This year’s seed catalogs! Haven’t kept on the mailing lists for the dozen or more I used to get. I do always look around online, but for the hard copy, and the main seed ordering, it’s reduced to two, one main seed supplier and a backup. The more you know, the less you need? I like the sound of that! :)
Farm lab (research!)
50 Things I’ve Learned from Tiny Farming: #38 Use a pencil
See the growing list of 50 Things I’ve Learned from Tiny Farming:
#38 – Use a pencil: You can find no finer quick-planning and sketching technology than the PENCIL, used with a crisp sheet of paper, a supporting clipboard, and a quality white eraser. There is a curious kind of commitment only a pencil can bring to the start of something. The impermanence, the erasability, the chance to begin now but make sweeping changes later, is the cool thing. Pencils are perfect for roughing out garden maps, preliminarily filling in tricky forms, and sketching all sorts of construction and fabrication projects, mobile chicken coops to better farm stand shelving (even crudely done, a picture is worth…a lot). Forget digital—lappies, tablets, smartphones, batteries, cables, software, formats and files—there’s nothing like good old straightforward no-frills paper and pencil (traditional or mechanical) for freeing you up to think!
Cold-grown salad
Cold-grown: Tiny lettuce leaves, crisp, fresh and delicious…and grown oh so slowly, without cover, in the unheated greenhouse, through many freezing nights, some down to -15C. Still a while till it’s big enough to harvest, and it was seeded way back at the beginning of October: that’s already 50 days compared to the usual spring/summer 25-35 days for baby lettuce mix). Also, the cold effect gets trickier as the leaves get bigger. All in all, though, seeing food grow in the cold with a minimum of help is quite fantastic.
Sifting compost (every tool has its day)
[8-May-2012] Every tool has its day! I bought this metal mesh-bottomed soil sifter in my first couple of years of tiny farming, it seemed like something that would come in handy, but for years after was used only as a handy storage tray. Today, it caught a break as the perfect tool for an experiment with compost in the seedling mix. Took only 20 minutes to fill 1/3 of the can with finely sifted composted cow manure. Beautiful! Some things take time. (Nope, I didn’t finish sifting that whole bucket load, a little went a long way.)
Winter spinach
Later and later we go: More late season/winter harvest experiments, with four-week-old spinach transplants into the unheated greenhouse. Also trying out a trench approach to transplanting—a furrow about 6″ deep, made with a hoe—instead of putting them in one by one. Seems a little quicker, but it all takes time!
Faster, slimmer carrots
One baby carrot…growing up fast! This is Sprint, a new Amsterdam forcing variety (good for growing in challenging conditions) that matures long and slender in a listed 42 days. That’s fast, over two weeks ahead of the quickest regular carrot we grow (the fabulous Nelson). I always find this new-better-faster hybrid stuff fascinating and a little freakish. Still, all things in moderation and…fun to try!
Monster tomato leaf
It’s a monster tomato leaf. There’s not much in the pic to give it scale, but some of these leaves are around a foot long. Way bigger than I’ve seen before. This is the first year I’ve tried tomatoes in the greenhouse, throwing in about 25 leftover tom seedlings and a few eggplant to see how they do. So far, they’re just blowing up, way ahead of the pack in the open field, apparently loving the heat. Nice!