be bagged up for sale.

It's a good thing we dug the carrots when we did. They were all harvested because we were under the impression that it was going to get really cold and start snowing. At least that was the forecast 5 days out for this week. As it has turned out it will rain today and it will dip below freezing at night from here on out but it looks like we will not get 12"+ of snow nor will the soils freeze up any time soon (like in the next 10 days). But despite the lack of winter we are finding a lot more damage on the carrots vs the last time we harvested them, about 10 days ago. Up until this final carrot harvest I would say the damaged carrots made up less than 1% (and some weeks there was zero damage). But this batch had around 5% damage, mainly from slugs, though a few carrot tops were chewed off by mice or bunnies. 5% is not bad at all for damage. The summer carrots had around 50% damage from mice and voles and carrot maggots. The summer carrots also were not nearly as big and beautiful nor did they have the wonderful sweet flavor of these fall beauties.

But as I was saying, it is good we got these carrots out when we did because I believe we would have seen a lot more damage from the slugs and mice had we left them in another 5 to 7 days. It was obvious to us that the critters are getting hungry and would have started dining on the carrots in earnest very soon. But now the carrots are safely put away out of the reach of the vermin and ready to be sold to SW Ohio and EC Indiana Locavores and distributed to our farm share members

New Book Listings!

In Honor of Black Friday (which I will not attend, I shall be in the bosom of my family that day, well away from the Malls and shops. Plus it is Buy Nothing Day) I have listed new titles and things for you to peruse and purchase for a Christmas present or for yourself. Look to the right hand side bar for the new titles. Click on any that interest you and you will be swept away to the Amazon website where you can purchase the item(s). Know that Boulder Belt gets a small % of each sale that comes from this blog and that that money supports what we do. So buying from Amazon via this Blog supports a small diversified sustainable farm.

3 of the titles are Eliot Coleman classics on market farming and season extension. If you grow for market or are into hoop houses so you can grow almost year round, if not year round, and do not have these books you need them. They really are a "must have" for your farm and garden library.

Solviva is a book about an interesting experiment that no longer exists. Ana Edy took her house Solviva and made it into a living breathing entity. But her success took her away from Solviva and it eventually died. But the book is about how this worked for many years and is full of ideas for the rest of us.

The Aerogarden I have not used but I have seen them and they are a wonderful idea for people who want to grow year round but do not want to fuss with big old hoop houses, snow loads and other issues one has with winter growing outdoors. And I have a listing for the seed pods too.

The Handbook of Organic Pest Control is one of my favorites. I use this book a lot. Well written and well organized.

The new Farmers market is for anyone who is thinking of starting a farmers market or selling at one. It is really two books in one, as it looks at farmers market from both the management perspective and the vendor perspective. I own this book and my copy has helped to start two farmers markets and has helped Boulder belt with marketing techniques. This is an essential book for everyone involved in farmers markets in any way shape or form

The Moosewood Cookbook. My favorite cookbook ever. The recipes are simple and tasty. I got my copy at least 20 years ago from My sister, Maggie and I still make good use of the book to this day.

Eugene Finds Truffles

Who woulda thought we would find truffles near a shag bark hickory tree in a potato bed. But we did.

We are not 100% they are truffles but from looking through the mushroom book we have and checking several places on line plus looking at a lot of images on google they really can't be anything else.

And they smell. A very strong moldy earthy smell like a cabin in the woods stuffed with woolen items that has been shut up for a long time. Not exactly pleasant. But they may well be interesting to eat. But what if they are the one yet to be discovered poisonous truffle. The evil anti-truffle if you will. if that is the case than we would get very sick or even dead from eating the truffles.

Yeah, Mushrooms can be scary if you are not 100% sure what you have.

So we have a mystery. These could be the rare and valuable Oregon White Truffle or not. Need to do some more research.

Here is what they look like

Not rocks, truffles!

This one is cut open. the inside spores are brown and may be mottled. the fungus itself is less than a cm across. these are not big truffles by any means.

Boulder Belt and the Choice Food Pantry

Many years ago when I was still on the Oxford farmers Market Uptown governing board I made the suggestion that we should figure out a way to get the left over food that farmers have at the end of every market to people who need food, i.e. a food pantry. Everyone on the board thought that was a great idea and voted it in. And we thought from there it would be easy to set up a system to get food from market to the needy.

Not so. It seems that at the time none of the local food pantries around Oxford (there were two at the time-family Resources and the Food Pantry of St Mary's/St Vincent dePaul. These merged in 2007 to form The Choice Pantry) had much, if any, refrigeration and were not open on Saturdays and had no real way to deal with perishable fresh foods. There also was no one to pick up the food and take it where it needed to go.

The first couple of years were hit and miss. It was obvious it was up to the farmers market to get things together such as coolers and humans to get the job done and this happened (we have a really great support system and community with this market). But it was not possible to find people every week to pick up food from the vendors and take it to the food pantry location and I know on at least one occasion the food pantry forgot about the Saturday delivery and the volunteers had no way to deliver the food. And there was also the issue that the needy people who were getting this food were not familiar with much of the produce being donated like arugula, heirloom tomatoes, specialty peppers, eggplant, daikon, fennel, etc., etc.. So they were not using the food and it often went to waste.

But that was 4 or 5 years ago. Than in 2007 the two pantries merged into Choice Pantry, run by St Mary's Catholic Church. They are well run and have refrigeration (because they knew about us farmers when they set this new pantry up and made sure they could utilize us). And they have Miami students hold classes to teach the food needy about cooking, nutrition, etc., so these people can use the food from the farmers market (more utilization). And we have Mike coming by just about every Saturday at noon to gather together food that would other wise be wasted (okay not exactly wasted as we and most other farmers at the market would do something like compost the produce or feed it to livestock-it would not be land filled in most cases) and he takes that food to the pantry for distribution that very day (unlike the past where the fresh food would sit around until Monday before distribution). It has become a very workable system.

So we have been donating a lot of food most weeks. Most weeks the pantry gets about 3 bushels of food. I think there have been only 2 or 3 weeks where we did not have much of anything left to give (and what we had was probably too weird for the food pantry-we do grow and sell a lot of unusual varieties). Over the season we have probably donated more than a ton of food.

It feels good to be able to do good works but it sure ain't easy to get these good works started up. But happily, in Oxford, OH they have it figured out.

The Wisdom Of Growing Berries Workshop

On Wednesday we went to Columbus Ohio to the 4-H building (or the 4-H mother ship) to the Wisdom of Growing Berries workshop. If you remember we had a farm tour back in August. That was stage one of the Wisdom of growing Berries and this meeting in Columbus was the second and final stage. This was all about sharing our knowledge with beginning farmers and farmers getting into berries. I saw quite a few people I know who are definitely not beginning farmers but I guess felt they needed more knowledge.

I was very pleased to see Kristi Fisher there. We met in 2000 when we both sold produce at the Dayton Second Street Market (which neither of us does currently). We see each other it seems about once a year, though I think it has been about 3 years since our last meeting. Any hoo we had a nice chat about chickens when we should have been talking berries-oh well...

Eugene and I went to the event as "Mentors" and sat on the afternoon panel. I gotta say I learned a from both the mentor panel and the new grower panel. Lots of good insights from both groups. I found that once again I felt kind of behind the other Mentor growers as we have not made good use of extension/OSU research. But considering most of the research is for the chemical farming crowd I have avoided it. But I was made aware that there is much there for the organic growers as well. If nothing else, pictures of pests and diseases and links and references to other sites.

But back to what we did. We sat on this panel of 5 mentor farmers and we were asked three questions and each of us had five minutes to answer each question. Most of us went over time, some way over time. But it was all useful information. After the panel discussion was over we broke into small groups. There were 43 participants plus the panel members so around 50 people in all. I know a few people left before the afternoon stuff started taking down the numbers. Unfortunately we only had about 25 minutes to talk in these small groups. There is so much to say and teach and rarely enough time to do it at these events.

But Sharon Sachs, the woman who put on this event for IFO, at the end had a solution to the not enough time to teach problem-she wants to pair up beginning and struggling farmers with experienced farmers in a mentor program. We have had apprentices and interns on the farm but this is a bit different. In this case we would get paid by the mentee to teach them what we know. it is up to them to initiate the contact and tell us exactly what they want to learn and than we go from there. Several farmers in the room had been on both sides of the table and the # 1 thing I got from this is don't trade work for information. Charge money for the information.

In the past we have done this mentoring thing a bit and always were disappointed because we would trade information for work but found that we spent a lot of time training the person to do the work and in the end it slowed us down too much. these people said if you do trade work for education than have that work be something big and something you do not really want to do like clean out a livestock barn-something you might pay someone an hourly wage to do for you. But do not include any chores that you are teaching. As one guy said he did not want any students pruning his blueberries but he is more than willing to travel to their farm to show them how to prune on their berry plants. In other words he does not want these people working on his farm and making their mistakes on his farm. Good policy.

I have no idea if we will be come mentors to anyone from this event. We are willing but have yet to be contacted

Planting the 2009 Garlic Crop

Planting garlic on a beautiful Indian Summer evening

We started planting garlic this past Tuesday. We are planning on doing 8 50' x 4' beds this year and growing 5 different types, Music, Purple Glazer, Shvilisi (Chesnok Red), Persian Star and German White-all hardneck garlics. The Persian Star, Shvilisi and German white we have grown for years. Last year I traded some rare tomato seeds for the Music and Purple Glazer and we planted the 3 corms of each last fall and got 41 corms of the Glazer and 31 of the Music which translated into 1.3 beds of the Purple Glazer and .6 beds of the Music. We also planted two beds of the Persian Star.

It took an amazingly short amount of time to get the garlic positioned and in the ground. Around 45 minutes a bed with 2 people laying out and planting 450 cloves per bed. Granted, the beds were ready to go. The tilling, raking and applying compost and other amendments would have added another 45 minutes to an hour of time. Though we did put down Sul-Po-Mag right before planting and that took maybe 2 minutes per bed.

Sul-Po-Mag

At any rate, between 4pm and dusk we planted over 1500 cloves of garlic. Our best time to date. We still have another 1300 to put in whenever it decides to not rain and we get a good day for planting root crops.

Eugene using a rake to mark out rows in the bed

Garlic needs to be planted in the fall. Usually we plant between Halloween and Thanksgiving but this year we had our first freezes in Mid October and the Sella Natura Biodynamic planting calender we use indicated that Tuesday afternoon and evening was a terrific time to plant root crops. So Eugene spent the day harvesting potatoes and doing the final prep on the garlic beds while I got the farm share stuff together. Than around 4pm I went up to see where the garlic planting was headed. Saw Eugene was just beginning to poke the first garlics into the ground and so I grabbed a trowel and started doing the same.

Laying out the garlic. This bed is finished and ready for planting.

While we were planting our garlic crop our neighbors were taking out their soy bean crop. The difference between how we farm and how they farm was striking. We were doing a human scale farming project. Our tools were a couple of buckets, some Sul-po-mag and garlic. They were doing and industrial machine scale farming project. Their tools were a combine with a bean head, a tractor with a gravity wagon and a semi tractor trailer. They were covering lots of acres (I believe the field next to us is 25 acres) while we were covering a small space, maybe 800 square feet at most. And yet we will likely net more money from our small space in garlic than they will on that 25 acres. And we do this having used a small fraction of the energy used in the industrial machine scale farm project.

Took a break after one bed and found that we had been doing this job for under 30 minutes and at that pace we could likely get another 5 or 6 beds done before dark. Drank a beer and sat around for 20 minutes breaking up German White corms into individual cloves because we felt we could plant another 6 beds before dark in 1.5 hours. After a few minutes we realized we really had time to do only 3 more beds as we realized that we had not accounted for laying out the garlic. That that task can sometimes take almost as long as poking the cloves in the ground. Plus we did not have enough garlic prepared for planting to do 6 beds.

Planting the Music at dusk. This was the last bed of the day.

So we headed back up to the garden and finished up the Persian star and than did the Purple Glazer and Music. Plus we finalized where the 3 beds of German white and the bed of Shvlisi will go.

All in all very good work.

Frost Warning

Prefrost peppers and eggplant

Got back from the farmers market Saturday afternoon with every intention of relaxing for the rest of the day (farmers markets really take it out of you) but than realized that the weather prophets had issued a frost warning for Sunday morning. That meant we had to do something about what was left of the summer garden. The tomatoes and eggplant are pretty much over except the late tomatoes that in theory are in a hoop house but in fact are not (they have a hoop house frame over them but no plastic on the frame as Eugene did not want to dig in the plastic knowing that he would in all likelihood move the house to another crop such as broccoli or kale) but we had a lot of peppers.

The (probably) last pepper harvest. That's around 400 pounds of bell peppers

I have been picking the peppers green with just a bit of color all summer. I have discovered that peppers, like tomatoes, will ripen up off the plant just fine. And by harvesting them early, the peppers do not get hit badly by bugs or disease. Instead of losing 50% to 80% of the peppers when left on the plant to ripen I now lose under 25%.

So it is now around 3pm. We have eaten lunch, unloaded the van and put away everything from market and most weeks we would be preparing for a nice afternoon nap. But as i mentioned, the weather service was predicting frost Sunday morning. So we had to forgo the nap and go back to work. We started with the peppers. we took out 6 crates and piled them high with mainly green peppers. That took about an hour with both of us working.

Next we were on to the green beans and haricot verts. They needed to be harvested than covered with row cover. We got under 5 pounds of beans from both beds.

Next the spring mix and beets beds needed to be covered. That took very little time as the covers were already there. They just needed to be pulled over the hoops and secured with rocks. But we realized the broccoli also needed a cover. Granted, all these crops can take cold conditions but they do so much better if they have protection. So Eugene found a cover for the broccoli and put it over top of them.

Freshly harvested ginger

While he did that I harvested the ginger. Yes we decided to try to grow ginger in SW Ohio. And it worked decently. But ginger does not like temps below 50F (the poor plants had to deal with a lot of nights in the mid 40's). I figured 33F would kill them so I decided to dig them up and bring them inside. Now we have a lot of ginger plants that need more time in the ground to make more ginger. And we have about 4 ounces of finished ginger. While I like the idea of local ginger I think it makes a lot more sense to buy the imported stuff if you use a lot of ginger. Because ginger requires a 10 to 12 month growing season and needs to temps to be above 50F (I suspect 85F is where is it happiest) it makes no sense to grow this on any kind of commercial scale here in Ohio. I believe the carbon foot print of doing so would far out weight the carbon foot print of importing it since a lot of heat would be required in winter and that heat would have to be more than passive solar. That said it is great house plant. It is beautiful, smells good and if you can keep the plant alive (which is pretty easy) for more than a year you can harvest your own ginger and divide the rest of the roots to make more ginger plants.

So at dusk we had the garden ready for frost. We were exhausted and went in the house to eat and eventually go to sleep-nothing like a 12 hour day of hard physical work to make you feel tip top. The next morning I get up and find that the low temp is no where near freezing, it is 37F.

Now we are ready for cold weather in the market garden. Bring it on Nature, bring it on.

Peanut Harvest

Eugene decided this was the year to plant and grow peanuts so he bought 2 pounds of seed (raw) peanuts and planted 1.5 rows of them in the bottom area back in late May. Yesterday we dug them up along with a lot of big grubs (which will become fish bait) and brought them up to the barn to cure for the next 3 to 6 weeks. It was interesting harvesting the plants. Many were still flowering and developing more pegs that will eventually become peanuts. many plants had scant few peanuts at all and others were loaded. We found that grubs like peanuts, perhaps more than potatoes as we found a lot of grub eaten peanuts along side potatoes that had older grub damage but very little new damage.

Peanuts are easy to harvest. All they need is a spud fork to gently lift them than a gentle shake to get the soil off and they are pretty much ready to by cured.

Big pile o' peanuts

A close up of the pegs (peanuts)

The peanuts are not big like they would be if they were grown further south but if we can get them to cure without molding they should be really good boiled or roasted.

Right now they are sitting in a big pile on an old screen door in the barn. The plan is to gather them up into groups of 3 to 5 , tie the plants together and hang them up somewhere in the barn to continue curing. Kind of like what we do with garlic. It would be easier to lay them out on other screens but at the moment we have onions finishing up their curing (most are done) and lots of potatoes curing where we have removed and cleaned up the onions. So those screen are occupied for the next 3 to 6 weeks.