emergency harvest

Yesterday afternoon I harvested almost everything I could before the frost hit last night. I was told last year by a mentor farmer that one shouldn't harvest a green tomato unless it has at least a small splash of color, or else it won't ripen well. I couldn't let all those perfect, beautiful tomatoes go to waste, though. I picked most of the blemish-free green tomatoes in the garden. I also picked all the remaining squash (summer and winter), basil, thyme, sage, patchouli, lavender, oregano, cosmos, snapdragons, peppers, tomatillos, and cucumbers. I have yet to harvest many potatoes. They are still in the ground, but I think they will be okay as long as I harvest them in the next few days. As the hail rained down on me I saw little cilantro sprouts peeking out of the ground where I seeded them a month or so ago. I hope they survived. I haven't been to the garden yet today to survey the damage. I said goodbye to the fair weather plants last night just in case ("See you again next year, if not tomorrow").
I will be participating in a farmers' market next week. On Thursday, September 22 I will be at Fond du Lac reservation's Gitigaan Fall Feast selling squash, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, tomatillos, dried herbs, potted sweet grass, catmint-stuffed cat toys, and possibly some flower bunches. I don't know if anyone in the area reads this blog yet but if so the Gitigaan Fall Feast is at 5pm at the Cloquet Community Center/Tribal Center, 1720 Big Lake Rd.

harvest time is approaching

Going into this growing season I was so excited to be growing an abundance of vegetables and herbs for sale, but as the season has progressed it has become clear to me that my lack of planning has mostly ruined the hope of growing much more than what my husband and I will eat this year. It has been a learning experience, and it has prepared me for a much more productive and abundant season next year. Now I know what I did wrong and what I can do better, and I would really love to be able to create a small CSA next year.
The garden is still looking great, and I have begun to harvest things like cabbage, fingerling potatoes, basil, thyme, oregano, rosemary, cucumbers, zucchini, and broccoli. The tomato plants are lush and healthy, and many are loaded with perfect, beautiful  (but still green!) fruits. I have eaten maybe 3 ripe cherry tomatoes.
Last week I planted a cold-weather succession of kale, radishes, turnips, kohlrabi, bok choy, spinach, collards, lettuce, salad mix, and peas, along with the rest of the gladiolas I found in the garden center's dumpster. They are already sprouting! There is a harvest festival with a farmers' market next month on the reservation and I plan to participate in that since I will most likely have quite a few tomatoes, squash, herbs, and potatoes on my hands. So it's possible I will still make some money on my efforts this year. Really it doesn't matter that much to me because I love farming and I would do it for free.
Grasshoppers have descended upon the garden  en masse. Practically everywhere I step in the garden, a cloud of grasshoppers jumps out of my way. They don't seem to be doing much damage to the crops, though. They have nibbled a bit on my leeks and they ravaged all of my mint and maybe a couple of parsley plants that had been suffocated by weeds anyway, but they have mostly avoided the tomatoes, squash, peas, potatoes, and basil, which are the plants that make up the bulk of the garden. Cabbage loopers have made swiss cheese of my cabbage plants, but a few heads survived so we shredded one and put it on our lamb tacos. I'm not a huge cabbage fan anyway, so I let the cabbage serve as a trap crop to keep the cabbage loopers, who will eat any plant in the Brassica family, away from the brassicas I like better, like kale, broccoli, cauliflower, and kohlrabi.
I sort of dropped the ball when it came to the application of 501, the biodynamic preparation made of ground quartz which is sprayed on the leaves of growing crops to facilitate their absorption and utilization of sunlight. I didn't realize that it is supposed to be sprayed when the plants are still young and small, and I had been putting it off until I could remove more weeds from the garden (the weeds got pretty bad, but since my hours have been cut back at work I have been spending a lot more time in the garden and cleaning it up). So I have decided to wait until the fall succession plants are a bit larger and then I will spray the whole garden. The instructions say to spray crops when they have about 3 true leaves. The true leaves are the ones that look like the leaves of the mature plant and do not include the cotyledons. Cotyledons are the first "leaves" to appear when a seed sprouts--some plants have one and some have two, depending on the species. The instructions also say that 501 can be applied when insects or disease have ravaged a leaf crop, and that it will help the plant heal itself. Unfortunately I didn't read that part until last week, so I guess my cabbage plants have suffered unnecessarily.
Oh yeah, one successful experiment I tried this summer was with alternative potato hilling materials. Potatoes are typically grown in hills, and as they grow taller, you can mound the dirt higher and cover up more of the plant to facilitate the growth of more potatoes. Their above-ground parts can be easily converted to below-ground, potato-making parts just by covering them up. When I planted the potatoes, I covered them with 6-inch hills. But I wasn't sure I would have enough topsoil to make the hills larger with dirt, so I purchased 4 bales of straw and covered all the potato plants with a few inches of the straw. Then, when the weeds were getting so crazy, I started piling them on top of the potato plants instead of hauling them to the compost pile. I tried to only do this in the earlier part of the day, and on dry days, so that the weeds would dry out instead of rotting and creating disease-friendly conditions. Also, I only used weeds that had not yet gone to seed, since weed seeds are the last things I want to put on the crops. This method has worked great, and it has helped retain water in the sandy soil of the garden.

things are looking great!

This has been a really busy time for me between working far away from home and getting married but fortunately the weather has been cooperating marvelously and doing most of the work for me.  My biggest concern right now is hoeing all the grass before it goes to seed. I was lucky not to have many weeds in the spring, but grass and other hot-weather weeds are popping up all over now. Today I will be harvesting some fingerling potatoes to see how they are coming along.
I liberated a large amount of flower bulbs from a garden center dumpster, many still very much alive and free of visible symptoms of pests or disease. I will plant those today or soon, along with the carrots and radishes I mentioned in an earlier blog and never actually planted. As it turned out, I haven't even used up the little space I was allotted. It's nearly full, but I definitely still have room to plant turnips, spinach, lettuce, radishes, and carrots (though it might be a little too late for that last one). Oh yeah, peas too.

So I finally have some crops in the ground! As of this evening, I have planted oregano, parsley, dill, fennel, thyme, potatoes, beets, Swiss chard, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, winter squash, peppers, tomatoes, basil, and a variety of flowers. I also spent an hour stirring the horn manure in my boyfriend's grandparents' driveway, which I later sprayed on the garden with a pine branch from the yard. It feels really good to finally have this started, and I actually don't care that much how productive the farm is this year as long as I have the opportunity to try it out. Well, that's not entirely true. Of course I want all of the plants to thrive and develop into robust, healthy, delicious beings. But I am willing to adapt and accept a little failure. Speaking of which, somebody (some bunny?) has eaten most of the broccoli already! I received a generous donation of Russian banana potatoes from Dr. Hans Aas, owner of Lakewood Berry Farm and my part-time employer. I'm hoping to make some money on those and on some cut flowers, and whatever is left will feed us in the late summer and fall. The space is small, water could prove difficult to deliver, and there will probably not be a fence this year. I am just happy to have the space to try this out.

At other folks' farms I had felt anxious about working fast enough. I tend to work a little slow, taking care to put plant starts in a good spot and pack it in well, but as I was told by an employer last year: “our time isn't valued so we have to work quickly.” I was glad to not have to worry about that this year...until the mosquitos started biting. My help evaporated immediately and I planted as quickly as I could to finish the job and get away from those merciless jerks.

We are getting a good amount of rain lately so I'm putting off coming up with a solution to the water dilemma. I'm considering a tough love type situation, where I don't baby the crops and see what happens. 

Things are changing so fast with the farm. Today I'm moving for the first of 3 times in the next 3 months or so. I still don't know if I'll have access to water, so I may end up fashioning a water tank out of a rubbermade container or trash can so that I can ensure my crops won't dry up. The timing on this stuff is terrible but I will make it work somehow, and I'm sure I'll be able to harvest a good amount of stuff this year, and that next year will be a lot better since i'll be able to start sooner and be more established, I won't be moving anymore, and will either work much closer to home or will not have another job to eat away at my free time. I have winter squash and rainbow chard sitting in my car as I type this, waiting to get transplanted in their new home. I also have some horn manure in there, which I will be applying either today or tomorrow.

ch-ch-ch-changes

Some interesting developments have transpired in the last two weeks. I now have access to a large chunk of land in Cloquet, Minnesota, which is about 20 miles from Duluth and it is where I plan to be living within the next 2 months. I have decided not to farm at Duluth Community Farm because it is so far from my new house and because the organizers have asked for, in my opinion, too much of my profits. I have nothing against them. I understand that this is the first year and they are just getting started with the program and they are lacking funds, but for me a major part of farming on my own is keeping the money I work so hard to earn.

I still haven't planted anything yet, so that is not a problem. The new place will still have to be tilled and it's possible the soil isn't as good and that the farmers' markets I might end up selling at might not have the visibility that the one at Duluth Community Farm will have, but farming in Cloquet means I get to spend more time with my boyfriend (and hopefully get more help from him) and it means we can grow perennial crops and benefit from our own soil-building efforts, and that we can start right away at making the land productive. A fellow gardener has offered us such treasures as weed-blocking fabric, a rain barrel, and a worm compost bin. We found horsetail and raspberries on the land.

It's a little scary to be doing this more or less by myself but it's also exhilarating. Something similar happened to me last year and the best outcome possible was the result. I started the season working for farm managers who didn't value my hard work and I ended up leaving for another farm where I was treated and compensated much better. Now that I find myself in limbo again, I am comforted by the fact that I found the right place to be last year, and I trust my instincts.

I will post more information as I figure it out, and I will let you know in which farmers' markets I will participate once I know. Once that gets started, I will post my produce availability each week.

My horn manure has arrived! I ordered two of the biodynamic preparations from the Josephine Porter Institute in Pennsylvania. I got 500, which is composted, well-formed cow manure (the kind that results from a grass diet) stuffed into the horn of a mature cow who has given birth several times over her lifetime, which is buried in the ground over winter; and I also purchased 501, which is ground quartz stuffed into a cow horn and buried in the ground over summer. Biodynamic agriculture is pretty esoteric, and if you can believe it, some of the other preparations (there are a total of 9) are way stranger and more gross. Check it out for yourself at www.biodynamics.com (well, not much info there, try wikipedia I guess).

I first became interested in biodynamics when I read the book “Secrets of the Soil” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. The authors describe a “spiritual science” developed by Austrian clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner in 1924 in response to requests from European farmers for a solution to their farming woes and worries about the future of European agriculture. Biodynamics are (to me) essentially an improvement upon organic agriculture by adding a spiritual element to more fully connect the farmer to her crops, land, and self. I have serious problems with some of the things Rudolf Steiner believed and talked about, including some things that were ridiculously racist and offensive (check out www.waldorfwatch.com for specific examples) but I believe in the power of his preparations to help heal the earth and produce quality foods.

Six of the biodynamic preparations are meant to be added to compost in order to make it more nutritious. As this is my first season as an independent farmer and I've only lived in Minnesota for a little over 2 months, I don't have any compost, so I'm skipping that part this year. The last preparation, 508, is a tea made of horsetail (Equisetum arvense) that is used to prevent fungal infection and help plants cope better with wet conditions. I didn't purchase that one because horsetail grows all over the place up here and I can harvest it for free. 500, the horn manure, is stirred into water alternating clockwise and counterclockwise for one hour and then applied in the spring to freshly plowed land. It encourages the growth of beneficial microorganisms and earthworms, and helps make elemental nutrients more available for use by plants. In the summer I will apply 501 to the plants when they are growing big and strong. 501 is stirred into water in the same way that 500 is and then applied as a foliar feed that is intended to increase the plants' capacity to absorb light.

Now you know that I believe in some pretty wacky stuff. Honestly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. But what you can take away from this is that I really care about producing healthy food and soil, and that my heart is fully in this.

I'm so excited to finally have a chance to try my hand at farming on my own. I worked on 3 different farms last year, and while those experiences were amazing and I learned so much, I couldn't help but wish I had my own land to farm on. I spent the winter thinking about how to make that happen while also trying to figure out in which state I would be living. My first choice (Athens, Georgia) fell through so we ended up moving to my boyfriend's first choice (Duluth, Minnesota). I bought the seeds that caught my eye, mostly organic ones but some conventional too. Now I'm not quite sure they'll all fit on a quarter acre, but I'm going to try some intensive farming techniques to increase the productivity of the small space allotted to me. One example of this is planting radishes with carrots, since the radishes develop relatively quickly and provide shade under which fewer weeds can grow, and carrots require a much longer time to grow and their leaves are so thin and dainty they can have a hard time getting started with so much competition from weeds. I'm toying with the idea of an onion/marigold border too, since both plants are good pest repellents.

It feels way too late in the season to be admitting this, but I have nothing in the ground yet! I still haven't seen the exact plot of land that will be Magic Summer Minifarm this season. I have some plants started, crowding out the window sills of my tiny house. I am waiting for Duluth Community Farm to put up a deer fence and point out my plot to me. Memorial Day weekend is typically the last frost date this far north, so I'm hoping to get most of my stuff planted in the first week of June. Let's pray for a long summer. No, make it a magically long summer.

My Prayer For the Farm:

May we provide plenty of nutritious food to eat and beautiful flowers to decorate our spaces and events. May the land heal itself with our commitment to sustainability through low-impact organic and biodynamic practices. May we witness the miracle of beings who turn sun and rain and soil into delicious food. May our hearts open ever more as our spiritual wisdom deepens. May our souls be nourished with the knowledge that we are doing a good thing for ourselves and the world.