The tiny farming action continues mainly indoors with the SEEDLINGS. I’m still starting away, staggering most things, but doing all of the tomatoes right now, all at once. The daily photos mostly tend to be—surprise!—extreme close-ups… So, while looking over today’s image harvest, the familiar plug trays and flats and well-separated seedlings seen up close for a sudden instant looked completely alien and bizarre. All that segregation and attempt at TOTAL PLANT CONTROL looked kinda…crazy. Plug trays: two seeds per cell, packaged under plastic, stuck under kinda ghastly cool white fluorescent lights. Tiny rosemary and celery seedlings (off to a much later than usual start), partitioned off in their own fibrepak flats. Little plant captives, brightly lit, carefully tended. Fanatically patrolled mini-monocultures. Yikes! Of course, the feeling quickly passed. Guess I just wanna get outdoors! :)
unusual
Kale in survival mode
At first, it looks like some sort of horrible, fuzzy mold, about to devour your newly germinated seeds. But when you get really up close, it turns out to be superfine, hairlike extensions growing from the radicle. These kale sprouts pushed themselves right out of the seedling mix, probably because they weren’t pressed in and covered deeply enough.
Kale, broccoli, cauliflower and other brassicas do this in a very visible way during a surface emergency, sending out a mass of fine root hairs in search of water. Root hairs are normal below ground, but I’ve only really noticed them growing exposed on brassicas, other newly emerged seedlings with bared roots usually seem to just dry up. An unusual glimpse of what plants are up to with their vast root systems down below.
Given half a chance—a little surface moisture—these guys can actually manage to burrow down and root themselves. Pretty cool trick.
Tiny farm moving – Part 3
Headed to the old farm to pick up the greenhouse. It’s only been a month since the main move, but the return to a place where I spent practically every day of the last six years felt strange. Inside the farmhouse, it was just a familiar space, but rounding the corner into the barnyard, surrounded by all the old red buildings—barn, goat barn, drive shed—and then, walking into the field, that was different.
I guess this is the first real attachment to LAND that I’ve experienced. It was definitely unusual, not at all emotional, just a really strong, quiet sensation, a deep familiarity maybe describes it. I suppose the memories of all that thinking, observing, and working, tying together place and weather and ground conditions and seasons coming and going in one long, continuous arc, couldn’t help but leave their own type of mark. So that was interesting! :)
Bob had already started dismantling the farm stand, but that was so solidly put together, with thick, rough-cut cedar, heavy old fence boards, and 3″ nails (if you ever expect to move the things you build, for a few dollars more, consider screws!), that’s gonna be for another day. On to the hoophouse teardown…
The hoophouse is all screwed together, so taking it apart was easy. I’d considered lining up some extra hands for removing the plastic—there was a breeze, gusting to 4-5 mph (6-8kmph)—but Bob thought we’d be fine. And we were: the plastic skinned off amazingly easily, without catching the wind at all, and it didn’t disintegrate or tear…it will live again.
Around five hours later, and it’s all in pieces, ready to load up and take down the road. Going up and coming down are exactly the same, so I decided to take step-by-step pictures when we put it up again at the new farm…
Your veg is in the mail
In comparison with just about everything else, tiny farming is so…basic. A friend sent me a link to Graze with the only comment: “Remember our chat about healthy food + convenience?” So I clicked it. I don’t know what to say. After reading through the site, I was kinda, literally, almost speechless—the service is summed up in the home page snapshot above: Graze mails healthy snacks to you at work. The UK business is based on the British National Health Service’s 5-a-day campaign that says you should eat five servings of fruit and veggies daily. Graze aims to help.
This is seamlessly intense green marketing. Every base is covered. Probably my favorite piece on the whole site is their description of how precisely-sized servings are shipped to you:
Our box is thin, strong & uses the least material possible. What’s more, it’s from a sustainable forest, biodegradable & 100% recyclable. We source our food locally wherever possible, and prepare everything in our own kitchen, keeping food miles to a minimum. We hate waste so we buy all our fresh produce on the day we send it, and any leftovers go to our local farm. And best of all, the postman delivers it, so we don’t need any vans or energy guzzling shops. We are always seeking ways to be even greener.
Fascinating! Puts direct-to-market tiny farming well in perspective! :)
New year, new farm!
It’s a new day rising in a new year, perfect timing for Tiny Farm Blog to officially become a tale of TWO (tiny) farms: where I started out on this surprise growing adventure six seasons ago, and what comes next. There’s a long and complicated story here, not without its drama and prickly points, but luckily, all that is really beyond what TFB is about, so I don’t have to go into it here! Yay. The new situation is as much of an unusual and unlikely set-up as the current one was unexpected, a more or less instant meeting of minds. There were more, well, logical options, but this feels right. It’s very real tiny farming, with all of the hard (though fun!) work and financial challenges to face, PLUS, the prospect of a whole new start-up in the field…which is the really exciting, critical part.
The new farm is just down the road, only about 30km (19mi) away, but with the many lakes in between, getting there by road doubles the distance. I won’t lose touch with the PEOPLE I’ve come to know and the friends I’ve made, but it means a complete change in my I-don’t-drive local. The garden and facilities are also nearly starting from scratch. I’m going from a farm refined over several generations for this one purpose—a fantastically practical agricultural infrastructure, you could say, with Bob a living part of it, carrying forward a couple of centuries of classic farm maintenance skills—to loosely tended hay fields and a small, bare barn.
I guess for me it comes down to challenge, perseverance and a self-test (although I really don’t like…testing!!): How transferable is the “tiny” spirit, how much have I REALLY learned, and how far can tiny farming go, without becoming just another small business (let alone, just another mortgage payment)? I’ll include more details of the old and the new, as they fit. In any case, this should make for interesting times on the blog. As I understand it so far, tiny farming is about growing, about people as much as crops, and it’s about change… Let’s see what happens! :)
Chickens love eggs
Today, a bit of an egg disaster, around 20 eggs down, by far the biggest single egg loss in my brief egg-collecting career. The girls choose to do most of their laying in one nest box (there are six in a row), so there’re usually around a couple of dozen eggs in there, conveniently waiting for pick-up. This time, there were only 8 or 10, all slimy with egg white and coated with shavings and droppings, with tiny bits of eggshell thoroughly mixed into the rest of the litter. What I think happened was, one of the eggs somehow broke, the girls jammed into the egg-packed nest in a feeding frenzy, their jostling and mad pecking broke some more, increasing the frenzy and the breaking, and so forth. As I was cleaning up the rest, one egg slipped and cracked, and half a dozen chickens went crazy slurping it up. Man, do they love eating eggs… I tossed the rest into a bucket (whereI later took the pic)… I don’t expect this to be a new regular thing, as the girls don’t seem to be interested in actually trying to break eggs…though I’m sure they could learn.
News, off!
Tiny farming tip: to be happier, healthier, and more productive, in and out of the garden, stop following the NEWS! I quit around three years ago, and never felt better. I got sucked back in last September by a tasty combo of Obama, Sarah Palin, and a side order of global economic meltdown. Who could resist? But now, the election’s long over, and CNN is still on in the background, like a radio… Until today.
Today, for no real reason, I decided to actually watch the news for a while. Started with some Terror in India, a little Baghdad Shootout, and then, the main course, a special investigative report, “America’s Killer Diet”… Wow. Segment after segment of bizarre, surreal and mildly disturbing bits of bad-food trivia. Healthy kid moves from Jamaica to the US, discovers junk food, and gains 30 lbs in his first year (concerned mom intervenes by actually COOKING). Secretary of Agriculture agrees that, if Americans tried to eat the recommended daily five servings of veg, there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Revealed: just about all of the food in America is really made out of CORN (and soy). Twinkies-maker says: “The core ingredients of Twinkies have been the same for decades: flour, sugar and water. Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to deconstruct the universe.” Spokeswoman for an urban farming project in Chicago explains that, in her neighborhood, you can easily buy a gun, but you CAN’T FIND AN ORGANIC TOMATO. What’s THAT about? What does that even mean? Off goes the news! Again. Phew! :)