Winter Kale

As long time readers know we do season extension and one of our annual goals is to harvest all 12 months of the year.I don't know if this will be possible in the winter of 2011 but at this point in the season it is looking good. I present to you rainbow kale

Here we have a bed of kale that took two of us about 1/2 hour to clear the snow and ice from so we could take the row cover off of the bed

Freshly harvested winter kale for our CSA members

Here we have a row cover that is too narrow. This is because when we took it off the snow had collapsed the hoops that were supposed to be holding the covers off the ground and kale. But several inches of snow and ice flattened the hoops so when we got the covers off we reset the hoops and added more and found that the covers had frozen in such a way that they were too narrow to cover the hoops/bed. So we fiddled with the covers for a half hour and got most of the edges loose so that the covers would cover the area. One of the many differences between winter growing and farming the rest of the year

The Poor Man's Fertilizer

Like most of the USA we have been inundated by snow. I believe we have had around 21" fall this month and we still have a couple of weeks and at least one more snow storm to get through.

A hoop house covered in snow

So far we have not lost any hoop houses but it is not easy to get into any of them. The one you can walk to fairly easily has its' entrance covered with a 4' deep drift that extends about 10' out from the house. the other houses have no drifts in front of them but you have to slog through about 1/4 mile of beautiful powder in drifts up to 3.5' deep (and an average depth of 2'). So no one has been in them since I harvested greens for a customer and Eugene hoed beds the 4th of February. I suspect things are growing in the houses as the days are certainly longer and we have had several sunny days which means the hoop houses got above freezing (likely well above freezing).

Deep snow means you can't do a whole lot around the farm. We have started kale and lettuce seeds to go along with the onion, leek and shallot seedlings but other than putting the kale and lettuce germinants into 2" soil blocks as they germinate and watering everyone about every other day (over watering kills more innocent baby plants than anything else) takes maybe 4 hours a week. Fruit trees and brambles need to be pruned but at the moment that is an impossible task. We have to wait until the snow quits accumulating and starts melting.

The packing shed in winter

The snow melt is likely gonna be problematic. We have over 10" on the ground and there are a lot of piles and drifts that are much deeper all over SW Ohio. If we are lucky we will get warmish dry conditions and the snow will slowly and safely sublimate away. But what is much more likely to happen is rain which will clear away the snow in a matter of hours instead of a matter of weeks but this will also cause flooding. I am rooting for the quick fix and possible floods, otherwise we will not be able to prune, work the ground or transplant early crops until well into March and than we will be facing an overwhelming task of getting a lot done in a very short amount of time without a lot of help.

Betty in her element

The good news about the snow is Betty LOVES it. To her snow is the best thing since sliced bread. Little does she know that soon it will all be gone. of course when it goes away her bones and other toys will reappear and vole hunting will likely be easier. And there is likely to be a very healthy vole (and other small rodent) population this spring as deep snow is the perfect thing for small prey animals. iIt hides them from predators and it keeps them insulated from extreme cold and wind.

Chicken tractors just about covered by drifts. It's a good thing we don't have any right now, they would be miserable

The other good thing about the deep snow is it is keeping all our over wintered crops like the garlic and asparagus nice and cold. one problem with bare soil in winter is when if freezes and thaws you get frost heave which will heave bulbs and plants all the way out of the soil where they will die. A nice layer of snow stops this sort of thing from happening. Plus the snow will leave behind things like phosphates in the soil which are always welcome. Old time farmers call snow the poor man's fertilizer

Winter Farm Fun

I had a spring mix order to fill for tomorrow so that meant going up to the salad house and seeing what there was to cut. So Eugene and I went up to see what's what and among other things, found buried in the area that is supposed to have onion seedlings a deer leg. Nice.


So he moved the leg out of the garden and we proceeded on to the salad house, went inside and found it nice and warm-a good 10 degrees warmer than outside. Nice conditions for the arugula, lettuces, mizuna, mustard and weeds growing in there.

We keep row covers on everything to keep the risk of frost damage down and so far this winter it has worked well. Though, in past winters, even with row cover and gallon milk jugs acting as heat sinks, we have had major damage to the crops. But not this year and it has been real nice to be able to eat fresh greens in deep winter. But using row covers means we have to remove them to work the beds

and That is exactly what Eugene is doing here, removing the cover over the arugula and mustard bed. And you can see the beds beyond him and next to him have no covers over them because I took those off so I could cut greens.


While I cut Eugene hoed. Even in winter we have to do some weeding. But the weeds and crops grow slowly so it is relatively easy to keep up with them. This arugula/mustard bed was not too bad and the soil was dry enough to work


But this lettuce bed to the south of the arugula/mustard bed was quite wet and hard to hoe. But it has to be done before these weeds all flower and go to seed


and you can see already some of the winter hardy weeds are beginning to flower. That is because in the hoop houses it is already late Feb/early March.

So for about 30 minutes we hoed weeds and cut salad. I harvested a pound of spring mix in that time. In warmer months I would have easily harvested 15 pounds in a half hour of cutting and within 10 days the cut beds would have grown back. This time of year it takes about 8 weeks for the greens to grow back. though this will change in a matter of days, by mid month the crops in the hoop houses will have broken dormancy and will start growing again.


About the time we were all done with work in the hoop house and were debating whether or not we should call it quits or not (there was a little bit of hoeing that could have been done) betty makes the decision for us by appearing outside the hoop house-we heard a noise and the next thing we see black paws on the side of the house. Betty had escaped from the fenced back yard. how? We do not know.


So we leave the hoop house taking our harvest and tools with us and see what Betty is up to.


Betty is hunting mice because she remembered that yesterday she caught her first vole right out side this hoop house and she hoped to get more (and she will in the fullness of time). So We let her poke around the perimeter of the hoop house for a bit than eventually went back to the hiuse. okay Betty and Eugene went to the house and I went to the store to bagged the Spring Mix for tomorrow's order.

Seed Buying

One of the big events in winter for us farmers is the seed order. Since we garden on acres this is a far larger undertaking than when we did home gardens. Ordering has happens much earlier for us growing commercially than for home gardeners. In fact we get our commercial catalogs about 3 weeks earlier than the home gardener catalogs (we know this because several of the companies we use have both). So in mid December we get our first catalogs-Johnny's and Fedco Followed by Seed Savers Exchange. A those are the 3 main companies we use for our seed supply.

There are a whole lot of companies we will not use due to the fact they source most of their seeds from companies owned by Monsanto (Peto and Semenis seeds). Jung's is one of them. Okay, another big reason we will never ever buy from Jung's Seeds ever again is they have sent us a lot of horrible plants and seeds. The rhubarb we got from there all died within 12 months, 95% died within 3 months. Than there were the trees they sent us last year that should have come in March or early April but cam in mid June and all but 1 were dead. We also do not like the policy of no refunds, store credit only. And they have bought up a lot of smaller companies (that people think are still independents) such as Totally Tomato
Vermont Bean Seed Co., Burpee, Cook's Garden, Earl May Seeds, Gardens Alive (not really a seed place they are more into fertilizers, pest control, etc.. and used to be a really good place to buy organic inputs), Lindenberg Seeds, Mountain Valley Seeds, Park Seeds, T&T Seeds, Tomato Grower's Supply, Willhite Seed Co., Nichol's, Rupp, Osborne, Snow, Stokes, R.H. Shumway, The Vermont Bean Seed Co., Seeds For The World, Seymour's Selected Seeds, HPS, Roots and Rhizomes, McClure and Zimmerman Quality Bulb Brokers, Spring Hill Nurseries, Breck's Bulbs,
Audubon Workshop, Flowers of the Month Club, Wayside Gardens, Park Bulb's and Park's Countryside Garde.

I also have quit buying seed from Baker Creek because they have send too many wrong or poorly bred seed. This is a shame because I really like Baker Creek. they are independently owned, they do not sell any GMO seed nor source with companies that do. All things that are important to me. but the seed quality for the most part sucks and in my market garden I have to have good to great seed quality and the seed should match up with what it says on the packet. I would say with Baker Creek, 3 out of 5 times there have been mistakes on their part.

Now savvier readers will note I order from Johnny's Selected Seeds and that Johnny's does indeed source some seeds from Semenis/Peto Seeds (though I hear rumors saying they have stopped or will stop buying from these corporations). The reason I make this exception for Johnny's is because I have been a happy customer for over 15 years, the seeds are top flight. There are very few mistakes made and when they happen they always make good, often within hours. they are an employee owned independent seed house with inhouse seed breeding program that is second to none. They are an official AAS trial site because of their location and great breeding program and they have one of the best seed catalogs in the world. And they have signed the Safe Seed Pledge (This link has a list of all the seed houses that have signed this pledge in 2009).

Around Christmas time we get the first catalogs (Johnny's first than Fedco a week later and finally SSE) and we start looking through them and also looking at the list of seed needs I complied last year as we used up the seeds (this is something that I had not done before 2009-or if I did I lost the list before seed ordering time. This saved a lot of time and made the order far more accurate than in the past). this year Eugene did the order and I was the one who got to put the orders on the order blanks, check to make sure we got everything (we never do and this year has been no exception. IIRC we still need a few tomato types) and than the order is calculated, checks are written and than everything is put into the correct envelopes, stamped and sent out.

This year Johnny's got $193, Fedco $207 and SSE $17.50. I know we still have to order strawberry plants which will be another $75 or so. And there will likely be other orders for seeds due to various reasons. And believe it or not this is a relatively small seed order for us. Many years we spend over $600 on seed alone (and several thousand on other inputs and equipment).

After the orders are dropped into the mail box at the Post Office we go home and sit around and await the incoming orders.

As per usual, Johnny's was the first to send us our order. About a 10 days ago the UPS guy delivered a box full of seeds and we were happy. We took the box inside and went through the seeds and found 3 kinds on back order. But within 3 days those seeds had also arrived at the post office. After the Johnny's order came the Seed Saver's order of heirloom tomatoes arrived. And yesterday we picked up the Fedco order at the post office. Or at least the majority, as many things are on back order and one thing was out of stock Even'star American Rapa which seems to be something for spring mixes so not a big deal that there is none. Besides I contacted Fedco and asked if they could send Hamburg Parsley instead of a refund and they said certainly (because they are flexible like that). one thing i am very happy about is the fact our onion seed arrived yesterday. You see CR Lawn, Fedco's founder always includes a newsletter with the order and he wrote that 6 varieties of onions have been on back order but during his writing 3 types arrived at their wearhouse and thus Fedco was able to fill some of their onion orders, including ours. This is important because onions (and leeks and shallots) really need to be started by Feb 1st for best results. It really sucks to see the term "Back Order" next to the seeds you need early as possible (and it is even worse when there is a note stating those seeds will not be available for 2 to 3 months and you already know there are none to be had anywhere because you already checked out 15 different companies for the variety-this happened to about 10 years ago mainly because we were not ordering our seed early enough, so we got smart and got into the habit of ordering early in the year).

Now that we have our seeds let the planting begin! And it will today with onions, leeks and shallots (and maybe kale and lettuces too).

Winter Garden Video

A short movie of the Market garden January 8th 2010 going from west to north to east. The first thing you see is the rhubarb patch than dormant raspberries. Next is the salad Hoop House than many beds covered in snow. Than brown asparagus fronds and behind that a hoop house that has leeks in it. More beds than the hoop house with spinach than more snow covered fallowed beds, the highway, the back of the store off in the distance and we are done

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.

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.

Summer Summary

Fall is here which means the summer of 2009 is officially history. It was a really good summer growing and marketing season for us. the weather was cool and for the most part dry. but when we did get rain it was generally a lot and at just the right time. Still we are down over 4" on rain for the year but perhaps this fall will be wetter than normal and we will make it up.

We grew the best melons ever (and Eugene is an excellent melon grower). Maybe 2% of them were not absolutely excellent. we had several customers (and these are people who's opinions about such things I respect) tell us that our water melons were the best they have ever eaten.

The alliums out did themselves again this year, meaning they are better this year than last and last year they were incredible. Sublime garlic, gigantic leeks (and so far, all we have harvested are the small fall leeks, the winter leeks which should be 2x to 3x larger won't be ready for another month or so), beautiful onions and wonderful scallions.

The tomatoes, despite the plants succumbing to some sort of local blight (not late blight but rather something we contend with every year) fairly early, still produced a lot of huge fruits. Or at least most of them did. We did have some failures such as Black Krim which gave us few very cat faced fruits. I believe we got about 4 usable maters from 15 plants. I do not believe we will grow these again. The Paul Robeson did not do well for us but when the plants did produce typical fruit it produced some gorgeous tomatoes. I saved seed early on and this will get a second chance. The Green Zebra was something else-I believe a small red saladette type mater, something we have far too many of already. Baker Creek messed up on that and as this was about the 7th time they have messed up with us, we will not be ordering from them in 2010. I do like their philosophy but they will have to do far better with selling us correct seed, good seed and getting orders to us in a timely fashion. There are several other seed houses that do heirlooms that give us better service such as Seed Savers Exchange.

Ah enough ranting, back to maters. The great White tomato, while a bad seller, was a great producer of beautiful ivory white fruits with a good acid bite. they came on early and produced longer than just about anything else except early girls which, while early and prolific were a bit of a disappointment this year. The early girls were not as big as last year and found the flavor lacking. fortunately we had GL-18 (AKA Glick's Pride) as our mainstay red mater and they far exceeded our expectations. they were far bigger than they have been before. The shape was about perfect and they rarely cracked and had zero cat facing. It would have been nice if they could have held on a week or two longer but they got us through most of September and we had big red maters when no one else did at the farmers market, cha-ching!. The other reds we grew-the canners did really well for us but I don't think as well as last year (or was it two years ago?). We grew Amish paste and Opalka again. The Amish paste out produced the Opalka about 4:1. We grew enough of these to make and can ourselves plenty of tomato sauce, ratatouille and salsa plus we sold about 300 pounds to others so they could put up tomatoes.

The cherry tomatoes were only so so (which is actually a good thing since when they do really well that means someone has to spend several hours daily picking them and than we have to figure out what to do with the excess). We have decided never to grow green grape again since it does not sell. This means it will produce hundreds of volunteers all over the farm in the future. It is hard to get people to try the green maters. Though it seems when I can get someone to try a green grape they get hooked quickly. they are a very nice mater but for most it is hard to get past the color. The yellow pear barely produced and a lot of them were green again this year. I think it is time to get new seed. the Sun sugar did well for about 3 weeks than quit producing much and the plants now look like hell. This is good as everyone at the farmers market(s) grew this kind this year so the market was flooded and sales were way down. I think next year we will cut back a lot on the cherry tomatoes. We do not need all that many for the farm share-maybe 20 to 30 plants and it seems they have become passe at market. that will free up beds for something else next year.

Unlike last year, we have a lot of ripe peppers. Last year the peppers were very late and we got a killing frost before they got ripe. It did not help that on Sept 14th 2008 we had hurricane force winds for about 6 hours that knocked down all the pepper plants. This year things are completely different. We have a lot of huge bell peppers and they are getting ripe well before it gets cold. I have also learned to take them off the plants when they show color and they ripen up just fine indoors away from pests and diseases that tend to ruin about 50% of the ripe peppers (which is why red, yellow and orange (ripe) peppers cost twice as much as green peppers).

the raspberries out did themselves again this season. The Lathams, our early summer raspberry, was spectacular again. Heavy production and excellent quality. My only complaint was we did a piss poor job of pruning in the early spring which made parts of the raspberry patch almost impossible to harvest. Next year I am cutting back a lot more than Eugene will deem necessary (he has a problem with thinning out plants and wants to leave a lot more than should be left). The Heritage raspberries, which we mow down in early spring, had quite good production and the flavor has been sublime, far better than the Lathams (which, as I said were excellent). Eugene has this crazy notion that we should let the heritage grow and produce in spring. I have this crazy idea that he can do all the harvesting as well as tilling, seeding, transplanting and other spring chores if this happens. You see we do not need a second kind of spring raspberry when the Lathams are pumping out over 30 gallons of fruit. As it is we do not sell all the Lathams produce (we come close but in order to get rid of them we have to sell in bulk and drop the price 33%). We do sell pretty much 100% of the Late summer berries and if we allow the Heritage to have 2 crops we will lessen the fall yield by about 60% and not have enough for the FSI, store and farmers market in August and September. In other words, Eugene's idea of more spring/summer berries is a bad one on many levels.

The strawberries have not been the best. I don't think we have them in the best place and they need to be replaced this fall with new day neutral berries. the yields have been down and disease problems up. We did get a very nice crop of April may berries because we put a hoop house over them. Granted, the hoop house got nailed twice in the winter-once by heavy wet snow and than a month later by high winds. But neither incident seemed to have any effect on the berry production. it is ironic that the first year the berries have been less than great we do a farm tour and in November a workshop on sustainable berry production. I will say the farm tour attendees did not seem to care what kind of shape the berries were in. Next season we should have a new crop of berries in a new and better spot and hopefully we will be swimming strawberries all spring summer and fall next year.

The greens have been around all season. In spring we had lots of lettuce, spring mix, arugula, kale and various Asian greens. Summer we lost the lettuce-we did try to grow some several times because it was cool most of the summer but every time we started lettuce we would get 5 to 8 days of heat and humidity, always a week or two after germination and that would cause the baby lettuce to get bitter and bolt to seed. now that it is autumn we have several beds of nice lettuce growing as well as volunteers coming up around the market garden. the same thing happened with spring mix. After late June it got impossible to grow it though we did try. We did get several harvests of arugula for our efforts through the summer but nothing else from the spring mix beds. Kale and chard were the summer mainstay greens, they always are.

Broccoli did badly for us but we did get some decent cabbages. I dunno why we have such problems with broccoli, perhaps we should quit growing it. Spring radishes were hit and miss and the early red meat radishes were a complete failure. But we do have a 1/2 bed of them now that are very nice. We got really nice early rutabagas as well as red turnips. the fall red turnips are ready to harvest and store for winter, though it will be early next week before that will happen.

Finally, the Farm Share Initiative has been a great thing for us. It allowed us drop a farmers market and make more money while being allowed to stay home and get more work done. Definitely a win, win for us and the fact very few people seemed to notice there is no longer a Tuesday evening market in Oxford (maybe 10 people have asked about this this summer) tells me that we would have made less money this year than last at that market. So it is good that we are doing the FSI.

I think I will change a few things on how the FSI is run next season. This season I allowed members to sign up for the entire season but pay monthly. That will stop as it is not fair to the members that ponied up the cash for the entire season upfront. And the members who did this have all dropped out for the last month, not good. They also got a few extra weeks as I was treating them like the paid in full members as I expected them to go through the entire season. I think the monthly farm tour/pot luck will go as well since we only were able to hold two this year mostly because of a lack of interest on the part of most of the members. I think a once a year farm tour/pot luck will suffice. I am having a hard time getting it through to the members that farm visits are a very important aspect of the farm share/CSA experience. This is how one connects to their farm and without farm visits one might as well buy their food from the farmers market. I also think it is time to drop the month to month deal. This has the potential of getting very confusing which will lead to mistakes -especially when the FSI grows to more than 30 members. It will be replaced by what I used call "Share Cycles" where I break the season down into 2 or 3 month increments for those who cannot do an entire season for whatever reason.

Well, that's the summery of our summer

Early September

Some farm photos for your enjoyment. These were taken throughout the day Friday Sept 4th

Tomato plants

Some of the winter squash harvest. Cushaws, delicata, butternut, acorn and sunshine.

Ugly radishes. sweet and hot.

Rainbow carrots

Sunflower

Sunflower being pollinated by a native bee

More sunflowers

Beetles on a sunflower

Purple peppers

Planting Celeriac

Celeriac on the cart ready to be planted

Eugene laying out the celeriac plugs

Eugene (and Nate) inspecting his work, making sure all the plugs are lined up correctly so the are evenly spaced and have enough room between rows for a hoe.

Lucy finishing up planting the celeriac plugs

First Farm Share is in the Bag

The food for 6 shares right before being divided up and put into bags. From left to right (1st row) we have chives, dried basil, garlic, scallions (2nd row) cilantro, leeks, apples (back) Spinach, parsnips & lettuce

Today is the opening of the Boulder Belt Eco Farm Farm Share Program. I am excited to get this program underway. The first week will likely be the week with the least amount of food and we still were able to get 10 items into each share. This week our members get Lettuce, spinach, parsnips, scallions, chives, cilantro, dried basil (cinnamon or Genovese), leeks, garlic and the last of the apples. Plus members get a newsletter with a recipe.

The past week or so the weather has been very nice-alternating sun with rain, warmish, a few tornado warnings (really, on Sunday evening 2 Tornado warnings went up for Preble County. one right after the other. Both Came right over top of the farm and property much ran out of steam than tried to reformed north east of us. We figure our Karma with nature-what with us farming sustainably and our reverence for all the critters on the farm (we protect even the wasps, snakes and spiders because they are excellent hunters for us)-kept the storms light and undamaging), general spring weather. But yesterday and today we have had cold, windy, snowy days. Not the best conditions to harvest but we were out in the snow getting scallions, chives and cilantro today because it had to be done. Harvesting for Thursday's group will be much more pleasent as it is supposed to be sunny and in the mid to upper 50's (about perfect weather, if you ask me).

In the coming weeks our members will see things like D'avignon radishes, snow peas, strawberries, arugula, spring mix and more in their spring shares

Better straw

Went out later in the day to finish the mulching and was pleasantly surprised to find all the other bales of straw that I used (one I did not use as it has the same green color of the thistle infested bale, and I did not need it) absolutely free of thistle. So I got the 11 asparagus beds I did not get in the morning all mulched and in some cases pulled out a lot of dandelion and clover. In another 3 to 4 weeks we out to start seeing spear.

I am relieved that most of the straw is clean and we will not be forced into buying not certified organic straw nor will have to use chemical herbicides to combat the weeds being brought in by seedy straw

It took me about 2 hours to weed and mulch 11 beds. It took me about an hour to mulch the first bed with thistle straw because I had to go over and over the mulch in the bed to get as much thistle as possible

Thistle in the Straw

Well color me pissed off. We went over to a nearby organic farm to buy 20 bales of straw yesterday morning and got a good price at $3 a bale (most of the conventionally raised straw around here goes for $5 a bale). Took the straw back home and unloaded it in the market garden so we could start mulching the perennial beds this morning.

I got a fairly early start and broke apart a bale and started putting it down on an asparagus bed. Immediately I noticed thistle down and entire heads of thistle seed. Not good. I shook out a second flake of straw and found more thistle, lots more. Again, not good. Now I had a big handful of the stuff so I ran to the store and got a bag and put the handful of seed into the bag and continued to distribute straw over the bed and grabbing as much thistle down as I could.

Soon the winds went from fairly calm to about 15mph-nice stiff breeze, great for sailing or kite flying but not good for grabbing thistle down. After getting close to 1/2 bale on about 2/3 of the bed I gave up because I noticed thousands of tiny seeds flying to the north west. So now I have distributed lots of thistle seed to the NW section of the garden and I have a bag with about 1/4 pound of thistle seed which I figure could nicely seed a couple of acres. I still have another 19 bales of straw to deal with and because I have to seek and remove as much thistle as I can it is taking about 5x longer to do this job. But if I don't attempt to remove the seed than we will have a much worse problem of asparagus beds rife with thistle and many many hours wasted trying to control it.

In the perennial beds we cannot do a lot of hoeing (much less trying to dig up the roots) and a healthy crop of thistle could out compete the asparagus at worst, and at best make harvesting miserable.

Now I am wondering if we should continue to buy certified organic straw if there is going to be this problem (this has happened before). I mean it kind of defeats the whole purpose of getting organic inputs if they cause bad weed infestations and the possibility of having to use an herbicide to keep the problem in check.

For now I am planning on using this infested straw and will have to make a plan of attack for the thistle that will be coming up in the beds. I have found you can get rid of the thistle if you cut it down just as it goes into flower but that will not happen until next summer (2010) and so we still have to deal with this years thorny growth.

Like I said I am pissed off and mighty frustrated

Pictures from the Equinox

A redwinged Blackbird sitting in an apple tree

A pair of Canada geese that flew onto the pond for a morning swim


Onions and leek seedlings in a cold frame

Eugene in the wood pile that is in the process of being shredded so it can be used as mulch


The perennial herb patch. The green things are chives

Freshly harvested heirloom lettuce from one of the hoop houses

Farm Tours

Eugene and a group of students from IU east

We have now given three private farm tours this month after not having had a farm tour out here in well over a year. Seems what we do has become interesting to the public so we are getting more and more requests for private farm tours. For years we have done these tours free of charge even though they are a bit of work and we have freely given out knowledge that we had to work a lot of years to amass. No more, we now charge $25 a head for a 2+ hour private tour where we show and explain to folks how we farm and allow them to ask as many questions as they want. For years we have felt a bit strange about charging for this service and as long as we did not have to do this more than a couple of times a year it seemed no biggie to give away what we know for free. But after getting many requests already for winter farm tours (and I am suspecting as the weather gets warmer, the farm greener and us much much busier we will have many many more requests for private tours) we realized it is insane to give away this valuable knowledge (not to mention the time involved), that we have worked very hard to obtain, when we should be making income from it. If a PhD makes income from teaching, so should we (after all, the learning curve for this occupation is that of getting a doctorate, only without having to defend a dissertation or dealing with university politics). And thus Boulder Belt has entered the realm of Agro-Tourism (I think this really should be considered Agro-Education but I guess tourism is often educational)

The IU East Students in the strawberry hoop house (which regular readers will note is back up after the big snow) Eugene is explaining to them how we grow spring mix over winter

This particular farm tour was for 4 students from IU East in Richmond, IN. They needed to visit a sustainable business for an anthropology class about food and they choose us. They came out in the early afternoon and we walked around the market garden in a cold biting NE wind and talked about what we do. Eventually we took the tour group into the strawberry hoop house where there was no wind and it was rather pleasant and talked about season extension and how that effects our bottom line. We than toured the store where we talked about the business side of things as well as small vs industrial agriculture and what the future holds for us. We finished up in the barn where we start our seedlings and showed them that part of the operation. It was a good tour and I believe the students got quite a bit out of it.

Correct me if I am wrong guys

It's Pruning Time

Things are heating up here at the farm. The snow is gone and, at least today, the weather is warm and that means we are getting busy pruning trees and raspberries. Pruning is amazingly important, without proper pruning trees and brambles cannot produce as well as they do when pruned. Pruning gets rid of dead and diseased material as well as branches that cross each other and opens up the plants to sunlight and air. After we are done pruning than we will spray dormant oil on everything to kill scale, aphids, mealybugs and other pests. Than lime sulfur is sprayed on the trees to control various fungi. After that we quit spraying and wait for the trees to flower and the bees to come and pollinate the flowers. Than we hang sticky traps which we make from orange plastic sleeves our in which daily newspaper is delivered covered with this waterproof sticky stuff called Tangle Foot. These sticky traps catch coddling moths, curculios and other fruit pests (we also use them for keeping arugula and eggplant free of flea beetles). they also will catch beneficial insects such as bees which is why we wait until after the flowers are gone to hang them. We even will bag some of the fruit (Martha Stewart had a segment on bagging fruit). It is the most effective organic way to keep everything off of the apples but it is also amazingly labor intensive so we never do more than about 5%. We simply do not have the time to bag several thousand pommes and pears and plant 3 acres in produce in the spring. And since apples are not our main crop, by any means, we get a bit slack with the bagging.

Eugene does most of the tree pruning. I have a fear of heights so will not climb way up into the trees (and we have 2 old apples that are 30'+ tall) and because i am not a man and do not have the upper body strength of one I cannot use the saw and cutters on the long extension for more than 10 minutes at a time. Nor can I control the extension well so it takes me several minutes to make a single cut. in that same time Eugene will make about 10 cuts.

So I get bramble duty. I started in on the red raspberries today and got about 30% done before my hand got too sore and stiff to use the pruners. I have applied arnica and heat and by Friday I should be able to continue my task. I would continue tomorrow except we have a big vet appointment in the morning that should take a few hours (3 dogs and a cat all going to the vet) and it is supposed to rain all day on top of that. I think I will need the time to heal my hand.

We grow two kinds of red raspberries, Latham, a summer bearing plant and Heritage, an everbearing type that we make into a fall bearing crop by cutting down all the canes in late winter. The Latham are a bit more complex to prune but by no means rocket science. What I am doing with the Latham berries is first going in and taking out all the dead canes and any live canes that have crept too far out of their bed. If I leave these in they will by summer grow into the aisle way making raspberry harvest difficult as well as making it difficult to deal with the crop in the beds immediately to the east of the raspberries (4 of them). I cut the canes as close to flush with the ground as I can with a pair of anvil pruners (I do not like the offset kind as much). After I get the dead stuff out, I look at the canes and remove any that are not straight and any that are crossing other canes. The goal is to leave 5 to 7 canes per foot. The cut canes are removed from the area and either will be composted or burned. We are leaning towards burning now that we have found mealy bugs and some sort of white scale on some of the canes.

Once the raspberry canes have been cleaned out we will go back and take out any small, misshapened or crossing canes we missed before and also cut about 10% off of the top of the canes (between 4" and 7" depending on the size of the cane) as this allows the plants to make larger fruit. After that they will be sprayed with dormant oil and mulched with cedar chips (these are acidic and raspberries like an acid soil) and either straw (expensive) or grass clippings (free). than we wait for the canes to leaf out, bloom and than make berries. Last year we had an incredible bumper crop and were when the season was over for the Latham we had harvested over 26 gallons, one 1/2 pint at a time. I really doubt we will have such a great crop this year, but you never know.

So for the next couple of weeks we will be pruning trees and brambles. Than it will be about time to start transplanting onions and leeks which is pretty much like planting several thousand blades of grass one blade at a time. It's a pretty Zen job if you have your head in the right place.

Winter Farm Tour with Cub Scout troop 511

Yesterday we hosted cub scout pack 511. Their leader, Stacy, had called 3 weeks ago to set up a form tour so the kids can get credit for some ecological/green living badge they are working towards. So I guess they thought a tour of a sustainable farm would fit the bill. Unfortunately they had to do this before the end of this month. So we did our first ever winter farm tour and it went swimmingly.

Around 15 kids, ages 8 and nine and 5 or 6 adults came out to learn a bit about sustainable farming. it was a warm day (50F) but messy because of all the melting snow. Of course, the boys loved the fact it was wet and muddy and they could be in it. We gathered everyone on the porch of the store and than set off to look at a hoop house a compost pile (which Eugene allowed the kids to turn using a potato fork. I wish I had remembered to grab the camera because the grins I saw on those faces was priceless). Than down to the bottom field where Eugene talked about nature and stuff with the kids.

I was blown away (I always am) with how receptive the kids were to all this new information. And I was happy to see the adults were also very interested in what we had to say about sustainable farming.

At the end of the tour we gathered on the store's porch again and I passed out heirloom lettuce seed packets to the kids along with boulder belt brochures and card with the information of the Oxford winter market. That really thrilled the kids (I had forgotten how cool it is as a child to get stuff to take home). Eugene explained to everyone how to plant the lettuce and I have a feeling that most of the packets will be planted this spring.

I had forgotten how much fun farm tours are and having one for kids was even better than adults. I think we will do this again.

What We are Doing: Early Feb.

It is mid winter but not to early to start planting things for the market garden. So far we have planted several kinds of onions and 2 kinds of leeks (I am waiting on the seed to arrive for the Musselburgh leeks, an heirloom am excited to try). We also have started White Russian and Winterbor kale.

Soon we will start lettuce for head lettuce (I do not mean iceberg lettuce. All lettuce comes in heads be it leaf, bibb, buttercrunch, lollo or iceberg) inside under lights along with broccoli, cabbage and chard. Most of these things will go into a hoop house for a few weeks until it stops getting really cold at night. Than the hoop houses will be removed and they will be under row covers for the rest of their lives.

In March we will do a lot more seeds. More broccoli, lettuce and cabbage will be sowed indoors along with early zucchini, tomatoes and peppers. We will also start celeriac, parsley, rosemary (which takes about 3 to 5 weeks to germinate and has very low germination too boot) and early basil. Out doors we will start transplanting the onions and leeks and will sow seed for spring mix, arugula, scallions, spinach, parsnips and plant shallot sets. I believe we also have plans to open up more beds so we have more planting room.

We prune fruit trees and deal with the raspberry and blackberry brambles in late Feb/early March. Pruning is amazing important. Without proper pruning the quality of fruit goes way down quickly as does yield. The first year we were here we were faced with 3 apple trees that had not been properly pruned in at least a decade (if they ever were pruned correctly). the fruit was small and full of bugs and disease. the trees themselves were less than healthy and had a lot of kind of dead wood on them. So Eugene did what one should not normally do-he took off nearly 50% of the trees. You generally do not want to take more than 1/3 in any given year but these trees needed major help so they were well pruned. Since than the apples have been much bigger and much higher quality and Eugene has not had to prune more than 25% of the trees since than. The brambles are much easier to deal with because we put them in.

The heritage raspberries get mowed down in late winter because they are an everbearing and we have found the do best if they are not allowed to set fruit in the spring. The Latham raspberries have to have all the old canes removed along with any canes that cross other and canes we don't want. You want to end up with no more than 6 canes per linear foot. Last year these berries went nuts and had a bumper crop (I have never seen so many berries in my life!) so there is a lot of stuff to remove this year. Once we remove everything we will also remove any perennial weeds (dandelion, thistle, etc..) and than put on a nice 6" layer of mulch which is generally a mix of straw and cedar chips to feed the berries, keep the soil on the acid side and keep the weeds down (not that many weeds can compete with these brambles)

The other thing we will plant sometime in March are nut trees. We ordered something like 10 nut trees and when ever they arrive they will go in the ground. We have a fantasy of developing a nut grove. I'll bet the local squirrels will love us for this idea

Frozen Mizuna

Today is a Friday when someone goes out and harvests things for the Farm Share members. Unlike past harvest days this time everything was frozen, even the crops in the hoop houses. Bummer.

I was hoping to supply the Farm Share members with fresh greens but after looking at the frosty lettuce plants and the icy Mizuna I knew there was slim chance that greens could be harvested today (or for the next several weeks as winter is making a cold statement for a while). I did hack off some frozen mizuna and brought it back into the house to see if it would thaw decently (many cold hardy crops can be harvested fully frozen and thaw out perfectly). It thawed and was not turning to green goo but was still kind of weird. I do not want to take the chance of thawing the Mizuna, putting it into bags and than having it start rotting after it is bagged. I have tried this with frozen lettuce and things did not turn out well at all. I believe Mizuna will do better but I want to experiment a bit more with it before foisting it upon my customers.

So the Farm Share members get no greens this week (and probably not the last week either) but will get a lot of other nice things to eat. This is pretty much par for the course with farming on the back side of the calendar. If we heated our hoop houses (which is not really possible with the design we are using) we would have a lot of things growing in them. All the cold loving crops need is for the houses to be around 40F degrees at night and at least that warm during the day (if the sun is out the houses will get over 85F when it is 25F outside). The down side of this is you have to use some sort of fuel to heat the houses-propane, natural gas, electric (from coal or other fossil fuels), electric (from solar/wind) or wood. Fuel costs money which adds to the cost of the produce and most fuels pollute which adds to our carbon footprint. So for now we deal with things like frozen mizuna in January and stay content knowing that the mizuna will thaw soon enough and we will have greens to eat come late winter and early spring when most gardens in Ohio lay dormant.

Winter CSA; Week 1

The first installment of the CSA went very well. All the shares were picked up and I ended up putting far more food into the shares than I had planned on because we have a lot of stuff coming in that has a fairly short shelf life and needs to be used. And who better to use the food than the CSA members.

I realized this week that I made an error in planning this CSA. Past CSA's have been weekly affairs and I have created shares and charged accordingly. But this winter CSA is bi-monthly which means the shares should be twice as big as what I am used to putting together (though the shares for the first week are close to a 2 week share) and I should have charged the members twice as much as I did. So what is likely to happen is I am going to dole out big shares (except in January when I expect winter to come in and shut the fresh greens growing down for several weeks) and the members are going to be very happy and I am going to rip off the farm by selling food at too huge a discount. This is what I get for throwing the CSA together so quickly-I did not think out all the minute details. Ah, c'est la vie.

This is not all bad. We are getting additional income from the CSA that we would not have gotten otherwise and low cost with lots of food should make all the members happy campers and thus loyal customers and repeat CSA members. And this is making me think hard about the details of a main season CSA

So what did the Boulder Belt Eco-Farm CSA members get this week?

They got:

2 pints of strawberries
3 leeks
4 peppers
1/2 pound baby heirloom lettuces
1 pound Napa cabbage
1 small bag of either tarragon, thyme or dill
3 heads of heirloom garlic
1 bunch Easter egg radish
1 charantais melon
1 pound turnip greens
2 pound keiffer pears
2 pound Dr Matthews apples
1 pound yellow onions


Which is worth $45 if I were to sell the stuff at the store or farmer's market. Great deal for the CSA members but not a great deal for Boulder Belt Eco-Farm if Boulder Belt Eco-Farm wants to be economically sustainable (and we do, otherwise we go out of the farming biz, sell the farm and get jobs as Wal-Mart greeters or fast food "cooks". Okay it probably would not be that bad). Now all that said, the winter CSA and it's huge shares will not shut down the farm. But if I were to continue to do this for into the spring summer and fall we could end up in financial difficulty.

I have learned in the 15 years of selling what we grow is underpricing one's harvest is a sure fire way to put yourself out of business (as can overpricing. Setting prices is an art and a science)