Spring is near!

Outside the sky is blue, the temperature is above freezing and the icicles on the roof are melting a steady drip-drip-drip in the warm sun. After a dark and wintery hiatus to reflect on the past year and plan for the coming one, Eva Mae Farm is starting up our second season! Go to our CSA page to register for 2015 membership.

The first job in the new season is starting seedlings, which will first spend some time indoors, then move out to the brand new greenhouse, then finally be transplanted into the soil in the garden. Peat moss, perlite, vermiculite, and organic fertilizer are mixed in large tubs and then a soil blocker is used to press down uniform blocks of soil onto the wooden pallets that serve as seedling trays.

Next the seeds are measured out and individually placed into the soil blocks. Depending on seed size we use either a vacuum seeder or drop them in by hand. Little hands can be helpful with tiny seeds.

Once the seeds are tucked into the soil blocks and misted gently with a spray bottle, they sprout under UV lights in the basement.

Our broccoli seedlings just popped up 2 days ago. They're our first sprouts of the year. Longer, warmer days outside and the first veggies of the 2015 season sprouting means spring is just around the corner. The end of another Canadian winter is always joyful, but the start of the farming season and the anticipation of all the good food ahead makes me all the more excited for spring.

Interested in learning more about membership in our farm for the upcoming season? Check out the CSA page.

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Tucking in the garlic

Happy New Year! We've been busy with the holidays recently, but here's a belated post from mid December to get us started for 2015. Stay tuned for information on this year's CSA registration coming out in the next few weeks.

The last real field task of the year is done!

After planting the garlic, I wait until the ground is starting to freeze and then mulch with straw. This helps moderate the temperatures in the soil during the very cold weather. Excessively cold soil temperatures and/or too many freeze-thaw cycles can be bad for the garlic, which (ideally) has already started growing roots.

I was a bit late this year as you can see from the snow:

One advantage of doing this job when the ground is frozen is that it simplifies straw delivery - I can drive around pretty much anywhere without being concerned about soil compaction or erosion:

There won't be much action in this field until the garlic sprouts start poking up, but garlic is one of the first plants up in the early spring so that won't be too long.

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New Greenhouse

A big offseason project in anticipation of next year has been this brand new greenhouse. The most important purpose for this area is to start seedlings for transplants, but the structure is sized large enough to do some season extension as well, which I'm really looking forward to trying.

I had hoped to slowly work on this as a late fall project, but an early cold snap froze the ground and I was worried that it wouldn't happen for another year. Fortunately, a brief thaw gave us just enough time to quickly lay out and set the ground posts for this structure. It was a tough couple of days getting it laid out (thanks for the help, Dad!) but we got the job done.

I managed to get all of the hoops bent and bolted in place a couple of days later:

The metal hoops are made from chain link fence top-rail. It's a widely available, reasonably economical way of getting tubing. I made a bending jig (basically some curved blocks of wood screwed to a big sheet of plywood) to shape the hoops. The only tricky part was accounting for the spring back of the metal - after a bit of trial and error, I managed to get the hoops to relatively repeatably bend to a finished 6 foot radius.

One of the many items lost in our 2011 house fire and forgotten about was apparently my plumb bob, so I made do caveman-style:

In this photo you can see all the main structural elements coming together. The purlin on the top is centered and the two wires on either side are suspended from every hoop, giving me three rows to do overhead trellising after the bulk of the seedlings are out in the spring. It would have been much harder to put these wires in after the plastic was on so I put in the time and effort up front to lay them out the way I think I want them - I hope they get used! I'm also considering ways I can use the wires to hold a layer of row cover fabric for extra insulation in the coldest weather. You can also see the hip boards that will form the upper point for the roll up sides (for warm weather ventilation).

Here is the end wall finished with a door and plastic. I've just rolled up the excess so I can adjust the tightness when the top plastic goes on - it gets trimmed at the end.

The plastic is held to the hip boards and the end bows with this "poly lock" system - an aluminum channel with a springy wire that just barely fits in. It is a bit expensive, but it makes it much, much easier to get the plastic on tightly compared to squeezing it down with a wood furring strip (as I've done in the past).

Finally, the plastic goes on over the hoops. We went out as a three person team early in the morning (usually the least windy part of the day) and got it on without incident. With such a large sheet of plastic even the slightest breeze would pull it fairly hard but once we were over the peak it went pretty well.

The last step was to trim the sides and set up the roll up sides. The bottom edges of the plastic are rolled around some metal tubing (half inch metal electrical conduit) and secured with clips. Then, parachute cord lacing goes on to hold the rolled plastic against the hoops. To roll up the sides, you rotate the end of the tubing (with a t-fitting) and the plastic rolls around it as it goes up to the hip board. I was a little worried it would be hard to do alone but the process is very smooth - important because rolling the sides will probably be a twice daily routine for six to eight weeks in the spring.

Now I just need to build some seedling benches, figure out an emergency heat source, and run some irrigation lines - easy!

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Outdoor Vegetable Storage

Our basement stays a bit too warm for winter vegetable storage, so this year we've decided to try something new - an instant root cellar.

This method is somewhere between an old fashioned 'clamp' (a big ole pile of vegetables covered with straw and a thin layer of soil) and a tiny root cellar.

We dug some holes and dropped in plastic bins full of root vegetables. The plastic bins make the storage a bit more resistant to rodents than a regular clamp, and burying the bin uses the soil as an additional temperature buffer.

After we buried the bins, we covered them with a few inches of straw for insulation and topped the whole thing off with some old seed bags to shed water (and keep the straw from getting soggy and matted down). We'll dig them out in a few months and see how it works!

There are lots of other ideas for outdoor storage in this article from Mother Earth News - we pretty much did their "Garbage Can Cellar" plan.

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Garlic 2015

I managed to finish the garlic planting just before the snow started flying. Hard to believe, but one week ago it was sunny and warm as I neared the end of 3 days of planting. The garlic we (and our members) are enjoying now was planted at the end of the 2013 growing season, with garlic scapes harvested in the spring and the bulbs hung in the barn to dry in the heat of the summer. Now that process begins anew for next year's garlic harvest.

I've been building my garlic stock since 2009, expanding year by year. Garlic propagation naturally lends itself to seed saving, allowing me to select for the garlic that grows best in this ecosystem. Seed saving helps preserve genetic diversity, contributes to the stabilization of our food supply, and keeps agriculture localized and smaller scale.

One bulb of garlic from the 2013 planting.

The first job is clove popping. Each bulb is opened up and the cloves are taken out. The small cloves are set aside for cooking and the big ones go out for planting. It's a tedious and boring job. Definitely my least favorite part of growing garlic.

Each clove can grow into a new bulb of garlic. Oh, the miracles of asexual reproduction.

Here is the late fall scene in field two: garlic is going in in the first three beds while the chickens are busy cleaning up the squash beds for me.

Using the broadfork to loosen the subsoil.

When I have the time, I like to use a broadfork to loosen the soil in the beds, especially for root crops and others (like garlic) that have an edible part growing in the soil. The broadfork aerates the soil and breaks through compaction without inverting the layers (which is bad for soil microorganisms).

After the broadfork I need to rake again so that the bed is flat enough for the next tool.

Homemade dibbler in action. Yes, we still talk about this tool as though we were in 7th grade.

I made this dibbler tool 2 years ago to speed up garlic planting. It has slightly sharpened dowels spaced evenly along the bottom bar at the just the right planting distance. The horizontal stick in the middle lets me line up the distance to the next row, so I end up with a nice grid of holes as I stomp down the bed.

One clove down, two thousand nine hundred ninety nine to go...

After a bunch of cloves are dropped in, I use the back of the rake to cover the holes and firm the surface. In a more typical November, I would wait until the ground got a bit colder and then mulch with straw before the heavy snows of December or January. Plans are a bit different this year thanks to early snowy insanity, but it look like there's a thaw around the corner, so hopefully the garlic can get put to bed properly before the winter. We look forward to the happy green shoots of garlic scapes popping up out of the straw in spring 2015!

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What's in a Box? Fall Edition

Just before the final delivery of the 2014 CSA season last week, we unpacked one of the boxes to show off all the tasty goodies inside. Since we're into November It's a thoroughly fall box, with hearty squashes and root veggies. Next year we hope to do the same with boxes typical of spring and summer produce.

Here is one of our packed and ready to go boxes...

...and here it is unpacked! See below for the complete list of veggies.

Back row from left to right: kabocha squash, butternut squashes

Middle row from left to right: purple cabbage, rutabaga, lettuce

Front row from left to right: beets, black radishes, black kale

In the paper bags: carrots, potatoes, garlic and onions together

Thanks again to all our CSA members for supporting the farm this year. Keep checking the blog during the off-season - harvest time might be done, but work on the farm never ends!

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