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a late-March sowing of beets, currently being harvested
I spend a lot of time standing in the field pondering beet spacing. I also spend a lot of time crouched down in the field thinning beets, as I find they respond very well to being given a bit of space to spread out. This year we’re growing most of our beets in triple rows down our a-little-wider-than-three-feet-wide beds. The rows are about nine inches apart, and we aim for four or five inches between each beet within the rows. This is more beets per square foot than one would likely find in a large, tractor-driven farm, but far less than I see in most home gardens, where they are often crammed together, sometimes to such an extent that the roots are physically unable to properly expand. A bit of time spent scratching one’s beard while considering plant density pays great dividends with beets.
Clockwise from the bottom (sort of): Cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi, butter lettuce, beets, daikon, cilantro, garlic scapes, snap peas, spinach, napa cabbage, frizzy French iceberg lettuce
I typically post a picture of the week’s vegetable boxes on the evening of each vegetable box day (Sundays, this year). Yesterday I was exhausted for all the picking, cleaning, sorting, boxing, and conversing, and I fell asleep while practicing yoga shortly after the last boxes left the farm. I expect some of the vegetable box updates will come in late from time to time this year, as harvest day is takes it all out of me, in the best possible way.
some of the assembled boxes, ready to be picked up
Pictured at right is an experiment in growing summer cabbage at a very high density. The bed in question is about three feet wide, and the cabbages are planted in a double row down the centre of the bed, with the plants just eleven inches apart in each row. I’m usually enthusiastic about giving plants lots of room to spread out, but in this case I’m hoping the crowding will produce the smaller than usual cabbages I desire for the summer season.
A very dramatic slime mould appeared on a mulched asparagus bed the other day. Tom Volk has an amusing writeup about this myxomycete here. The slime mould in question has become like a son to Jessica and I, and we are raising it as our own. The love I feel for my son is like nothing else in the world. The fact that he doesn’t technically have a “cell wall” like other kids doesn’t affect the way Jessica and I feel about him one bit. We’ve made the difficult decision not to breastfeed him, as he prefers to digest an assortment of bacteria with his pseudopodia. I’m not ashamed of the way he absorbs nutrients, and I don’t care one bit who knows it! We’re probably going to home school, because we aren’t comfortable moving him to an unmulched environment that may or may not have the high moisture levels he needs to thrive.
from left to right (roughly): kale, radishes, broccoli, salad mix, napa cabbage, red bok choi, dill, spinach, romaine lettuce, cilantro
We started the 2013 Vegetable Box Program one week earlier than we’d initially planned this year, and felt a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment as the Vegetable Box People came to pick up their produce this evening. The program will run for 23 consecutive weeks this year, four weeks longer than the 2012 program. Very careful attention to soil mineral balance, weed control, and irrigation, and well-planned succession plantings, will hopefully allow us to fill all 20 boxes each week. With grit and determination we will distribute a total of 460 boxes to our members over the course of the year.
Morag accomplished at least six weeks worth of work in the two short weeks she stayed with us. I couldn’t imagine a more pleasant person to have around, helping us with our endless toil. She turned thousands of pounds of compost, spread manure, thinned, planted, slashed comfrey, hauled materials, and generally helped with the hundred inter related tasks that keep a complicated garden going. She was good at everything. Her boyfriend Joe came up for the last couple of days, and the two of them are almost as cute a couple as Jessica and I. I tend to find cute couples somewhat threatening, as Jessica and I pride ourselves in being “The cutest couple north of the 50th parallel”, and take our reputation very seriously, but these two weren’t upsetting to be around at all, and I hope they return sooner rather than later.
Constant change is the only predictable part of the universe, and things are changing pretty quickly around here. We’ve pushed the date of the first vegetable boxes of the 2013 Vegetable Box Program forward by one week, due to very fast growth of many of the spring-sown crops. The first boxes won’t be as full as those that will follow them, but I expect they’ll still be greatly appreciated by the 20 families we now lovingly refer to as “The Vegetable Box People”. I’ll be posting photos of each week’s boxes every Sunday evening, starting on the 9th of June.
‘Spring Hero’ cabbage, cut open
In other news, serendipity thrust Morag into our lives early last week, and she has been working very hard in the field ever since. She is a wonderful volunteer and we’ve been trying to convince her to stay on a bit longer. The other day she planted three hundred linear feet of carrot row in one go, by hand, without taking a break! I’ll post a photo of her and her man Joe here tomorrow.
The cabbage photos accompanying this post were taken about three weeks ago. Better late than never, I suppose. Our August 2012 sowing of ‘Spring Hero’ cabbage was a complete success, and will be repeated for sure.
This is some comfrey Jessica planted next to section one in the autumn of 2011. The little divisions were planted directly into turf and sheet-mulched. Most of the plants have been run over more than once by our truck, in addition to having been stepped on by many peoples’ feet, and they are stil five feet tall and covered in blooms and insects of all sorts. We periodically slash the comfrey back with shears and machetes, and it grows back with startling speed. Comfrey is the Iggy Pop of hardy perennials.
a coldframe stuffed with well hardened tomato plants, ready to be planted
I started planting the year’s tomatoes today. We’re putting in 54 ‘Latah’, 51 ‘Ropreco’, and a dozen or so of an unnamed Burmese variety. Next year we’ll be growing a greater variety of varieties, as our seed company, long dormant, has re-germinated and will require a wide assortment of tomatoes, particularly fast, tough determinate varieties. If anyone has any they’d like to see grown out and made more widely available, drop me a line.
This morning, after the rain stopped, I realized that all the onion flowers in one section of the field were occupied by sleeping bees. Some of the blooms, such as that pictured at right, held more than one bee. I watched them closely, and found that, once in a while, one of the bees would wake up and stagger along the flower for a moment, seemingly in a daze, before returning to sleep. By afternoon they were awake and buzzing around normally again.
our first shiitake, the delicious product of mycological neglect
Three years ago, when we had first moved to Quadra and were living in Open Bay, we inoculated some freshly cut alder logs with shiitake and oyster mushroom spawn. We watered them a few times that first summer, then forgot about them. When we moved to our current home, in February of 2011, we brought some of the inoculated logs with us. We stacked them in a shady place, and promptly forgot all about them again, not giving them periodic rehydration soaks, as is generally recommended, and generally paying them very little mind. Until two days ago, that is, when I happened to walk back to where they were piled to have a pee, and I spied a shiitake mushroom growing from one of the logs. I almost peed all over my leg! To make a short story long, we soaked the logs in our pond, and now have them positioned in a prominent place that we walk past several dozen times every day. I’ve been spending quality time with them twice daily, convinced I’m seeing little mushroom pins forming. This may or may not be in my imagination. Expect updates soon, as my interest in growing mushrooms on hardwood logs has been re-inoculated.
viewed from above, my first shiitake growing from a section of alder
we floated the inoculated logs in our pond for 24 hours to rehydrate them and hopefully stimulate fruiting
like a father who was never around then suddenly shows up and starts taking his teenage kids to baseball games and buying them designer jeans and whatnot, I now spend time with the logs every day and hope they don’t resent me or fail to live up to their potential out of spite
Our first intern of 2013, Nena, is leaving the farm tomorrow morning. She is from The Netherlands and has been living and working with us since early April. She has moved countless wheelbarrows of manure, and planted thousands of onions and leeks, and laughed at most of my jokes. She didn’t complain once in over a month of work, which is truly remarkable. I complain at least once every half hour, and it is my project! Jessica and I really enjoyed having her as a temporary member of our family, and will miss her when she’s gone. Afscheid, Nena. Bedankt voor al het harde werk en voor het onderwijs me hoe je Nederlands te spreken. Het is een mooie taal, en helemaal niet moeilijk om uit te spreken.
a clump of mache, the result of a thwarted attempt to save it’s seed in this bed last summer, grows through the fine leaf mulch under a planting of purple sprouting broccoli
I took an unexpected hiatus from blogging over the past week or so, as I’ve been expending all my energy on planting and having a series of expected minor planting-related nervous breakdowns. I’m back now. Some readers may have been asking this question regarding my absence:
Oops. A few days ago I posted here that I’ll be speaking about tomatoes at the HBI on April 23rd. The actual date is April 24th, so if you show up on the 23rd looking for my handsome face you’ll be sorely disappointed. Come on the 24th.
The first ‘Galleon’ cauliflower of the year. We started these plants in early July and planted them out in the field about three weeks later. They overwintered happily with no protection aside from leaf mulch.
Not a particularly well composed photograph, but it gives an idea of what the overwintered cauliflower planting looks like today, a little over nine months after planting. Only one of the plants has formed a curd so far, though they all look happy and I expect the harvest will be good.
This is going to be an exciting year for tent caterpillars in these parts. I pruned fruit trees all over the island this winter, and cut off many hundreds of tent caterpillar egg masses in the process. Caterpillars have now started to hatch in great numbers on trees everywhere. At right are some infested branches on an apple tree growing in a client’s garden last year, photographed immediately before the writhing colonies were removed with my pruners. I’ll post more images as the season progresses.
Shortly after they take root, lemongrass cuttings begin to form new leaves of a distinctive light green colour. This cutting took about five weeks to root.
Part of this year’s crop of tomatoes, photographed before pricking-out eight days ago
Come on down to the HBI on Wednesday, April 24th to hear me go on and on about growing tomatoes outdoors in our less-than-ideal-for-outdoor-tomato-growin’ west coast climate. I’ve got lots to say on the topic, and lots of photos to show. 7.00 pm.
At the end of August we seeded some escarole into beds from which we’d recently harvested a crop of storage onions. The seed came from our friend’s father, who mailed it from the south of France. In November we covered the immature plants with a low tunnel to help them survive the winter. In late February and March it began growing very quickly and happily, and about one week ago we started harvesting the sweet, tangy leaves. Escarole is our favourite salad green of all, and it is most welcome in April, a month rich in spring seedlings but often lacking in non-brassica salad greens.
In this spring salad (not everything is visible in the photograph): Miner’s lettuce, wintercress, escarole, lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale buds, tatsoi. Flowers: Viola, choi sum, and arugula
Jessica finished assembling cold frame #2 the other day – It is beautiful and I love it (and I love her and she is beautiful). It is already filled with seeds and seedlings of all sorts
beautiful craftswomanship from all sides
coldframe #1, crafted by Jessica last year, is currently filled to capacity with a great miscellany of allium seedlings
From left to right, roughly: Komatsuna, arugula (in bag), green onions, bok choi, kale buds, escarole, chard, leeks, beets, chinese cabbage shoots, parsley, kohlrabi and mizuna shoots, wintercress, tatsoi buds
A ‘Spring Hero’ cabbage, planted in early August, looking like it is thinking about forming a head soon
Unlike traditional winter cabbages overwintering types do not mature before the onset of winter. Instead, they overwinter as small plants and resume growth in the spring.
Cup fungi, possibly Peziza repanda, growing at the edge of an overwintered romaine lettuce planting in a low tunnel
This species of fungi has been following me from garden to garden since the first time I used cardboard to sheet mulch a pathway, back in the summer of 2006. It typically fruits at the interface between pathway and bed, growing out of the carbon-rich sheet mulch materials. The little cups thrive tucked into the margins, under and around whatever plant and foot action is taking place over their heads.
each level, with the exception of the very top, is illuminated by four four-foot fluorescent tubes. The top floor is illuminated by two tubes.
Out most cherished late winter tradition, which involves Jessica cobbling together a light stand inside the front door of our yurt while I make unreasonable demands regarding it’s design, is now complete. We typically start the indoor seeding season with alliums in late February. Right now 80% of the light stand is occupied by various sorts of alliums. This year we are focusing on shallots, as they were one of 2012′s great successes. Soon the alliums will be given haircuts and moved into coldframes, freeing up space for potted up eggplants and peppers, and seeded. Some time in April, after these precious solanums have been moved to the coldframes to harden off, we’ll start basil, then curcurbits. By the time the curcurbits have been moved outside, we shut down the lights and start using our front door again.
overwintered green onions producing lush new growth
We grew a tremendous quantity of green onions last year. I was excited about them in the spring, and we made many, many successive plantings between march and July. It was all a little too much harvesting, eating, and distributing that many bundles of green onions, but it was a learning experience. This year we’ll exercise some restraint. Pictured at right are part of a late June planting that we didn’t harvest in the autumn. They have put forth a surprising amount of new growth since they first started up again in early February, and are tender and delicious. I expect we’ll use more and more allium species as overwintered spring vegetables in the coming years.
edible and medicinal plants stabilizing and repairing disturbed land
I’m working on a post about the overwintering cabbages we are growing in the field, but it isn’t finished yet, so here is a photo I took of an unplanned plant community in a patch of disturbed, compacted ground in the field. These “weeds”, heavy emphasis on the quotation marks, are performing a multitude of important tasks, and I thank them for it every day. I also eat some of them.
The tunnel at right, with the plastic in the ‘up’ position, covers our first planting of peas. The two beds at left are pictured partway through this afternoon’s tunnel construction. All three beds are covered with row cover, weighted down with rocks, to keep the birds from eating the peas.
In 2006, while living in suburban North Vancouver, I planted about 30 square feet of ‘Laxton Progress #9′ peas, and about 20 square feet of some sort of snow pea. I recall standing in that garden in July, enjoying my bounty of delicious pods, and knowing that one day I’d have more space, and would be able to expand my pea plantings to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of square feet. 2006 Ryan would be very pleased to see how 2013 Ryan is spending his life. A few weeks ago we sowed a 50 foot double row of ‘Aladdin’ bush peas, and yesterday we sowed two 50 foot double rows of ‘Sugar Ann’ snap peas. In one month we’ll sow two more 50 foot double rows of ‘Sugar Ann’, then three weeks after that we’ll repeat the process again. Over the past two years we’ve had great results from planting double rows of peas down the centre of our 38-inch-wide beds, with rows of fast-growing crops flanking the peas on either side. The fast growing crops (lettuce, kohlrabi, gai lan, cilantro, and dill in the beds pictured above) are harvested at ground level a month or two before the peas, allowing the pea root systems to occupy the entire bed during the second half of their lifespans. I am very excited about this sort of fast/slow interplanting, and intend to cover it extensively on this blog this year, which is another thing I think 2006 Ryan would be pleased with. Extensive coverage of pea interplanting experiments. It boggles the mind that this blog doesn’t have a larger readership!
Clockwise from the kohlrabi: Kohlrabi, baby escarole, loose leaf bok choi, parsley, rosette bok choi, arugula, kale, collards, tatsoi buds, wintercress, komatsuna, and beets
For the 2012 CSA season I used a scrap of plywood as the background for photos of the weekly vegetable harvests. I used it for some shots this winter as well, but am considering retiring it for something a bit more classy. For the photo at right, of an assortment of vegetables we picked yesterday, I used part of a broken table that has been leaning up against our workshop. I’m considering splurging for a proper background for the 2013 photos (or painting my scrap of plywood a different colour). Which colour shall I chose?
a box of veggies we picked for our friends yesterday evening, clockwise from the bottom (approximately): Collards, wintercress, bok choi, salad mix, black kale, green kale, komatsuna, and beets
March is typically a difficult month in which to have a wide variety of fresh garden vegetables ready for harvest. We’re finally making progress in eliminating the ‘hunger gap’ months of late winter and early spring in our field, and lots of careful planning and some tunnel construction have been paying green, fibrous dividends. While our harvests have slimmed down, they are still harvests, and for that we are thankful. I spotted a sure sign of the approach of spring when I pulled the beets pictured at right: They have started to grow thin, white feeder roots, in response to increasing temperatures and daylight hours.
from left to right: Felco #2s, large tooth saw, medium tooth saw, pole pruner, rag, isopropyl alcohol, sharpening stone
I’ve got six more days of winter pruning scheduled for the 2013 season. It has been my best winter pruning season yet, by a enormous margin. For the past six weeks I’ve enjoyed a combination of remarkably calm winter weather and a plethora of beautiful trees to work on all over the island. I’m already looking forward to the 2014 season.
exposed yet undeterred, one plucky young garlic plant copes well with its difficult life circumstances
I dug a narrow drainage ditch along one side of section 4 in the autumn, after garlic planting season. The other day I noticed that a few cloves growing in the end of a bed adjacent the ditch have been growing happily, partially exposed to the elements. I find the amount of root growth that has already occurred to be inspiring. Between mid-October and now the clove photographed in this post has been stripped of mulch and partially uncovered, and it has still managed to hold onto the steep edge of the bed with a tenacious tangle of winter roots.
same plant, closer. I encourage any philanthropy-minded blog follower(s) to buy me a macro lens, if they are wondering how to help this project out
Komatsuna has been a miraculous winter crop. We’ve experienced significantly milder and dryer conditions this winter than normal, which may account for the success of our unprotected, early-August-sown crop of this most delectable green. We began harvesting leaves off the plants in October, and continued through late December, and which point the komatsuna harvest slowed down considerably. Now, two months later, a great flush of new growth has started, and the harvests will soon be increasing in size and frequency again. While we’ll most likely grow this crop under a low tunnel next winter, it is nice to know that, at least during mild years, it can overwinter outside with no protection other than leaf mulch.
the winter 2013 komatsuna patch absorbing the season’s increasing amounts of solar energy
why did I put these fig cuttings on a clean white towel?
This interview warmed my heart while I pruned roses in the sun yesterday. The Fig Man, whose site is Land of Enfigment, is so excited about figs that a bit of his excitement oozed out of my earbuds as I listened. He just really, really loves figs, and that is what he wants to talk about. The world would be a better place if there were more people like him on it. I feel very strongly that figs should be promoted as a viable fruit crop in this part of British Columbia, and Jessica and I have been propagating them in limited quantities here on our tiny farm. We’ve got five varieties in the field right now, and are looking to expand that number significantly next winter. I’ve been pruning many, many fruit trees all around the island this winter, and have seen so much disease on apples. pears, and plums that figs are looking like a particularly good idea to me right now. The Agroinnovations Podcast covers some interesting ground. It seems to be on haitus right now, as the most recent episode was put up one year ago. I just found it the other day, and have been enjoying listening to some of the past episodes.
