It’s nearly midnight and finally the rain has come. A glorious, loud, sloppy and much-prayed-for storm is dumping generous buckets on my grateful crops and animals and heart. I realize I’ve stopped putting carts and tools away, having lost all hope of them rusting. The car windows are open and there’s laundry on the line. I could care less. I go now to open all the house windows, so I can hear the gutters overflow…
Pray For Rain. I actually wrote a song with that title a decade ago. Little did I know how much I’d be singing it in a future farming life. A local friend and fellow farmer, the owner of an organic hard cider apple orchard, has been counting days and she’s at 24 since the last rain in our neighborhood. Nevertheless, things grow! Here’s what’s in the box today: continued »
Some of you may know that I’m a little bit, a tiny little bit, of a musician. I played out some here and there in Chicago, mostly in folk -rock type projects. I took off for a couple of years while I was figuring out the farm thing, but I recently joined a bluegrass string band out here. I’ve always wanted to play around with Carter-family-style harmonies, so I’m thrilled to be learning this kind of music and thrilled to be playing with the talented Peg Cullen, on lead vocals and fiddle, Bob Cullen, on banjo and dobro, and Carole Spelic on upright bass and vocals. I’m sort of along for the ride on guitar and harmony vocals. They’re teaching me a ton of old-time tunes and I’m teaching them my favorite Gillian Welch songs. This Friday we play our first gig together as the MooGrass Trio. continued »
Last night I killed a chicken for the first time. “We” have butchered chickens to eat before, and I do all the plucking and gutting, but my husband Shannon has always been the one to actually bring down the hatchet. I have held the chickens, and a goose and a duck, while he’s done the chopping, so I’ve been right up close and involved in the moment. I catch the chickens and I decide who goes into the pot, but I’ve never been the one to actually end the life. Until last night. And it was, frankly, easy, in a certain way. But very hard in another. continued »
The lack of rain is really starting to affect things now. Even though we are able to irrigate at will, water from a well doesn’t contain the helpful fertilizers and captured gases that rainwater imparts to soil and plants. Lightning is really where it’s at, though. Rain from a thunderstorm contains lots of ready-to-use nitrogen, a favorite food of plants and one they don’t acquire well on their own. While the plants live and grow under the artificial showers provided by sprinklers, the fruits are slower to mature and the yields are lower than a few weeks ago. The happy exceptions – yellow crooknecks and zucchinis. They don’t call ‘em summer squash for nuthin’. Here’s what’s in the box this week. continued »
When the gardens are in full swing, it’s easy to write about the farm as though we go from victory to victory every day around here. Not so. Yesterday I lost a little lamb in what is likely the worst way possible. Flystrike. continued »
Certainly I now understand why many organic farms, even those that don’t participate in Community Supported Agriculture, are communes of some sort, or otherwise organized along alternative employment models. Many hands are required to manage well a chemical-free garden of any size, and more importantly, the great satisfaction derived from tending earth is all the more rich done alongside fellow earnest laborers. continued »
Early summer is a truly gorgeous, potentially perfect time in the garden. If you are caught up on weeding, which we are not, you have by this time in the season removed all of the straggly early-season plants like peas and replaced them with freshly tilled beds of seeds or vigorous transplants. What is growing is at its peak, spreading fast and furious, with none of the yellow leaf tips or spent blooms that will overtake crops as the heat wears on.
The dark green tomato plants are covered in a riot of yellow blooms, while the mighty squash vines, three feet deep in emerald dinner-plate leaves, are just now sending branches on a relentless romp up and over every thing in their paths. Cucumbers optimistically climb trellises with tiny curled tendrils while the edamame unfurl tender fuzzy foliage toward the sun. Bean blossoms in pink, yellow, white and purple snuggle beneath heart-shaped leaves. Fuschia and red beets push plump shoulders through the dark earth and crisp creamy onions bravely live half above ground, their succulent spiked fronds held strong and straight on even the hottest days. Here and there, zinnias and nasturtiums produce flowers luminous and sparkling as jewels midst the crowded plants, and in hedgerows and meadows, yellow Black-Eyed Susan and Purple Coneflower blooms wave above the grass like butterflies. Butterflies, too, dance randomly about, most often alighting on some damp bit of mulch for a much-needed sip of moisture.
Only the eggplant and brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli) show signs of wear and tear, as they’ve been battling flea beetles and worms since they were planted, and are ravaged by holes both large (cabbage worms) and small (the beetles).The carrots, though older, are lovely and green as seedlings, and the parsnips, which have been in the ground since March and will stay there until November, have been so far untouched by pests and wave together in the wind like an underwater prairie.
Contemplating some crops makes you feel lucky and blessed, while others seem to be evidence of a curse-induced plague. More honestly, contemplating some crops makes you feel smart and virtuous, while some make you feel downright ashamed. My newest garden, located on the lowest tillable part of our property, is, frankly, a weed patch with some corn and squash struggling through. Unlike my other two crop gardens, this one had not been tilled by the pigs. Most likely a cow yard in years gone by, sited as it is adjacent to the small calving barn, the lower garden has the most fertile soil on this whole sand farm. I thought it would grow great vegetables, and last year we did harvest fantastic soybeans and basil off a small section.
After letting the animals eat the green low last fall, I just went in and rototilled the entire area several times this spring. Then I raked the grass roots off and closely planted peas, potatoes, spinach, kale, onions, beets, kohlrabi, cabbage, lettuce, radishes, salad turnips, purple turnips, corn, squash and a permanent asparagus bed. The first crop I tilled back in was kale, which germinated much slower than the weeds. Then I tilled in the onions and radishes, along with their weed companions. The potatoes I left to grow up with the lambs’ quarters, which grew much faster. But with the help of my kids and the WorkShare Crew, we pulled the weeds out and mulched the potatoes in plenty of time for them to thrive. And I’ve been able to harvest the rest of the crops, though I sometimes have to look pretty hard to find them. As a market garden, it’s pretty much an embarrassment.
Tilling as I did so early in the spring allowed me to get a lot of things in the ground quickly, and so I can harvest nearly full-size potatoes now in early July. But I wasn’t able to utilize the heat and dryness of warmer weather to kill off exposed grass roots and weed shoots the way I might have if I waited a little longer to till. Also, I planted too closely, with the intention of inhibiting weeds once my crops were grown up nice and close together, to be able to cultivate effectively before my seeds germinated. Simply scraping the soil shallowly with a hoe will knock back most of the weeds before they even emerge from the soil, if you do it at the right time. But at the right time, I didn’t know where my plant seeds were and I couldn’t safely hoe between planted furrows because they were too close. Finally, I let the whole thing get away from me. I was busy planting and picking in my other gardens when this one needed cultivation. Now, my squash have vined out and any attempt to hoe around them could nick their fragile skins and let disease take hold. For better or worse, this garden will be a mess with lots of things, both desired and despised, growing in it this year.
Still I find a have a divided attitude toward the weeds, and toward the requisite tilling involved to control weeds in an organic enterprise. Where there aren’t weeds, the ground is bare. At least until the crops size up. Bare ground releases moisture at a faster rate than covered ground, and tilled ground releases it even faster. Bare ground can also run off in a rain storm, and blow away in a wind storm. Over-tilling of Midwestern prairies created the terrible Dust Bowl during the droughts of the 1930s. And turning over the ground, even in the best of weather conditions, disturbs the fragile web of tiny ecosystems that live in a healthy soil.
So what’s a farmer to do? On a small scale like ours, it’s possible to mulch nearly everything and squelch weeds by burying them. Author Ruth Stout, a quirky favorite of mine, mulches heavily with straw in fall, then just pops transplants into the mulch come spring. She parts the mulch and plants seeds on the surface of the soil. One of the reasons I so enjoy raising animals in addition to crops is that composted barn bedding is a nearly perfect mulch, especially after chickens have picked through and fluffed up the straw and manure. But mulch has it’s problems, too. Mulch is the perfect environment for slugs and various gloppy caterpillars to winter over and to stay cool in summer. Mulched lettuce will be full of slugs, and mulched cabbage full of holes. Mulched squash will likely be full of beetles and borers and may not be able to find the soil for its many branching vines to re-root as it grows far from the crown.
So if tillage and mulch can’t keep soil safe for crops, what is the solution? I’m thinking toxic herbicidal petrochemicals. Or weeds themselves. Even though I’m reluctant to allow visitors to tour my lower garden, what I’ve found down there is that weeds have been an excellent moisture- and soil-conserving mechanism, as long as I can get them out in time or keep them in check enough that crop plants get the sun and nutrients they require. Except for the few crops that I tilled in because they were too overshadowed, the rest have thrived alongside their less valued neighbors. The peas used the interloping grass to climb up into the brush pile trellises. (Then the chickens ate the blossoms until I put electric net around the garden.) The lambs’ quarters and potatoes were so dense growing next to each other, together they crowded out the grass that would’ve taken food from the potato roots. (Then the chickens scratched up the mulch around the plants and started pecking the potatoes until I put the net fence back up.) The cabbage and spinach benefited from shade provided by weeds on either side. (I wish I could use electric fence to repel cabbage worms.) I’ve yet to see how the squash and corn do sharing the soil with weeds, but I do like that the ground isn’t bare while they grow into themselves.
In nature, any number of weeds lurk around waiting to cover the bare spots left when ground is disturbed. They fill an important niche, as they hold the soil in place until other things can take hold. Some seeds remain viable under the surface for decades, until they are turned up into the sun. Of course, we don’t so much appreciate this when the weed is something like thistle, which quickly fills any exposed ground that appears on our farm. Conventional farmers and prairie restoration enthusiasts find themselves in an ironic tussle with nature when they spray herbicides on pesky invasive species, only to find thistle almost instantly coming up in the brown spots. I’m working, both out of principle and out of necessity, to make peace with the weeds in my care, hoping to have them loosely save the place for my valuable crop plants, and then gently urge them out when it’s time for the crops to take over. We’ll see how it goes.
What a gloriously bountiful time of year! Everything is coming on at once – any given day in the garden offers up numerous choices for delicious meals and we’ve tried to capture that in this week’s box. continued »
When we started to plan last fall for our first CSA season, we decided to offer every-other-week boxes. The half-share niche was needed in the CSA market, we thought, because many of our Chicago friends with weekly farm subscriptions ended up giving lots of food away. We also thought bi-weekly deliveries would be easier on us, as we wouldn’t have to choreograph big harvests every week. What we didn’t factor in was how much food was going to be ready in the garden on those off weeks! Hence, we have now switched to every week deliveries, one week for local customers, and the next for Madison. Readers, we hope you’ll enjoy the weekly updates on what can grow in one Wisconsin garden. And we hope you’ll take advantage of the recipes wherever you are. continued »
