Mycoremediation

I've been researching mycoremediation lately and I finally started reading a book that a friend recommended a few years ago (Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World), both of which have pointed me in the direction of Paul Stamets. He is the author of the book and a huge proponent of mycoremdiation. When our house was getting set up somehow some gasoline was spilled in the yard. I planted a white cedar in the front yard last fall and the soil smelled really strong of gas. As I filled the hole back in I had to smell each handful of dirt to see if it was contaminated. I didn't really know what to do about it except send the white cedar positive energy, and to spread sawdust around the affected area. As it turns out, oyster mushroom mycelia and straw would have been a better choice. I will be ordering the mycelia from Paul Stamets's website, Fungi Perfecti at www.fungi.com sometime in the near future. Enjoy this Ted talk from Paul. It is fascinating!

Great News

My husband gave me the okay for a beehive! He had been nervous to add a beehive to the minifarm because black bears live in the area and he does not want them getting used to coming here for food. Plus it would be horrible if they destroyed a hive. A colleague's beehives were attacked by a bear in the middle of Duluth! In my internet research I learned that electric fences are the best protection, but that nothing is foolproof. Bears are smart and strong. One major key to successful deterrence is having the fence up when the bear first encounters the beehive, so that means acquiring an electric fence before acquiring the bees. I haven't been shopping much for either yet, but I have been looking at top bar bee hives. Top bar bee hives are an improvement upon the typical white boxes that many beekeepers use, and they are a more natural option. They are trough-like in shape and feature a hinged or removable lid. Removable bars are lined up along the width of the top of the trough. Bees will then make their own honeycombs on each bar instead of using the artificial honeycombs attached to the frames of some of the typical white boxes. Creation of wax is actually an elimination process for bees, so it is good for them. They are exuding waste from their bodies. It does also eat up some energy and time, which is why commercial beekeepers use artificial honeycomb to get the maximum amount of honey. I am planning to buy a handmade top bar hive from Kenny at www.kenny61.wordpress.com.
I will purchase a "nuc" (nucleus colony--a queen and a few of her daughters) of Minnesota Hygienic bees. Minnesota Hygienic bees were bred by the University of Minnesota to be "hygienic"--that is, to groom varroa mites off of their larvae. Russian honeybees also exhibit this behavior and can stand the cold temperatures of northern Minnesota.
I accidentally ordered a Forsythia that is only hardy to zone 6. I live in zone 4, so I will need to plant it close to the house and give it a southern exposure. I will mulch it heavily in the fall too, and hope for the best. It is already starting to come to life in my kitchen.

permaculture

I never mentioned what happened after that emergency harvest. So what happened was most of those lush, beautiful plants turned brown and withered. We put tarps on some plants but it didn't do much good. I dug up the rosemary, lavender, and two of the Thai basils and brought them inside. The rosemary and lavender have been thriving in a large, south-facing window. The Thai basil is still alive but it hasn't grown anything new as far as I can tell. I still have winter squash in my kitchen. And potatoes. Unfortunately, many of the tomatoes and peppers ended up in the compost. The parsley, thyme, leeks, potatoes (below ground), oregano, sorrel, cabbage, kale, and peas all did really well after the temperature dipped into the twenties a few nights in a row. I planted some fall crops by direct seeding, including lettuce, radishes, kale, kohlrabi, peas, cilantro, and spinach. It was too late and none of them got very big. Some animal ate the pea plants, and the grasshoppers got some of the other stuff. The spinach tasted incredible. I ate about 7 leaves of it before it froze to death but it was the best spinach I've ever tasted. Unfortunately, I don't recall the variety and I think I composted the seed package. Oh, here's something interesting: the snapdragons were the last to die! They were so hardy for some reason. The cilantro actually lasted longer and survived lower temperatures than I expected, too.

I am starting to think about the back yard and the plants I want there and how to arrange them. I want it to look nice rather than simply utilitarian, which is how last year's garden looked and felt. I didn't have the time or energy to map things out beforehand, and the tracks left by the tiller were too compacted for easy digging when I began to transplant crops to the garden, so I ended up placing them somewhat randomly from the outside in. I liked the potato spiral, though. I replanted it with onions and garlic as I dug up the potatoes, kept the hill and covered it with the straw mulch.

I debated about what to do with the dead plants: whether to leave them where they were and recycle the nutrients back into the soil or pull them all up to prevent the spread of disease and harboring of insect pests. 
I decided to pull them all up and compost them. I figured it was safer to do that, especially since I could still recycle them back into the soil as compost, which is a more beneficial form anyway. One thing I should have done and really, really regret not doing is plant a cover crop. That soil is naked out there (except for the snow), and cover crops are good for erosion control and for replenishing the soil after it was inhabited by heavy feeders like broccoli and tomatoes. Maybe there will be time for cover crops in the spring.

Today I find myself in the strange and wonderful position of having a well-paying garden job in January in northern Minnesota, one that requires me to grow food and medicine on a 1/4 acre demonstration garden, teach workshops, and write a blog about it! I am so blessed and grateful to have that! What I've noticed, though, is my need for an outlet for my spiritual feelings. My employer is an Ojibwe reservation, and there is a spiritual element to my job and to the Ojibwe approach to farming. I respect that spirituality and I want to learn more about it, but it isn't mine and I don't feel comfortable expressing my own spiritual feelings in the arena of my job blog or in the workshops to come. So I'm resurrecting this blog. I guess I abandoned it in the first place since I felt like a failure for not making a living off my farm in the first chaotic year. I'm realizing that's not the point anyway. I would want to have Magic Summer Minifarm in my back yard no matter what.
 

a new direction

So our produce sales at the Fall Feast were underwhelming, but it was a fun experience anyway. I discovered that what my husband lacks in patience for gardening, he makes up for in salesmanship. He did a great job engaging customers.
I just started a new job that I really like and that will likely take up a great deal of my time and energy for gardening, but nevertheless I intend to expand Magic Summer Minifarm this year. I will have a new area tilled that is about the same size as the existing garden bed. This new area is beyond the shadow of the tall pines that begins to shade half the garden by 3 in the late summer. I have ordered an abundance of seeds and plants from Companion Plants, an amazing resource for medicinal, native, culinary, and ceremonial use plants ( www.companionplants.com ) located in my home state of Ohio. I plan to turn the existing garden bed into a perennial bed and use the new one for annuals and fruit bushes. I will put the raspberries closest to the edge of the yard, where there is a forest full of deer, to act as a living fence in case I don't get around to putting up a fence right away. I got lucky last year so maybe I shouldn't push it with the deer any longer than I have to. I must say, though, that I have 2 plants in the yard that are typically considered "deer candy": an apple tree and a white cedar. I did try that new product "Repellex", which is a systemic capsaicin for ornamental plants, on the white cedar, but the apple tree has no such protection. Both plants, as far as I can tell, have not been touched by the deer at all. It probably helps to have neighbors that hunt.

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.