Moving into summer - the garden's bounty

The busy of the growing season continues here on the farm.

The headline event for this week was our wonderful neighbor, Kyle Rohr, bringing his tractor and brushhog out to mow the farm.  Normally we would bale the hay, but his baler wasn't working and we didn't want to mess with finding someone else, so he agreed to just mow it instead.  The farm looks so much nicer with all the growth knocked back AND we can confirm to the county that we are continuing to follow our plan to prevent the lespedeza from multiplying. 


The garden has started to really produce now.  We dug all our potatoes this week - yukon gold, red pontiac and white nordland (I think) - and came away with about 100# of spuds.  It isn't our best harvest, but it also isn't our worst.  We only planted 3 beds this year (we've been planting 6) so not a bad showing all in all.  We're also harvesting blackberries, currants, goji berries and our first ripe peaches!  The peach tree we planted way back in 2012 is completely loaded with fruit this year.  It is also infested with moth larvae.  Its so disappointing to see such beautiful peaches and know that almost all of them have worms in them.  Then, tonight, I also saw June Bugs munching away in big clusters on the ripe fruit.  Sigh.  I did some research on the moths and I think next year I'll put up some sticky pheromone traps to see if I can limit their damage.  I'm also picking up all the dropped and caterpillar infested fruit to feed to the chickens.  If I can't enjoy the peaches, at least I can enjoy the eggs!  I've read about a molasses trap for june bugs but haven't tried it yet.  Maybe I'll give that a whirl this week.  Learning how to manage not just an organic orchard, but a no spray orchard is a priority for the next couple of years.

First squash, blackberries and a peach!

bed #1 potato harvest air curing

The same neighbor who mowed for us has a couple of piles of cow manure that we're steadily moving into the lower garden.  We picked up 2 trucks full yesterday and got one of those unloaded.  There were SOOOOOO MANY GRUBS!  I swear that every shovel had 2 or 3 grubs in it.  We collected all the ones we found as we unloaded and dumped them in with the chickens.  They were in heaven!  And, yes, between fruit, scraps and grubs our chickens are totally spoiled. 

scoop of manure being dumped into the truck

Chickens going to town on a pile of grubs

A host of other farm stuff got done this week too.  Beds were weeded and mulched, we got 2 loads of cardboard to continue doing sheet mulch in the garden aisles and we harvested SO MUCH SQUASH!  I picked a 5 gallon bucket full on Friday evening and we still had squash left from the last time I picked.  Everything we eat must have squash in it so that we can keep up.  Normally, we would be coming into ripe tomato season too and most of this squash bounty would find its way into vegetable soup that we enjoy all year long.  Our tomatoes are way behind though, so we just have the squash. 

 It was also time for our regular battery maintenance on Saturday morning.  We have to monitor the water levels in all the battery cells to keep them running at their best.  In the summer time we're finding that we need to monitor them every 2 or 3 weeks.  In the winter, it is less often.  We pull each of the white caps off and top off the 3 battery cells underneath with distilled water, then replace the cap and go on to the next cell.  The whole thing takes about 10 minutes.  This time, while we were working, a tiny toad hopped into the ratchet set!  He was too cute not to take a picture.

 Jacob topping off batteries

 A froggy friend visiting our work 

The most amazing thing for this week was that I got to spend all day Saturday on the farm.  There were no errands or functions or anything else to take me away.  It was a solid day of working in the garden, spending time with Jeremy and focusing on doing the work I love to do.  I need more of these days.  It is good for my soul and body to do real work that I can see, to connect with this piece of the earth and to connect with my family. 

A Solstice Reflection

The summer solstice has just passed and the earth has begun its slow tilt back toward the winter solstice.  The days that have been lengthening since Christmas are now shortening again.  The change isn’t pronounced yet – the hottest weather of the year has yet to come and the sun still shines well into the evening – but for those that live in relationship with natural systems it means a subtle but real shift in the year.  The spring rush of growth is done and the trees and other plants have started storing their winter starches and ripening their fruit.  The greens turn from vibrant and light to darker and more deep.  The change isn’t just in the plants though.  

The humans in this system also know that a shift is happening.  The summer has only just begun but for the grower, winter is coming already.  The rush of spring planting and planning is over; the garden is growing; summer crops are getting their legs and setting first fruits while spring staples are fading.  For us, we will celebrate the start of summer with food – creamed peas and new potatoes are the meal that says summer for us and we have eaten it every year that we have had a garden big enough to grow them.  The meal is bittersweet and delicious – a celebration of the start of the harvest season and also a reminder that time is already running out to get food put up.  We are thankful that we don’t have to count only on what we grow for our annual nourishment.  The safety net of modern society and the grocery store make the rush to put up the harvest a little less pressing and stressful.  

I’m finding this year more than many others that the solstice is also bringing an introspection.  At 40, I relate to this time of year more deeply.  I am now at or just past the solstice of my life – I am not getting stronger or taller, I have spent my youthful energy and now am settled into my life’s pattern.  I feel much like the trees with my arms stretched to familiar sunshine enjoying the built up years of work already done while still trying to reach a little farther into the warmth.  It has been a good first 40 years by any measure, but the celebration is bittersweet.  My children will move on from me soon and the house will feel empty.  While I can still do a hard day’s work now, I know the time is coming where I will have to slow down.  My knees and shoulders already tell me that I am not the 25 year old that started this journey so many years ago.  I know my winter is coming even as I celebrate my life’s summer.

I think in some ways this is the greatest gift of living in relationship with the land.  The annual cycles of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death are comforting in their familiarity and humbling in their inevitability.  As I walk with my plants and animals through this cycle, I know that I too am going through the same cycle.  I know my own mortality deeply.  I know that there is no way out of my own physical decline and eventual death just as there is no way to avoid the coming winter.  I will celebrate the summer harvest as I celebrate my own growth to this point and all that it has created.  I will watch as each crop declines just as I will one day not be able to keep the pace I do now.  I will watch the leaves turn in the fall just as my hair and skin will change and are changing already.  I will see the first frost kill the last of the summer crops just as one day I will have to stop doing things I love.  The world will go to sleep under a blanket of snow and I too will sleep one day with only memories to remind those who know me of what I was once like.  

These changes are inevitable and ultimately welcome.  When we focus only on one time of year or of life, then we miss the beauty of the others.  I would not want to have a year without the autumn leaves or the crisp mornings of fall and I don’t think I would consider my life fully lived if I did not get to enjoy the young adulthood of my children and celebrate their life’s spring with them, perhaps offering some wisdom gained from my own spring and summer.  I look forward to the coming of age of the trees I plant this year.  I will walk more slowly under their shade than I do now and I will need help to care for them, but what a wonderful autumn to my life to see their flowers in the spring time and their leaves in the fall.  While I don’t look forward to the cold of winter, I do enjoy the wood stove and the time to rest with family.  I hope that the winter of my life will be filled with the warmth of love and the deep rest of a life well lived.  

As I stand on the farm on this year’s solstice and recognize my own life’s solstice, it is profoundly grounding and real.  I feel immersed in nature’s rhythm and I am enjoying my small part in this great dance.  

Happy solstice day to you all!

Back in the garden! And a little more house...

What an amazing year we have had so far.  We finished the last of the tile in the storage hallway and we got some more outlets operational in the dining room and kitchen.  Then it was time for a break from the house, so we shifted gears to the garden!

Beginning in the spring, we started prepping garden beds.  First, we had to dig all the weeds out of them.  That was a job!  We also moved our asparagus patch from the bed along the hoop house into 3 garden beds in the main garden.  In the process of dividing up the original 12 or so asparagus plants, we ended up with 80 separate crowns!  That filled up our 3 beds and we gave some away.  I love self-reproducing perennials.

 second load of asparagus crowns

We decided to build sides for the beds this year out of some of the live cut boards we weren't using for the house.  We also dug hugel trenches along each bed.  The trenches got filled with old logs and wood chips up to the level of the aisles.  The idea is that the wood will soak up water when it rains and then release it to the garden bed during the dry periods.  I have to say that the strategy worked.  Even though we had drought weather for an extended period this summer, we only watered the garden 3 times and it was still one of the most productive years we've had for the limited crops we planted.

I have to say that it felt absolutely amazing to be back in the garden again.  The smell and feel of dirt, little seeds tucked in and then growing into plants taller than I am, the joy of the first ripe tomato...these are the things that brought us to the farm to begin with.  It is wonderful to be back at it again.

In addition to the usual annuals, we also bought and heeled in 50 root stocks for pears, plums and cherries.  We hope to graft off of our existing fruit trees to these root stocks to increase the orchard.

We set up the chicken coop this spring also and stocked it with 10 laying hens.  We lost some in the summer heat and had to replace them, but overall the girls are keeping us in plenty of eggs.  It is wonderful to have farm fresh eggs again!

The garden harvest was very rewarding.  We didn't plant as much variety as we normally would, but we still canned over a hundred quarts of tomatoes, green beans and soup.  It was another return to normal to get the canners out.  It was also an awesome opportunity to really test out our 6 burner propane stove!  It was an investment, but so worth it to be able to put 2 canners and a large pot of tomatoes on the stove at the same time!

Corn and melons thriving in the garden

harvest waiting for canning

New stove ready to go!

Along the way, we did finish the beetle kill pine wall boards in the living room and dining room.  We still have to wrap up the upstairs landing with them, but we got to check 2 more walls off the list as finished.  I think it turned out really well!

Living room pine wall

We also hired out the building of the kitchen cabinets.  They were delivered and installed last week and they turned out perfectly!  The doors and drawers are made out of the douglas fir we had milled from Colorado and we finished them to match the staircase.  Now we just have to do the counter tops and then we'll have an actual kitchen again.  Woo hoo!

Swales!

We have taken advantage of the nice weather in January to build some swales.  The first one was to both clean out the catchment area at the bottom of our driveway ditch and to redirect water that was flowing across the bottom of our driveway into the road.  It went something like this...

We had created a wide, shallow drainage area after the culvert under out driveway.  This allows any sediment to settle out before the water flows on which keeps valuable topsoil on our property and not in our neighbor's pond.  The catchment area had completely filled up, so we dug out this valuable resource.

Kids and Jeremy filling the wheelbarrow

Then we moved the soil and created a berm/swale along the south side of our driveway to redirect water into the roadside ditch instead of across our driveway.

Catherine by the completed ditch

Jeremy did some additional swale digging this week also.  He dug out the next 2 grape swales behind the hoop house so that we can move our grapes from their temporary bed in the garden up to their permanent homes.  That will free up some valuable planting space in the garden and will give the vines a chance to really grow.  Eventually, this hillside will be a small vineyard.

Swales on contour to catch water for the grapes.

Jeremy's been busy on some other fun projects, but I haven't gotten around to getting pictures of them yet.  It will have to wait for another post.  ;-)

We also have a ton of little herbs and onions growing on the seed stand now.  They're coming along nicely and I'm looking forward to starting this year's cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower soon.  Spring is coming...

New year begins on the farm

I don't care what the calendar says, the year doesn't start on the farm until the first seeds go in the ground.  That started last weekend with the first round of onion seed getting planted in flats for (eventual) transplanting into garden beds.  The first of them are just now starting to poke their heads up.

Onions sprouting!

Currently, I have 5 flats of onions planted and 2 flats of various herbs (thyme, lavender, stevia, yarrow and parsley).  As soon as the seed arrives, I'll have another flat of herbs to plant (oregano, wormwood and a couple of other things).  Here in another couple of weeks I'll start the coles (cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower).  It is wonderful to have veggies growing already!  There's a little bit of spring in our living room now.  :D

Seed stand and lights

On the goat front, we traded bucks with some country neighbors who also have la mancha dairy goats.  The loaner buck, Bucky, has successfully accomplished his mission despite a less than auspicious beginning. 

Upon meeting their new boyfriend, the girls unanimously ask, "Who is this guy?!?!" 

The girls spent most of the first week or so running away from him.  Luckily he was predictably persistent and they eventually decided he wasn't so bad after all.  LOL.  We are expecting baby goats sometime in April or early May.

I don't have pictures of it, but we have been busy recently cutting firewood and getting practice splitting wood.  It has been nice to have some not-quite-frigid days to be out in the winter sunshine.  We hope to do a little lumber milling in the next couple of weeks also.  There's a nice downed oak tree in our woods that looks straight enough to make nice timbers, so we're going to give it a shot. 

In preparation for winter, we assembled a section of our second hoop house over the house slab.  It makes a nice, mostly wind free, space that stays a bit warmer than outside.  It should let us work when it isn't completely frigid out this winter and it will let us leave the work out once we get started.  That will save a ton of time spent uncovering and re-covering the timbers. 

Hoop house over the slab

I have yet to do the final tally of garden produce, but I think ended up close to 1000 lbs.  The bio-char trial definitely proved that the char made for healthier plants and higher yields in our tomato trials.  It didn't seem to make a difference for the dry beans we grew or the cabbage and broccoli.  It also didn't hurt either of those crops, so over all it seems to be a beneficial treatment.  We plant to use the remainder of the char we bought last year on our tomato beds for this year and we will likely purchase more to add to our remaining garden beds.

On tap for this Spring's projects (other than the house, of course) are some re-working of our catchment swales by the garden, creating a mini-chinampas bed for watermelon, finishing the grape swales and planting the grapes and (finally!) getting the front hedge row planted.  It will be another busy year for us, but at this point we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if it wasn't! 

Long time away...

So sorry for the radio silence.  Those of you who connect with us on facebook have gotten regular updates on some of the happenings on the farm, but for those who don't we'll do a quick wrap up!

We're now living with our farm neighbors which is working out great!  Hopefully our next move will be into the house. 

The garden is exploding.  We've harvested close to 350 lbs so far and its still going strong.  It feels wonderful to be canning and dehydrating and fermenting again.  We've put up sauerkraut, naturally fermented pickles, regular pickles, salsa, spaghetti sauce, canned tomatoes, tomato juice, green beans and tons of jelly (blackberry, peach, mulberry and gooseberry). 

Blackberry and peach jelly and peaches

 

Mid summer garden

 

The preliminary results of the biochar trial show a significant increase in yield and plant health in the biochar beds vs. the normal beds.  We'll tally up final results once everything is harvested in the fall.

We hayed our top field and are working steadily to clean out the sumac patches.  The field is also infested with lespedeza which is a noxious week in Kansas.  It is also pretty good goat food!  Which brings us to...

 

Hay in windrows before baling in the top field  

We brought the 3 doelings and the buck (Jack) to the farm at the end of May and all are doing well.  The does are growing well and helping us clear out sumac with relish.  They are truly adorable and Catherine in particular has fallen in love with them.

Our girls (from L to R) - Beldandy, Erd and Skuld

The chickens are also doing well and laying 3-4 eggs a day most days.  They are clearing our north field for us bit by bit in their chicken tractor.  Jeremy built an addition to the tractor that can link up through the gate or not, so they can have double the forage room.  They seem to enjoy it a lot. 

Chicken tractor before wire and paint.  The gentleman in the flannel shirt did most of the building (can't thank him enough!).

 

We are making some progress on the house, although we've found that the busy of the growing season has not left us as much time as we'd like to work on that project (not to mention the two kids, work, sleep thing). 

Jeremy working on joinery

We've been making compost piles with food scraps from Jeremy's job and some of the hay and weeds from the farm.  Its looking promising for having enough finished compost by next spring to put a healthy layer on all the growing beds.  You can never have enough compost!

In the coming weeks we'll be putting in full crops of broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage; second plantings of lettuce and radishes; annual planting of garlic and potato onions and a host of other things.  If I have time, I'll update here.  If not, look for an update when it gets cold in the fall!

Quick update

Its been busy lately, but I have been horrible about remembering to take pictures!  Here are some highlights though:

• planted 62 tomato plants earlier this week. 
• Spread a truck load and a half of compost on other garden beds
• Making compost like mad with scraps from Jeremy's work
• Everything is growing at the farm!

Our list of things for the next 2 weeks includes:

• mulch tomatoes
• install rabbit wire around the garden (we have visitors)
• plant green beans, corn, squash, cucumbers...
• paint chicken tractor
• build goat shelter
• fence goat area

We are also getting ready to move again, so there's no end of busy in sight!  Hope you are all enjoying the spring weather!

Biochar trial update #1 - Cabbage and Broccoli

We are participating in a trial to see what effect biochar has on annual vegetable growth.  I wrote about this a bit before, so here's the first update.

This week on Wednesday I inoculated the biochar for the first 4 test beds.  I first measured out 3 five gallon buckets of finely ground char.  Then I mixed the char 1:2 with compost (one bucket char to 2 buckets of compost) and mixed all that up in a big bin.

Next, I watered the mix down so that the microbes from the compost would multiply and inoculate the char.  Then it sat for 3 days.

Put char into the container

Add compost

Mix thoroughly

Water it in

 

On Saturday, it was time to put in the first transplants for the trial.  The first 4 trial beds will be tomatoes, cabbage and broccoli.  When the cabbage and broccoli come out in July, we'll put in a planting of black beans.  This way we'll get to test fruits (tomatoes), leaves (cabbage/broccoli) and a legume.  The steps for doing this are:

Spread compost on all 4 test beds.  Add biochar to 2 of the test beds and spread it out.  The kids were champs and did a big chunk of this.  Then they took down the tomato tunnels we had set up from last year.  This is a big job and I wondered if they would be able to handle it by themselves, but they did great!  In case you're wondering why they were working on their own, I was working on the chicken tractor in the last post.

Next, we re-assembled the tomato tunnels in the new beds.  The tunnels are made of 16' cattle panels pinned between 2 fence posts, so the first step is to pound the T posts in to the beds at the right spacing for the cattle panels.  We put them about 1 foot into the bed so that there is a foot for the tomatoes to be planted on the inside of the tunnel and 3 feet outside the tunnel for the other vegetables.

Assembling tomato tunnels

Then we have to bend the cattle panels between the T-posts to make the arches.  This is a 2 adult job because the panels are heavy and they can spring back and catch you with some fairly sharp edges.  We clip the panels to each other to keep the whole tunnel a bit more stable once their in place.
 
Now we're ready to plant!  We put the same mix of varieties and vegetables in each of the 4 beds.  We planted a total of 72 cabbage and broccoli plants on the outsides of the tunnels.

Then we watered the transplants in and put leaf mulch around them to retain the moisture and discourage weeds.

Watering in the transplants

spreading mulch

Last, we covered them with insect barrier so that the cabbage moths don't eat our crop instead of us! 

Cabbages covered and ready for a good spring rain.

Ta da!  Finished garden beds!

How do you know if you're on the right track?

“How do you know if you’re on the right track?  When resources start to gather around you.”

We came across this quote by Toby Hemenway this week and it perfectly sums up how this weekend went for us. 

First, I have to revisit something from my last post.  The picture of the beetle (large timber framing hammer) Jeremy made last week just didn't do it justice.  This one gives a much more accurate representation of his handiwork!

Jeremy and the Beetle

It was a three day weekend for us (I took Friday off) so the work started as soon as we dropped the kids off at school on Friday morning.  As mentioned before, the greenhouse plastic was in desperate need of replacing, so that was the big job for this weekend.  Friday and Saturday were predicted to be very calm with major wind kicking up Sunday and Monday.  We started by removing all 3 layers of the old plastic and dragging it far enough away from the hoop house to not be in the way.  Then we had to remove all the old hold down channel for the plastic and add some more tape/padding to a couple of edges that had rubbed on the old plastic.  Then we unrolled the new plastic next to the greenhouse.  All of this took until 3:30 or so.  This is where the first resource gathered around us. 

Pulling off the first 2 layers of plastic.

So here we are looking at 128 lbs of plastic (a 40'x105' piece) and a 12' tall hoop house, getting ready to do battle.  Having already done this before by ourselves, we have some idea of the ordeal this is going to be and we have some doubts about whether we will be able to do this by ourselves.  Last time we were able to pull it over an existing layer of plastic which helped immensely.  We had no such bonus this time.

One thing we've learned from all of the things we've done is that sometimes you just have to make yourself do it even when you don't think you can.  So we were mustering our courage, taking a deep breath, getting our last drinks of water and generally preparing for a major ordeal.  Then my brother drove up unannounced!  Hallelujah, the cavalry had arrived!  It is impossible to express how much help it was to have an extra set of hands in this process.  It took about an hour and half, but we got the plastic pulled over the hoop house and locked into the ends on Friday.
 
Saturday morning we were at the farm at 7:30 (yes, AM) to lock down the sides of the plastic before the wind started blowing.  It was a bit chilly with frost on the ground and running the cordless drills made all our fingers get a bit numb, but we got it done.  The plastic looked wonderful - perfect tension and everything.  There were a couple of holes to patch from where it snagged on some loose staples, but they were quickly taken care of.  Excellent!  We got to cross this project off our list!

Then more resources showed up!  Scott came by again around 9:00 and brought presents.  He had some shelves and pegboard he had torn out of a house he's remodeling that he was going to throw on our brush pile.  Instead, we will be repurposing most of it into our soon to be work shop space!  Can't beat that!

At 10:00, our friend Jeff showed up again (we knew this one was coming, but his help is still such a gift).  Saturday he helped us fold up the old plastic to be used on some future project and then he helped start building our new chicken tractor.  The plastic was quite a chore to fold - 3 pieces at 128 lbs each makes for a lot of muscle moving! 

Folding old greenhouse plastic

The chicken tractor, on the other hand, was a bit more technical.  We first had to disassemble some large pallets to get the framing lumber.  We tried the first one with hammers before quickly moving to the sawzall.  The people assembling these things must have been paid by the nail!  It was absurd how many nails were in every piece.  Once we had enough framing pieces, we started cutting and assembling.  Jeff is a carpenter by trade and he made short work of getting the pieces ready and making sure that everything went together correctly.  It was a privilege to work with him and learn some of the tricks to really getting it right.  We managed to get the whole frame together on Saturday before he had to leave. 

Jeff and I and a chicken tractor in process

By the time we got everything picked up and wrapped up, it was 5:30 and we were pooped.  A 10 hour day at the farm is not for the faint of heart.  This was also when we realized we had made a tactical error when pulling the greenhouse plastic.  We did it when it was too cold.  In the 70 degree air on Saturday, the plastic expanded to the point that it was very definitely too loose.  We were too tired to pull off all the side boards and re-tension it on Saturday though.   It was definitely time for showers and some rest!

Sunday was a light day.  We intended to go tension the plastic, but the wind was too strong.  While it has been moving a lot on the frame, it doesn't appear to be any worse for the wear at this point.  We will have to wait for a day that is both warm (60-70 degrees) and still(er) before we will be able to take care of the problem.  Instead we kinda putzed around a little bit and then went to go see our friends Doug and Bayliss for a bit.  ;-)

Later Sunday afternoon, we got to go visit the baby goats!  They are truly adorable little doelings - full of spunk and very lovable.  They are going to be a great addition to our farm in another couple of months.

Kids and kids...

Lastly, on Monday morning we put the finishing touches on the re-organization of the shed!  Jacob put in the lion's share of the work on Saturday while the adults worked on other things, so we just had a few things to finish up.  Check out the before and after!

Before...

After!  :D

Some projects coming up for this week include: 

• continuing to move dirt in the garden and finally finish getting all the beds ready (that project has only been on the list for a year now...). 
• Pull out the cedar limbs from the garden fence behind the blackberries and thread the blackberry canes through the wires.  This should keep them from taking over the aisle again.
• Mulch the raspberries
• Get the next set of beams laid out for the house so that joinery can commence
• finish the chicken tractor

There are some other planting/transplanting things to do too, but they may wait a bit.  This is enough for now!