Bloom and Grow
The last of the blueberry blossoms.
It is raining today; not that I will complain after two weeks of pure sun. Sunshine has such a beautiful way of lifting the spirits, doesn’t it? I could definitely tell the difference in my outlook yesterday when the drizzle started a day earlier than I expected. I was ready for the rain today and had planned for some time on the computer. It is much easier to sit at a computer when it is raining.
Blossoms on last year’s kale
We are two months into spring and the garden is growing. Yes, I did have the song Edelweiss stuck in my head last week. Everything is blooming and growing. The blueberries are finishing up with their final blossoms and setting some nice berries. We took out the last of the kale last week, in full bloom, along with the crimson clover cover crop. The beds are all prepped for planting and we are getting closer to the end of the main planting time. (Planting does continue all summer into fall, but at a much less intense pace.) This is what is planted and growing in the garden so far: garlic, fava beans, peas, carrots, beets, lettuce, fennel, endive, cabbage, kohlrabi, scallions, chard, kale, mizuna, bok choi, spinach, parsley, onions, leeks, potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini and some other summer and winter squash (the last four went in just this weekend). Hopefully, by the end of the week, the rest of the squash will go in, along with more lettuce, some dry beans and the first snap beans.
Crimson clover
Though I picked the first handful of peas this weekend, I am expecting the harvest season to start the first full week of June. A little later than I had planned for, but certainly not unusual. There are a few reasons for a later start. First, some of the early seeds I started did not do well and I had to start them over again. I start them in the basement, under lights, and though I followed my usual protocol, I don’t think I let them dry out enough between waterings and they suffered from damping off disease. Then, we had record rainfall in March, which slowed down bed preparations some, though not as much as you might expect.
A pea blossom
The final reason for a later start is that my time and attention have been diverted some this spring. We have been fixing up our house to get it in shape to sell. Steven and I have been dreaming, thinking, and looking for a few years for a larger piece of property that we could farm full time together. Though our little 1.25 acres has lots of potential for production, it is not enough to financially sustain us. Farming full time, as a sole source of income, is quite a scary thought, given how few small family farms survive without some off-farm income. After much discussion, we have decided the reward is worth the risk. If we were to wait until Steven retired, our bodies would be too old to do all the work needed. We have found a few properties with possibility and even made an offer on one three or four weeks ago, though it didn’t work out. We are still looking, so if you hear of some land with farming potential, let us know. Even if we do find something, we will still have this season here, or at least, most of it, and I am looking forward to what it will bring.
We’ll see where this dream takes us.
The first of the peas…yes, I ate it.
Winter 2012
Beautiful winter sun
Can you believe this is January in Portland? I took this picture today. We do get these cold, sunny days, but it sure seems like more of our winter days are dark and cloudy. It has been remarkably dry so far this winter, which worries me a bit. There is no scientific data to back up my worries, it is more like karma: we are going to get some 35 inches of rain each year. Will come in winter like it should or we will get it later, in spring and summer when I want the ground to dry out so I can plant? But really, it is too early to worry. The rains will come when they come (next week?) and there will be some opening between the showers to get everything planted.
Soaking up the sun
The girls have been free ranging since mid-November now. On the really cold days, they tend to hang out near our front door, under some heavenly bamboo next to the garage. It is one of the warmer places on a cold day, and it offers protection. I like to be able to look out the front windows and see them there, though I like it even better when I see them scratching around in the vegetable beds. On a sad note, there will be no employee of the year this year. Last year’s winner, Medium Girl, died in December. The week before she died, she was out working with me as I finished cleaning up the bean beds. She was snapping up worms, slugs and other bugs right and left. She even ate two little frogs and it takes some time for a chicken to eat a frog. I am not sure why she died, but I suspect she just wore out. Out of respect, I canceled this year’s award.
The garlic is showing up.
The work for 2012 has started. I attended the North Willamette Horticultural Society Meeting: Organic Crops Section on Tuesday this week. There were some interesting presentations. One fellow from Canada presented some research on the benefits of using compost on berries. He was preaching to the choir, but I like seeing the research that validates organic methods. I have a 10 week class starting tomorrow on the business side of farming and The Small Farms conference in February. Lots of good things to learn.
A foggy late afternoon in December: more to come?
Planning is underway. I welcome your feedback on vegetables and varieties that you especially liked or ones that you could do without. Planning will be followed by seed ordering, reading and research, and getting everything cleaned up to start seeds in February. Are there ever enough hours in a day? Even in the dead of winter, time flies.
End of the Season Stats
Some 2011 QuickBooks reports
The 2011 season really is finished now, with the last delivery about a week and a half ago. It has been a good season.
I am a detail person. I have always liked things like maps and charts and math class at school. So, it is no surprise that one of the things I like about QuickBooks are the reports you can generate. I’m sure I am not using it to its potential, but I can get some interesting data without much effort at all. So, via my record keeping in QuickBooks, I have the following statistics from the 2011 season:
Lovely tomatoes
I delivered produce to 78 different customers this season.
Sales increased by almost 24% over last year. (Disclaimer: percentage increase can be high when the numbers are low!)
Tomatoes brought in the highest percentage of sales, at 11.8%, followed by lettuce at 9.7%, peas (snow and snap) at 7.1%, beans (snap) at 6.9%, and kale at 6.2%.
I sold 285.5 pounds of carrots…more weight than any other vegetable, unless you count all the varieties of winter squash together (I put pumpkins in this category, too), which totaled 651.5 pounds.
Sage had the least weight sold, at 1 oz., since I never put it on the list and only put it in one bag.
476 zucchini left June’s Corner Garden, along with 375 garlic scapes (75 bunches of 5), and 190 leeks, but only 16 lemon cucumbers got out (they did not have a good year).
A tropical vacation? Nope, just some of the left over kale.
I figured it up again: all of this and more came from 1/3 acre, which in 2011 was 64% vegetables, 16% fruits, and 20% not producing this year. (In the future, it will be pretty close to half fruits and half vegetables.)
Whew! There is a lot of information in these reports that will help me with planning for 2012, in January.
Until then, I still have a few beds left to cover for winter, now just with leaves or compost. Then it will be mostly inside until February; reading, researching, planning and preparing for next year. I can let the girls out to free range some now. You’d be amazed at how well they can find big earthworms in the wet grass. They love scratching through the leaf and compost covered beds, too, where I am always hoping they will find and eat the slugs and slug eggs. I do have to be careful they don’t scratch up the cover crop that isn’t quite established yet and they don’t get to the left over kale before we do. And, of course, they only get to free range as long as they don’t cross the road!
With the close of the season, I would like to say thank you to all my customers for making 2011 a great season at June’s Corner Garden.
A free ranging Dominique, looking for something good to eat
End of the Season
The garden is just about ready for winter; that's cover crop in the first few beds.
The end of the season is here. Yesterday was the last Thursday delivery. Monday will be the very last delivery of the season. It took me a long time to decide when to end the season. I have this romantic notion that our Thanksgiving dinners should be based on our local harvest, with the emphasis on what we are harvesting right now, more than what may have been preserved for winter. So, of course, I would like to deliver the week of Thanksgiving. The reality is, that can be pretty hard to do. There is a reason why many CSA farms and farmers’ markets end this time of year.
The Brussels' Sprouts still need to be planted earlier; they didn't quite make it to maturity.
As I have mentioned in recent posts, plants stop actively growing when we get down to about 10 hours of daylight. That means, most everything that will be harvested for Thanksgiving has to be ready to go now; but the longer crops sit in the field, the more chance there is for damage to occur. On a large farm, this can be managed. There is enough space to get fall and winter crops in the ground early enough to mature, and enough room to overplant, expecting to cull much more than in the summer months. In a small space, it is harder, though not impossible. I have to get spring and early summer crops out quicker, to use the same space for fall crops. Then, with more pest and weather damage, I don’t have as much to choose from and the quantities to sell are smaller.
After talking about this with a neighboring farmer, I have finally decided to give up on my romantic ideal. Until I have more room to grow, I will plan for the season to end at the end of October.
Aquadulce fava bean seed
As for what is happening in the garden this week, we did have a another frost Wednesday morning. This time, it was a good one, maybe enough to start to sweetening up what is left in the beds. I started cleaning out the squash field, to get it ready to be covered by oak leaves for the winter. I am a bit late, but I will try to get the fava beans planted today (I just finished harvesting the lettuce yesterday in the bed where I will plant them). I have a new variety to try out for next year. I will plant the Casine favas I had this year again, but I will also plant Aquadulce. I am already looking forward to trying out the new beans!
First Frost
Can you see the light, spotty frost on the blueberry field?
We had our first frost out here, at least sort of a first frost, on Wednesday morning. It was very, very light and spotty. It didn’t kill the beans, peppers or squash plants that were still growing, but I will still count it. I was actually hoping for a bit more, since I had gotten ready for this one. On Monday night, I cut down most of the hot pepper plants that were still out in the garden and took them in so I could dry the peppers. I didn’t get to the squash until Tuesday, when I brought all the ripe ones in. I was hoping we would get another frost on Thursday morning, but no luck. It was pretty cold, though.
Will the kale sweeten up a bit?
I still would like to see a few frosts soon, not only because I have the garden ready for it, but because I have always heard that crops get sweeter after a frost. I read in Steve Solomon’s book, Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, that to survive winter weather, plants increase the sugar in their cells with frosts, to act as a sort of anti-freeze. They also pump water out of their cells, when it gets close to freezing, so when they do freeze, they won’t burst their cell walls. So, yes, they do get sweeter, but they also can get drier and tougher. How much sweeter and how much tougher? I don’t know yet. Most years, we’ve eaten everything in the garden before a good frost comes, so I haven’t tasted the difference a frost makes. Maybe this year? It looks like next week there are some clear days with cool nights forecast: a chance for another frost.
Shorter Days
How much more will the beets grow?
My work days are getting a little shorter. Earlier in the summer, I could get up by 5 am, get outside to work right away and stay out working until 7pm or later, even. Not anymore. I really noticed the morning light yesterday, when I wanted to get out to harvest for the day’s deliveries. I did go outside a little after 7 am, but even by 7:30, I didn’t feel like I had enough light to see really well (at least, not to see the things I was looking for, like flaws on the kale). My day is now ending by 6 or 6:30 pm, when the girls are ready to go in.
This baby slug got a free trip to the slug jar
The vegetables notice the shorter days, too. They are getting closer to the day when they will stop growing at all and just hold. I am still trying to figure out where that point is. I read on a seed catalog website that 10 hours of daylight is the magic number for plant growth. At less than 10 hours, vegetables stop their active growth and pretty much just hold steady. I did a little search and found out the first week of November is when we get to about 10 hours of daylight (or at least about 10 hours between sunrise and sunset). However, just because the plants stop growing doesn’t mean the pests stop eating. The slugs and larva are out feeding on the plants and, unfortunately, the plants can no longer outgrow their damage. It is a balancing act for me, to figure out how long I can keep plants in the field to grow a bit more, but not get too much pest damage. The act starts much earlier in the summer, though, since I also have to make sure the plants are out in the field soon enough to be mature by the time we get to 10 hours of daylight. Each year I get a little closer to that sweet spot.
Just the hot peppers are left in the orchard field
In the shorter days this week, we got a little more of the garden ready for winter. We cleared out the orchard field of the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant and Steven planted the cover crop there. I planted the garlic for next year and will finish up tucking in that bed with a layer of compost today. Other activity in the garden had nothing to do with us, but some visitors: deer. I have been noticing more signs of their presence this month: footprints in the beds we have gotten ready for winter and nibbling on the fall crops (chard and kale in particular). I am not sure what it means, but they have been in our garden more this year than ever before.
I guess deer like Swiss chard
Borrow a Cup of Sugar?
The Canadice grapes
It is official now. I heard it on OPB earlier and read it in the Oregonian today: grapes are not as sweet this year in Oregon. For the record, I still think the grapes we are harvesting taste good. They are just not as fully sweet as they have been in other years. I will keep the grapes on the vine as long as possible, but I don’t know that there is much more I can do at this point to make them sweeten up. I have to admit, I don’t do a lot with our grapes. I kind of take the hands-off approach. Sure, I prune them in February and sometimes Steven or I will cut them back in the summer so we can get to them, but basically, we let them go and they do pretty well on their own. These last two years are making me think I am going to have to get a little more involved in the process and give those grapes a some direction for how I want them to grow. I have also been thinking about taking out a couple varieties and replacing them with more Canadice and another, yet to be determined, seedless variety. That would be another good project for winter!
Chesnok Red garlic cleaned up
In other garden news, I used some of the rainy days in the past week or two to trim and clean up the garlic. I’ll pick out the best heads to use for seed and am planing to plant next week, if we get the dry days that are forecast. I am excited to be using my own garlic for seed.
Cleaning up the garlic gave me some table space to start bringing in the winter squash, as it ripens up. I have brought in all the Rogue vif d’Etampes, Galeux d’Eysines and miniature pumpkins. Since we don’t have any forecasts for frost yet and some of the vines are still kicking, I’ll leave the other squash out a bit longer. It is good to know I have a space for them when I need to bring them in.
Galeux d'Eysines squash and Rogue vif d'Etampes pumpkins
Finally, the cover crop we planted a few weeks ago is getting a good start. We got it in just before some rain and it has been warm enough for good germination. Steven is taking next week off work, so I may get a little extra help from him to get some more cover crop planted.
