From the Living Soil

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.

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.

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.

Escarole, with lens cap for scale

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.

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.

Everything is connected.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

Next year we’ll grow most of our winter chard in a low tunnel, as I expect yields will be higher and the plants will be much happier with some cool season protection. For years I’ve tried to keep chard producing over the winter without protection, and I’ve had very mixed results. The images in this post are of a May planting that is currently overwintering in one of the drier parts of the field. The plants are a mix of coloured chard varieties, and they show great variability in their ability to tolerate growing, and being harvested, throughout the winter months. The bed in question is 50 feet long, and we’ve been harvesting the plants in it fairly frequently for since July. ‘Perpetual Spinach’, an absurdly misnamed variety of chard, is growing in a different part of the field, and has overwintered in much better condition than most of varieties pictured here. This variety may be discussed on this blog at a later date. Growing chard in tunnels will definitely be discussed on this blog at a later date, some time in early 2014.