Unfortunately, the soil blockers can be hard to come by. They are hand-made in England and shipped over to the U.S. by only a few distributors and they can be rather pricey. They are available through Peaceful Valley (order early in the growing season as they can take a while coming from England). I also recommend buying the book, “Transplants in Soil Blocks” from PV as well.

Hello all,

Everything is going good here at Ellwood Canyon. With a break in the rainy weather I am making a big push to prepare my next section for planting. Here is a step by step of the process:

1)Planted peaceful valley’s soil builder cover crop mix in December.
2)Mowed and turned under the cover crop just as it began to flower the 3rd week in February (the flowering stage is when legumes are at their highest nitrogen fixation point).
3)Let the ground sit for a couple weeks to allow the plant debris to decompose.
4)Spread a thick layer of compost (about 12 tons on a 1/6 of an acre)
5)Till and mix the compost into to ground
6)Shape beds
7)Lay mulch (only for certain crops)

8)Plant

I am currently on step 4 and hope to have this section ready to plant by the end of next week depending how the weather behaves.

Here are some photos:

Cover crop:[[Show as slideshow]]

Compost:[[Show as slideshow]]

Thanks for reading,

Jack Motter

When I first started to write this post, my intention was to segue into photos of our top bar hives – the first of which Matt completed today! – with information on the importance of honeybees to agriculture (and the economics of agriculture).[[Show as slideshow]]

Most gardeners and farmers are accustomed to embracing the important role that bees play.  While doing some research for those impressive numbers – the billions of dollars and percentages of crops to be credited to honeybees – I learned that other pollinators, including the 3500 or so species of bees native to North America (honeybees are European) – are far more important.  They – like honeybees – are also in peril.

Luckily, many sources exist that provide information and materials to help out our native bees.  ATTRA provides an excellent reference paper called “Alternative Pollinators:  Native Bees.”  The National Wildlife Federation gives information, and instructions on building a “bee house.” Peaceful Valley sells a book, nesting block, and other materials to encourage populations of the Orchard Mason bee.  People living in areas with lots of unmanaged open space may not need to provide nesting habitat, but it might help to plant permanent, undisturbed places with pollen and nectar sources – Good Bug Blend being one option.  We have purchased some of this seed mix and will soon establish a permanent planting.

We will definitely continue with our plans for keeping honeybees for pollination and for honey, but we will pay more attention to the needs of our native bee friends.

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…

Our new small hoop house is adorable, but is it financially sound?

Here is the bottom line on the financials for a 5′x5′ hoop house.

Raised bed – recycled scrap wood.  $0

Wood screws to construct raised bed – $8.67.

PVC pipes – 1/2″ inner diameter, 10′ length (5 at $1.16 each) – $5.80

3/4″ copper 2-hole pipe straps, package of 25 (we used all but 1) – $11.12

Wood screws to affix pipe straps – $2.00

So far, the hoop house has cost us $27.59.

In addition, the hoop house will need a covering and clips to attach the covering to the structure.  Materials for that are on order, as follows:

7.5 oz PolyMax All-Purpose Fabric, Clear 120″ (quantity 15 feet) – $45.00

Labor Saver Fabric Clip, .706″ OD pipe, 20 @ $.80 each – $16.00

Total cost of hoop house with covering:  $88.59

Dan

Today we used a plan from groworganics.com to build a small hoop house, where we can start our tomatoes.

Check out the plans we used here:

http://intheloop.groworganic.com/2009/04/how-to-make-a-hoophouse-on-a-raised-bed/

It was up in about 2 hours and that includes patching together the 4 sides from scrap wood, salvaged from construction of our straw bale field shed.  We had 18 pieces of 2×6, each 27 inches long, sitting around from having trimmed them off the ends of our floor joists, so we bound them into patchword sides for a raised bed by using short sections of 2×4s to connect the 2×6 lengths, 4 per side.

What a great opportunity to use even more of our remarkably meager scrap from the straw bale project!  Drew was amazing at estimating materials, and our scrap pile is VERY tiny — and getting tinier.

Here is a set of pictures documenting the hoop house construction today.  We made just two changes to the original plan:  (1) we attached the hoop brackets inside, instead of outside, of the raised bed.  Hopefully this won’t impact our efforts to attach the tarp — which we’ll do 2 weeks from now.  We also plan to bolster the whole thing, and the tarp edges, by bracing the sides between damp straw bales.  (2) We added a horizontal strip of PVC to the front and back, as a way of anchoring the “door” portion of the tarp.

We’ll be tarping and planting next weekend.

Dan

Dear Blog Followers,

It’s so good to be back here on the blog.   We have spent a lot of time this winter adjusting our lives to the wide range of changes that take place once a couple turns  together to a life of farming as their fulltime occupation.  Sara and I have been married just over a year, and for the last three years we’ve been tending the earth and planting seeds together, a life skill we completely lacked before that’s now an occupation for two rather than a hobby.

I’m fortunate to be farming another season side by side with Sara, who believes in all my abilities and is a constant reminder to turn to trust, and love.  It’s my main objective this season that I share with my wife, more  hugs and kisses than farming woes.

Seeds are being sown and the hand tools have met the soil.

We lack the money and supplies to start seeding our tomatoes… a bit concerning.

CSA shares are coming in slow and sparse.  I’m really bummed that the largest CSA farm in WA, Full Circle Farm, (which also ships CSA shares to Alaska) is delivering CSA shares to our  community some 103 miles away…  It seems odd to have to state this but, I highly encourage people to purchase Community Supportive Agriculture from farms in their own community, with the farm owners being the farmers.

We’ve been working on Orchard 2, the second of our two existing orchards, the past couple of weekends.  The soil is right for digging and our gypsum amendment has had some time to work into the soil, so although we trampled our still-infant cover crop a bit, the time was right to put in this year’s new baby trees.

Here’s a picture of Orchard 2, its fledging cover crop, and the new trees.

We had a lot of fun with this planting, because we waited for the right time to dig, plus the weather was fantastic, and we are right on the cusp of that magical time when everything is emerald green.  Not there yet, but almost – I find myself holding my breath, waiting for it.

This is our second year of planting trees, and we learned from our efforts last year.  We put the trees into Orchard 2, which is slightly higher than Orchard 1 and on a slight slope.  Our hope is to avoid the problems we ran into with Orchard 1, where we ended up with fungus and cold weather damage, due to Orchard 1’s location in a spot of lowest relative elevation where the damp and cold settled.  Also, we amended with gypsum and cover crop to improve the soil’s texture – making digging easier but also hopefully helping the new trees get a better start.  Lastly, we used gopher baskets, taking advice we heard after planting our trees last year.

Gopher baskets are a bit costly, so I hope they are effective.  We definitely have a lot of gophers in the meadow between Orchard 1 and Orchard 2.

I thought it would be fun to include a series of tree planting pictures, a kind of “how to” to document our process.  I felt pretty clever with my use of the trenching shovel to define the sides of the holes, and the spade to do the actual earth moving.  These are much better dug holes than last year, that’s for sure!

Happy spring,

Dan

Like most other farmers in Northern California I am getting a respite from the field due to some rainy weather.  I used my time away from the field to pay a visit to the Humboldt County Agriculture Department to get the ball rolling on my organic certification.  I had an in formative meeting with the Ag/weights & measures inspector who helped me understand all the paperwork required.     Basically, all inputs need to be accounted for including seeds and amendments.  Also, since I am a new operation the past three years of my leased farmland need to be detailed so far as inputs and activity go.  The last step after all the paperwork will be to have an on site inspection.  It is a lot of work, but the result is that when a customer picks out a tomato at market they are assured that it is truly an organic product.

p.s. I have included a few pictures, in order they are: 1. Downriver half of the property which will be the 2010 garden  2. Upriver half which will be farmed in the future 3. Hoeing garlic 4. Young garlic 5. Coco