Posts filed under 'gardening'
August Rush
August is here, and all of a sudden the steady pace we have held to since spring’s crazy planting rush has picked up tempo again. We are in the thick of fall’s planting, which is a rush just like in spring, but feels even more like a race since we aren’t working our way towards warmer, faster growing weather where late plantings often play catch up, but rather towards the cooling down, the slowing down. Unlike most crops in the spring line-up, which are often going to be planted in succession anyways or want to be planted when its nice and warm so there is no hurry anyways, we have pretty clear deadlines on most of our last plantings of the year if we hope for adequate growth and sufficient yields to make it through the fall, winter, and early spring. So, there is a lot of clearing house right now, prepping beds, and general angst about whether it will all get done because we also happen to be in the thick of summer’s glorious but unrelenting fecundity. We felt like all we could do last week was harvest and water, demands of the heat and its boost in productivity all of a sudden in the fields. The weeds enjoyed a week of undisturbed growth as well while we were busy, but the farmer and our wonderful farm help managed to make pretty good mileage against those yesterday. Really, the fields at this point are the tidiest we have ever been able to manage, so that will be a boon as we push through this month, perhaps our busiest of the year.
But even this August rush isn’t all there is to come. Its bramble time, blackberries in the mornings. Sunflowers and zinnias, tomatoes too. Dark purple fingers picking bright orange and red and yellow, the colors of the height of summertime. As much work as there is to be done in what seems to short a time, being able to do this work, to be out so fully in this time of year, to notice every bit of it and to love it for its beauty as well as its hectic routine, it is all worth it, for a zillion reasons. The greatest of which, aside from our own personal pleasure in living this life, is sharing the bounty of these fields and this labor with all of you.
Add comment August 4, 2009
Summer love
I am sure that at this moment, we all have one thing taking up residence in our minds, filling in all the spaces between our many other thoughts, unavoidably resurfacing in the front again and again. And what could so ubiquitously bring us together in such grand collective consciousness besides the weather: it is hot! Not just hot, I guess, but HOT…at least hotter than we are used to; and really, hot for most everyone, except for those folks in the desert areas, where HOT, from my recollection, could be closer to 120 degrees than 100. That is the kind of heat that makes you sure your dog is going to die as you travel through. But still, heat is heat, and although I am not worried too much about the animals here, we do have to give them extra attention during these high temperatures. Salt nibbles out of hand for the goats, fresh mud baths for the pigs…the dog, with her furry coat, just digs into the cool ground and lays under the porch.
We, too, are pretty bothered and hot, feeling yet again the affects of poor insulation in an old manufactured home and not a lick of shade to protect the house on the south and west. The icing on the cake of this less than ideal scenario is that the west wall of the house is all windows, of course, so that the house dwellers can enjoy the wonderful view. Add to the pot a scant amount of opening window space and none of them set up for providing cross ventilation, and you have a recipe for an oven of a home. Still, as much as we curse poor house designs, we are never really ones to dwell on the back side of the hill. We aren’t really even all that bothered, just hot.
So, in this vein, I have been stewing a list of all the really great things about this heat, some jewels for us all to remember as we work and play and try to get some sleep in these next few really hot days, and the only somewhat less hot days to come. It is summer after all, and like any other season, it’ll come and go sooner than later. Every minute we have the opportunity to gain a memory to hold onto as things change, constantly change, and move forward, faster than I ever could have imagined as a child.
Top on our list of happy thoughts are that the plants love, love, love this heat. Granted, they were regularly well watered to this point, so that isn’t a consideration or worry for us or them. Instead, they have a lushness, a green, and a vibrancy this week that is just different. Not that they didn’t look beautiful before, and not that plants don’t thrive under our normally less than extreme summer temperatures, but I have a comparison point. After moving here from the hot summers of the Midwest, I haven’t really seen this kind of summertime boom in our garden. Really, it has more to do with the night temperatures than the day, and having this little heat wave, with nights barely dropping below 70 degrees…ooh la la! Plants primarily grow at night, using up the daytime to feed themselves via photosynthesizing. The summer plants love for the heat to remain through the night, and grow they are. This is something we will all benefit from! And although we won’t see it in this week’s harvest, we have harvested the first red tomato, a beautiful striped roma, and surprise of all surprises (for us anyways, since eggplant usually are the last summer crop to ripen for us) a single, gorgeous eggplant. The banana peppers, almost ripe!
Another thing we are thankful for…getting to take the afternoons off! What else can we do really? It is unbearable to continue field work, and unbearable to stay in our home (per the reasons mentioned above). And so we head out with drinking water and sun hats and find a place to get wet! And because it so very hot, we don’t even have to get into the water in that slow and cautious gingerly manner, we can run and jump right in! And when we do, the water, even in the creeks, is warm or cool, not freezing cold! It feels so good, better than any regular mid-temperature summer swimming could. And if
you are young enough or can get away at night, we actually have fit weather for night swimming! To swim on a hot summer’s night with the stars overhead…..lovely!
And as we hope to experience ourselves today, the heat we have here hasn’t left the Oregon coast cool and windy, but nice and warm, warm enough to let that cold ocean water scent your skin with its sweet saltiness even if you’re an adult. The smell of summer’s flowers lingers in this hot air, and maybe if you have a little child she will go out into the tomato patch and when you pick her up, she will smell just like tomatoes so you will squeezer her tight, the smell of a summer garden! And you will crave vegetables even more than you normally do! At least that is us, with scant an appetite
by dinnertime because of this heat, fresh vegetables are the perfect food. Cucumbers, zucchini or white Lebanese squash, cabbages, and steamed beets or blanched green beans all make simple and elegant vegetable salads with not much more than a nice vinegar and a quality olive oil, some fresh herbs, sweet cipollini onions or tasty scallions, and some local walnuts or hazelnuts or delicious artisan cheese for a little bit of protein. And after the 100 degree days simmer down to the mid-90’s, we are back to perfect outdoor grill dining, and nothing tastes like summer more than grilled vegetables!
So, dwell with us, in these joys of summer, heat and all. As I know I write about again and again, our lives are tied to the seasons with such intricately weaved strands that intersect with every little aspect of our lives here on the farm. I was always one for the seasons, they were so distinct where I grew up. By letting ourselves fully submerge into what makes each one unique, by creating and maintaining associations and memories, activities and foods for each one, it makes there coming and going all the more dear, and provides us with the beautifully complimentary pull of sweet and bittersweet,
loving and longing, for each in its own way, to accompany us through the days.
2 comments July 29, 2009
Fitting summer into year-round farming (otherwise known as just the opposite of what I used to think about growing food)
The weather warm up last week brought with it the feeling that summer has arrived, and although this week’s vegetable harvest won’t reflect it, next week’s will. The summer squash and zucchini plants exploded with their gorgeous yellow blossoms and are now filled with the fruit of their labor, just a bit too small still to harvest this week. The beans, which take a little longer from blossom to maturity, should also be ready by next week. And we almost had carrots for today’s harvest, but a little bit into the row made it clear another week would be worth it. Hooray!
The tomatoes all look so gorgeous this year, the main planting all done in a new section this year, the lowest part of our main field. The bottom of any slope is always the most fertile, and in our case, the wettest. Our tomatoes had a minor set back this spring after we lost the greenhouse and their tops were touched with frost, but we babied them back to really good looking starts, albeit smaller ones than last year. After planting them in this low spot, we have not had to water them once and they are thriving, a great experience we are having with using our seasonally wet spaces for dry land farming certain crops.
Still, our large slicing tomato varieties have a lot of maturing to do, although the cherry varieties will be ready soon. All of our summertime crops come a little later than many of the other farms we spend time with each week at market. One obvious reason for this is our choice not to use large forms of season extension to help these heat loving plants ripen sooner. This is something we will probably keep to, although we have expanded our use of row covers for pest protection this year, and are probably going to utilize this next year to warm certain crops in their early growth, something that will help with quicker maturation.
I have been looking through our records, though, and I think that another reason why we don’t have summer crops right out the door of the main season is because we have chosen to not place our main emphasis on these crops. Having switched to growing vegetables for year-round harvest, we have removed all the weight that is often placed on summer and fall crops. Our planting schedule is almost continual from mid-February through September, and when we look at our whole year, we have more harvests in the “off” season than we do for these “main” season crops. With a goal more than twice as many weeks of harvest for the CSA as for market season, we have to keep our to do list balanced in the early parts of the year, needing to concentrate on fast growing cool weather crops in the spring while we also get the fields and the seedlings ready for our summer plantings. We always know that when our summer crops mature, we will have more than we can sell.
We are on the door of that kind of vegetable madness that summer brings, and for us, it seems to be right on time. And although we are just about to jump into almost daily summer harvesting, we are also at the start of our fall planting schedule. Just yesterday, we started over 2000 flats of seed for transplanting in a month, the beginning of food we will all eat from for the fall, winter, and early spring. These plantings bear so much significance in this light, the cooler months a time we more instinctively feel the need to make sure we have plenty of food growing, a time of less surety. And that is the funny fate of the year-round farmer, to not fully be fully present in the wild abandon of summer, with vegetables growing like weeds, so fast and furious; because it is during this time of the year, during the thick of it all, that we are readying the soil and seed for the slow and steady pace of the rest of the year.
Add comment July 8, 2009
Looking forward
Greens, greens, greens!! There are a lot of greens in your share today, in true spring veggie style. Everything we are harvesting right now until the first spring planted radishes are ready (next week?!?) was planted last year in July, August, and September!! This is very exciting to us, to even have so much fresh food to eat in this season. Still, as we actually plan for next winter/early spring harvests at the beginning of the year rather than committing to growing year round in the middle of summer like we did last year, we are happy to be able to plan for potatoes and celery root for these harvests next year when they need to be planted rather than way past too late. With a grain restricted diet, we miss starchy root veggies to round out our meals. Still, on the menu last week with the veggies that your share included we had so many great and filling and more than sustaining farm meals. Goat and barley soup with leek tops, salad mix with nettle pesto, vinaigrette, and chopped hazelnuts, braised rack of goat and sauteed rapini, pizzas with nettle pesto and sheep’s feta and with olive oil, caramelized leeks, rapini, and Parmesan, coconut red beans and rice with baby perpetual spinach, oil and vinegar, and feta, falafel and chard cakes, rice noodles with kale, locally fished tuna, and buttery leeks. Spring eating is great, and now that we are harvesting again, and we are on the road to new crops, our own veggie intake gets to go up as we no longer have to wait to pick at the greens we have been wanting to grow more. Greens upon greens on our table, yeah!
But the season will move on, and we have to grow different greens and some not at all in the heat of summer, so we enjoy their sweetness and abundance now! Some of you have asked about what will be coming through the summer so that you can plan your own growing spaces, so this is one thing to consider. We don’t tend to harvest kale, arugula, or mustard and Asian greens in the summer, although you will have them through June, but we will continue to harvest chards and lamb’s quarters in the greens department. Traditionally, we have given out salad mix, which goes through minor transformations through the seasons, every week. We aren’t planning on doing this for 2009 even though our salad mixes have been called the best by many of you (thank you!). We do plan on giving out more heads of different, beautiful varieties of lettuce, and one or the other for each week is the goal. If you are a big salad eating family, please talk with us about adding a bag of salad mix to your regular share. By doing it just for those who have come to really want this every week, we can save some harvest time (our salad mix is very labor intensive). We are growing a lot and multiple varieties of these crops: beets, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, onions, beans, winter squash, tomatoes, and peppers. We are growing the same delicious Italian zucchini we did last year along with a Lebanese variety, some heirloom crooknecks and patty pan summer squashes, and will have loads of these and straight slicing Marketmore cucumbers. The spring will bring radishes and snow and snap peas. We will have pickling cucumbers and canning tomatoes available for u-pick, half price for CSA members. You can also pick cherry tomatoes and a bouquet of cut flowers near the house at your veggie pick up on us, our way to show our appreciation for your support and to make the drive (on top of the veggies) worth the while!
We are going to try to grow small watermelons and muskmelons in a hot spot on the farm with a constant supply of safe greywater in an attempt to get a harvest at least for the family, perhaps to share with members if they would like, but not to sell. Melons like it hot, and they like a lot of water, and to this point we haven’t had any ripe ones in Oregon, but we know it is possible, so we are working on it! Our apple trees may produce this year, but whether it will exceed family needs and suitable for the CSA or only be enough for a market crop has yet to be seen. Our first planting will be three years old, our second, just two, some only one year old, so yields will still be small. That is it on the fruit front for now, our kids will likely eat all the strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries we get this year!
Our whole eggplant planting failed in the greenhouse this year, so we are purchasing just 50 organic eggplant starts from a Beaverton farm this year. Eggplant isn’t a heavy producer here in Oregon, so this will likely only translate to one or two weeks of eggplant harvests for the CSA. If you love eggplant, this would be a good one to put in your home garden. We also will not be growing any sweet corn for fresh eating. This could be the subject of a whole other newsletter since we have many things factoring into this decision. We grow only open-pollinated varieties, and this in and of itself makes fresh corn difficult. OP sweet corn is perfect for harvesting in about a one day window and then good for eating in about a one day window. This is hard for scheduled harvesting and weekly boxes. We also have a neighbor who grows genetically modified corn, so we have been unsure about growing open- pollinated corn for fear of cross-pollination. Now we have gotten variety and plant dates from our neighbor, selected a corn variety that will pollinate within the safe 3 week distance from the GM corn, but it will be for drying, and we will be using a lot of this for supplemental chicken and pig feed. However, we will also batch grind some for cornmeal and polenta for our family, and maybe for the winter CSA! We know that sweet corn is good, but it is also water intensive, space intensive, and poor on the nutritional scale, so this is where we are going with corn. We always buy or receive a few meals worth from other local farmers, and encourage you to enjoy this summer treat from Farmer’s Market or from you own garden! We are growing some Cannellini beans this year too, for fresh shelling and dry beans!
Of course, it is hard for us to know what this will translate to given our last two years…we have had problems with certain crops each year. Yet, there are a lot of things that make us feel more confident that all of these crops will be on our tables in abundance. We have learned so, so, so much in the last two years. So much of when we were just large scale home gardeners hasn’t translated, but we feel like we are learning a lot of what will make us great market gardeners. We now see that as we work to build and build healthy soil and bio-diversity to ultimately deal with pest pressure and plant health, we have to use things like row covers, trap crops, and nettle brew in the foliar sprayer pro-actively to fight pests, and that we have to add to the soil organic fertilizing amendments (compost, granular, and fish emulsion for the greenhouse and transplants). These are intermediate ways to help with the problems, not long term solutions nor our long term goals. Still, we love carrots just as much as all of you (who doesn’t!) and we want at least most of what we plant to be beautiful and harvestable. So this year, we feel like the crops we say and plan to have, we will, and that is a good place to be this year!
Add comment April 29, 2009
Blog For Food Campaign
Because our farm is young and because we started the whole thing coming off of five years of living on a single meager income, whenever we make arrangements to donate to the food bank, Andre always jokes that it is the needy helping the needy. Luckily, we aren’t needy in the food department, being able in land and body and knowledge to grow so much of it for ourselves. Even when we didn’t have so much space, we were able to do this for ourselves…I’m not sure what our food status would have been otherwise. Even with the few staples I go to the store for, a bag or two full of butter, bulk grains and beans and flours, coffee, cream, olive and coconut oil, fruit in the winter, some almond milk, sometimes some cheese–I walk away with a price tag that always surprises me. Food is expensive, especially nourishing food from good sources. And I know of how to save money (and resources) on these things, Azure Standard, and I know how to cook, and knowledge goes such a long way when we are talking about poverty and hunger.
So a group of Oregon bloggers have joined together to raise money for the Oregon Food Bank, I urge all of you to contribute to this campaign by clicking on the logo here to go to the OFB donation page (just write “blog for food” in the tribute section), as these food banks are helping a lot of our community members right now, and if we help to keep them well stocked, they will continue to be a great source of help come what may this year. But, and I don’t really have anything solid here, more like just a calling to arms, great help can also be spread through spreading information. This is more difficult than it sounds, I know. But helping our communities gain knowledge about how to have more control of our food security and more knowledge as to how this is integrally tied to the control we have over our own health..this would help us become a community that has even more assets to fight these huge issues of hunger, poverty, and health care.
You can always take food itself too. If you would prefer to donate food rather than money, we were given this information as well pertaining to this particular campaign: Sarah Pederson from Saraveza has generously offered her place as a food drop off site for the campaign. So if people would rather donate canned goods than cash, direct them to Saraveza! (http://saraveza.com/) Saraveza is located at 1004 N. Killingsworth, PDX 503-206-4252. Here in the valley, contact Tricia Harrop of YCAP at Ext. 124 – 503-883-4170 for information on how to donate in Yamhill County.
For us, we always feel blessed when we have fresh produce to donate. We have to provide for the business and our family first, and because of those larger needs, the first few years we donated little in comparison to what we were growing. Our hope is that with improved yields we can reach a point of donating every week. And this is something for everyone with means to consider…planting just a little extra in your garden can provide you with a way to help fight hunger with fresh, nourishing food. For those in need, a little from those of us who feel our needs our met, goes a long way.
1 comment February 4, 2009
