Sat, Dec 05, 2009 · Filed under Autumn, Grow your own, Home garden, Off-the-farm, Urban farming, Veggies
Often heard about, never before seen first-hand, this is front-yard tiny farming in action—late fall edition. I’m at the home of Andrew and Sue and Margo, in a town of 70,000, leaning on the front porch rail on a residential street lined with single homes on small lots. Typical front lawns all along. Except here, where the grass is gone, replaced by an eclectic collection of veggies and herbs. Beets, carrots, tomatoes, corn and several other crops are already gone for the season. Still up and struggling along in the cold, there’s colorful Swiss chard in a couple of spots, parsley and sage, and a few other things that need a closer look to ID. Andrew also mentioned native edibles, like ostrich fern (fiddleheads), wild ginger and wild leek. And more. The keyhole path set-up comes from permaculture methods: minimum path for maximum access to the growing area. It’s a front-yard revolution! After a season or two of sidewalk-side veggie abundance for all to see, I wonder if this alternate land use will start to spread up and down the street! Urban agriculture. Pretty cool!
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Fri, May 15, 2009 
Filed under Fieldwork, People, Seed starting, Spring, Tools, Veggies
More slow but steady planting out. Flat-leaf and curly parsley, started so long ago, finally hit the field by the hands of Libby and Lynn. Later in the afternoon, we started one section of potatoes. The timing this spring is…unusual. We’re still tilling and retilling sections to further break up sod, planting the same crop in two or three different spots, and staggering planting dates by waiting as long as possible, to get as much variation in conditions as we can. It’s hedging bets in a new market garden…
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Thu, May 07, 2009 
Filed under Fieldwork, Seed starting, Spring, Veggies
It’s a jumble of seedlings around the seedling room, inside and out. Actually, it looks like a good part of the entire market garden, neatly in miniature, lined up in trays… Due to a pile of one-thing-waiting-on-another (for example, we have to run electricity for the fan that inflates the two layers of covering), the greenhouse is STILL not refit with its plastic, so the fallback plan is ferrying the seedlings out to tables—4×8 plywood on sawhorses—in the morning, and back in at night (when it’s still as often as not hovering around freezing).
Hardening off! All that daily moving is a bit of a pain, but they have to come in at night. In the hoophouse, without wind, it’d be a lot easier to row cover, and we could apply a minimum of overnight heat with the kerosene heater (or propane space heater). Outside is too much of a risk, particularly for the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash,… Moving takes a total of maybe an hour a day, around 60 trays in all. (And the upside: it’s always cool to see backup plans work! :)
In the pic, the last of the onions from seed, plus cauliflower, parsley, and summer squash just germinating in the distance. Waiting to go…!
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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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Thu, Mar 12, 2009 · Filed under Farm lab (research!), Indoors, Seed starting, Veggies, Winter
Three weeks old, and the parsley is already well past its seed leaf stage, where everyone pretty much looks the same, and is busy expressing its true nature. On the left, Green Pearl, a curly variety, starting to pucker and…curl. On the right, Hilmar, of the generally stronger-tasting flat-leaf type. Curly, straight, plants, people…we’re all bobbing around in the same big boat! (I’m still WAITING, holding back for a few more days before starting the next wave of seedlings… :)
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Mon, Feb 23, 2009 · Filed under Seed starting, Veggies, Winter
Parsley, seeded 11 days ago, began popping up over the last couple of days, so that’s the second crop of the season, underway. Four varieties this year, two each of flat-leaf (Plain Dark Green Italian, Hilmar) and curly (Forest Green, Green Pearl). They’re 18 cells per variety, in a 72-cell plug sheet, around 4-6 seeds per cell—I’ll eventually thin them down to two. They’ve already started to stretch because they’re sharing a light rack shelf where the lights are set higher to accommodate a tray of onions. Parsley is easy to start, I’ve had no problem with transplants, but my seedlings have always tended to stretch and tangle in the trays before transplant time. Last year, I snipped them back quite a bit so they wouldn’t tie themselves to each other. They seem to like their light strong. These are just early season details that I won’t be much concerned with a little later on, but I’ll see what I can do. I’m gonna hang lights on another shelf for them right now!
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