Frost Scramble

Frost Warning!

Last year I set up a frost monitoring system. I used a program called If This Then That to subscribe to the Environment Canada weather alert feed for my area and send me a text message if it sees the word "frost".

Today, it's been buzzing me all day as the forecast has steadily gotten colder, pushing into frost warning territory. So instead of working down my task list I ended up on frost protection duty and now the garden is a sea of white row cover:

The whole event was a bit of a gong show due to the high winds that are bringing in this cold. Row cover fabric is beautifully light, which is all well and good when it's rolled up, but a bit of a problem when you suddenly find yourself holding a 1000 square foot sail in the wind. I'm sure a time lapse video of me running around with everything flapping would have been pretty funny.

This year I splurged on a box of special "row bags" - basically sandbags with handles (that you fill yourself), but they went quickly. Pretty much everything heavy that was lying around ended up pressed into service to hold the cover in place - big rocks, extra fence posts, trellis posts, logs, etc.

Row cover is a pretty amazing material. It lets in most of the light during the day and lets water pass through. Underneath, plants are protected from wind and insects, and it acts like a blanket overnight, holding in the warmth from the ground (to the tune of about 3 degrees - just enough for a light frost).

Scrambling around protecting things has added to my backlog of tasks to catch up on but I'll sleep better tonight knowing I've done what I can to protect the vulnerable plants. Even so, I'll be out there bright and early tomorrow to see how everything did overnight.

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Potato Planting Day, Year 3

Over the past three years that we've been here we've created an annual spring tradition of planting potatoes. This year, the optimal day for planting fell on Mother's Day, so we expanded our usual little group of four to include Eric's family, who drove up on a beautiful spring day last weekend.

Barnhorst men (Eric, his dad Dick and brother Kevin) prep the field.

First the tractor creates furrows for the potato seed, then rock dust is sprinkled over the soil in advance of the potatoes being planted. The rock dust adds several trace minerals and potassium. Potato "seed" is actually just potatoes! We use a mix of saved potatoes from last year's harvest and purchased organic seed potatoes.

Naturally, the kids' favorite potato seeds are the funny shaped ones.

Rose, as always, is a determined little helper in the garden. Give her a row to plant and her favorite gear (kid-sized gloves and a little foam kneepad are her essentials) and she will slowly and diligently plant until the row is done. Interrupt her at your own risk - she will be unhappy if you pull her away before the task is done. Sylvia is still our wild child, but each year she gets a little more focused and a little more calm in the garden. We're still trying to teach her to walk in between the garden rows rather than trample across everything, but this year for the first time she did some real helping... for a little while anyway until her attention shifted to climbing in and out of the garden cart.

This year we finished in record time thanks to our extra helping hands, so don't worry that we spent the holiday toiling in the field. We did work up an appetite, though, and enjoyed a lovely Mother's Day dinner later that evening.

Happy belated Mother's Day and happy potato planting season!

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Race Car Tomatoes

As space opens up in the greenhouse (due to seedlings moving out to the field) I am trying some greenhouse grown tomatoes. These aren't your hydroponic, temperature controlled hothouse tomatoes with no flavor - they are grown in the ground with just enough climate modification from one layer of plastic to boost their growth. I've been thinking of them as the race cars of the garden this year because in order to maximize the yield from the relatively limited space, I've put extra effort and resources into almost every aspect of growing them so far - from specialized seeds, to babying the transplants and now to the soil preparation:

I started out by double-digging the bed. This is a technique that is great for small gardens or intensively managed areas but takes far to long for me to do on a large scale. First, a trench is dug, reserving the topsoil on the side. Then, the bottom of the trench is worked up with amendments and loosened with a fork. Then, a second trench is dug next to the first one, replacing the topsoil that was removed in the first one. The process is repeated until the bed has been completely dug, and the topsoil from the original trench is replaced in the last one. It's important to keep the soil layers separate, because inverting them or mixing them can lead to anaerobic conditions which are bad for roots and other soil life.

After plenty of digging, the bed is ready. Although this method is generally beneficial to the soil health, I think it's worth remembering that it is still a huge disturbance to the soil ecosystem. The manual labor associated with performing this method with hand tools makes it hard to ignore.

Finally, I put the tomatoes in the ground. I have a hoop over the top (now covered with fabric) to help keep them warm overnight until the nights are reliably above 7 degrees C or so. The plants are spaced quite closely for single leader (one stem) training. As they grow, I will use a special roller to lower the stem to keep the productive area of the plant at picking height.

If all goes well, I'm looking forward to "race car" performance - higher yield, longer season and earlier harvest.

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Seeding the Field

The greenhouse has been bursting full of seedlings for a while, but now the outdoor beds are warm and dry enough for some direct seeding. It's been hard to wait, but working the soil when it is too wet is bad for its structure and cold soil is a recipe for rot, even with cold hardy plants (like peas).

Below you can see some remnants from last year's garden that haven't been incorporated yet. There are cabbages and cornstalks here and in the far right background you can see some kale. I'll take the cornstalks off the field and compost them separately (to avoid the repeated soil disturbance that would be necessary to break them down in place) but the rest will be incorporated.

I generally choose to leave unharvested crops in place until the spring if there isn't time for a cover crop to protect the soil - the roots hold the soil in place and prevent erosion and contribute to the organic matter. Cornstalks also catch snow and hold on to it which insulates the ground to some extent and provides water. The downside of leaving the plant matter unincorporated is the risk of harboring disease - something I need to watch out for with this method.

Here's the Jang seeder in action. First plantings of spinach, beets and peas are in!

Here's the Jang seeder next to the Earthway. The Jang is a huge upgrade over the Earthway - it makes a more consistent furrow, more accurately picks out one seed at a time, and allows you to set the plant spacing independently of the seed plate. That said, I still use the Earthway for planting large seeds, marking rows and planting cover crops, which are all tasks that it does well. In the picture below, I'm pointing to the gearbox that allows independent adjustment of the seed plate turning rate, which is driven by the front wheel.

Spring is here!

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The Hungry Gap

This is the time of year known as the hungry gap. Generally for pre-industrial farming communities in the West this was the late winter/early spring period when the stored food from late year's harvest season was dwindling, but the garden was not yet producing much (if anything). Animal-based foods might also be in short supply if meat stores from the winter are exhausted and farm animals giving milk and eggs have less to eat and thus produce less. Some even posit that this is the origin of the Lent tradition of sacrifice.

In our house this time of year means I stop skipping past the produce aisle in the grocery store as our stored veggies from fall tend to have either gone bad or been eaten. If I lived at any other point in history the hungry gap would have been a time of real struggle, but for me in the modern world it means a dearth of local foods but no actual hunger as plentiful "back-up" veggies are available from all over the world. (I should admit, though, that I buy fruit year round for my fruit-crazy kids.) As I shop I try to reflect on the privilege I have to not go hungry while at the same time think meaningfully about the social and environmental impacts of buying food from halfway around the world.

Every year during harvest season abundance we try to plan our food storage for the coming months. Mostly this means canning, freezing and an improvised cold cellar in our basement stairwell. Some things work better than others and we tinker with the system each year. Last fall we added an improvised clamp to our storage repertoire, and as we came to the end of the carrots in the cold cellar last week we decided it was time to dig up the clamp and see how it did.

With the snow gone we moved some of the small rocks that were holding down the top layer of the clamp: a collection of old seed bags used to keep moisture out. Underneath that layer is straw for insulation, and under that a thin layer of dirt covering the veggie bins we buried.

Inside the bins are veggies we haven't seen in over 6 months.

We buried turnips, beets and carrots. Rose drew a map just after we made the clamp to help us remember where things ended up.

Eric was skeptical about the results since all January we had cold temperatures with no snow which means the ground got extra cold in those weeks without snow cover. In the end, though, things were not quite so grim.

The beets and turnips survived! I was thrilled to see fresh-looking beets as they have long since succumbed to rot in the cold cellar. The turnips in the cold cellar were still going strong, however, so perhaps next year we'll pick something else to bury. The carrots didn't fare so well, unfortunately...

Fingers crossed as we dig up the carrot bin. — Fingers crossed as we dig up the carrot bin.

Oh well. Did the extra cold environment affect the carrots' texture and make them more prone to rot? Was there contamination in the bin and the microbes eventually just took over? It's disappointing since carrots are such a staple veggie for us - I think Rose has had carrots in her school lunch every day since the late fall. We'll try again next year and see if different winter conditions lead to different results. For now we can celebrate the addition of beets to our hungry gap diet and look ahead to the abundance of summer.

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Spring in the greenhouse

The new greenhouse (that we built at the end of last year) is a hub of activity these days. I've got insulating row cover fabric clipped to the trellis wires for an extra sheltered seedling area at one end. The extra insulation has been just enough to get through the cold nights with no external heat source - for now this is 100% solar powered.

On the benches, onions and broccoli are growing along, oblivious to the snowy scene outside.

The benches are steadily filling up. For now, I'm keeping the heat lovers (like tomatoes) under lights in the basement, but they will make their way out eventually.

Benches filling up with spinach, beets and turnips

The other side of the greenhouse (outside the seedling area) is already prepped for some in-ground crops that will get going in the first week of April. Even though I'm sure I will be sick of working up beds by late spring, for now it has been a treat working with real soil in the greenhouse while everything is frozen solid outside.

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Eva Mae Farm