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…

For those of you in the Humboldt Bay region… We’ve just added a new session of the course I teach through Humboldt State University’s Extended Ed – “Organic Gardening: From the Backyard to the Kitchen Table”!

This course is an abbreviated offshoot of the semester long course I used to teach at HSU, now trimmed down to 5 evening sessions and a trip to my farm.  I go over all manner of organic gardening fundamentals, from bed preparation and fertility to pest management and planning for year-round harvests.

The current session filled up fast, so sign up now!  Link Here

At this point, nearly all of the seeds I ordered for 2010 have arrived, and I’ve sorted and grouped them all into big ziplock bags so they are easy to find during the season.  In this posting, I’m taking a look bag at the order and teasing out some info for you:

1) Cost – My seed costs are pretty high for a couple of reasons.  For one, I’m trialing a lot of new varieties.  This means that instead of getting a bulk price for a larger quantity of one type of, say, mainseason carrots, I am buying 3 or 4 types at a higher per-seed price.  Even when I do cut down on the amount of new varieties I’m trialing, my per-acre seed cost will remain high simply because  I grow relatively small patches of many different crops.  I’ll never be getting the largest quantity discounts.  Below are my 2010 costs for the 6.5 acres of annuals I plant over the course of the season:

Vegetable Seed: $3,186

Flower Seed: $341

Seed Potato: $1,208 – 550 lbs, 11 varieties, shipping included

Strawberry Plants: $780 – 8750 plants, 6 varieties, shipping included.  I really only needed 4500 plants, but I’m trialing new varieties.  I was able to sell many of the extras.

2) Organic Seed – I purchase certified organic seed whenever its an option for the varieties I choose to grow.  Because I rely on the income from my farm, it is more important for me to choose a variety that I know will perform as needed, even if the seed is not organic, than to choose a variety simply because its certified OG.  I do make an effort to try new OG varieties each year, but as it stands, just 66 of the 165 veggie varieties I’m growing this year are organic seed.  10 of the 11 potato varieties are OG, but only 1 of the 6 strawberry varieties was available as OG.

3) F1 Hybrid Seed – The situation is similar when it comes to Open-Pollinated (OP) varieties vs. Hybrid (F1) varieties.  I am always seeking OP varieties that perform well, but I do plant F1 varieties when they show a noticeable advantage over similar OP strains.  This year, 83 of the 165 veggie varieties are OP, and 37 of the 38 flower varieties are OP.  Because seed producers can make more money from F1 seeds, it seems that the breeders are less focused on OP strains.  I do not grow any GM seeds.

4) New Varieties – There are a number of crops where I feel like I haven’t yet found the best possible varieties for my climate, soils, or time of year.  To try and remedy this, I trial a number of new varieties each year.  Of the 220 annual plant varieties I’m growing this year, 73 are new to me.

5) Seed Saving – I am not currently saving any of my own seed.  While I recognize the potential for improving the adaptation of varieties to my farm, I am not ready to commit the time and space required.  Perhaps when I’ve identified more of the OP varieties that do well for me, I will begin to save some of my own seed.

6) Sources – I purchased seed and planting stock from 11 different companies this year.  What I’m looking for is: a) The varieties I want, b) The availability of organic seed, c) Good bulk pricing, and d) A reputation for high-quality & reliability.  This year I purchased from Johnny’s, Osborne, High Mowing, Territorial, Snow, Stokes, Peaceful Valley, Turtle Tree, Uprising, Ronnigers Potaoes, & Lassen Canyon Nursery.

I find it extremely helpful to make a plan for all of the sowings and plantings for the coming season, and then to rigorously stick to that plan.  With most vegetable farms, having an extended harvest of various crops is important, but with CSA this need is amplified.  For CSA, you’ll likely be growing more types of crops and you’ll be needing a very regular supply of harvests.

I start out by deciding what crops I want to grow over the course of the year (not yet getting down to varieties).  The goal for my CSA is to achieve a regular harvest of the most popular vegetables, while throwing in some less common, or niche additions here and there.

Then I determine how often I want to include each of these crops in the CSA offering.  I make a spreadsheet with each week of the harvest season on the x axis and each of the crops on the y axis.  It takes some knowledge of your climate to know when you can reasonably expect harvests of the various crops.  My advise is to start out conservatively, and slowly push the envelope year by year.  For my spreadsheet, I’ve assigned a $ value to each of the produce items, so that I can see what the total value of each week’s share will be.  I then try to shift things around so that week-to-week the amount of produce is fairly consistent.

Now that I have a harvest plan, I need to convert this into a planting plan.  For this I make a new spreadsheet with all the weeks in the planting season on the x axis, and enough blank spaces on the y axis to list the crops that will be planted that week.  Using the harvest plan I’ve just created, I take one crop at a time and work backwards from the planned harvest date, to the date I need to be planting that crop.

This part is a bit trickier.  Some crops are planted once for multiple harvests (like tomatoes & zucchini), others are planted anew for each harvest.  This can also depend on how big of a patch you sow.  Take carrots as an example.  You can sow enough at one time for a whole month of harvests, or you can sow just enough for two weeks at a time.  To give some examples from my own plan, I sow lettuce and spinach every week, snap beans every two weeks, peas and carrots every three week.  I sow cucumbers just twice each season, and potatoes and winter squash just once for the year.

You’ll also need to consider that some plants are being direct sown and some are being transplanted.  When seed catalogs list the days to maturity for a variety, they are sometimes listing it from direct seeding and sometimes from transplant.  If its from transplant, you’ll need to count back from your planned harvest date not only the number of days to maturity, but also the days it will take for that seedling to grow.  As you get more advanced with this, you can also try to adjust for the fact that growth rates vary across the season.

Perhaps the hardest part is figuring out how much of each crop to plant at each planting date.  For a crop like lettuce heads, it can be fairly straight forward:  Decide whether you’re planting for one or two weeks of harvest, determine how many heads you need a week, and add in some overage.  From this you figure out how many row or bed feet this harvest requires, and how many seedling you’ll need to raise.  It’s not so easy to figure out for crops like carrots, where yields can be really variable, or for zucchini that yield multiple harvests from the same plant.  I’ve been playing with a matrix that would determine this for each crop based on the number of CSA members and the various other markets I harvest for, but it would take a few years of really good record keeping for this spreadsheet to actually work.  Instead, I ended up pretty much winging it the first year, and I can now look back on that and make adjustments for next year.

Hope all this helps!

My favorite part of winter farm work is the part that happens indoors… planning for the year to come.  For me, this involves the following steps:

1. A crop by crop review to determine what changes should be made in the year to come.

2. Updating the harvest plan – when and how often to I want to harvest X crop for X market?

3. Updating the planting plan – to achieve the above harvest, when do I need to plant each crop, and how much should I plant each time?

4. Taking a seed inventory – How much did I really use of each variety?

5. Making the seed order – Choose varieties based on the crop-by-crop review and what the catalogs are offering.  Comparing this year’s planting plan with last year’s (& with the inventory) to see if seed amounts need to change.  Seek out organic varieties; compare prices.

6. Update the crop rotation map – how many beds/rows of each plant family will I be growing in Spring? Summer? Fall/Winter? Overwinter?  How does this fit into the multi-year plan.

I’ve now completed all of these steps for the 2010 season, and in the next couple posts I’ll share some of what I’ve come up with.

Getting an early harvest is often a real plus for farmers.  The prices for the produce are higher, and boosting the diversity of your early farmer’s market table can attract customers and draw sales.  For my CSA, getting an extra-early start on some of the longer-maturing crops means that I can begin sooner in the year with a good spread by matching them with later-planted short season crops.

Getting that early harvest usually also means putting in some extra work.  One of the techniques I’ve adopted is to amend and shape raised beds in the fall before it gets too wet, and then cover them with a black plastic mulching film.  Then, in mid-winter and early spring I can pull off the plastic and have beds that are soft and ready to sow or plant into.  I sow the seed, then put down hoops and rowcover to protect the crops form cold and rain impact.  I’ve been doing this for the last four years with good results.

I sow snap peas and carrots first in mid-January and again in early March, and they give me an extended harvest beginning in late May.  If I were to wait ’till the ground was dry enough to plant in spring (most years not until early April), I wouldn’t be harvesting these crops until late in June.

The main drawback is that is does require using more plastic that ends up in the landfill.  None of the biodegradable plastics hold up long enough, and sturdier reusable sheeting is not practical at my scale.  But I remain conscious of this, and limit this technique to a relatively small area.

Well… It’s been a great, long season of harvests; and now it’s over.  We kept it coming for 32 weeks this year, which is longer than any of the CSA farms in the area, and longer than I’ve ever kept it going before.  For the 6-week Winter CSA add-on we had 94 member-households.  The harvests were abundant and diverse, and folks were pleased to be getting farm-fresh produce long after the Farmer’s Markets had ceased.

But I’m glad to have stopped when I did.  There is still a lot of produce at the farm, but the diversity of the offering is going way down.  While the serious locavores might be thrilled with a late-winter harvest of Chard, Kale, Cabbage, Leeks, Potatoes, and Beets,  many of my members would get a bit tired.

A realization that I’ve come to is that our climate is not all that great for a late winter CSA.  We have enough cold that the crops need to be hardy, but then we get warm, wet stretches that cause roots to rot, leaves to mold, and plants to start bolting long before spring.  It seems that the best climates for all-winter CSA’s are those that are either warm enough for crops to keep growing, or consistently cold enough for the field to become like a refrigerator.

Anyway… it’s been a great season, and I’m truly grateful to all who supported me in the farm’s first year!

My farm is only 4 miles from the ocean on the north California coast, so it never gets really cold… but it’s been pretty cold lately.  We’ve had numerous frosty mornings in a row and this morning it was 24 degrees.  I’m used to being able to leave the hardier crops uncovered through the winter, using row covers just for winter lettuces and other tender stuff, but these temps had me covering up carrots and bok choi as well.

I’m hoping the plants fare alright; I still have 4 more weeks of winter CSA harvests.  It does warm up every day, but waiting for things to thaw can slow down the harvest.  Lately we’ve been wearing neoprene diver’s gloves that have really been saving our hands.

This year at DeepSeeded Farm, we’ve decided to keep the harvest coming for a few weeks into winter.  I planted an acre or so of crops that would mature in the fall and provide harvest a ways into winter.  Though it is possible to harvest something from the garden all year long in this climate, I decided to keep the winter CSA to just 6 weeks for a couple of reasons.  One, it’s great to get a break from harvest at some point in the year.  Secondly, after a while into winter the diversity of crops available for harvest in our climate starts to diminish, and keeping the CSA baskets diverse and interesting becomes challenging.  Two farms I like to keep tabs on that are doing all-winter CSA’s are Oakhill Organics in Dayton, OR, and Mendocino Organics in the Redwood Valley area of Mendocino county, CA.

Our winter CSA runs 6 week for $120 ($20/wk) and includes eight to ten of the following items each week:  Arugula, Beets, Broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, Bok Choi, Cabbage, Carrots, Cilantro, Chard, Celery, Cauliflower, Fennel, Kale, Lettuces, Leeks, Parsnips, Potatoes, Spinach, Sunchokes, and Winter Squash.  We are now full at 90 members!

In general, the farmers I know are the type of folks who don’t get sick very often.  It’s extremely hard to be out of action when the harvests are demanding, and you already have a giant backlog of work.  I managed to make it clear to the end of our mainseason CSA harvests, but by the end of last Friday, I was out.  I had a fever and couldn’t do anything for 5 days, and finally felt better just in time for Thanksgiving (yes!).

During that time, though, the farm still had to bring in a pretty big  harvest – the first of the winter CSA pick-ups – and I am super-grateful to have a good crew.  They already knew how to harvest and prep most of the items, and they worked extra-hard to pull it all off without me.  Here’s to Scott, Will, Jess, & Molly!!