Year: 2009 - Page 20 - Tiny Farm Blog

Perfect (market garden) squash!

4 Apr 201626 Aug 2009 by Mike (tfb)

In the market garden, summer squash can’t get much better than this. These guys, part of the second planting for the season, have it all.

Leaves looking really healthy: green, uneaten, and so far free of the powdery mildew that inflicts itself on many squash varieties and eventually kills some off before their time.

Perfectly ready for picking: These Early Crooknecks are a nice size, there’s a few per plant, and they’re quite easy to get at. All the summer squash were multiplanted, 2-3 plants growing together, so things could get pretty overgrown and hidden. This second planting set fruit fast (unlike the first round!), and the plants are still nice and open for easy reaching in.

More to come: In the small-scale market garden, you’re always thinking quantity and COUNTING. How many pieces do we need for today’s CSA shares, how many bunches for tomorrow’s farmers’ market, and so forth. You’re thinking for now, and also for Next Week, and then, more weeks ahead. In that order. Today, there are plenty of tiny squash that’ll size up in a week no problem!

Bonus specialty selection: Squash flowers! Lots of veggies have cool options, like broccoli flowers and side shoots, squash blossoms (aka zucchini blossoms), beet greens, pea leaves, and generally, harvesting very small and young (I tend to like things to grow to a nice, solid size). So if you dropped in looking for a few squash blossoms (as seen on Food Network :), we could hook you up!

So there it is, my idea of practically perfect market garden summer squash for the tiny farm harvest. There’s ALWAYS room to improve…but here, how?

Garden in transition

20 Apr 202227 Aug 2009 by Mike (tfb)

The weather is warm, the days still feel long (although, at 5:00 a.m. for Saturday market, I’m already waking up in the dark)—summer is in full effect, but you know the season’s soon changing because the field is clearing out. Today, I did some tilling, cleaning up before weeds get too established, and preparing for a last seeding of spinach for fall harvest (a gamble, for sure).

In the pic, a couple more passes to the left of the freshly turned strip and we’ll be at the edge of the previous spinach planting, barely visible, seeded about 3 weeks ago. To the left of that, a half-bed of bok choi, delicious and miraculously untouched by flea beetles, at tiny baby stage from seedlings transplanted at the beginning of the month. Beside the bok choi, beds of broccoli and cauliflower, also set out 4 weeks ago, and looking pretty good for harvest in October.

This section was planted out at the start of the season to snap peas, lettuce, and the first spinach. After adding in some of the handy pelletized alfalfa, it gets to go round again!

In the next section (top right of the photo, which is…east), I’ve started tilling in an overgrowth of grass and vetch, where more peas and the first plot of potatoes used to be. That section is done for the year, and may get a protective cover of fall rye, as a green manure to be turned under in spring.

In the market garden, it’s always one thing after another… :)

The other sunflowers…

1 Oct 20111 Sep 2009 by Mike (tfb)

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…

Harvest board revisited

16 Nov 20234 Sep 2009 by Mike (tfb)

As the afternoon shadows get longer, Michelle checks out the harvest board to see what’s left to do for tomorrow’s farmers’ market. This same whiteboard is now in its third season of service, a little worse for the wear, with the surface no longer coming clean, and one edge of the frame fallen off (it’s lying there, right behind, waiting for repair), but fully functional. As long as I remember to keep it out of the rain and too much sun, it could have a few years in it yet. And I’ve grown to really like it. The shiny WHITENESS is a little glaring and kinda office-like—I considered switching to a chalkboard—but the printing stands out so well… It makes things clear, which is always good!

Fresh new garlic ARRIVES!

19 Apr 202224 Sep 2009 by Mike (tfb)

There’s almost no describing how pleased this morning’s delivery made me. Pretty happy! In two sturdy cartons, by FedEx Ground, 80 lbs of certified organic Music garlic, looking so fine! :) This shipment comes from a farmer named Warren, who grows a huge amount of garlic about 200 miles (320 km) from here—I’ve chatted with him about garlic, read his garlic literature, bought garlic from him before, a quirky and fun garlic grower indeed! And you certainly can’t have enough garlic… Possibly the WORST part of this mildly crazy tiny farm transition (moving farms from last year to this) was not being able to plant garlic last fall. On EVERY LEVEL, good garlic is GREAT…and if AT ALL POSSIBLE (it’s easy to grow!), you must have it around at all times! This season’s spring-planted garlic experiment did work out OK, but there wasn’t much of it, in number or in size. Now, we get to go again… Cool!

(By the way, if you’re really into garlic, this is the, um, BEST GARLIC SITE EVER: Gourmet Garlic Gardens! It has everything…)

Eat good food

3 Feb 202226 Sep 2009 by Mike (tfb)

We’ve been faithfully bringing the matching pair of chalkboards to the farmers’ market since we bought them at an office supply box store in mid-summer, but it’s what to put on ’em that’s the puzzle. Today’s new message: “Eat good food”! The other one (out of sight on the left) has been a standing quote from Will Allen: “We need 50 million more people growing food, on porches, in pots, in side yards.” A little odd, perhaps, for the market? Maybe, but there they are. Promotional words on chalkboards is the plan. It’s a work in progress!

Harvesting Jerusalem artichoke

18 Nov 20092 Oct 2009 by Mike (tfb)

For tomorrow’s farmers’ market, Lynn, Andie and Jordan harvested more of this year’s Jerusalem artichoke. The tubers have gotten noticeably bigger since pulling some just a couple of weeks ago… Chokes are a really simple, satisfying harvest, at least, when you pull up the plants in their first year. These guys are spaced at 12″ (30cm), so we just grab the usually multiple stems at each spot and tug. The main root ball is shallow and contains most of the tubers: pull ’em off, and bang the root clump a bit to get at the ones in the middle. You also have to scrabble around for maybe a hand’s width or two past the little root crater to find a few extra outlying tubers—guess that’s where the “invasive” part of choke lore begins, they do try to spread. Overall, though, it’s quick and easy, especially when the fall weather is mild like today. Nice!