Well, the difficult spring kept me away from the blogosphere for a while… but now I’m back, and I’m pleased to report an abundance of beautiful produce.  We’re now beginning week 8 of our 26-week CSA, and we have enough additional produce to go back to the Saturday farmer’s market as well.

I’m still not fully recovered from the weather-related difficulties this year (read: wet soil, perennial weeds, fungal outbreaks, wind-burned & chilly summer crops), but with all the great food coming from the field now I’m a lot less stressed about filling baskets in the weeks to come.

It’s inevitable that by this time every year I feel hopelessly behind, but somehow this year it’s been even harder.   I hedge my bets with many different crops and multiple planting dates, but this year hit me with more losses than I’m used to dealing with in a single year.  The garlic crop was almost completely destroyed by a rust I’d never seen before, the early peas had a drastically reduced harvest due to a downy mildew I’d never seen before, and I ended up pulling out over a third of the potato patch because of late blight (more on this later).

But enough doom and gloom… The CSA harvests have been nice every week and there are way more things going right than going wrong.  With care, planning, love, and sweat, the Earth provides in amazing abundance!

Man is it fun to have all my CSA members coming out to the farm again!  The pick-up times are a great social setting, and it is really fulfilling to get to know the folks I’m growing food for.  After our seasonal break, I got to catch up with last year’s members… and since we’ve expanded, I got to meet many new members as well.

My CSA membership goal this year is 160 members/households, and we started this year with 156! (I’m still hoping to fill those last 4 spaces).  We had a nice first harvest on Tuesday and another big one on Friday and, despite the difficult spring, we’re starting at the same time as last year with a nice array of veggies.  Early in the season I always have some anxiety about the upcoming harvest, but as the season progresses and the abundance manifests, it’s easy to send everyone home with a full basket.  Here’s some pics from the 1st week:

The later part of spring is always very full, and this year’s wetness has kept things interesting.  We’ve been getting our big, once a season plantings done… onions, potatoes, tomatoes, etc… with frequent interruptions from the weather.  We’re in the midst of a cold spring rain storm that just brought a scary bout of hail to the coast and some snow at just 3000 feet!  When the hail was falling I was picturing swiss-cheesed rowcovers, but the walk around the fields afterward thankfully showed little damage.  I’m still waiting to get the winter squash and melons sown ’till it’s a bit warmer and drier.

Though the strawberries are not quite pumping yet, there’s enough good food on the farm now to start the CSA!  It’ll be fun to have all the farm members coming out on Tuesdays and Fridays again, and hopefully in the time between harvests we can catch up on weeding/thinning beets & carrots and hoeing lots of beds.  Talk to you again soon

After a wetter and colder than usual April, things are finally drying out and warming up.  The crops are actually beginning to grow without rowcover!  We’ve been planting for the last month or more, but the ground prep has been mediocre and intermittent and the weather less than ideal, and as a result there’s been some spotty germination and even a bit of transplant mortality.

Now that it’s drying up, we’re working fast to get a whole lot done.  My goal each year is to get all of the big planting projects (and as much weeding as possible) done by the time the CSA begins.  That’s now just three weeks away!  So… we’ve planted out the first round of flowers, gotten our potato patch in, planted out the first rounds of summer squash, cucumbers, & snap beans, and are mostly on top of the weeding.  Now we need to finish turning around the coldframes to get our tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants in, get one more weeding of the strawberry patch done, plant out the onions, sow the winter squash, and keep up with the weekly plantings.  The ground for all this is nearly ready… already manured & amended, just awaiting final tillage.  It’s Go Time!

While my main sales outlet at DeepSeeded Farm is my CSA program, I have planted a number of early crops for Farmers Markets as well.  These crops bring in revenue early in the season, and they also help me market my CSA shares.  This year, through a combination of coldframe space and fall-prepped, early spring planted outdoor beds, I am now harvesting butter lettuce, spinach, salad turnips, carrots, potatoes, baby bok choi, and (soon) zucchini and sunflowers.  I’ll also have an early harvest (late May) of coldframe onions, outdoor peas, and outdoor carrots that will allow for a more robust start to my CSA season.

The colframe crops are easy to grow, but the space is expensive.  The early outdoor beds are less expensive in terms of materials, but take a good bit of extra work.  So, is it worth it?   I don’t have good numbers for cost of production,  so I can’t really evaluate the profitability, but I can sell almost everything I produce this early, and for a higher price.  Here’s a breakdown of revenues per 100′ bed:

Coldframe:

Butter Lettuce -350 heads @ $2.25 average = $790

Bunching Spinach -170 bunches @ $2.50 average = $425

Salad Turnips -220 bunches @ $2.60 average = $570

Carrot Bunches -250 bunches @ 2.25 average = $560

New Potatoes -400 lbs @ $2.00 average = $800

Sunflowers (med-large) – 300 @ $1.50 = $450

Zucchini – 530 lbs (over 8 weeks) @ $1.80 average = $955 (but in this time frame I could instead have a whole 2nd crop of radishes or cilantro or arugula)

Outdoor (2 weeks later than coldframe):

Butter Lettuce -350 heads @ $2.00  = $700

Bunching Spinach – 150 bunches @ $2.50 average = $375

Baby Bok Choi bunches – 260 bunches @ $2.50 = $650

As you can see, some crops are more lucrative than others.  But.. the diversity makes sales easier.  If my entire coldframe was in lettuce, I would likely have to find wholesale outlets that would not give me as high of a price.  As soil fertility and my production techniques improve I may see higher yields and higher revenues, but for right now, it’s just great to have some money coming in.  Here’s some pics:

The Humboldt County farmer’s market season began this last Saturday with a special early market at the Plan-it-Green conference in Arcata.  It was fun getting back to into that social dynamic that is unique to farmer’s markets, and of course it is good to have another stream of revenue early in the season.  We had a nice spread, combining winter storage crops, overwintered crops, and early greenhouse crops.  Folks were happy to once again have access to super-fresh veggies, and I sold nearly everything I brought!

The conference was a great one as well.  The Plan it Green conference is a great learning opportunity and networking event on the broad topic of building green communities.  This year’s them was “Local Self Reliance – making connections”, and one of the focuses was on local food systems.  I had the opportunity to present on a panel that took a broad view of the current state of our local food systems and highlighted opportunities for enhancement.  Sara Mosser, a local planner, spoke about policies that support local food systems (like Community Food Assessments) and gave many examples of innovative projects being undertaken by communities around the country.  Melanie Patrick, representing our local CAFF chapter, spoke about food distribution models both past and present and provided insight into how we can help local producers connect with local institutions like schools and hospitals.  I spoke about accessing farmland, and about promoting “food literacy” so that all our citizens can become more comfortable growing, purchasing, and cooking local, whole foods.

The conference drew in over 1,000 people, and it was great to see fellow Freshman Farmer Dustin Dougherty there (see his good blog posting, too!).

Floating rowcover, agribon, reemay… whatever you call it, this lightweight, translucent, water-permeable, spun-bonded plastic sheeting is awesome!  Though it is plastic that eventually gets shredded and ends up in the landfill, this material has a myriad of uses that help my crops succeed:

1) Warmth bonus – Even the lightweight version that I use manages to add a few degrees of warmth to my young plants.  The protection from wind is definitely a part of this.  I use it on the cool weather plants that I put out extra-early, and I use it on my warm weather crops to get them going outside while the weather’s still a bit shaky (this is where a bit of frost protection also comes into play).  You can use this warmth bonus at both ends of the growing season.

2) Germinating seeds – If I think there might be a strong rain coming (or if there’s a lot of silt in your soil),  I put rowcover down over beds that I’ve just direct-seeded.  Not only does the layer of fabric prevent crusting on the soil surface, but it also retains soil moisture so that I don’t have to worry about the surface drying out while the seeds are germinating.

3) Insect barrier – There is pretty strong pressure at my farm from a number of pests that can be prevented with a simple physical barrier.  Many crops just need protection while they’re young (like keeping cucumber beetles off of young beans), but there are some crops that I grow their entire cycle under rowcover.  I do this to prevent damage from brassica root fly on radishes, rust fly on carrots, and flea beetles on arugula and bok choi.  Plants that spend this long under rowcover can become weakened by the pampered environment, but in some cases it’s worth it.

4) Hoops, or no? – 10 gauge galvanized wire (usually cut to ~6′) can be used to keep rowcover up off of young plants.  You can get a bundle of wire and cut it yourself, or buy pre-cut hoops from Peaceful Valley.  The rowcover is light enough that I typically lay it directly over the plants (“floating”), weighing down the edges with shovels of soil or sand bags.  I do find, however, that the hoops are really helpful over the winter and early spring when the rains can be quite strong, or when it’s cold enough that the fabric will freeze to the leaves.

Well we just had another spring soaker, but before the rain I managed to get a bunch of ground work done and begin the regular outdoor plantings.  This spring has been warm, but its been wet.  My field was just barely dry enough, but I new there’d be more rain coming, so I went for it.  I started by mowing and disking the ~4.5 acres of cover crop and spreading lime over everything.  With only a few days for cover crop breakdown, I spread rock phosphate, some azomite, cow manure, and chicken manure over the ~1.5 acres that I’ll be planting between now and the beginning of May.  Over this area, I then chisel plowed, rototilled, marked beds, and began sowing and transplanting!  More time for breakdown, and a slightly drier soil would have been ideal, but now that the field is soaked again, I’m glad I got in when I did.

Our standard beds are 100′ by 5′ (with ~3.5′ of bed top between the tractor tires).  We were able to direct seed 3 beds of carrots, 3 beds of snap peas, 2 beds of beets, 1 bed of spinach, 1 bed of radish/turnip, and a 1/2 bed of cilantro & arugula, then transplant 3 beds of broccoli, 1.5 beds of lettuce, and 1 bed of baby bok choi.  We just managed to get all the direct seeded beds covered with rowcover before the rains began.

I was hoping to get more pictures of field prep (especially the manure spreader in action), but I was working solo that day.

There’s a quote I’ve heard that goes, “The best time to plant a fruit tree was 10 years ago; the next best time is now”.  Well, I managed to hold off for one whole year to give myself time to prepare the ground, and now I’ve done some planting.

Aside from an abundant strawberry patch and a few coastal melons, my CSA share is all vegetables (and flowers).  But in a few year’s time, there’ll be raspberries, blueberries, apples, pears, and plums as well.  The planting is now done, the irrigation is mostly set up, and the mulching is underway!  Here’s some of the details:

Site Prep – I wrote a blog post about this a few months ago describing the steps I went through to get the ground ready.  One of my goals was to get the perennial grass to die back so I could replace the ground level flora with clover and a mix of forbes.  In this I was mostly, but not entirely successful.  The ground between the berries rows and fruit trees is now full of dutch clover, yarrow, chicory, and more, but there is still pasture grass coming back.  No longer, however, will I have the problem of thick grass sod competing with the tree roots and overwhelming the mulches.

The soil I started with was already pretty acidic (5.4).  I added lime where the fruit trees were going, but not in the berry section.  In these beds, I was able to incorporate some peat moss, and soon there’ll be a thick mulch on top.  The entire area received a generous dose of rock phosphate, and some azomite as well.

Varieties - My perennial patch consists of 440 bed-feet of raspberries, 850 bed-feet of blueberries, 50 apples, 14 pears, 8 plums, 12 peaches, and a few miscellaneous trees just for me.  Here in Arcata, our cool summers really limit the variety of tree fruits that will ripen here.  Many apples and pears do well, but only a couple types of plums (Beauty, Prune), one Peach (Frost), one Fig (King) and no nectarines, apricots, cherries, persimmons, walnuts, etc.  You can grow Meyer Lemons in sheltered yards, but citrus doesn’t really thrive here either.

In deciding what kinds of apples to plant, I talked to a bunch of folks in the area, and I also asked myself what qualities were most important.  Rust and powdery mildew resistance are a plus here,  flavor is a high priority, and I mainly wanted apples that matured in Late September through October with decent storability.  The varieties I ended up planting are King, IdaRed, HoneyCrisp, CrimsonCrisp, Mutsu, William’s Pride (early), and a couple others to try.

With the blueberries, I decided that, for the size of my patch, it was better to have a lot maturing at once than to have an extended harvest season.  At least two varieties are needed for good pollination, and I chose Chandler and Bluecrop.  For raspberries, I chose Himbo Top and Anne, both everbearing types that have their larger fruit set pretty late in the season (after the strawberries and blueberries).

Spacing – Most of the apples are on M7, with some M111.  The plums and peaches are on Citation.  The spacing I chose was 12′ between trees in a row (staggered) with 14′ between rows.  This between row spacing is a bit small for tractor mowing, but the orchard’s not too big, and can mow with a brush mower.  Depending on how things are looking, I’m playing with the idea of letting the ground cover stay a bit tall and wild.  The in-row spacing is pretty conservative for these rootstocks.  Some people plant them much closer, but because of our potential for mildew problems, I wanted to maintain good airflow.

The raspberries are at 3′ and the blueberries are at 5′.  The rows are 8′ apart.  It looks wide open now, but it’ll fill out in no time.

Irrigation – For the fruit trees I’m using Supernet mini-sprinklers, and the berry beds each have two lines of 1/2″ emitter tubing.  They’re set up to be watered separately, and there’s a nice big spin-clean filter on the header.

Mulching – The berries are getting a top-dressing of cottonseed meal, then a double-layer mulch of green waste compost (lots of conifer) and small fir chips.  Redwood chips and shredded bark are the cheapest mulches around here, but I’m avoiding them because of the growth-inhibiting tannins (though I guess the jury’s still out on which plants this is actually harmful to).  I’d like to mulch the fruit trees with hardwood chips, but there aren’t too many of those around here.  Instead I’m using rice straw, with a scattering of feather meal beneath.  I thought about using some of the composted cow manure I have, but it’s too weedy.

Anyway… Here’s some pics.

With the greenhouse work completed for the moment, I find myself waiting for the next dry stretch.  In the last few breaks in the weather, we were able to weed garlic & strawberries, begin fruit tree planting, and plant out the remainder of our extra-early beds.  I had prepped and mulched over some beds in the fall, and we have just finished seeding, transplanting, and row-covering these beds.  There are two successions of peas and carrots that will likely be ready for the first CSA shares in late May, and we also planted Lettuce, Broccoli, Baby Bok Choi, and Spinach for early Farmer’s Markets in April & May.  These will complement the early crops now occupying the greenhouses.

The question now is how soon ’till the soil dries up enough to work in cover crop and begin making the new season’s beds.  Hopefully it won’t be too long…