Tue, Sep 01, 2009 · Filed under Farm lab (research!), Flowers, Planning, Summer, Veggies
There are pretty ornamental cutting sunflowers, and then there are these monsters of the field, towering Early Russians, and their almost as imposing kin, the rugged Jerusalem artichoke (last photo). They’re the genus Helianthus, North American natives, supposedly dating back 8,000 years, and by the look of it, really not too disturbed by the crazy weather right now.
Both of these are experiments. This is the second season for the Russian giants, grown exclusively for their potential as a plant-protecting wall. It’s the third time around for the JAs, a crop that can do double duty as a living wall… Neither were strategically placed for action this year, but the idea is mainly to use them as shade during scorching summers. They get to a pretty good height by sometime in July, so the timing works. Even at 7-8′, they won’t protect too far out, a dense and high-value crop like all-lettuce mesclun would make it worthwhile. They could be good as windbreaks as well, but I haven’t considered for what…
The sunflowers are around 8′ tall now, it’s quite incredible (with a longer season, they can apparently get up to 14′). You’d think with them growing so fast and big, they’d always stand out, but with all that’s going on in the field, you can forget and then one day, turn around and BAM, there’s that wall o’ green, STARING at you…
The flowers are practically as big as my head, and so heavy, they eventually wind up completely face down.
The Jerusalem artichoke are a little more refined, but still big and resilient. They’re around 7′. Both sunflowers and JAs are planted in double rows, and held up to this year’s helping of storms and massive winds no problem. Reliable…
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Thu, May 21, 2009 
Filed under Farm lab (research!), Planning, Seed starting, Spring, Veggies
A last tray of onions—Red Wing hybrid red onions that did well last year—is hanging around the seedling room. What are they doing still not in the ground? Well, most of our onions—Stuttgarter-type yellow cooking, yellow Spanish, Red Wing, around 3,o00 in all—are already planted, in two sections, far apart. As I jigsawed together this season’s garden layout (now with the garden MAP), these guys just didn’t fit in the first two onion plots. So, they’ll get a bed of their own, somewhere, real soon, and we’ll see how they do compared to the others. Timing!
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Thu, Apr 30, 2009 · Filed under Farm lab (research!), Fieldwork, Seed starting, Spring, Veggies
With the timing of the move to the new farm, there was no fall garlic planting for this year. Very sad—over the last three seasons, we’ve grown 2,000-3,000 bulbs a year, it’s a much-loved crop all around (starting with me!), and it’s been the very first sign of new veggie life as the fields wake up every spring. Oh, well, we should be back to full-on garlic this fall!
Meanwhile, what we have INSTEAD is about 200 of the toughest, most I-will-survive garlic cloves ever, going in today for a really late start, late even for spring planting! After long months of storage, and an accidental total freezing, the loss of garlic I’d been saving was pretty huge, these 200 out of maybe a thousand.
The guys who made it got an overnight cleansing and rejuvenating bath in a mild solution of baking soda (anti-fungal) and kelp extract (boost), and they’ll be quickly rinsed in alcohol just before going in. Especially for this small, late planting, all this prep probably doesn’t matter much, but they deserve it (personify and pamper your seeds and plants when you can, it’s friendly, until you harvest and eat ‘em!).
So, it’ll be a first-hand test of whether it’s worth planting spring garlic at all. From what I’ve heard, chances are we’ll get at best smaller, later bulbs, some misfires with no bulbs forming, and the same great garden-grown garlic taste! We shall see…!
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Sat, Mar 21, 2009 Filed under Indoors, People, Seed starting, Spring, Veggies
It’s spring! The ground is clear, hasn’t snowed in a while, but it’s still cold, and the tiny farming action remains mainly indoors. We’re steadily filling up the racks (here, Lynn populates a plug sheet with Red Russian kale; under the lights, parsley and onion). I’m spreading things out a lot more than usual, instead of starting a whole lot on one day. We’ll see what difference a few days or a couple of weeks make to the various veg… It likely won’t be much, but some interesting things could happen if we get really drastic week-to-week weather changes around transplant time, like we did last year. An experiment!
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Tue, Nov 25, 2008 · Filed under Autumn, Farm lab (research!), Fieldwork, Harvest, Veggies
Every season there’ve been hardy veggies left to the cold and snow, and this season, it’s a record quantity, with nearly 2,000′ (610m) of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and kale that mostly started sizing up just as the farmers’ market finished at the end of October. It seems like a waste, but it’s only a typical garden gamble on the weather (I was trying for an extra, really late crop). The risk was clear back in August, and we didn’t get enough sun to push things along a tiny bit quicker. We did harvest a lot of the Red Russian flat-leaf kale (above), for a good four weeks, and one round of 1-2 lb (450-900g) cabbage (a nice size for a meal for one or two). And there’s been a lot of personal-use picking in November. The rest is a giant farm lab experiment, more exploration of the snow-on-veggies effect…
More than the snow, the many nights of extreme cold (-15°C/5°F) that came with it this year really blasted these guys, wilting them and burning leaves and buds. So, none of the crops are too firm or pretty, BUT, they’re still alive: for the most part, there’s good color and texture. The kale, always super-hardy, did the best from a let’s eat some perspective, with good texture and great taste. The broccoli, while a little wilty on the stems and burned on the buds, also tasted great, fresh and flavorful. The cauliflower did the worst, the heads really damaged by the freezing and thawing, too mushy for me to bother with a taste. (Eating raw was fine, but how would this all cook up? We may see…) We’d already reaped most of the filled-out cabbage, so the rest aren’t going to go anywhere from here…
What’s all this odd information worth? Not much, I guess, I’m not planning on deliberately planting for snow harvests. But checking things out is always fun, no experience goes to waste, and there is at least one advantage to knowing there’s still good eating out there: the laying hens will be feasting on a fabulous greens buffet for a while!
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Tue, Sep 23, 2008 · Filed under Autumn, Fieldwork, Harvest, People, Pests & Disease, Tools, Veggies
Today, the pumpkins came in, wrested from a jungle of pigweed gone wild. Every year, a few of the 40 50′x50′ sections that make up the 2.5 acre garden get a little overrun with one weed or another (usually, pigweed). This year’s pumpkin patch was a good example, with pigweed growing unchecked for a good six weeks—no time made to weed, not IMPORTANT enough a crop—until today, when Raechelle used the belly-mounted 52″ mower deck on the Kubota compact tractor to mow it down!
Of course, this is exactly what you DON’T EVER DO in a garden: allow weeds to flourish and go to seed, then mow them down, broadcasting seed everywhere… Oh, well. The alternative, pulling the pigweed by hand, then carting it off, we also do when necessary—see the Pigweed Mountain—but once in a while, I go for the instant gratification of seeing a section clean and clear in an hour or two. The millions of pigweed seeds, ensuring healthy future generations for years to come, will be dealt with…later. (As long as we weed on time next time around, how bad can it get?! :) Anyhow, it’s all part of the grand experiment! Guest pumpkin photo by Lynn.
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