Gildrien Farm

Yikes! September!

The summer seems to be pretty thoroughly over, though the Eye in the Sky claims that there's some more warm weather coming. We've gotten about to the end of the summer foods - we gave pretty much the last of the tomatoes and definitely the last of the cukes  to the CSA this week - and the fall goodies are coming in. The cherry tomatoes are the only thing still going in the greenhouse, which has been mostly taken over by drying onions and curing winter squash, but even they are starting to look tired.

We're getting ready to start on our new greenhouses - just got the building permits last week. Soon we'll rip all the tomato plants out of this house and plant some spinach and carrots, probably; the big new one will be our tomato house next year and this one will probably be our plant house, where we'll start all our seedlings. The third one will be much smaller, and probably an experimental house, a place to play with new ideas.  It's pretty exciting to contemplate the possibilities of all this new greenhouse space - even though we don't heat our greenhouses, they provide enough protection to really change the scope of what it's possible to grow up here, and we're really looking forward to exploring that a lot more in the coming seasons.

July is plowing right along. We've had a pretty good mix of sun and rain and most things are growing like crazy. We ought to be picking cukes, zukes and green beans every day, but three times a week is about all we can manage. We haven't had enough sunny, dry days to get ahead of the weeds, and they've been growing just as fast as everything else, so every sunny, dry day is spent weeding. Harvest and wash for CSA and market takes most of the day on Friday now. This week we added potatoes to the mix.

New potatoes are one of the reasons I love farming. They were really a revelation for me. I think that everyone knows - at least theoretically - that a fresh, sun-warmed, garden tomato is fundamentally different from the tomatoes you get at the grocery store. What most people don't know - what I didn't know until only a few years ago - is that a fresh, just-dug baby potato is a fundamentally different vegetable than the big old russets (or even the pretty-good red-skinned ones) you get at the store. They're so creamy and soft and tender and full of good flavor. Potatoes are one of my favorite things to eat and one of my favorite things to grow. They don't take much care, just basic weeding and a hilling once or twice, and they grow all big and bushy, then you dig them up and surprise! There's potatoes in there! It's like magic every time.

Besides, potatoes, what else is new? The younger chickens have just started laying, so we get a little blue pullet egg every other day or so (a pullet is a young hen). When chickens first start laying, it takes them a few tries to get it right, so the first eggs tend to be a bit funny - often they're very small, grape-sized or even smaller, sometimes without yolks. Sometimes they don't get their hard shell on and are just enclosed in the inner membrane. Sometimes they have two yolks, or only yolk and no white. They're an adventure. After another few weeks the pullets should have it all worked out and we ought to be getting four or five good blue eggs in addition to the 8-10 that the other fourteen hens lay each day. Which will be good, because our household eats 6-8 eggs a day, and we haven't had as many to sell as we'd like.

The new chickens also seem to have integrated into the flock better now that they're full-sized and laying. They mostly roost all together now, although one still insists on roosting on the coop's hipboard rather than on the roost. I suspect that when winter comes she'll join the flock.

Also, the cherry tomato plants in the greenhouse have reached the top of their trellis (which is about 7 feet high), and Jeremy has doubled them over and trained them back down, and they have now reached my waist on their way down to the ground.

Yes, the tomato plant is a foot taller than I am.

Wow, it's hard to find the time to blog!

Things are going well on the farm. The Japanese beetles have made their first appearance, right in sync with the black raspberries ripening. (Our black raspberry bush is very small and provides us with one tiny handful of raspberries every few days during the season... but it's a delicious tiny handful!) Pests haven't been that bad this year, so far (knock on wood) but it's early yet.

The magic December-planted carrots from the greenhouse are all done now, and the greenhouse is firmly in the grip of summer plants: eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes which are growing several inches a day. The cherry tomato plants are taller than I am! We've got a few just starting to turn color, so hopefully the rest will follow suit and soon we'll have tomatoes for the CSA and market.

We're starting to plan for this winter now, making sure we've got all the fall crops planted and figuring out what will go in the greenhouse when the tomatoes are done. We're planning to build a second greenhouse this fall, so we have to figure out the timing of that and what to plant when to fill it up. There's garlic now where that greenhouse is going, but that will be coming out fairly soon. Probably we'll plant some late brassicas and spinach there, then build the greenhouse over it, like we did with the first greenhouse last year. Maybe we'll plant more winter carrots! With two greenhouses, we should have the same problem of needing to plant the summer crops in before the winter crops are finished. Eventually, we'd love to have movable greenhouses... but that's for the future. Right now, we need to decide how much rutabaga seed to order!

Several items of interest this week:
1. New chickens! We got five new pullets to add to our laying flock. They're Ameracaunas, which are blue-egg birds. Gabe at Four Family Farm raised them until now, about ten weeks old, and we picked them up on Thursday. We fenced off a corner of the coop for them, and this morning I opened a little pop-hole in it that they can get in and out of but the big hens can't fit through. That way they have a safe place to go if the hens pick on them, and that's where their food is and roosts that are lower down. I raised up the hens' food so that the pullets shouldn't be able to reach it - their nutritional needs are different when they're growing from when they're laying, so we don't want them eating each others' food. I'm not sure how we'll manage when the pullets get to be full-size (probably July) but before they start to lay (sometime in August), but we'll figure something out. This set-up should hold us for a while.

2. We've started harvesting! We harvested more than ten pounds of spinach out of the greenhouse last week, most of which we sold to local restaurants. We've also started pulling radishes, but they're still pretty small and just snacks while we're working in the greenhouse. The scallions should be ready in time for market (which starts May 9!), and it looks like we should have carrots in time for CSA.

3. The field has been harrowed! We plowed a new piece of ground last fall and have been anxiously waiting for it to dry out enough to harrow, which finally happened this week. Of course, it's raining again now. Hopefully, we'll get a stretch of dry weather soon so we can till and plant.

4. We made the front page! Neighborly CSA was featured on the front page of last Thursday's Addison Independent! If you have an online subscription, you can read it on their website, or click here to download a PDF that we scanned. It's a pretty great article!

Shorts, sandals, and a tank top - what month is this, anyway? It was in the 80s today at the farm, and I spent the day pulling the mulch off the garlic. The "weed-free seed-free" rye straw that we mulched with ended up being neither of those things, so I also spent the day weeding the garlic. I might be a little sunburned, but it was great to be outside in the sun.

Two weeks ago, it got down to six degrees overnight. I was a little worried about the spinach, carrots, peas, and onions growing in the greenhouse. When Jeremy went out early in the morning, everything was frozen solid, but by 10 it had all thawed out and looked great - just like it's supposed to do! Pretty exciting. We've started tentatively harvesting the spinach, and the carrots are getting bigger by the day. Horray for spring!

You can see some more photos from today over on the photos page, under The Season Begins!

Spring is coming, guys. We ordered all our seeds a few weeks ago, and started seeding spinach this past weekend. The greenhouse is all prepped and waiting for those little soil blocks to sprout little spinach seedlings. Today we saw the first one break the surface of the soil, so once the rest of them poke their little cotyledons up they're going in the ground!

Out in the greenhouse now, the carrots we planted back in December are starting to come up. Wait, let me try that again: The carrots we planted WAY BACK in December are starting to COME UP! Now! Carrots! Growing! I'll confess to not being 100% confident that those carrots and spinach will do their thing, but I'm pretty excited to see how it goes.

Of course, outside of the greenhouse now is about two feet of snow, which all fell in the past 24 hours or so. I've shoveled it out twice so far and will probably need to do it again in the morning. I'm glad to have some snow, finally, but my back is not entirely happy about all the shoveling.

Still: Spring is definitely coming, and I've got the sprouts to prove it.

This past week has delivered us about a foot and a half of snow, which has been great for sledding and snowshoeing (my favorite ways to stay happy in the winter). However, it hasn't been very great for shoveling. Specifically, we've been working to keep the greenhouse clear.

If too much snow builds up on the top or the sides of the greenhouse, it could collapse. We built our greenhouse with a Gothic-style roof-line, which helps it shed snow. So far, that has worked very well, and we've only had to clear the top off once. But all that shed snow from the roof slides right down the sides. After our big storm last weekend, the snowbanks on the sides of the greenhouse went almost up to the beginning of the roof-line - way too high and getting dangerous. From the inside, you could see the plastic being pressed in by the weight of the snow.

So our friend Douglas - who will be working on the farm with us this summer - and I spent the better part of a day earlier this week digging out the greenhouse. We have a snowblower attachment on our walk-behind BCS tractor (which I'll tell you more about soon), but the snow was too deep and the BCS just got stuck. In fact, I spent far longer than I care to remember trying to get the poor machine out of the snowbank I'd driven it into.

So that left us with a shovel and our own strength. Fortunately, it had been a very light, dry snow, so even though it had piled up higher than I am tall, it wasn't too hard to shovel. Even still, I was sore for three days afterwards.

The carrots we seeded back in early December haven't done anything yet. That isn't much of a surprise - it's been very cold! I'm thinking that they'll sprout sometime in March or so, when temperatures are likely to be a little more forgiving. I don't really know, though - it's an experiment! I am, however, very excited to see how it turns out.

We've been reading Eliot Coleman's new book The Winter Harvest Handbook, which is, as it turns out, all about winter harvesting. And winter growing, too. He faces most of the same challenges as we do on his farm up in Maine, and he's been farming for a long time, so I'm inclined to listen to what he has to say.

He has a lot to say about winter gardening. His approach is all about the low-tech solution - he is not talking about growing hothouse tomatoes in February, though there are some folks doing that up here. He's talking about modifying the conditions just enough that cold-adapted crops will grow - things like spinach and leeks and greens and carrots. For most of them, you want to plant in the fall, and then they grow until it gets really cold, then sort of hibernate before starting up growth again in the spring. We didn't get our greenhouse up and covered until just a couple of weeks ago, so we missed the planting dates for most of his suggested crops.

But not carrots! Today, on December first, we seeded our first bed of winter carrots. Theoretically, these carrots will grow slowly all winter and be ready sometime in May. And theoretically, they will be some of the sweetest carrots that anybody's ever tried.

We aren't betting anything on these carrots, since it's our first time growing them, but I sure am excited. We're planning a bunch of other winter experiments for the greenhouse, as well. I really like the idea of working within the boundaries of the season, but playing with them just enough to have something growing all year round. Fresh greens all winter! Just think! We probably won't succeed at that for this year, but next year we're hoping to.