Veggies

Checking under row cover

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Three weeks ago, it was floating row cover everywhere. So, what was it worth? Today, I checked things out. Overall, growth has been startlingly slow, due to the lack of sun. This is really noticeable in the summer squash (above), which could be huge at this point, but…aren’t. Under cover, these zucchini (I didn’t check the variety) are doing fine, no cucumber beetle damage, but of course, weeds are doing fine as well: unmolested under there, pigweed runs rampant. I’ll take the cover off here in another week or so, and then there’ll be a whole lotta weeding to do… I removed the cover from the first beds of cauliflower (Snow Crown) and broccoli (below), they’re big enough to take a little flea beetle munching. The leaves have shaded out much of the potential weed action in the beds, but you can see a nice collection in the path (top center, where the row cover ends). The plants look untouched, although the flea beetles managed to get under and at the kale and collards, (they’re out of sight just to the left)—I left them covered, back in a week. If there’s any doubt about what the FBs will do, just check the radishes, which grow MUCH faster than these guys and can survive the damage…

Back with the cucurbits, the cucumbers are the most noticeably slow: after a month, they’re hardly bigger than the transplants they started as (hope it’s all going into the roots!)… I’ve cleared away the weeds between a couple of the plants, beetle damage is minimal (they tend to get in at the ends of rows, where the cover can get blown up by the wind), but there are weeds everywhere. Cover goes back on here for a while. Weird stunting weather and floating row cover: not the most peaceful and inspiring natural garden combo, but it should all straighten out in a bit… ;)

Weeding day

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A cool, gray, peaceful day of WEEDING. Lynn and Raechelle combine hoeing and basic hand weeding to pull up a nice mix of pigweed and lamb’s quarters, with a little mallow and orchard grass for variety. I did paths with the wheel hoe. At the same time, we checked for Colorado potato beetle eggs (orange clusters on the undersides of leaves)—they’ve been here for a week or more, but so far not in troublesome numbers. It’s slow work, but satisfying in the end. The potatoes are growing abundantly with all of the moisture (which isn’t a problem so far), so much of what’s weeded now won’t be coming back under the expanding leaf cover. That’s nice.

Weird weather day

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This was one of the strangest single days for weather that I can remember. Transplanting more squash in the morning—Michelle is checking out working on the farm one day a week—it was beautifully sunny, with a nice breeze. Around mid-morning, suddenly, it shifted to humid and sticky. I headed in to change into shorts, but before I’d even walked out of the field, the humidity started fading again, so I didn’t bother. A bit later, covering the squash with row cover, a nice breeze from the north, enough to easily float the cover, casually shifted 180°, coming from the south, in the 20 minutes it took to lay down the cover and unfurl the next. Early afternoon, the wind picked up, and within half an hour what had been a largely clear sky had totally clouded over, then, pounding rain and HAIL (not too big, only some leaves got battered, no smashed plants, you can used the bottlecap below for scale). Then back to calm and clear for a couple of hours. Then heavy clouds again, and a massive wind storm that tore some branches off of trees. Then back to…sunny. As extreme as this day’s been, two or three quite drastic changes in a single day have been happening quite a lot recently. This is our new weather…?

Plastic…fantastic?

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At the market today, greens were finally in great supply, with loads of mesclun and spinach: two giant, clear leaf bags full of each. I went home with quite a bit—no sold out sign this week!—which was great, ’cause I was selling right up to the end. And, as usual, I noticed all of the disposable plastic involved…

Greens, and market/CSA share harvests in general, usually involve lots of PLASTIC BAGS. In the beginning, this didn’t overly concern me on any level, other than that buying bags by the hundreds and thousands was kinda costly. But being on the dispensing side of this steady stream of plastic gradually made me realize how much of it is continuously being tossed out there FOR NO LASTING PURPOSE.

What got to me first wasn’t the environmental issue, but the fact that people were profiting off of this useless mass consumer habit of taking tons of “free” bags at every stop… Don’t like being fooled again and again… This culminated in one way for me about two years ago, when I stopped taking shopping bags for, like, 98% of my store shopping. Last year, I started cutting down on the way I offer shopping bags at the market: instead of automatically grabbing a bag for a customer as I asked if they needed one, I ask in a  leading way, kinda eying what they’re carrying already—not surprisingly, with all of the anti-plastic bag attention lately, the majority of people so far this year bring a basket or cart, or fit their purchases into a bag they already have.

I mean, to grow greens, it takes 40-60 days of watching, watering, weeding…and suddenly, in less than 24 hours, they’re harvested, bagged, distributed, and, hopefully, within another 2-3 days, EATEN. And the really useful life of the plastic in a bag of fresh-market greens is more like a very few hours, because once you’ve gotten your greens home, there are many more efficient ways to refrigerate them (like in a nice cotton bag, in a salad spinner, in a big bin,…). But there’s nothing that easily replaces the convenience of plastic for that last little trip between stand and home (a couple of people have asked that everything, greens and all, be tossed loose into their own shopping tote, which is kinda cool and should work no problem, but doesn’t sound too easy to encourage amongst ALL…).

So what am I getting at exactly, besides the OBVIOUS? Well, I guess it’s that plastic is curiously useful stuff, I’m not about to outright REJECT it in all its many handy shapes and forms, but I should learn more about it for a start… More as it unfolds! ;)

Sweet potatoes!

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Sweet potatoes are in! They were a last minute addition this year, I was expecting them by the end of May, and then started to write ’em off when I couldn’t get in touch with the grower who was supplying them. But he came through, and they arrived by UPS yesterday, one box with around 1000 slips. Bob P., the sweet potato farmer who sent them, is also here in Ontario, but further south in a microclimate zone near Lake Ontario that’s a lot warmer. Still, they should grow here as well. The variety is Beauregard and they’re started from slips, which are vine cuttings. This is the first crop I’ve started strictly from direct grower-to-grower info, it was great to chat about them on the phone, rather than do the usual new crop…research. And they sound unbelievably trouble-free. Bob’s instructions: stick ’em in the ground with the growing point 2-3″ (5-7.5cm) above the surface, 12″ (30cm) in-row spacing, and as little as 12″ between row, all the way up to 3′ or whatever you like for tractor transplanting and cultivation. That’s it! No watering in, no watering except in extreme drought conditions. Just…weed. Hmmm… I’ll look into them more, but for now, that’s what I did, and there they are. The leaves will probably die off, it’s new rooting that should happen. One mild concern: sweet potato grows best in loose, sandy soil, where here the heavier clay loam is being well-compressed by lots and lots of at times pounding rain. Also, the slips are apparently supposed to be planted within 7 days of cutting, and it’s about a day after that. We’ll see. In 100 days, sweet potatoes? ;)

The Endless Salad…

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Lunch has turned into a collaborative cooking affair, built around the near-infinite possibilities of the Endless SALAD. Everyone who’s around pitches in: here, Lynn and Melissa chop. We build it from what’s available in the field, plus supplies from the farmers’ market and from the supermarket (with mixed feelings, I’m now buying mostly organic), a variety of raw nuts, and sometimes meat (turkey, chicken, fish, so far). We pick the ingredients, and there can be MANY, by whatever sounds good together. It always works! The salads started last month, when I asked to join Shannon in her vegetarian lunches, and Lynn and Raechelle would fill out the table on the days they were here. This direct connection between growing and cooking and eating and people started last season, with Friday evening dinners after harvest, and the first, occasional all-local-food mini-barbecues, and now it’s become part of everything…

Thinking about it now, this deepening food awareness is happening over what seems like a curiously loooong time, this being Year 6 in the garden. For the first couple of years, I was out in the field alone, spending 10-12 hour days at least six days a week during the main growing season. At the end of the day, I ate TONS of veggies. It was normal to harvest several types of greens for a salad, plus whatever was around for a sauteed side dish, and every three-four days, I’d roast a bunch of root crops. Meat was definitely in there, regular supermarket fare, but almost as a garnish, a small steak or a big pork chop or a chicken breast, on top of a mountain of veggies. I relished dinner every day, partly from the novelty of having grown the better part of my meal, a lot because I has HUNGRY, and mostly, as I remember it, because it simply attracted me: the taste, the super-simple preparation, but also the physical feeling of satisfaction these meals brought. Then, I wasn’t giving much personal thought to nutrition or “local food” or anything like that, it wasn’t a calculated, conscious enjoyment, it seemed simpler, more common sense. During the winters, in between gardens, my old eating habits didn’t change: not much junk food, no instant microwave meals, still, the regular parade of meat-and-starch industrial food type eating, straight from the convenience of the supermarket aisles. It seems a little odd now that this didn’t concern me. Then again, I wasn’t tiny farming to save my health or save the planet, this wasn’t any sort of cause, instead, something I had wandered into, seemingly by chance, that took hold: there was no agenda, only an unfolding path to somewhere cool…hopefully! And then came last year’s people in the field transition. While the garden stayed tiny in size, the intensity increased as really relying on others became a part of it all. Along with that, the food we’re growing has become linked to…daily living, plain and simple, whether it’s sharing meals from the field, or people stocking up on things to take home at the end of the day (not so different from the farmers’ market or CSA, but even more…personal). And this increasingly deeper connection to FOOD, not based on concepts or conscious direction but just on what’s happening, is surprisingly new to me, yet another part of the tiny farm experience, where what should be obvious to us all is revealed in unexpected ways… (Guest photo: Lynn laughing, me tasting, by Raechelle.)

Scaling up the grass mulch

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Not the nicest weather today, but good for gardening: not too hot (finally) and not too wet. The grass mulch experiment continues. With all of the recent rain, there’s been good growth, and I’ve cut and gathered quite a bit. Still, the volume of grass mulch available earlier in the season is still unknown, and it takes a lot to cover just one section. Here, Raechelle and Melissa (first time in the field) mulch tomatoes…


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