The Golden Rule Garden

Dreaming of Spring (Wheat)

2012-01-08T20:27:00.000-08:00

The garden is deceptively quiet this time of year – the slow growing cover crops, winter grains, and garlic seem almost dormant. However, thanks to our fertile soil, the weeds gladly fill the vacuum whenever and wherever an opportunity presents itself! We are also staying busy inside: Rachid is installing new drying racks and streamlining our grain processing setup; Ellen and Fernanda have been working hard to preserve the summer’s harvest of apples, pears, and garlic; Randy has been organizing our impressive repository of seeds; and we all have been threshing, winnowing and saving seeds and grains from this year’s harvest and catching up on some from past years. Our barn is looking better than ever.

While garden work may be slow right now, the next significant task is just around the corner: planting spring grains. The end of January will find us busy flatting spring grains (and spacing the flatting days apart so we won’t find ourselves with too many ready-to-transplant grains at one time).

This year we have some exciting varieties of spring wheat that we are growing for the first time at Golden Rule. After perusing the Kusa Seeds catalogue, we settled on the “Embassy Wheat Suite” collection of seven different spring wheats. Taken directly from the Kusa Seed catalogue, here are the names and descriptions of the seven we are going to grow this year:

BAART EARLY

Baart Early is a spring growth-habit wheat (Triticum vulgare) with large, semi-hard, white-color kernels and white glumes. It reached heights of up to 48” in the Kusa Seed organization grow-outs. Baart Early was imported into Australia from South Africa in 1880 and came to the United States in 1900. It became well established in Arizona, then spread to the Pacific Coast states. About 500,000 acres were grown in 1919, while the 1939 records show 890,000 acres grown on the dry and irrigated lands of the West. A widely-grown, pre-modern bread wheat.

GLOBE WHEAT STRAIN 1506

Globe Wheat (Triticum sphaerococcum) is a spring growth-habit wheat with small, spherical (round) kernels. The shape of the kernels is quite distinctive and memorable. The stems are very stiff on 24-inch plants whose leaves are all stiffly erect. The seeds have fast germination and emergence. Globe wheat filled the bread basket of pre-industrial colonial India where grain from the plants furnished the flour for the delicious native chapatis and countless other wheaten foods, probably for many long centuries. This crop tillers vigorously even when crowded and has an excellent agronomic appearance by “modern” plant-architecture standards. All heads have short awns. Start with a few seeds and get to 80-pounds with the third-generation harvest. The harvest from the 80-pounds will produce enough grain to feed a whole village.

HURON

Huron is a spring growth-habit wheat grown commercially as a bread wheat in the United States about 100 years ago. Huron was selected in Canada about 1888. Height ranges from 44-62”. Huron was exposed in the field in Ojai, California to multiple nights of 16° F. temperatures at 50 days of age without harm.

MAURI BLACK-AWNED

This is a landrace wheat from ancient Afghanistan (Triticum turgidum). This race of wheat acquired the common names “Cone” and “Rivet” wheat in England, when they were “somewhat widely” grown in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This is a spring growth habit wheat with its own way of going about the business of “growing up” (have you ever had teenagers living at your place?). Cone and Rivet wheats are best if planted in the autumn, in regions with temperate winters. When sown in the spring, they ripen very late and the kernels struggle to properly mature. According to Percival (an authority on ancient wheats), this is the tallest of all the wheats and in the Kusa Seed organization’s grow-outs, Mauri Black-Awned reached heights of seven-feet. The plants have very attractive, erect leaves and the appearance is one of a very successful and productive-looking crop. Stem strength is modest; the grower should support the plot to prevent lodging. This is an ancient wheat of remarkable beauty. “The productive power of most varieties of Triticum turgidum is greater than that of any other race of wheat when the soil is suitable and the climate allows for a long growing period for the crop” wrote Percival in his monograph The Wheat Plant (1920). This wheat has black awns and white glumes and nice hollow stems (drinking straws).

MILAGRE

This is a landrace wheat of spring growth-habit (Triticum polonicum) from Portugal. Milagre has very distinctive, long glumes and long, narrow kernels. Milagre belongs to one of the tallest races of wheat. In the Kusa Seed organization grow-outs, Milagre reached heights of 7’ (84”). Milagre has very large grain heads and broad, droopy leaves. This wheat has nice hollow stems, used for drinking straws in the old days. This wheat pre-dates the industrial revolution and is highly scenic. Anticipate possible lodging by furnishing support. A most esteemed faculty member with a historic portfolio.

MIRABELLA

This is a landrace wheat of spring growth-habit (Triticum polonicum) from ancient Italy. Mirabella has “elephantic” length glumes and tremendous height potential. In Kusa Seed grow-outs, height varied from 30-84” with some stiff stems exhibited at times. The height expression depends on the soil, climate, growing-term, and other factors (how it likes your place; the local hospitality factor). Once you meet Mirabella, you’ll want to squire her, no doubt. A real, honest-to-goodness beauty queen with a clean and decent soul. Be sure and have your camera on hand when you grow Mirabella, and plenty of film or memory. You likely have never seen anything so fetching before. This is real grain. Nice hollow stems.

SIN EL PHEEL

This is a landrace wheat (Triticum polonicum) of spring growth-habit from ancient Iraq. What a faculty member to have on staff! Huge heads of grain; “elephant size.” Moderately stiff stems. A magnificent specimen of ancient wheat. If the neighbors see it, you’ll have to put up a fence with a strong padlock on the gate. Good for pasta, bread, other culinary items and curative for the “wimp factor” that car-driving and web-surfing inescapably thrust upon us. Height in the Kusa Seed organization grow-outs ranged from 30-84”. Imagine a giant towering over you; that’s Sin El Pheel at its best form. Nature has some surprise secrets to share with you and this faculty member comes with a briefcase full of them.

The Kusa Seed Society endeavors to increase public knowledge and understanding of the important relationship between humanity and edible seedcrops. They have a unique selection of not just spring wheats, but also winter wheats and barleys. If you are interested in growing grains at all, then you definitely will enjoy visiting their website.

May 2012 bring you closer to your friends and family, contentment in your work, and a fruitful harvest.

Happy Flatting, Planting, Dreaming...Happy New Year!

Fall 2011 Update (Part2)

2011-11-29T14:28:00.000-08:00

After a rather extended period of dormancy, The Golden Rule Garden Blog is once again in production. Our Garden Manager, Ellen, has written an update of this year's activities in the garden, which will be presented in two parts. The first is a brief overview of our work, philosophy and challenges in the garden. The second part details a few specific crop production statistics.

Within our garden we have a section called the 40 Bed Unit. This is our experimental area that represents all the food, compost crops, etc. grown to sustain one person. This is the area where Randy and most of the interns have grown their experimental beds. Within these beds we have grown 740 square feet of potatoes. All of our potatoes have exceeded or almost equaled the national average. Our average Yukon Gold yield was 83 lbs/ 100 sq. ft.; Yellow Finn was 92 lbs/100 sq. ft; Rio Grande russets was 95 lbs/100 sq. ft; and Colorado Rose was 112 lbs/100 sq. ft. Our seed potatoes came from Sanhedrin Nursery in Willits and they’re a wonderful organic seed potato from White Mountain Farms in southern Colorado.

The other crop that we have some data on at this time is our quinoa. We have 200 square feet (out of more than 500 sq. ft.) threshed and winnowed. The variety we have grown this year is Colorado 407D. This is the third year we have grown this variety in our garden. It is extremely beautiful and grows quickly and quite well in our shorter growing season. Quinoa, in general, likes cooler drier weather. Some of the quinoa that was planted at the end of April and the first part of May was smaller and more affected by fungus because of the wet weather. While it still grew, the yields were decreased somewhat from what we were used to producing. We have an average, at this point, of 8.3 lbs/100 sq. ft. with a biomass yield of 7-8 lbs/100 sq. ft. In past years, with this variety, we have achieved 10-11 lbs/100 sq. ft with a biomass yield of 8-9 lbs/100 sq. ft. We expect that the quinoa that is not yet threshed will exceed our existing average. Those that were planted at a later, warmer and drier time didn’t develop the fungus that seemed to affect the growth of the earlier quinoa.

We have had great success in past years growing this particular variety of quinoa as a catch crop. Catch crops are crops that you plant after over-wintering or early spring planted crops come out of the garden beds in late June or July, like cereal grains or garlic. Catch crops are quick growing plants that will produce food or biomass for compost before it is time to plant the cover crops for over winter. We were able to grow a crop of quinoa that produced well from early July to early October.

We are growing a beautiful variety of purple amaranth that we found last year from Canada. It is a combination of many colors and shapes that are quite vibrant and white-seeded. We have been able to grow seed from the amaranth as a catch crop this year, and the biomass from the amaranth is quite a bit larger and fuller than the amaranth that we transplanted in the cooler, wetter months. Amaranth is a heat-loving crop and is quite beautiful in your garden.

Two other catch crops that have produced well this year are pearl millet and Dale sorghum. These crops were planted after cereal grains were harvested and are now producing. The pearl millet has tall stalks and is now producing seed and the Dale sorghum is getting tall enough to press for sorghum syrup.

Fall 2011 Update (Part 1)

2011-11-29T10:32:00.000-08:00

This time of year at Golden Rule Garden is very beautiful and busy. As a matter of fact, we are almost as busy as the spring and summer planting time. It is an ending to one growing season and a preparation for the new year. For the gardener, it might represent a chance to maybe take a little time off or start the new garden plan for the next growing season. At Golden Rule Garden this year, we have been facing the same challenges as most agriculturalists everywhere. We have had to adapt to the changing climate and plant many of our vegetable and summer grain crops later, after an extra 4 weeks of cool wet June weather and then adapt to a cooler summer. With those challenges, we have still managed to produce abundant food for our community here at Golden Rule as well as for the local senior center, food banks and soup kitchens thanks to the help of Golden Rule Garden’s new field coordinator, Randy Fish, and our interns Binod, Fernanda, Rachid and Lucas.

We have tried to adapt the varieties we grow to the possible permanent climate changes in our area. With some of the experimentation we have been doing, we are able to offer the varietal seeds we have grown to our local seed company, Bountiful Gardens. Growing tomatoes, for instance, can be challenging with the type of weather we have been dealing with in the last few years, so we have found tomatoes used to cooler nights. We are still experimenting with them and hope to have data on their successes or failures in the future.

It is often fun to grow seeds and preserve them in your own garden. It is truly sustainable to grow out seeds that work well in your garden and are available to you and others. This is a very important aspect to our garden and should be something that we all think about. The world is losing the amazing diversity of heirloom vegetable and grain seeds. At our garden, we are trying very hard to preserve the quality of open-pollinated heirloom seeds for both the vegetables and grains that we grow.

As the growing season ends and we’re preparing for the winter, we are busy composting, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, seed saving, cover-cropping and weeding. Many of these activities continue into the winter...when we start pruning our 84 fruit trees and rebuilding flats. A farmer’s life is full of diversity. However, we are still excited about planning for the growing season next year and what the weather will be. Whatever it is, we will adapt.

Belated Departure

2010-03-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

For those devoted readers who have almost given up hope, we have some explaining to do!

Margo and I finished our time as field-coordinators at the Golden Rule Garden in mid-December of 2009 to travel back to the midwest, have Christmas with the family (for the first time in years) and figure out where we would start our own farm. As successful graduates of Ecology Action's three-year apprenticeship program, and having spent another year working closely with EA interns and apprentices there, we have been looking gratefully toward the time when we could found our own place. It's an opportunity to support EA's work in a different climate, pass on the knowledge we have gained, and, most importantly, do our own thing and make lots of mistakes.
We have settled on a site, partnering with my Mom on her land. For more information on the process, check out our new blog (as of March 2010), Circle of the Sun at royermillers.blogspot.com. But don't look too soon, cause we don't have content up yet!
All this is to say, you can look forward to many wonderfully informative, insightful, and humuserous posts by Garden Manager Ellen, who will be officiating the Golden Rule Garden blog now.

This is How we Roll

2009-12-10T07:33:00.001-08:00

I have long been wanting to get to this subject - the processing of grain directly before eating. There is one grain so soft that you don't have to boil or grind it to make it edible, and that is the oat. And our past garden manager at Ecology Action has the perfect oat tool: a roller.

Industrially speaking, there are vast machines that do this task, putting millions of round cardboard tubes full of stale rolled oats in thousands of grocery stores, but this is different. It fits on your countertop and can be put away in a drawer or cabinet when you are done. It doesn't take a mechanic to service it, and doesn't require anything but your own arms to power it. And it allows you to have fresh rolled oats every day.
For a house-warming gift when we moved to the Golden Rule, Carol got us one, and we have been loving it. It works like this: You pour some oats in the hopper, turn the crank, and the oats get squished by two rollers, landing in the hopper below. When you finish, you brush the rollers off and put it away. Simple and effective.
Of course, it doesn't have to stop there. Margo, being the adventurous spirit she is, postulated that, by soaking other grains we might make them soft enough to roll. So we tried it with barley, triticale, rye, and probably wheat. As you see from the photos, we made it quite a process of soaking and laying out to dry a little, then rolling. All that we eventually found was necessary was putting them in a jar with water at the rate of ¾ cups grain to 1 tablespoon water. Letting them sit over night will soften them sufficiently to roll, then you go for it!
Where does one get this magic tool? The same place we get many other great magic tools: the Lehman's Catalog. It's where you can find the next topic of conversation, too.
Not long after arriving at Ecology Action my attention was drawn to the funny contraption in the corner of the cooking area. White enamel, a pedestal, a wheel and a crank. A hand-powered grain mill, specifically the Country Living Grain Mill, which makes all dreams come true. Soon after uncovering it we were grinding all of our grains fresh for bread, biscuits, tortillas, cookies, cakes, polenta, all that stuff. It takes elbow grease, it's true, but after a few months of using that every time you need flour, it gets much easier. For three loaves of bread I would grind 16 cups of flour once a week or so. We'd put it through twice for a finer grind, and that would mean 40 minutes of work, which I could do continuously by the time we left.
Upon moving down here we started using the available mill, which is called the "Magic Mill". For pictures and a great explanation you can check out this blog on food storage. The long and short is that it takes half the time and infinitely less physical work, but the stones don't get as close so you don't have as fine a flour (unless you sift it). Plus you don't have the satisfaction of doing it yourself. And no, I'm not being sarcastic.
I came up with a few methods of making the hand-mill easier, which ended up being a lot more work to figure out and much less helpful than just buckling down and doing it - one involved taking a hacksaw to a child's bicycle. I bet it would have been better if I knew how to weld...
One might ask, why bother when you can buy flour at the store? The short answer is that we like bothering. The longer answer, from which I will not spare you, involves simple seed anatomy. All seeds, grain included, come with a fibery husk, which surrounds and protects a big starchy endosperm and a small germ. The germ is the embryo of the plant, and the starch is the energy to help that plant develop. Which part is most devoid of vitamins and minerals, do you suppose? Now hold that thought.
The germ contains, among other things, oils, and oils that are stored correctly keep from going rancid. One of the incorrect ways of storing oils is mixing them up in flour and putting them on a shelf for weeks, months, or years. On the other hand, that is a great way to get rancid oil that makes your flour taste bad.
In the early half of the 1900's industry came up with the roller mill, which enabled them to pulverize the endosperm while sifting out the husk (bran) and the germ. Also known as the fiber and the minerals. The end result is a beautiful but nutritionally bereft white powder, which is then further bleached and then enriched. All the oils (in the germ) have been removed, and can be sold separately, like the bran, to consumers. Nice for the seller, and convenient for the buyer. But not good for the buyer, since the bread now lacks all that fiber (as well as its indigenous vitamins and minerals). Sound like colon trouble?
So we cut to the chase, growing some grain and buying the rest bulk in 25 or 50 pound bags from the local health food store. That gives us the nutrition in an easily stored form, and saves us a lot of money. It has been an educational and satisfying transition.

A Couple of Friends (Part 1)

2009-11-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

They've been staying with us for a few years now, and we couldn't be happier. I'm talking about Mr. Sourdough and Ms. Kombucha, our two fantastic fermenting friends. Seriously, once you commit to them, it is hard to leave them behind when you go on trips of more than a week. You care about them, and don't believe anyone will treat them as good as you can.

But let's get down to the nitty-gritty. Many people blog about their kombuchas, and you can get the history on Wikipedia, so I will give you personal experience, failure, success, mediocrity and glory. Don't worry, it's pretty short.
My brother gave us our Kombucha completely unsolicited as a Christmas present, ignoring the classic wisdom that you ought not surprise people with live gifts. Added to the possibility that the receiver might not like it is the potential accidental death of the gift, and the commensurate guilt of that outcome. So we tried brewing it once and, two weeks later, had our first taste. That first taste convinced us it was worth continuing, and the experiences have (mostly) only gotten better. In the interest of trying to figure out why some batches taste bad, some great, some fizzy, I started keeping track of them on a chart. We've had many friends visit who have told us ours was the best Kombucha they've ever had, so that's encouraging. In the summer, when it's hot and dry, I started brewing two batches at once. This Fall, when I was thinking about going back to one, I had a disaster that helped me out. There is a reason they tell you to cover fermenting things: the paper towel I had been using had gotten some small holes, and a fly got in an laid eggs on my Kombucha, which then hatched into maggots. So now I'm down to one again...
So here's the simple version of the recipe my brother gave me:
Brew 3 liters of tea and dissolve one cup of sugar in it. When it has cooled, add 1 tablespoon of white, pasteurized vinegar and your Kombucha thing. Cover the container with cloth or a paper towel and leave it for about 10 days. Taste it every once in a while, and when it has stopped tasting sweet, put the liquid in 10-to-12 oz bottles and cap them. (At this point you can move the Kombucha thing to the next brew of tea). Put the bottles somewhere they won't get kicked or knocked over, and leave them there for about 10 days. Then refrigerate and enjoy at your leisure!
A few miscellaneous notes:
Make sure all utensils and hands are clean. Rinse the Kombucha off between brews, and store it (if you need to) in water. Lately I have been using 2/3 cups sugar and 1/3 cup honey, which seems to make it a little fizzier. Keep the whole process warmish. It will go much slower under 70° F. Most people say caffeinated tea is best, but I have not universally used it. The Kombucha will start forming layers, which can then be separated and given, unsolicited, to others. But then you already know that if you have one. Sometimes a little baby Kombucha will form in the bottles. This is fine, and can be consumed.
I've heard many claims about how extremely healthy Kombucha is for you, but the bottom line for me is that I wouldn't consume it if it didn't taste good.

A Couple of Friends (Part 2)

2009-11-30T11:08:00.000-08:00

Our relationship with sourdough has been going on a bit longer. While at our first agricultural experience, an internship with the eminent Steve Moore, his wife Carol passed on the wisdom of fermentation in many ways. By far the most regularly used by us is sourdough starter, which leavens our bread nowadays. Some of you may be aware that sourdough is a popular style of bread, especially just south of here in San Francisco. What you may not know is that often commercial sourdough bread uses a starter for flavor plus yeast for leavening. That's because you have to wait 6 hours or more for your bread to rise with the starter, compared with less than two hours for the yeast.

For those who are all about fermentation, adding yeast to do the job faster cuts out the most important step. Since starter is a symbiosis of yeast and bacteria it does not only consume sugars to create bubbles, it also breaks down proteins. The most obvious results are a sour taste (from the acids released) and a denser loaf (because some of the gluten is broken down). Less overt is the combined effect of the disintegration of proteins, which is that the resulting bread is easier to digest. I make no claims, but I have been told by folks who have wheat allergies that the sourdough I have made didn't cause them reactions. At any rate, I make the same statement on sourdough that I make for Kombucha: it may be very healthy, but I like it because it tastes good (and because I made it myself).
The latter of which under-girds many of the skills I have cultivated. I am a little uncomfortable relying on products and processes that I don't know how to repair or replicate, from food to tools to structures. Since I don't know how to culture and maintain pure yeasts, and don't know how to make baking soda, the bread style I have adopted is sourdough. If I could only figure out how to make glazed donuts with it...
The process is very simple, and very natural. You create your own starter by fermenting a mixture of rye flour and water, which harnesses local yeast and bacteria populations. Then you keep using this same starter over and over again by feeding it before every breadmaking. I have had my current one for about three years, and have talked to folks who've had theirs for fifteen.
Here's the recipe for the starter: in a bowl, mix two cups of rye flour with two cups of water. Keep it covered with something breathable. The next day move it to a clean bowl and add one cup of rye flour and one cup of water, mixing well. Continue in this way for five more days, and you end with a big batch of healthy starter. Advice: don't use metal bowls. You will have a big batch of dead starter. I learned the hard way, though I understand it is common knowledge that fermentation and metal don't mix.
Use as much of that initial batch as you want, but make sure you have at least a cup of starter left after any baking adventure. That will go in the fridge for next time.
The bread recipe is just as simple. Start by taking the starter out of the fridge and feeding it. Two loaves of bread require a combined 3 cups of starter, and I want at least one cup left over. So if I have 2 cups in the fridge from last time, I'll feed it an additional 2 cups of rye flour and 2 cups of water (and stir it well) for a total of a little more than 4 cups.
Each loaf of bread calls for 1½ cups of starter, 1 cup of water, 1 tablespoon salt and about 6 cups of flour. Mix the first three well, then add flour till the whole mass gets too tough to stir. Turn it onto a surface and knead for about 10 minutes. It should feel like any other bread. Put it in a bowl, coat lightly with oil and cover, putting it somewhere it can rise for six or more hours. When convenient, punch it down, form loaves, and let them sit 1 more hour. Bake at 450°F for 15 minutes, then turn down to 400°F for 30 minutes. I butter my bread pans first, then brush butter on the tops of the loaves when they come out. Yum!
An upcoming post will discuss the flour we use, and whence it cometh.

3DW 11/09

2009-11-09T07:34:00.000-08:00

That's our shorthand for the November 2009 Three Day Workshop. We hold two every year, one in early March and one in early November. They are frequent enough and the number of characters is cumbersome enough that it's easier simply to abbreviate excessively. Each one is unique, though, and each one is important to us. The months, weeks, and days preceding each are filled with thoughts of preparation, ideas of possible changes to format, and anticipation of the great people we will be exposed to. Despite the work that goes into each, you cannot imagine the injection of inspiration such a workshop creates for us: twice a year we gather with 30 to 40 new faces, each of which come full of ideas from past experience and future hopes. There are school teachers, farmers, homesteaders, college students, retirees looking at new directions, community garden organizers, rocket scientists, folks from inside the DC beltway wanting out, Americorp volunteers, activists and agronomists from other countries, musicians, and many others. This workshop we had participants from Washington (state of) to Maryland. While they come for knowledge from John Jeavons and other Ecology Action staff, they also give us a great deal. We spend the whole time in awareness of the energy and ideas percolating throughout the group, and the potential the participants have for change in their own areas (not to mention the possibilities in networking).
While we were at a new venue this workshop (hosted by Christ's Church of the Golden Rule) the biggest difference between this and past 3-Day Workshops was the absence of Carol Cox, former Garden Manager at the Ecology Action research garden. While Margo and I picked up the classes she taught (and did so nicely, I must say) her presence was missed. Great thanks go to her for giving us some teaching tips right before the weekend.
There are some great activities going on that some of the participants are involved in, and as I crunch the bio's for websites I will put them in this post or another.
Also, I made a promise that I would post the recipe I use for sourdough bread, so that will come in the following post.
All this is to say, it was a great workshop and we look forward to hearing what participants go on to do in the world of healthy, sustainably-grown food!

We Can't Get No Dehydration...

2009-10-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

One of the best forms of food preservation has remained elusive to us for the past week. Just as we were preparing to introduce an exciting and new form of food-drying, our tried and true method bit the dust. These would be the solar food dryer and the electric one, respectively.

Our electric dryer, which can be identified only by its manufacturer, "B & J Industries", and vague "Model # 7010", remains somewhat of an enigma to me. What has more miscellaneous information about everything than the internet? And yet the only two leads I could find on this dryer are an ad in a 1980 issue of Backpacker Magazine and a thread on an online forum called "Rapture Ready" in which the writer talks about hers suddenly ceasing to work. That's just what happened to ours, and in the absence of any information on the omnipotent and omniscient internet I was forced to take matters into my own hands.At this point I'd like to harp on the benefits of a well-rounded childhood. Last week our intern Tracy said her son asked "how does Dan know how to do so much stuff?" (keep in mind, this is through the eyes of a 5-year old). My answer: I took lots of stuff apart when I was a child. My family can attest to this. Apparently it is only much later that one learns how to put stuff back together again.
But back to the point. I'm not very electrically savvy, but I could figure the dehydrator out after taking the back off. It runs more or less in series from the power supply through motor, heating element, thermostat, and thermal cutoff, which is the safety fuse in case the whole thing overheats. Bypassing the thermal cutoff (which breaks at 98° C) I found the whole thing worked. To make a long story short, I found 98° C thermal cutoffs online and got one for a little under a dollar. Which is really a ripoff, because if I ordered 1,000 of them they would only cost 34 cents each...
I haven't installed it yet, because I have been too busy dancing with excitement around our new solar food dehydrator! For my birthday I received a book, The Solar Food Dryer, which discusses the concept of using solar energy and contains recipes for dehydrating. Which I skipped right over to get to the plans it gives for building your own "high-performance, low-cost solar food dryer". It took me much longer than it had to to build, because I'm not great at assembling all the materials before beginning. As far as I can tell at this point, it is certainly capable of high performance and was relatively low-cost, depending on what one has lying around.
For materials the plywood, pine and redwood were free, and the big pane of glass was donated from friends' renovation project. (I actually got two of those panes, so I am building one for us down here and one for the folks up at Ecology Action). For the first unit I also scrounged much of the hardware (or fabricated it) from found items. For the second I am using "nice" things that I bought. It is sort of hard to nail down a final cost for the hardware (screws, handles, hinges, screen kits, thermometer, misc. other) because I wasn't keeping great track, but my estimate is about $75 per unit. Maybe less.
Those with more discerning tastes for the final look might spend more, and those who have a keener eye for scrounging parts would spend much less. Probably the only somewhat mandatory costs are the thermometer (~$7), screen kits (~$30), weatherstrip ($5), and the high-temperature stove paint (~$12). The gathered ingredients look something like this.
I put it all together, and ended up with a very nice, very effective piece of equipment. How effective? I was hoping to get it finished when we would have full summer sun to use it, but only just got it all finished this past week. We put it out Wednesday afternoon when the temperature was about 70° F and the interior temperature hit around 140° F. One afternoon wasn't enough to finish the large screen of apples, so we put it out again Thursday morning and they were dry before noon, again hitting about 135° F on a day with a few drifting clouds. So with mid-October sun angle and cool temperatures it still did the trick wonderfully. I'm sold. Well, I was sold before, but now I would recommend it to others.What we have now is a contraption that, with no further cost, will dry two 42" x 30" screens at a time full of yummy fruits and veggies whenever the sun is out. Yay!

Let's go to the County Fair!

2009-10-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

This year we were hoping to attend the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show and the California Wool and Fiber Festival, three big events bundled together. It is a great time because, besides the usual rides and fried foods, it has lots of free samples of apples, wonderful art and craft displays, tons of cute animals, a whole building of fiber stuff, and best of all, the Sheepdog Trials. If you want an impression of how cool these dogs are, check out this youtube video of the 2008 Champion at the Mendocino County Fair. Picture 1,500 or so people behind the camera hanging on every motion of the dog. Previously that has been the highlight for us.

So what would have ordinarily been a fun time turned in to much more this year, as one of the Willits Spinning Guild members was organizing the Fiber Festival part. She came to the August meeting and announced that she wanted it to be a good show, so everyone should submit at least something for judging. It was a reach for me, but I decided to submit four samples of yarn I am spinning for Margo to crochet into an afghan. Just to fill the ranks out, you know.
We went to pick up the booklet that tells you guidelines, divisions, categories, and classes, and it was thick. Margo couldn't resist looking through it, and as she did she got ideas, marking pages that she thought were fun possibilities. She became more and more ambitious, and in the end decided to submit two pies, a plate of cookies, and solar-canned peaches and pears.
In this way we brought extra excitement about the fair. Sunday held the Sheepdog Trials and the spinning contest, so that was our day. We got there in time to see the last two dogs, then wandered straight over to the fiber building to greet friends and check out my submissions. I ended up with a first, second, and third place ribbon among four samples, which felt great. There were some fantastic projects in the mix, all woven, knitted, crocheted, tatted, felted, etc. We got to see our friends Steven and Tamara, who go about in fashionable buckskins and are the most hardcore primitive-skills people we know. At their booth they had home-made examples of everything from arrowheads to nets, plus some further down the alphabet. They have a company called Paleotec hnics through which they sell some kits, have a number of books, and do an incredible amount of education.
Then came the spinning contest. I spun in it, and Margo helped the judges get everything organized and processed. As you see in the photos, there are a few styles of spinning represented: drop-spindle (my choice), Navajo spindle, and spinning wheel. The contest has three parts. The first is the warm-up spin. In this one they give you some fiber and a blindfold. The pictures tell the rest. These ladies are using the Navajo spindle and, as they have probably been spinning twice as long as I have been alive, are not much hindered by the blindfold. I was another matter...The second part involved spinning for quality. This was broken down into many classes, dividing by age, experience, and method. I am experienced enough to not be a beginner, but not so much that I can compete in quality with the average "experienced" spinner. The only other experienced drop-spindlist had 20 or 30 years' practice on me. But we had fun. And I got to show off my andean-plying skills. For a great description of the technique check out this blog post by an intrepid spinner. I've created my own way to avoid the necessity on my drop spindle, but the contest involved extenuating circumstances. And, as I said, I got to show off.
The third part was as hopeless as the second in terms of winning, but was a real hoot to try. It was the speed contest, and was only divided into beginner and experienced, all else considered equal. There is no match for a spinning wheel in all-out speed. There was a great clacking and clattering, and I was reminded why I prefer simplicity to mechanization. If anything had gone wrong with one of those wheels it wouldn't have been pretty. The one next to me sounded ready to throw a rod. So no prizes for Dan there. Below, Margo helps to make sense out of a tangle of niddy-noddys.After winding our way through buildings and displays, sheep, hogs, cows, bunnies and fowl we finally made it to the Arts and Crafts building to see what kind of success Margo had found in the canning and baked goods. They were spread all over the place, whether to make better decoration or because of some strange sort of logic, we weren't sure, but it took a while to find all her submissions. First we stumbled across the Shoofly pie, which had a second-place ribbon on it. It's always nice to see that someone else thinks your family recipe is [almost] as tasty as you do. Wandering, we found the solar-oven-canned peaches and pears, which won first and second places in their classes. After more searching we found the mint-chocolate-chip cookies in a glass case, with a second place ribbon on them. Great victory for the Royer-Miller kitchen!
It took us a long while to find the final submission, her "All- Pumpkin Pie", but when we did we were quite pleasantly surprised. It won first place in the Pumpkin Pie class and Best of Division for pies and pastries! A little blue ribbon and a big purple one. How about that?
The downside of submitting baked stuff to this fair is that they do the judging the Wednesday before the fair opens. Then it sits there all Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before you can pick it up. At the least it means stale cookies. At the worst, in the case of moist stuff (like pumpkin pie), it means a healthy layer of mold. Nothing says "Yum!" like a big purple ribbon on a moldy pie. Below is the pre-penicillin version.So if you want the secret to amazing cookies and pies, you know who to ask. And remember: if it molds, it is natural.
Out of nine submissions, then, eight won awards. What's more, the cash involved paid for the submission fee and gas to the fair! But not the garlic fries and the funnel cake...

First Frost!

2009-10-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

No soft about it: the weather has shifted, and last night it went right down to 28° F. That means the end of our beautiful solanaceae element. Peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, they all have a sad look about them. And any amaranth still in the beds took a very ugly turn when they thawed out. Similarly the buckwheat.
Luckily we saw it coming, and got the sorghum out last week. Our favorite variety is Dale, which produces both seed and syrup. The seed can go through any freeze, but the sap goes through a chemical shift after frosts and becomes much less palatable. So we always want to make sure we harvest the sorghum and run it through the press with time to spare.
The millet seems to have passed through alright this once, and the corn is as happy and dying as ever it is this time of year. Our little baby rye and wheat plants love this kind of thing, so if they make it past the birds and rodents they will get big and strong despite the winter.
And the heater turned on in the house last night... Looks like Fall!

Happy Fall Equinox!

2009-09-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are on the other side of the main growing season... I took the photos two weeks ago, when the amaranth and beautiful colors were still present. The amaranth has been harvested now, and some of the green is starting to fade into yellow. Nothing like the yellow of the hills around us, which are parched from the typical summer of no rain, but the yellow of things that aren't going to grow any more no matter how much water they get. Corn, for instance.

Our second earliest sweet corn, Brocade, has only remained in the bed this long for one reason: the supposedly "bush" style beans have climbed up it and show no sign of slacking. As you see in the photo the crispy corn stalks are peppered with the lush green of beans. Though loathe to cut a productive plant off, we'll have to do it in the next month to get in our cover crops.
This is the turning point of the annual cycle, when the garden begins to take on a different look. Step by step, week by week, as each main season crop is harvested the observer can see farther and farther. Six weeks from now, where once stood many visually impenetrable layers of plant matter, there will be nothing but 1" to 8" tall cover crops, and one will be able to make eye contact with a fellow agrarian across the garden. It's pretty exciting. And most of that plant matter will be stored away against the rain for compost material next spring.
Like the straw from the grains we harvested in June and July. Last week apprentices Ed and Natasha finished threshing the last of it, which is another happy moment. Once the rains start everything takes on moisture whether they are covered or not, and moisture makes threshing much more difficult. We have all started working on threshing main season stuff like amaranth, quinoa, and teff.
Speaking a little earlier of compost, we have noticed that clearing beds of immature stuff from weeds to "catch crops" (which I'll talk about in a future post) brings with it a dire need to build more piles. Margo has been diligent at this, starting the second pile in as many weeks. Pictured here is the first, resplendent in its amaranth and bean layers. Usually spring is the most intense composting season, and piles are built and added to gradually until winter comes.
Late summer brought with it the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show and the California Wool and Fiber Festival, which are all held together in late September. We participated in it through attendance as well as submissions, the process and results of which are intriguing enough to be documented in their own post. Suffice it to say, we had a good time. Here I am participating in the "Quality" portion of the spinning contest, a drop spindle knee-deep in a circle of spinning wheels.
Makaiah's sunflower circle, referred to in the summer solstice post, is past its prime, but still present in full force. Planted a little closer together than optimally, they did not reach the towering height that other beds did. Still, they were over his head, and that was good.
One would think that the fall would bring milder, autumnal temperatures. This has not been the case, as we suddenly find ourselves needing to cope with 103°+ F days, which are supposed to continue through the week. Next week it is to revert back to the predictable mid to high 80' s.
With waning daylight and hopefully lowering temperatures, we are also faced with the last three weeks of the summer course, when the interns we have worked with and gotten to know so well head off into their next stages. Fall is a good time for contemplating change...

Preaching the Good Word

2009-09-06T19:38:00.000-07:00

That would be "grains".

September has brought with it two things of note. First, that crisp, cool, beautiful weather I connect with Autumn. Second, the beginning of our Fall spate of teaching.

We kicked it off last Saturday at Common Ground, the garden supply store and education center in Palo Alto. As a part of their outreach, Common Ground offers all kinds of great classes on the basic theme of gardening. Because of their relationship with Ecology Action, a number of these classes are related to Grow Biointensive, and because of our work with Ecology Action we teach some of the classes. This is all to say that we presented two segments on grains to a wonderful group of enthusiastic gardeners on Saturday.
In two weeks we will go back down to present an Introduction to Grow Biointensive class and a class on composting. The following Monday I will give a presentation to the Ukiah Garden Club on seed saving, and the Sunday following that I will give a similar class at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens. Two weeks after that we will be back at Common Ground to present on the Master Charts in How to Grow More Vegetables and on seed saving once more. Then, in early November, we will assist in Ecology Action's 3-Day Workshop. Lots of teaching!
Which leads to another fascinating realization: we know things that other people don't. As a dutiful product of a traditional public education, I still carry with me the idea that adults know everything and I have no meaningful knowledge whatsoever. Even though I have been an adult for a while now.
But this is all beside the point, which is that we had a wonderful time teaching on Saturday. Fifteen established or budding grain enthusiasts came and participated, hearing all we had to say and sharing some of their own wisdom on the topic. We talked about anatomy, characteristics, and how to grow, harvest, thresh, clean and cook common (and many uncommon) grains.
And the icing on the cake was that Margo and I spent about 5 hours the day before that grinding and making into biscuits wheat, rye, barley, triticale, oats, amaranth, corn, millet, quinoa, rice, sorghum, teff and buckwheat. We wanted everyone to get a feel for the distinctive taste of each grain. And we realized, as we were tasting them in class, that 13 biscuits are a lot to eat all in a little span of time. (We had a good bit left over).
What follows is one of the recipes that folks in the class were really interested in. More will probably come in subsequent posts...

Creeping Crust Cobbler (from Margo's mom)
Melt in 10' baking dish:

¼ c butter

Mix:

1 c barley flour (or whole wheat)
½ c sugar (can be reduced)
1 T baking powder

Mix in and then spoon over melted butter:

½ c milk or buttermilk

Heat and pour over dough:

3 c raspberries (or fruit of choice)
½ c or less sugar (or ¼ c honey)

Bake for 30 minutes at 350°F

Corn Pollination

2009-08-30T18:03:00.001-07:00

This is the time of year to really buckle-down into seed saving, which is a simple prospect for many of our garden plants. Lettuce, for example, you simply let go to form a stalk and a bunch of little flowers, which then form seeds with fuzz on them like dandelions. With tomatoes you take the mature fruit, gut it into a jar, and let it sit a few days to ferment the protective layer that coats each seed. Both of these vegetables have something glorious going for them from the gardener's perspective: they are self-pollinating. Each flower has both necessary parts, fertilizes itself, and keeps unwanted crossing to a minimum.
Not so, of course, with corn. I won't go into any depth on the biology of corn pollination, since I wrote about that in an earlier post. But I would love to share how I deal with the question that follows that understanding: How does a person get pure seed under those conditions? Especially if they live in Corn Country? Especially when, if their seed gets contaminated by genetically modified crops Monsanto comes and sues them like they've been doing to lots of small farmers.
My solution comes from Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth. It is one of the great, comprehensive seed saving books for anyone who wants to understand the ins and outs of the subject.
Because it is a time, energy, and focus-intensive process at first, I started last year saving from three Hopi Blue flour corn plants. This year we planted out the resulting successfully-saved seed, together with some of the same variety bought from a catalog. The reason for this is that, in the case of most plants, genetic diversity is important. Seed to Seed recommends, as an absolute minimum, that 100 corn plants should be saved from. You will end up with 50 ears, though, because half of those plants will be participating only by tassel.
Maybe I should explain the method now...
There are two vital elements in corn pollination: the tassel (which releases pollen), and silks (which accept pollen). One silk only accepts one pollen granule, which will become one kernel on an ear. So essentially we need to stand between the silks and ANY tassels.
The best way to do this is by bagging ears before the silks emerge. Choose the best ears right before the silks come out (the only tricky part) and clip the tip of the husk off to see the bundle of silks. They grow fast, like an inch a day, so by clipping them like this they will all be the same size in one or two days when you remove the bag to pollinate them.
The next step comes one or two days later: the collection and distribution of pollen. Get more bags, stick them over tassels and staple them close to the plant, so no pollen drops out. Do this early in the morning before they start shedding pollen. Before it gets hot that day (hot enough to destroy the pollen in the closed bag), say maybe 11am, you take the bag off, bending and shaking the tassel as you do, and then you have a little pollen. Collecting and mixing all the pollen in one bag, you have quite a bit of it.
At that point you make the rounds of your bagged ears. Take off the bag, pour some pollen on the now-emerged silks, and then put the bag back on to mark the ears you selected.
It is a simple as that. As mentioned above, the only tricky part is trying to identify which ears have almost emergent silks. I cut the tips off of many husks only to be disappointed. But, as with many other things, if you don't start and fail a lot, you'll never know what you are doing!
So to sum up the ideal situation: 1) snip tips and bag 50 ears, 2) one or two days later bag 50 tassels from plants whose ears you did not bag, 3) collect the pollen later that morning and pollinate the 50 aforementioned ears. Done! Sit back and watch them grow, and harvest them when they are mature and dry.
Corn and squash are really two of the most difficult plants to keep pure seed from, so if you are feeling adventurous some year, do your reading and jump into it! Once you have it down, you can probably make at least a little money selling the results to a seed company.

Get Them Before They Get You!

2009-08-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

I've hit a landmark of west-coast living that I put on the same level as learning how to surf. Last week I ate my first rattlesnake! It happened like this:

Garden Manager Ellen's son Cody, who roams the ranch fixing fences, irrigation pipes, and cows, occasionally runs across a rattlesnake. Often he kills it, and on one notable occasion he skinned one for a hat-band (turning down my suggestion of making gloves - you know, with little rattles at the fingertips?). The natural progression was to grill one up for dinner, which happened last week.
The photo shows clearly what happened: Cody relished it and Ellen, on the right, was disturbed, disgusted, and naseaus. Everyone at the table, in fact, fit into one of those two categories. Happily (for those of us in the former) Cody was willing to share!
Inevitably someone must ask "Does it taste like chicken?" To which I must answer "Probably it tastes like gutted chicken neck grilled with seafood spices." Specifically, a chicken whose neck was genetically modified to contain lots of very strong salmon bones. Tough, but novel.
I am told it is a lot better in stew, though somehow I had always pictured them cut in sushi-style rolls and frittered. Shows what I know. (That's me in the photo on left, sampling my piece).
Ok, now to a subject I have wanted to broach for a while. Hear me out before you mock. There are many among us who say "I am a vegetarian, though I eat fish" or even "I am a vegetarian" when it turns out that white meat in general doesn't count as meat to them. And saying "I am mostly vegetarian" is not objectionable. But I am betting that I could not get away with saying "I am mostly vegan." Never mind that I hardly ever eat meat, or that I consume merely a little butter or honey regularly. I'll let Nikki respond however she likes to that one.
I don't specifically want or need to be vegan (especially given the opportunistic tendencies demonstrated above), it is simply a hypothesis of mine that vegetarians are a little more inclusive with their designation. 'Cause I can still be a mostly vegetarian and eat a little rattlesnake if it crosses my path. Free-range, grass-fed, and everything.
Having enjoyed the novelty of rattlesnake, what other dangerous delights might be next? Here's a hint from our front door (picture it deep-fried, if it helps):

With the Grain

2009-08-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

When this book was first published in 1977 I suspected, but could not know for sure, that a day would come when increasing populations and increasing costs of producing and transporting food with fossil fuel, fossil fertilizers, and genetic manipulation would cause food prices to rise so high that more traditional production methods- organic, natural, low-labor and local - would begin to rule the economy. Thirty years later, that is exactly what is happening.

Gene Logsdon, Small Scale Grain Raising

Around about the time we were finishing up our grain harvest, midway through July, we had a visit from a fellow Grow Biointensive practitioner down in San Luis Obispo. John DeRosier has a firm grasp of the benefits of the method, having attended Ecology Action's 3-Day Workshop a number of times, and put to use what he has learned. His current passion, though, leads him in a slightly different direction.

Like certain others (myself included) John has been parasitized by the grain bug; the compulsion to cultivate all manner of the edible seeds courses through his system. The difference is that I want to eat my grains and share my enthusiasm while he wants to share the actual grains. I can meet my need by growing my own grain and telling people about it, which is easy enough. But John's calling involves a much larger proposition: growing as much grain as he can.

John's 40 beds of veggies surrounded by a field of grain

Of course, it gets more complicated. Being a proponent of the Grow Biointensive method, he is interested in sustainability. This means turning his back on the world of giant machines and petrochemicals, and working instead on a scale based on human limitations and regeneration of soil. The good news is that operating expenses are minimal: hand tools, a few irrigation supplies, water, and seeds saved from the year before. That is as opposed to tractors, implements, combines, and bills for seed, fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. Find the right market, as in the Community Supported Agriculture format, and you can make a lot of money on a little acreage.
The challenge is that, while everyone was growing grains by hand or by horse 100 years ago, virtually no one in this country is doing it now. So John, through his creativity and drive, is discovering through trial and error the best way to make small-scale grain raising work, physically and economically, in his climate.
To go into the details that John presented to us would be excessive in this post, but the summary is the same as for all farming enterprises: bring creativity, a solution-based mindset, and a love of your land. Add to those a desire to benefit your community, a head full of ideas, and willingness to put the work in and you have a recipe for success on multiple levels. From calculations based on his own experience of time spent per task and yields harvested, he can easily make enough money to support his family and have extra to invest in community grain-processing resources. Because of the smaller scale he can grow an incredible number of varieties of grains, thereby encouraging an appreciation of diversity of grains.
So, to make a long story short, John DeRosier's ideas are an inspiration, and I look forward to seeing the example he is setting for the rest of us aspiring grain-producers. Through his website, WithTheGrain.org, he hopes to post the ongoing process of learning, teaching, failures and successes of his enterprise. (John stands with his millet on the right.)

The quote that begins this post is from the introduction to the second edition of Small-Scale Grain Raising, by Gene Logsdon. I can't stress enough the usefulness of this resource, and we were delighted to find the second edition newly released this year by Chelsea Green Publishing.

Corn Nuts

2009-07-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

We, like industrial America, value corn highly. The difference is that we are not going to make high-fructose syrup, ethanol, or plastic out of it. We are going to eat it! And, of course, feed the stalks to our compost.

We grow three categories of corn here, for three different purposes: flour corn, sweet corn, and popcorn.

The flour corn doubles as a high-calorie multi-purpose food and high-biomass compost crop. According to How to Grow More Vegetables an intermediate yield for flour corn is 17 lb/100 sq ft for seed and 50 lb/100 sq ft for air-dry biomass. Which is a whole lot of seed and stalk. Last year we came close to the intermediate seed yield and exceeded the biomass yield in two beds.

And different varieties will perform at different levels.

But high yield isn't everything - we aim for aesthetics, too. The photo above shows, in order, Bloody Butcher, Hickory King, Seneca Red Stalker, and Hopi Blue. Talk about fun colors of cornbread! On the right is some Oaxaca Green from the Ecology Action site.

At the Golden Rule Garden, since we are producing food for a community (as well as learning, teaching, and researching) sweet corn also plays an important role. Who doesn't like sweet corn? This year we are growing two open-pollinated varieties! Those of you familiar with sweet corn or seed catalogs know the prevalence of hybridized sweet corn varieties, so I might as well take a moment to talk about them.
Many plants (corn, for instance) spread and accept pollen freely. This is a wonderful way for them to find new genes and increase their diversity, because the pollen doesn't always land on the same variety from which it originated. If this foreign variety accepts the pollen, then it is cross-pollinated. The seed resulting from this cross-pollination, a hybrid, will grow a very nice plant, mixing characteristics of the two parents. And, most often, this new hybrid plant will produce either sterile seed or seed that grows into plants with unpredictable characteristics. Not so helpful if you want to save seed from year to year.
Seed companies began selling hybrid corn in the first half of the 20th century, and it has sold well to this day for two reasons: first, because of a condition called "hybrid vigor" that predictably occurs when two inbred varieties cross. The first generation of this hybridization is taller, bigger, and higher-yielding than either of the parents. Following generations of this hybrid plant will be much smaller and, as mentioned above, have unpredictable characteristics. The second reason it sells well is that it is almost the only thing sold. Go ahead and search your seed catalogs for non-hybrid sweet corn. Burpee's website offers 34 varieties, 2 of them open-pollinated, the rest hybrid. Because corn crosses so easily, there are few farmers or gardeners who go to the trouble to save their own seed. So if they are going to buy seed anyway, why not buy seed for vigorous, high-yielding plants? An added bonus for seed companies is that the details of what varieties they are crossing are proprietary information, so even if you wanted to go to the trouble to hybridize plants you would have to do your own years of research.
Ok, so that's the deal on hybrids. Look forward in the next month to a post about hand-pollination of corn, which is the best way for a small garden in the midst of corn country to save their own pure seed.
Finally, we are growing one variety of popcorn: Vermont Red Kernel. Margo and I are regular popcorn eaters, so we want to invest in that knowledge now. The downside of both popcorn and sweet corn, in Grow Biointensive terms, is that they create much less biomass. Flour corn might produce 48 pounds of air-dry stalks per 100 sq. ft. for compost material, while a good sturdy sweet corn may only yield 24. Probably less. And popcorn will probably be less yet. I'll let you know when we get the yields this year.
On the right is Jerry, a past intern, with his [open-pollinated] flour corn, 14 feet tall.

The First Zucchini!

2009-07-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether to bounce with joy or to cringe in fear, but here they are: the first two zucchini of the season. There are present signs of many more on the way, and a bed that threatens to pour summer squash forth in Tribble-like abundance.
In the photo at right: does Margo have the zucchini, or does the zucchini have Margo?

Knee High by the 4th of July?

2009-07-04T14:43:00.000-07:00

Maybe if you are that Chinese basketball player. Our garden is growing like all-get-out at this time of year, and the hot weather we got last week pushed some of our heat-loving crops to do great things. On the right is a photo of our Hopi Blue flour corn. Half of this 240 sq ft bed is planted with seed I saved from last year using hand pollination as recommended in Seed to Seed, a book published by Seed Savers Exchange (an organization advocating the use of open-pollinated seed, as opposed to the artificial processes of hybrid and genetic modification). In the next month or two it will get up to eight or nine feet and tassel, and I will fine-tune my hand-pollinating skills.

Amaranth is another of the main-season crops we tout so highly. Hailing from central America, amaranth was the staple food of the Aztecs and the backbone of their culture and worship. Recognizing this, the Spanish Conquistadores banned it and actively destroyed it wherever it was encountered. It has been theorized that, had that not happened, amaranth would be to our culture what corn is now (maybe aside from all the recently discovered derivatives). It produces a brilliant plume of flowers that Victorians might have called beautiful, others might call gaudy. The seed is tiny but plentiful, and can be boiled, ground, and, yes, popped. The young greens are also tasty.
Quinoa was first cultivated high in the Andes of South America, so you might wonder why we'd attempt it way down here. Happily, it can grow anywhere from 12,000 feet down to sea level, depending on the variety. Its claim to fame among health food fans is that it is a whole protein, containing all of the amino acids that humans need. Plus it cooks in about 20 minutes and take on flavors easily (so don't eat it alone expecting to be impressed). The seeds grow naturally coated with saponin (a soapy substance) that is so bitter that birds don't bother it. The good news is that when you buy it in the health food store it has already been washed free of the bitterness. The bad news is that the store won't make house calls to wash the quinoa you grow yourself. We're still working here on the most efficient way to process it.
Rye stands out in this post as an over-wintered crop instead of a main-season one. It is one of my favorites of all we have here, between its beauty, its height, and its usefulness. The tallest cereal crop we grow, its ready tendency to host microorganisms (like the poisonous fungus ergot) makes its grain the prime ingredient for sourdough starter (a yeast kept alive through a mixture of rye flour and water). And we thrive on sourdough bread in this house. Like all the other crops I mention in this post, one of rye's biggest chores within the garden is as a compost material. The mature stalks can be easily saved for months or years after threshing to provide mature material when you are ready to build a pile. Rye also has an incredible root system, which means good things for soil quality in the garden.
Finally, Jerusalem Artichoke, a.k.a Sunchoke. While it produces an incredibly tall stalk, the flowers are all pretty small. The edible part of the plant is the tuber, which has, depending on what you read and whom you ask, a nutty flavor, a starchy flavor, or a flavor like to that of an artichoke. Which leads to the name. There is much speculation as to the origin of the name "Jerusalem", for instance that it may be a corruption of the Italian "girasole", following the sun. But I have discovered that whenever one puts "Jerusalem" in front a common garden noun it generally means "kind of like but not actually a". For instance, Jerusalem Sage and Jerusalem Cricket.
All of these crops, besides the rye, are in for the main-season long-haul, and will be harvested sometime in September or October. Having shown them as juveniles, you can expect some full-grown images from us later on...

Happy Summer Solstice!

2009-06-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

A bit belated, it's true, but for good reasons. Not only is it the longest day of the year, it is also a choice time for weddings, and we attended two great ones.

The asparagus has gone to seed, now looking reminiscent of fennel. The comfrey is ready to be harvested for the second time this season, to go into compost piles as immature material.

But the greatest difference between this and the last State-of the Garden report (at Equinox) is that we are long bereft of compost/cover crops, and most of the main-season crops have been in their beds for more than a month. This is the list that starts with amaranth, beans, and corn, and ends with tomatoes, watermelon, and zucchini. Some notables that fall between the alphabetical extremes are quinoa, leeks, flax, teff, rice, sunflowers, ...

While these and the potatoes are growing enthusiastically, it is harvest time for some of my favorite crops: garlic and winter grains! First came the garlic, always threatened by our over-eager gopher population. This year it looks as if the crop was mostly untouched. I will plan to put a post in on them soon, after data has been done. We did a test spacing them on 4", 5" and 6" centers (the distance from one plant to the next). This photo shows one of 13 braids we made from this year's harvest.

As for the winter grains, their time has come as well. We have already harvested Cologna Lunga, Hard Red Winter and SS791 wheats, Kynon oats, Musky triticale, and Karan 16 barley. The Cereal rye (on left) and Jet barley, with a host of others, are calling my name in the middle of the night, reminding me that they are almost there, too. You know that spring and winter grains are ready when 1) a kernel of grain, removed from the head, is mostly or entirely hard, 2) the grains are falling from the head on their own, or 3) the birds are eating them. Whether or not they are ready for harvest, when the birds are eating them you don't have much choice. To harvest we cut them slightly above ground level, bundle the stalks with heads together, and hang them upside down in a safe place to dry. Ah, grains... The spring wheat and barley will take an additional few weeks in the ground before they are ready.

As the long-season crops come out, they leave bed space to fill. While we have plans to put fava beans or compost/cover crops in for the winter, they will not get planted till October. In the mean time we'll plant what we call "catch crops", which fill the bed during the intervening time but will probably not come to full maturity. They will, however, grow quickly and cover the bed, keep the soil microbes happy, and look pretty. We are currently putting in Hegari sorghum, Pearl millet, buckwheat, and dry beans for catch crops. Here Margo is interrupted in her millet transplanting by an urgent matter.

Thankfully the fruit set did not get frosted off this spring, so we have promise of Asian pears, numerous apples, and lots of other great stuff.

Finally, an inspiration of Makaiah's is coming into its own: the Sunflower Circle. He wanted a place to be able to lounge in the shade near his parents' garden beds, so they cultivated and planted this area. It promises to be dramatic, but the Fall Equinox post will have to show its maturity.

Purslane Cake

2009-06-25T06:36:00.000-07:00

We are blessed or infested, however one sees it, with an abundance of weeds in our garden. Most are some degree of irritation, whether that be through fast growth, thick roots, disturbing height, prickly leaves, choking vines, or some combination of these “qualities”. Only a small number stand out as neutral or nice. And out of these few, the greatest is Common Purslane (Portulaca oleracea). Many of you may be familiar with it, and many more may notice it as a result of this post. Which is well, because it is not only edible but packed with great vitamins and healthy traits, as many wild edibles are. But purslane specifically is endowed with more Omega-3 fatty acids than any other plant and, unlike fish oil, can be presented on the dinner table in many tantalizing ways from salads to stews.

As an added bonus, its roots aren't thick and it doesn't grow tall enough to choke out cultivated plants. Still, we do weed it to keep it in some semblance of control, and it was while weeding purslane that Margo introduced it to Makaiah, the son of our 6-month interns. She explained that you could eat it, and that it tasted good. He tasted it and then, trying to hold back his excitement, said "We should make purslane cake!" Margo asked him what ingredients he would use, and he was ready for her, saying "purslane, buckwheat, cinnamon, apples, and sugar," and asking if they could make it that day. She said now wasn't the best time for her, but that they could do it soon.
Which came around the other day, when I entered the house to find Margo and Makaiah making a lot of noise with the blender. Taking Makaiah's suggestions in mind, and adding a few other bits to make it a slightly predictable experience, Margo devised the following recipe:
Purslane Cake
Mix in a bowl:
2 cups buckwheat flour
1 heaping tsp cinnamon
¼ cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
In blender mix:
2 cups purslane
2 eggs
5 T applesauce
1 T oil
1 tsp vanilla
stir together, pour into a greased 9x9 baking dish, bake for 30 min. at 350°
serve with strawberry juice on top (mash strawberries, add a pinch of water)

Their improvements for next time include using apple chunks instead of sauce, and adding cream cheese frosting and lemon or orange peel.

Ladybug vs. Aphid

2009-06-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about Alien vs. Predator, except that it involves two species having a war on Earth. One side does vanquish the other, but the human interests caught in between are also almost completely destroyed.

Our own garden's recent battle, that of Ladybug vs. Aphid, has had a similar outcome. While the ladybugs have clearly risen to the occasion to overpower the aphids, there have been casualties. If they just hadn't spent so much time toying with their prey! As you can see from the photos, one whole section of our Fava Beans were rescued. Unfortunately the other section has some major damage. In the first section most plants have been relatively successful, achieving a reasonable height of ~5' and setting plenty of pods. In the other section none of the flowers survived to set pods, all having been destroyed by aphids. What is more, individual plants and some whole areas gave up entirely, not even giving us the benefit of any appreciable biomass!
It is always a learning experience when one watches a crop through its entire life-cycle, and pays attention to how that crop deals with adversity. Certainly when they are flatted and transplanted we always choose the strongest seed and seedlings. After that there is little we can do to help - the plants must continue by their own wits. But by observation there are many lessons to be learned.
These two sections are 200 and 140 square feet, respectively. We plant out many beds of Fava Beans as compost/cover crops in September, but only leave a part of that to go to full maturity. They do a considerable amount of growing before the cold of Winter slows them down, and so we trellis them with stakes and string. Why? This photo explains.
When frost and snow hit them, they lose all turgidity and wilt this way and that. Holding them off the ground preserves the plant when warmth comes again, allowing them the best chance of recovery. Then, once the Spring comes and they leap forth, the trellis keeps them out of the path.
Back to the point of adversity, we noticed that the 200 sq ft section (the one that now looks great) grew more quickly in the Fall, then suffered the most during the frosts. In the Spring it looked terrible, with sections of plants dying throughout. It had aphids as bad as any other section. But now it looks productive and healthy, and will probably have excellent yields. The 140 sq ft section, planted 10 days later, was slower off the blocks, not knocked back as hard by the frost, and then infested with aphids same as the rest. Somehow, though, this section was overcome, set no seed, and areas died before the middle of May.
How do you read this riddle? We know there are no easy answers, and certainly no concrete formulas for success in this kind of matter. In agriculture you watch, pay attention to any variables you can discern, and speculate. For instance, in this case the only constant was the seed source. The losing bed is ten feet from the windward garden border, the healthier bed is well to the center. Maybe the former got too dry at a pivotal moment? What was planted in each bed previously? Did two different people plant the sections with significantly different techniques or attitudes? Did the frost trigger some immune response, or had the bigger plants set more energy aside in the Fall? Did the ladybugs colonize the 200 sq ft section first, or did the aphid infestation really initiate in the 140 sq ft section and spread from there?
So we draw our own conclusions and create theories, then watch in future years to apply them. This is how, after forty years of experience, a farmer can say in the Spring "I think this is going to be a good year for corn, but the cucumbers might be a waste of time."
For the time being, we have an abundance of ladybugs and their spawn, even on the dead plants. In the photo below you can see three stages; larvae, pupae, and adults. Incidentally, I have noticed that there are many adult ladybugs with deformities in their shells and wings. Is this perhaps because eggs were laid in an environment once populated with food, which became scarce by the time the eggs hatched? I can imagine the larvae not getting enough nutrition before transforming, then suffering the consequences as adults. Probably similar in humans...
Look forward to the next post: Purslane Cake!

Composting 102 - Heat

2009-05-23T05:36:00.000-07:00

Alright, now for some application of the principles. First, where does one acquire such copious amounts of mature and immature material? There are three options: don't worry about it and build piles with what you've got, scavenge from your neighborhood or surrounding land, or plan to grow enough of what you need. Each option has its upside and downside.

Using what you have available is easiest, but does not always end in a balanced pile. Usually you will be heavier on the immature material, unless you buy a bale of straw, which leads to the second option.

Scavenging from the woods, fields, lawns and farm supply stores can also lead to an unbalanced pile, but that is less likely. The only three objections I can think of are that it might cost money (gasp!), the material may have qualities you don't want to introduce to your system (like pesticides), and you would technically be stealing fertility from another source. Granted, the local coffee shop may only have one other outlet for all those grounds (the trash) but you are still importing it to your system. Obviously this last objection is more philosophy than practicality. The farmer we learned from in our first internship made a deal with the township that, when they went around in the fall collecting leaves from curbs, they would dump them on his farm. He would then mix these massive piles with some nitrogenous material (horse manure) and let it compost. Often, when spreading this compost, we would find little plastic toys that got raked up with the leaves. It kept us amused... And sometimes made us wonder what else the leaves carried with them. But this farmer had found an incredible amount of mature material, delivered right to his farm, for free. And you can't really argue about the practicality of that. He was farming on a market scale, though, where most of the farm's nutrients are being exported as food. You have to balance things somehow.
Ok, so addressing the first point of the second paragraph: a pile that is unbalanced, favoring the immature. For the record, "unbalanced" is completely relative here, because things will compost no matter what. But when we are trying to get the best possible result, we should keep an eye on what goes in. Allow me to dig briefly into the biology of the compost pile: Once you have built it, the microorganisms in the environment go to work, assuming there is enough moisture. They consume, among other items, nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Unless the pile is too wet, in which case the pile turns anaerobic, meaning the microorganisms doing the work operate without oxygen. This will smell bad, your neighbors will resent you, and the finished product will not be so pleasant. I speak from recent experience.
But assuming it is aerobic, meaning oxygen is involved, your compost will smell nice or not at all. As the microorganisms go to work their metabolisms rise and with it their temperature, so much so that the temperature of the whole pile rises. Eventually it will get too hot for the active population of microbes, at which point other populations will become active. This continues until the material available to the microbes is consumed by them.
How hot does it get? That depends on the food you are presenting to the microbes. Two things will affect temperature most: the amount of immature material and the amount of oxygen. If you build a pile only out of grass clippings your pile may get quite hot, upwards of 160° F. If you forget to apply water to a pile of grass clippings and chicken manure (which is HIGH in available nitrogen) it can conceivably get hot enough to combust. Don't try this at home, kids. When a pile gets turned, oxygen is brought into the system in new quantities, which will cause the microbes to become active again, heating up the pile.
To a degree (ha!), heat is beneficial. It means things are working, and at a faster pace than if the temperature were lower. But at a certain level heat becomes unproductive, causing some of the nutrients to which you'd like to hold on turn into gases and exit the pile. Additionally, high heat will kill populations of microbes. Which is actually the point in some composting schools of thought. If you can get your compost pile to reach 160° F or more it will kill most of the disease-causing microbes and many of the seeds that made it into the pile. The downside is that, along with most of the pathogens, all of the beneficial microbes will be killed off. And what holds disease in check? Beneficial microbes. So all you have left in your pile is the most tenacious population. In Grow Biointensive we aim not to eradicate negative populations, but keep them balanced by the beneficial populations.
What, then, is the ideal temperature? We aim for no higher than 140° F. Oops! How did that picture get there? We have compost thermometers with 18" probes to get to the middle - a very handy educational tool. This pile got a little too warm by our standards. The photo below showcases a more reasonable temperature.
These are both examples of classic late-spring piles. Our mature materials from the year before are almost used up, but we still have immature cover crops to pull out. These immature crops are becoming more and more mature in quality, but still have that slightly higher nitrogen content. So the piles, like the days, tend to be warmer. In the fall we have lots and lots of mature material but not much immature. They tend to be cooler. The air temperature plays a role, too. If it is freezing outside you probably won't have a 140° F pile.
As to the turning, it is a trade-off. Some nutrients will be lost in the turning, it's true, but if you don't turn it at least once the materials on the edges of the pile will not break down. We generally compromise by turning each pile once. (For the uninitiated, turning involves taking the pile, piece by piece, and rebuilding it in a neighboring location. Not flipping it over all at once.) There are contraptions called "Compost Tumblers", which are drums that pivot on a horizontal axis. They allow you to put your materials in and turn them as often as you like. Once again, more oxygen, higher heat, and cured compost faster. With greater nutrient loss.
What is turning into a series will probably wrap up with the third post, which will cover manure, undesirable material, compost quantities, and miscellaneous other. Enjoy!

Why We Are Tired Tonight

2009-05-18T21:03:00.001-07:00

Whew! This is what summer is all about... All seven and a half of us just left the garden at 9:00 pm, having gone on a wild planting spree. Main season things, you know.

So far we've gotten a start with some sweet corn, tomatoes, quinoa, sunflowers, and onions in their beds. Tomorrow will bring amaranth, with flour corn, millet, sorghum, peppers, eggplant, cukes, zukes, and many others to follow.
There's no going back now!

Composting 101

2009-05-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

Here I sit, in the shade, sipping cold kombucha in the midst of our first 100° F days of the year. What topic could be hotter than compost? Or more appropriate, given that it is Spring and we have an abundance of weeds, cover crops (which we refer to instead as "compost crops"), and all the dry, stalk-y, crunchy mature material we saved from last year.

Michele, of the Rabbit Wrangler Ranch in Idaho, posted some questions after reading my admittedly vague reference to our composting in the Happy Spring Equinox post. Hopefully this will answer your questions and bring up a lot more.

I often feel like most of my experientially-oriented posts should start with a disclaimer, so here's this one: there are many ways to compost, many books written on the topic, and many, many products sold to help you compost. This is how we do it here, and how it is taught in Grow Biointensive agriculture through Ecology Action's courses.
The recipe is fairly simple: 4 parts mature material, 4 parts immature material, one part soil. Add water. Sounds easy, right? It is. And the details aren't even very devilish.
Mature material, popularly referred to as "dry matter", consists technically of any plant matter that has achieved full maturity. The easiest example is straw, which can come from rice, wheat, rye, barley, oats, and so forth. Also included are corn stalks, quinoa stalks, sunflower stalks, amaranth stalks... You get the picture. Essentially anything that is tough and crunchy. Tree leaves that fall of their own accord count. Burnt bacon doesn't.
Immature material, popularly referred to as "green matter", is basically anything that has not gone to maturity. Slug-eaten lettuce, grass clippings, most kitchen waste, weeds (which you hopefully got before they went to seed), and anything else you pulled out before it completed its life cycle.
The reason for the revised terminology is that the common terms are deceptive. Grass clippings that have been sitting on the lawn for a week can certainly be dry and brown. But that does not change their composition, except that there is less water in them. And it's all about the composition.
I will oversimplify to prove my point: for our composting purposes, anything you put in your pile is made up of carbon and nitrogen in varying ratios, and the carbon involved varies in its density. The mature material we use is relatively higher in carbon than the immature, and the carbon is denser. Because of that fact the organic matter from composted mature material will last much longer in the soil, which is what we want. But if you build a pile only of mature material it will take years to break down completely.
The microbes that will decompose your pile want appreciable amounts of both carbon and nitrogen, which is where the immature material comes in. Though its carbon is less helpful to us in the long run, immature material is relatively higher than mature material in nitrogen, and its presence in the pile will help the microbes do their job and give you lots of nice, long lasting compost (human-encouraged organic matter), which in turn makes your soil system healthier which makes your plants more productive and pleasing to the eye, and eventually culminates in world peace.
Soil is the last ingredient, and we add it in small quantities for a couple of reasons. It's true that adding soil inoculates the pile with helpful microbes (which would have happened eventually anyway), but more importantly it helps the pile maintain moisture and moderate its temperature. This may be less necessary in a cooler, moister climate than ours, but is vital here.
Now you know the ingredients, so here's how it goes together: Choose a spot to build your pile, preferably in direct contact with soil, and possibly on a garden bed you can spare. The liquid that leaches out will do great things for the soil underneath, and direct contact will also aid microbes coming and going through your pile. It should be a minimum of 3x3', which will help maintain the core temperature and moisture of your pile. It can be bigger if you like, but not smaller.
Stick a fork in the soil to loosen it where the pile will go, then lay down a few inches of rough mature material. This is a different category of mature, things that won't break down easily. Like tree branches. The point is to allow air to enter the pile and excess moisture to leave. It also creates a definable bottom to the pile.
Now you start building, adding a layer of mature, a layer of immature, and a layer of soil. We use 5 gallon buckets (not sustainable, no, but plentiful, free in any quantity, and standard in size for measuring). One layer for us is two buckets of mature, two buckets of immature, one-half bucket of soil.
Oh- and we build them as square as possible. This makes the most efficient use of space and materials. Plus they are aesthetically pleasing...
At this point, having not answered more than one of Michele's questions, I am going to end this post. The next will cover a little bit of the what's, why's, do's and don'ts of the process, hopefully answering some of the questions that this post generated.

Interview with a Pair of Fanatics

2009-05-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

Our friend Nikki, who was an intern at the Ecology Action Research Mini-Farm for a few months this past winter, came down to visit last week. Nikki is a writer both of journalism and fiction, and is also a health food nut. (Those of us who claim the term wear it with pride). Her passions also tend toward life-long learning and the sustainable lifestyle.

While the majority of her visit was spent with her sister, who is currently a six-month intern at the EA site, Margo and I did get a chance to have them both down at the Golden Rule for dinner and conversation. Nikki came prepared with her notebook and a desire to interview us about progress on our own path of self-sufficiency and healthy lifestyle.
Her finished product gives us a chance to step back and see that we have made some incredible steps. The fact that we play in the dirt everyday is the only thing that keeps us humble :)
Anyway, we recommend her blog, Generation V, and the interview in particular (for when the post has moved off the main page to make way for other excellent and more recent posts).
We are grateful that Nikki is friends with us even though we aren't vegans :)
And here is the one photo of four we gave her that she didn't decide to put in. I think it is self-explanatory.

Integrated Pest Management, Golden Rule Style

2009-05-09T05:51:00.000-07:00

Our Fava Beans aren't looking so hot right now. They are suffering, as they always do this time of year, from one of the biblical plagues so hideous it could only be referred to euphemistically as "locusts". Yes, I'm talking about Aphids.

Ours are black, and a little bit of research has me guessing that they are Aphis fabae, the Black Bean Aphid. They are the scourge of our Favas, and probably indicate something of which we should be aware (we are generally of the belief that most plants in any given crop will have pests or disease, but only the weaker specimens will succumb to the attack).

At any rate, we worry some about our beloved Fava Beans, high biomass producers that they are, and heralds of the coming of the Fava Bean Burger mentioned in an older post. Mostly, though, we worry about what other people will think when they visit the garden. So we kind of rush them past the Fava beds.
Until recently, of course, when we began to see the textbook example of what we preach in terms of pest management: Lay off the poisons, focus on a healthy system, then let natural predators step in. Most notably we have the Ladybug, which is our garden hero due to its status as a general predator. Once it has finished with the aphids, it will move on to other pests. Or, more likely, when it has eventually reproduced to levels too large to be sustained on the aphids the excess will migrate to the rest of the garden. So when the plants die (of natural deaths) in June or early July, we will have a ridiculous number of ladybugs spreading out for new grounds. A side-note here; Ladybug beetles and larvae both do plenty of eating, up to 50 aphids a day. And Recently a Dutch group called the Foundation Against Senseless Violence chose the Ladybug as its logo. Cute for us humans, ironic on an insect level...
Here we have an unidentified wasp species, which began arriving in droves a week or so ago. They hang out over the Fava Bean beds in the hundreds, maybe thousands, and create roving clouds in the rest of the garden. It isn't their eating habits that please us as much as their egg-laying habits. You can't say that for many things besides chickens, can you? These wasps, just a half-inch long or so, inject an egg into each aphid they encounter. The egg hatches, parasitizes the aphid, and then, when it has eaten all there is, leaves the aphid an empty shell (see left).
Here is another strange predator, which those more skilled or experienced might be able to identify. It is enough for me to know that, with a shape like that, it is not eating Fava Bean plants.
There we have it. If we had gotten wigged out by all those aphids and sprayed, dusted or otherwise applied poisons, the aphid population would surely have been affected. But so would the populations of all the predators attracted to the aphids. It is a basic law of predation that 1) there are fewer predators than prey and 2) the reproductive cycle takes longer for predators than prey. So when it comes to bouncing back from devastation, the prey will excel. Predator populations will come back much more slowly, leaving room for a great infestation before they catch up.
So here's to our ladybugs! May they always get their way in our garden.

The Illicit Tuber Trade

2009-04-28T05:52:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure exactly how to say this best to avoid retribution and underhanded attack by certain parties in our vicinity, but honesty and full disclosure of the facts is probably best. And the truth needs to be known.

We have an underground market in Jerusalem Artichokes (see photo on right) and Potatoes. Probably other roots, too, like Salsify and Parsnips, maybe garlic seasonally. But tubers are definitely the big targets. The crimes, which are mostly simple and petty, boil down to theft and stockpiling. Market manipulation? Maybe... But the truly insidious side is that the business goes on, unseen, even in daytime hours.

Who are the culprits? Oh, we can be almost positive on this count. Voles, they do their deed and depart. While sometimes incredibly destructive, like certain vegans, they flee the scene leaving evidence of their crime. Mice and voles, both, are bad. But it's in their nature. They can't do anything about that. Ravens, sparrows, and the like: well, they're just free-wheeling and don't understand the implications of their actions.

We're talking about gophers, here. Infrequently even seen above ground, let alone in daylight, these animals have been plotting all along. We thought they, too, were tunneling to our crops out of need, which we would have understood. But that wasn't enough. They have used their complex tunnel system to transport the above-mentioned tubers as far as 60 feet in the garden, stashing them in hideouts indiscoverable except by chance.

We thought it was gardener error when a bunch of Jerusalem Artichokes came up in the raspberry bed. And when Margo, while preparing a bed, unearthed a pile of potatoes, all 1 1/2-2" in diameter, we thought they came from the same bed, in which potatoes had been growing not two feet away. But those potatoes had been red. These were yellow. The closest planting of yellow potatoes had been two beds away, at least.
One and one-half to two inches in diameter. Big enough to matter, small enough for easy transport through a gopher hole. The implications finally started to sink in.
This Spring Margo unearthed a similar pile of Jerusalem Artichokes. There is only one bed in the whole garden in which we are growing Jerusalem Artichokes, and it was not that one.
And, finally, the day before yesterday I was surveying the scene of the bramble removal, which was carried out three weeks ago. The blackberries have started sprouting up from their mangled stumps, it's true. But something else was sprouting up, too. Outside the garden, where once was a solid bramble (the perfect cover), are now growing potatoes and Jerusalem Artichokes.

Greenhouse Re-Upholstery

2009-04-23T14:45:00.000-07:00

I guess the fact that I am about to complain about our greenhouse speaks to the privileged life we lead here at the Golden Rule Garden, but those who have seen it will agree – it is almost worse than no greenhouse at all. See Exhibit A above: the original skin, fiberglass. No doubt wonderfully durable and transparent for the first couple of years, but you can see to what level it has sunk. Yes, technically it does let in light, but probably around 50%, and that is abysmal for a greenhouse. Does anyone know the word “leggy” as applied to plants? Here is Exhibit B: seedlings which, though given plenty of water and excellent flat soil, could still arguably be described as “languishing” in their relatively dark dungeon. Exhibit C, parts one and two, are full-grown amaranth plants inside and outside the greenhouse. As you can see by the little reddish blotches towards the top of the sea of green, the ones inside are reaching for the sun, putting all their energy into nearly eight-foot stalks with tiny seedheads. The ones outside are short in comparison, maybe 4.5 feet, but have great, full seedheads. I rest my case. The defense might add that the greenhouse does provide enough warmth for the lemon trees to survive and that swiss chard sure seems to thrive, but I, the prosecution, would interject that, yes, the chard does fine until the aphids get tired of their first love, the fava beans.

But let’s not bicker about it. The truth is that our greenhouse is not ideal, but we must make the best of it. And the best of it is the south end, where a few years ago a seedling room was created. Set against the southwest corner, interior walls and lowered ceiling were framed and covered in plastic to retain heat, and the floor was covered in hardware cloth to keep miscellaneous varmints out. It works great to collect and retain heat, even in January, but does a poor job in the sunlight department.
The point is that we want strong, correctly proportioned seedlings, not weak, leggy wastrels. That’s where a little motivation and all the wood, plastic, and screws one could wish for come in. We have been thinking about taking the roof off the whole dang structure and covering it in plastic, but that seems to be a long way off. The real urgency was the seedlings, and so I got permission to take drastic measures on the west side of the south end.
Step one was to, well, take a picture for posterity, of course! But then to remove all of the fiberglass. I’ll let you know, for those who haven’t experienced it yet, that deteriorating fiberglass leaves shiny little fibers all over your hands. I guess the resin breaks down and stops holding it together. Anyway, I got the gloves out after I realized that fact. This was the simple and fun part, first because it got a lot hotter after about 10 am (on the south side of a big structure), second because it’s always a lot more fun taking things apart than putting them back together. So the second photo in the series is the naked seed room.
The upper section of fiberglass didn’t need to be removed, but I wanted to tuck the plastic sheeting under it, so I climbed up above the seed room inside and screwed in scrap wood to prop the upper section out from the wall. You can see that in the third photo. Also subtly present in this photo is the absence of the sliding door rail, which, though heavy and unwieldy, was completely in the way and had to be removed temporarily. So did the windows.
The third photo also showcases the first layer of plastic. I stretched it as tightly as possible simply for the sake of being neat and tidy since it will not be subjected to the stresses of wind like the outside layer. While one layer would be enough to protect the seedlings from birds, heavy rain, and fierce winds, it would not insulate nearly as well as two. Kind of a primitive double-paned energy star window, but we’re short on caulking and argon, so we went with the easy way.

I put the first layer of plastic directly on the frame of the greenhouse, then screwed 1x2” boards over it as the spacers between plastic. Nails would have worked as well and been cheaper, but I don’t know how long this greenhouse is going to last. I don’t want folks to be cursing my contribution when it comes time to disassemble.

The last photo shows the final product. The second layer was stretched as tight as possible, and ¼” boards were nailed along the studs. This way any flapping in the breeze will be kept to a minimum, and the thing will last longer. All the finishing boards are redwood, which is kind of a treat. Too expensive in many areas to be practical, these specific boards are reused from a recently renovated building that is over sixty years old. Redwood is local to us, and can be farmed responsibly, though due to the age of these boards it is possible they are from old-growth trees. Redwood is known for its slow deterioration, to which these particular boards attest.
An important point here: this project does not express our walk of sustainability, just so nobody thinks I'm completely ignorant of this point. Plastic and fiberglass are not, as of this writing, supplies which can be created without a lot of toxic processes. And, clearly, they are not made to fill their purpose for more that five or ten years, after which time they will be junk. We will need to be much more insightful to devise sustainable tools for season extension.
I’m not a great finisher, so this project was a real trial for me. The bulk of it was simple to execute, but the final touches of trimming, tucking, filling gaps and fine-tuning were a bit much. Thus the homage to those, like my friend Bobbi, who have a flair for sharp re-upholstery.
In the end we have a seed room that will be worth the effort others have already put into it, because now the fortress lets in light!

A Few Loose Ends

2009-04-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

It being springtime I thought I might tidy up a bit, tie up some projects and things to which I have referred but not followed up on. Above and on the right we have the Lemon tree that won "The Most Butchered" award a couple of months ago. It's not dead! As you can see, fitting for Easter and Spring and all that, what once was clearly "non-viable" is now sprouting out of every conceivable spot. Whew! Sigh of relief from Dan.

We cut and ashed some more potatoes this Monday, and by Thursday our last bed was ready to plant. So now we're all ready to sit back and watch them go. Oh, yeah, and weed them a ton. One of the beds had a compost pile on it previously, which makes for amazing growth, but also happy weeds. Here's a picture of new apprentice Ed ashing a potato slice.
One of the books into which Margo has passionately delved is Healing with Whole Foods, a 700+ page beast of nutrition theory and food-based medicine. She recommends it heartily. It is in Ecology Action's library, but we soon bought our own copy. Back to the point, one of the many ideas it presents is eating for seasons. Spring is for pungent herbs, sprouted things, and a bunch of other foods I won't turn down. So we are now tossing sprouted barley on top of our customary morning oatmeal. Sounds odd, I know, but it is quite tasty and spring-like.
Also on the food front, I want to share a couple of Margo's forays. I note in many of the blogs I read that recipes and food experiences are prime content. (I think that shows I'm paying attention to the right blogs). I'm not so great with recipes myself, but I'll gladly share what I know of Margo's.
First is a granola bar recipe from a farming friend east of here. She told Margo about it, and seemed to indicate that the oats used should be whole, not rolled. The bars were delicious and intriguingly, almost disturbingly chewy from the whole oats. Upon speaking to her later, our friend said something along the lines of "You used whole oats, huh? Wow, I never thought of trying that..." So we experimented without even knowing it.
The second one I've been waiting to share is the squash pie. Margo does experiment fearlessly in foods, consistently veering far from the known territory clearly mapped for us all in Joy of Cooking. Standing on that solid terrain she plots and theorizes, then suddenly striking out in surety she claims new ground. Usually it turns out to be a land proverbially flowing with milk and honey (I bet you vegans just love that phrase), though occasionally it is a mosquito-infested swampland that is left further unexplored. In the case of the squash pie I think it was generally a good experience. What stood out most in this pie was its lack of dairy and eggs. In fact, I do believe that this pie came entirely from the garden, with the exception of spices. Margo read somewhere that flax seeds work great as an egg substitute and tried them out in this pie. As you can see it was both solid and tasty.
Look forward to more of this kind of thing, but address Margo for the specifics.
Lastly, we are one cat less in the garden now. Marcello is no longer with us. I am not writing euphemistically here; Ellen took him off to a shelter on Wednesday where someone who wants a strange cat can choose him. His tendency to attack people when they weren't looking was lots of fun for us who know him, but for visitors and especially children that behavior is less entertaining. So, in honor of him, Marcello gets the final say in this post.

This Spud's for You, Part II

2009-04-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

This is going to look kind of strange coming in line before Part I, but we'll go for it.

The pizza dough is rising, the flats have been watered, and I am ready to proceed. I believe our potatoes are ready to go in? Good... So we turn to the soil.

Our bed preparation for potatoes varies depending on how loose the soil already is. In the Golden Rule Garden, where the soil structure is mostly excellent, we often only do a single-dig (that's ~12" down with a digging fork) though sometimes we do double-dig the beds (24" down with spade and fork). Since potatoes are roots, they perform especially poorly in compact, rocky soil.

We don't do trenching and hilling here, just planting. We used to use a bulb planter, but that is a lot of up-and-down, and sometimes does not put them far enough under. (The funny thing about potatoes is that the tubers grow up from the original material. The seed potato is planted, the shoot comes up, and the potatoes develop along this shoot. This is why hilling and many other stranger procedures are popular - the plant grows, you bury it, it grows more, you bury it, and it grows more, all the while producing potatoes. Then when it is done growing you have to dig as deep as the original material to harvest all your potatoes.)

Anyway, how about a picture?These are the tools we use when planting potatoes: first the digging board, which helps distribute the planter's weight to avoid compacting the soil. Next, the spacing board at the top of the bed. This board is as long as the bed is wide, and is marked at 9" intervals, which are offset on the other side of the board. You would notice, upon drawing a line between the markings, that they formed equilateral triangles. This is no coincidence. With the intensive spacing used in Grow Biointensive (also referred to as "offset" or "hexagonal" spacing) all plants in the bed are equidistant from their direct neighbors. Ok, I'll get back to the planting board in a minute.

Next up is the shovel. Specifically a trenching spade. I used to call it a tree spade until I learned that a tree spade is actually the hydraulic truck-mounted hunk of steel that can dig up and move full-grown trees. So don't use one of those, use a trenching spade instead. The glory of this tool is its long, curved blade (to which the angle of the photo doesn't do justice).

Last of all is the little stick you see there next to the spade, which is a 6" spacing stick. How to Grow More Vegetables recommends that potatoes go six inches down, and the stick is to measure the depth if you want. Deeper than 6" is good, too.

We go about the whole process like this:

Start at one end, lay the planting board where the first row goes, and plunge the spade in. Pull slightly back and up, and put the potato in the hole the spade made. Pull the spade out, and the hole caves in. Nice! Plant the rest of the row in the same way, and when that is all done, flip the planting board over. The markings on the far side should indicate where the previous row's potatoes were planted, and the markings on the near side indicate where the next row should go. So do that row, flip the board towards you, plant that row, repeat... And if you are working with another person it becomes even easier. One stands with the spade, one squats with the potatoes. Works real good.

We cover the bed with a shade net then to protect the soil until the potatoes come up, and then we raise the shade net on sticks to protect the potato foliage. Some of the really hot days can scorch them back, so we figure any added bit of protection is worth it.

The other quirky thing we do is, with stakes and string, trellis the foliage of the plants. This keeps the plants vertical, out of the way of the path and each other. Additionally, you know the tubers are ready to harvest when the plant dies back and flops over (see left), so by holding them up we hope to keep the plants going just a bit longer...
When they eventually do kack, it's time to see what you've got! This is what Margo enjoys the most about root vegetables: it is always a surprise, and you can never be quite sure what you have until you dig. We use a potato fork, which is a lot like a digging fork except that the tines are wider - good for lifting potatoes instead of stabbing them. I'm sure later in the season I'll have a lot to say about this process. For now I'll note that we go through each bed at least twice when harvesting, and still find potatoes popping up the next year.
How to Grow More Vegetables lists an intermediate yield for potatoes of 200 lb per 100 sq. ft. One of our beds last year did that well, and we are counting on better this year. The gophers can surely only eat so much, right? If we do get intermediate yields, or better, for our crop it will mean 1,500 lb of happiness! That's what I'm talking about!
I guess I could say a bit here about storage. There are some potatoes that store better than others, and so you should have an idea of what you are growing them for. And if you want to be able to store your potatoes from harvest all the way to planting the next year, well, that will take really knowing your varieties together with some of your own experience. There are always some bitter (and smelly) failures, but success is oh, so succulent! Especially with some salt, a little roasted garlic, a bit of mayonnaise...

This Spud's for You, Part I

2009-04-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

Margo and I love potatoes in almost every way. In addition to boiled, baked, fried, toasted, and the inevitable mixed-with-garlic, we like to plant and harvest them.

Let me stress this one point about potatoes: they are easy. If I can grow them with any amount of success, you can as well. While there are many creative ways to cultivate our originally South American friends, this post will outline the method we use in Grow Biointensive, with a few elements we include for this area's hot summers.

Let us begin with varieties... As the wonderfully informative and pictorial (though depressingly-titled) Fatal Harvest points out in the chapter "Monoculture vs. Diversity," there are upwards of 5,000 varieties of potato in the world today. Only four of these are grown on the major commercial scale, but since we're all small potatoes (ha ha) we have many more choices open to us. This year we stopped by one of our local nurseries to find they had organic seed potatoes, which was great. (The only two reasons I can think of to buy seed potatoes to plant as opposed to grocery store potatoes are 1) the aforementioned possibilities of choice and 2) the disease-free guarantee that seed potato vendors can give you. None of us want potato diseases imported from Maine or somewhere.)
So we got Purple Majesty, Yellow Finn (on the left), All Red, Jacqueline Lee, Red Desiree, Red La Soda, Red Norland, and the ubiquitous Yukon Gold and Russet Burbank. And these are not getting put in tiny allotments, either. We'll be growing around 750 sq. ft. of potatoes. That's seven and a half beds that measure 5'x20'. We'll be rollin' in the potatoes by October, woo hoo! Yeah!
I think I'm getting ahead of myself.
If your local garden supply store doesn't supply seed potatoes (or has poor selection) you can always order them from one of many dependable suppliers. For great diversity we usually go to Ronniger's catalog. There are lots of others. Remember to plan ahead on this point.
How to Grow More Vegetables says it will take 25 to 30 lb of potatoes to plant 100 sq. ft. It gives a range because the actual weight depends on the specific potatoes you are going to plant. Massive potatoes can be cut into smaller pieces to plant, assuming there are enough "eyes" - I'm going to assume we all know what those are. That said, you can't carve a peanut-sized piece off around a viable eye, plant it, and expect it to grow. We go by the policy that plant-able potatoes should weigh at least 2 ounces.
If your supplier is being kind to you, they will give you "single-drop" potatoes, which are small enough that they can be tossed in the hole a bulb-planter makes. If your supplier is being naughty, they will sell you huge potatoes, by the pound, with only two eyes, both on the same end so as to make cutting impossible. Most likely you will get a mixture. Unless you get to choose, in which case you will choose excellent-looking, perfectly-sized potatoes.
If the previous two paragraphs don't make much sense to you, ignore them and plant whatever you want. This shouldn't be made into rocket science. But always pay attention to what you do, because it will give you a chance to learn something.
Now you have your potatoes... This part is easy: Set them out a month before you want to plant them. Not in direct sunlight, and not where they will freeze. How about on your dining room table? Or beside it? Ok, how about in front of the sofa? (These pictures indicate the lengths to which our addiction leads us - they are not simply the same trays being moved around). Put them wherever you want. The point is to get them to sprout.
Once they have sprouted, determine whether any can be cut in one or more pieces. Cutting should happen three or so days before planting, and you should have a can of wood ash at the ready when you do it. Each cut face should get coated with some. This will help keep the potato from getting disease, I think, but Margo will let me know for sure when she checks this out.
Now your potatoes are ready to go, and it is time to get down and dirty in the garden!
...but now it's time for me to make tonight's pizza dough, and so Part II will follow shortly.

Past Accomplishments

2009-04-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

Margo has instructed me to write about planting potatoes, and I will, but later this week. I think an accounting of how the past couple of weeks went is in order first.

We have had visits from prospective members of the Golden Rule Garden gang, a visit from my brother, a trip to Hidden Villa Ranch to present to the Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture (MESA) orientation of new stewards, and a trip to go surfin' and campin' down around Santa Cruz (I'm the one in front of the blue board). Plus a whole lot of gardening, weeding, and things I'll tell you about momentarily.

Since last post, Spring Equinox, where I declared the trees were budding and asparagus sprouting prematurely, we have had at least five, maybe more like seven nights below freezing. Most of those well into hard-frost territory. The Asian pear and Plum trees go right on, as if they didn't notice. That means we'll be getting out the spun polyester soon to protect them.

We had, on the west end of the garden, a large blackberry/grape vine bramble. It stretched about twenty feet along the fence and stood around eight feet tall for most of that. Let me first stress this most important of all facts: it did not produce many berries, nor did it produce any grapes whatsoever. It shaded the bed next to the fence starting around 3:00pm, which could be good or bad depending on the crop. It leaned heavily on the fence, which is a plastic deer-barrier fence and not in any way structural. And it provided an excellent habitat for a number of birds. We thought this last part was great, until the Red Fife wheat we planted nearby began to be decimated. And then the sugar snap peas, then the kale, then the mustard. You have probably noticed that the bramble has been referred to here in the past tense, and that is what this paragraph is really about. Ellen has been talking for a while about getting the backhoe in to rip the bramble out, but last year it was shading the delicate crops so nicely that we asked her to put that off a bit. This year is different, and since my brother was visiting with his excellent trail-maintenance skills we did it last week. Now it acts as a nice, but mobile, habitat. I'm guessing it will ambulate (with persuasion from a golf cart) to a better location in the next few days. Besides, it isn't like there aren't blackberry brambles ALL OVER the place here anyway. That one taking over the greenhouse, for instance...
The final point I'll reference now is the reconstruction of old flats... Flats are great for using space wisely in the garden - seeds are planted in 3" deep flats and stay there until the seedlings are of a size to transplant. That way whatever is already growing in the beds can grow some more before being pulled out for the new crop. The downside of flats, as with most other things, is that they eventually break. This is the corner of our greenhouse where we store such flats. (They don't know that the wood burning stove around which they are stacked is out of service - it keeps them honest.)
Out of this pile, so far, have arisen fifteen solid and usable flats. Eight of these were cobbled together from pieces of broken flats, and the other seven incorporated some brand new material with the old pieces. Here are three of the flats, which constitute the two most popular flat dimensions at the Golden Rule Garden. The two on the left are referred to as "half flats," because they are approximately half the width of the full flats cited in How to Grow More Vegetables. Their interior dimensions are 15.5"X 10", and they are much easier to deal with when full of wet soil. The flat on the right is a "long flat," and is 2'X 9". It is heavier, but since it is long you can keep its center of gravity closer to you.
I'll end with a digital print of my flat-concocting diagrams. The medium is graphite on 1/8" redwood board. It is the first of its series...

Happy Spring Equinox!

2009-03-20T16:07:00.000-07:00

Golden Rule Garden, 3/20/09

This seems like a great time for a State-of-the-Garden report, to take stock of where we are now and what is imminent...

We'll start with the perennials. Someone is confused in the garden, and I think it is them. They've all been living here longer than I have, but I'm pretty sure that just because it is officially Spring, and just because it has gotten nice and warm for the past stretch of time, it is not by any means certain that no hard frost lies in our near future. But the raspberries are caning, the blueberries are forming flowers, the Asian pear is tempting fate with its buds and the asparagus is four or five inches high. We'll see. As the folks who buy their tomato starts in February say, "You never know. This year may be different!" And our perennials will be ready.

I talked to Mom today, and she pointed out how lucky we are to be moving ahead with garden preparation. They weather has been nice and warm back in Ohio, but that simply means that the ground has thawed into a thick muddy mess.

We are starting to pull up cover crops to plant potatoes, and have already put in about 250 square feet of them already. Those that haven't been pulled are shooting skyward, as are the fava beans and the seed heads of the green onions we didn't quite get harvested last fall. We have happy garlic and lettuce, and Margo just planted sugar snap peas yesterday. A little early, perhaps, but something to look forward to.

Our broccoli is flowering.

As for work, we are clearing paths from weeds (which seem to give us half of our compost material themselves) and building compost. Here is Margo with the first pile this year! We have also started sifting the compost piles from last Fall to get out the rocks and un- decomposed material out.

And flatting... We have promise of wonderful crops in flats in the greenhouse right now. Allow me to rattle off the list: arugula, basil, beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, eggplant, flax, kale, leeks, the ever-present lettuce, mustard, parsley, peas, sweet peppers, hot peppers, quinoa, salsify, spinach, stevia, tomatillos, and tomatoes.

Finally, the main-season wildlife is starting to show up again. Most notable are the western bluebirds and cliff swallows. One of these days I'm going to post our bird list on here, as inspired by Anne.

So Happy Spring, everyone! I hope you get all the water and sun you need to get your gardens going!

One of our male western bluebirds shows what he's all about

Fava Bean Burgers

2009-03-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

Margo pointed out to me that it has been suggested to us that Banner Fava Beans are not the tastiest, and that the bigger the bean, the tastier it is. That said, we here prefer a modest bean that grows very well to a delicious bean that doesn't. In the past year we have learned that most parts of the plant are edible (roots being the exception), and can be delicious. Last year at a fancy fund-raising dinner for Pacifica Gardens (a wonderful educational/community resource garden project that deserves its own post) one of the plates featured Fava Bean greens, the top 6" of immature plants which were then sautéed in wonderful things and served on baby potatoes... Mmmmm!

Almost immediately after being told that, yes, fava beans grow well here, but no, they don't taste good, Margo set out to create a recipe that would do them justice. Without further ado, I am going to give you the sheet she worked up on them. Photos are of flowering plants and dying, mature plants.

Summer 2007

In the garden we have just completed our harvest of mature fava beans. In the kitchen, I am playing with my new favorite recipe, fava bean burgers. At the table, we are delighting in each new batch of burgers soon to be accompanied by our own fresh tomatoes! We have enjoyed these burgers topped with steamed greens, onions, and vegetables or on our own sourdough rolls. Fava beans have a sweeter flavor than most beans; it is a unique taste to savor. (Fava beans are known to result in an allergic reaction of varying degrees in some people of Mediterranean decent, be aware.) For those interested in trying this garden treat, here is the recipe:

Soak overnight:
• 2 c. dried fava beans Drain the beans, cover with water, and cook until soft (add a bay leaf or two if desired).
Mash beans and add:
• 1 c. onion or green onion, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• ½ c. mashed potatoes
• 1 T. flour
• 1 T. fresh thyme (or herb of your choice)
• ½ t. salt
• ½ t. pepper
• pinch of cayenne
When well mixed, shape into patties and cook on a lightly oiled or well-seasoned skillet until browned. Flip burgers and brown other side. This recipe was created with the intention of being as directly “from the garden” as possible. I experimented with adding an egg to hold the burgers together more and determined it did not make a difference. I encourage you to experiment with this recipe too. If you make any delightful discoveries or improvements I’d love to hear about them! - Margo :)

Jack Frost Nipping at our Beans

2009-03-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

I know this post isn’t going to receive any sympathy from folks in the northern lands, but those of you on the west coast and in the south know what I’m talking about: when the mercury falls below 32°F it’s really cold! So much so that things start to freeze! Thank God it doesn’t stay that way when the sun comes up…

All subtle bragging aside, we have a mild enough climate that the occasional nighttime lows below 32 are sometimes exasperating as we consider all the things we might be able to grow if it never froze. Add to that our last frost date of May 15 and occasional frost begins to seriously affect our capacity to grow long-season crops. Sorghum and corn barely mature before frost comes again, late potatoes are often still small at harvest, and miscellaneous other marathon crops are, for the most part, out of consideration. So tease us about our lack of severe winters, but realize that your warm nighttime lows in the summer allow your plants to overtake ours handily. (See the sidebar under “temps” for clarification).

As to the title, we have a variety of legume that stands out in a number of ways. Its seed production is great, its biomass production is incredible, and its hardiness means it will live through our winters. All three attributes put together make it an ideal crop for us. It will act as protection for the soil against sun, wind, and erosion, give us a great deal of mature material for compost, and make a tasty meal to boot. This wonder crop is the Banner variety of Fava Bean. It grows to around five feet high, can produce more than six stalks per plant, as many as seven pods per stalk and up to six beans per pod. We’re talking up to 252 beans per plant, and they are largish beans. And, as I said, they are hardy.

It gets down to 18F, as you can see if you scrutinize the min-max thermometer above, and while the Favas don’t like it they do cope. They get a little wilty, maybe a little covered with snow, and maybe even the tops die back. The point, though, is that they don’t die, and whatever they have saved to their roots starts going into high-gear around late March, which we’ll see soon. Here you see them relaxing onto the strings we set up to help them stay vertical.

As I mentioned earlier, any solar exposure usually melts the frost promptly around here. It seems, in general, that the sun is stronger in the west than, say, the Midwest. If you are working outside when the air temperature is, say, around 65°F you might be comfortable in the shade, but when you move out into the sun you get too warm quickly. Not that I’m complaining about that. At least, not in the winter. It means that, as long as your garden isn’t shaded all day, the ground doesn’t freeze very far down, and won’t stay frozen long. Root veggies store pretty well left in the soil. And you don’t have to worry (too much) about draining pipes and hoses. This photo was taken about 8 am. The hose is still frozen, as you can see from the frost, but the sun is on it already and it will thaw soon. Pipes are all around 12-18” down, well out of danger.

This week looks to shed its wetness tomorrow and turn the gardens into a warm, sunny, potato-planting wonderland!

Lemon Tree, Very Pretty

2009-03-05T09:11:00.000-08:00

Walnut Grove in Lake County

A disclaimer: some of the following images may be offensive to arborists or horticulturists. Children may be able to identify them as somewhat Seuss-esque.

This year's pruning time has come and gone. I almost missed out on most of the action because of my high ideals: I believe that pruning fruit trees requires long-term vision, and the owner of the tree should either 1) be the sole pruner or 2) always have it pruned by the same person. The rationale is that fruit trees can live productive decades if taken care of, but can take years to train in a certain direction. A surrogate pruner might cut off a two-year-old branch for which the owner had high hopes.
But I enjoy the art of pruning, so until I have trees of my own I'll prune any trees for which the owner hasn't created a plan. Step one was our visit to a friends' place in Portland, OR. They have a recently acquired property with a few fruit trees, two of them over 50 years old, maybe over 60. That leaves plenty of time for mismanagement. The pear was probably at least 30 feet tall, water-sprouts and all. A little high for easy harvest. At 10' the main trunk split into two 8" trunks which were racing each other to the heavens. At 20' both of these trunks had been cut to stubs, each of which had a dozen or more branches reaching out. To make a long story short I was aggressive, perhaps overly. I wish I had pictures. With the advice of an arborist who lived across the street I cut one of the two competing trunks halfway down. (The idea is to end up with a tree half the height of the current one, but such a change has to happen over a long period of time with such an old tree.)
The other old tree was an apple, which was less out of shape. It is a shorter story. Essentially, it is said, your fruit tree can be a fruit tree or a shade tree, but not both. So it got thinned mercilessly. Again, the pictures would be great. You'll have to use your imagination after seeing the lemons.
So that was step one. Step two was that, upon our return, Garden Manager Ellen started talking about the lemon trees in the greenhouse needing pruned soon. She always lets interns prune those, because she says they come back beautifully from anything. So last week I went for them.
Not ignorantly, of course. I looked up articles on the internet.
I read an amusing quote recently by the Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade which goes "The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say."
The internet is like an amiable genius on LSD. If you listen long enough it will run the gamut from the insightful to the utterly incomprehensible. But, like the Bible, it is most easily misinterpreted when you step into the middle of the monologue, not knowing what came directly before or after (and not taking the time to find out).
So I found two main thoughts on pruning lemons, and citrus trees in general. The first is that everything thinner than a pencil should be taken off every year, and you can prune it all off back to main branches. In "the industry" they sometimes cut them back to trunks. The second is that citrus trees don't need to be pruned. They'll take care of themselves.
I disregarded the second because 1) the trees are in a greenhouse and are already touching the ceiling without encouragement and 2) it isn't any fun. So I started pruning, then went back to the internet to check because the tree started to seem a little gaunt. Emboldened by what I re-read, I forged ahead. I took pictures this time.
With the first tree I followed the advice thoroughly. As you can see, the number of leaves left on the tree could be counted on two hands. We had a family of friends visiting about this time, and they were glad to come out to the greenhouse to help tame the wild lemons with me. I'm leaving their names out to protect them. If I get hauled away for tree mutilation I want them to be safe. I'll take responsibility for this one, guys.
They were in charge of two of the other trees, setting a more moderate example for me when it came down to the final two.
Now time for a little educational piece. You might or might not wonder what I did with all the prunings. In Grow Biointensive we try to keep everything in the system, so tree prunings generally either get used as mature material in a compost pile or as the rough material upon which we build the pile. These tree are different, though. I don't know if this is true for lemons as a whole, but Meyer Lemons (the variety we have) produce a bonus crop on their branches: 1-2" thorns that are sharp enough to slice as well as pierce. We handle our compost often enough to not want surprises like this inside.
Last year's prunings got tossed out the back of the greenhouse and ignored.
This year I was going to do the same, but further away. I wanted to provide wildlife habitat, but preferably not right up next to the greenhouse. We have enough rodent problems. I started by moving the earlier pile, which had been increased by weeds tossed on top. Underneath the pile was some very nice compost. Now my plan is to make the new pile further away from the greenhouse, yes, but not to ignore it. Every bit of organic matter is a big help.
Here are some of the tools I used. The Felco pruners at top left and the pruning saw are both indispensable, but the next tool to the right is also very nice. It has pruning shears at the business end, which is on a long, adjustable aluminum pole with a hand-trigger at the other end. Very, very nice. The last tool is powerful but wicked. It has a lopper on the business end of its pole and a long rope. Pulling the rope levers the lopper closed on the branch of choice, but you have to pull hard. This is where it gets wicked. Where do you put the butt-end of the pole to brace it against the pressure? I tried my rib cage last year, but only once. The shock of the successful lopping bruised one of my ribs, so now I steer clear of the thing completely.

I don't know if you can identify with me, but I often find that shortly after I do something new, which I thought I had read enough on, I stumble upon something else enlightening on the subject. So one of the books I later looked at on a whim mentioned that lemons store most of their fruiting energy in their leaves. Hm.

Formerly Known As the Plastic Cloche Emporium and House of Miscellaneous Pots

2009-02-23T11:25:00.000-08:00

Everybody has probably experienced the feeling of seeing something that looks useful, or actually may be useful but not at that moment, then struggling with whether to get rid of it or not. Those of you with garages, attics, or barns each have the experience to a different degree. And those who have hobbies requiring large numbers of objects bigger than a stamp understand that stuff gets collected. Every once in a while, say during the cold and rainy winter months, you get a chance to step back and look at the past 20 years' accumulation of these objects. You have the opportunity to look at them with some sense of perspective. Especially if someone else put them there.

Let's get to the point now. You may or may not be familiar with the idea of season extension. Most often it involves greenhouses, floating row covers, cold frames and such. Back in the 1800's the French Intensive gardening method started using glass bells, each of which would cover one plant, to be able to grow earlier and later in the season. Here is a close view of one I found on a forum about how to start eggplants in Ireland.
One of these cloches for each plant in your garden. Are you starting to see how this could lead to the "large numbers of objects" I referred to earlier? For an even better visual, check out this blog post by Alexis Madrigal on the subject of British food raising in 1918. The photo shows women working with over 200,000 cloches, each covering a single lettuce plant. Wow, huh? You might ask why one would go to the trouble working with multiple tons of glass pieces that are somewhat expensive (especially now) and very breakable, not to mention need to be cleaned occasionally to remain transparent and have to be stored somewhere when not in use. And the answer, of course, would be because they work very well for the purpose, which is to get plants going weeks or months before they would ordinarily be planted. A gold mine for the savvy market gardener or the farmer trying to produce as much as possible.
Ah, but the times have changed, and plastic has altered the season-extension landscape. We have greenhouses covered with flexible and cheap alternatives to glass, and we have plastic milk jugs that are durable and cheap alternatives to the traditional glass cloche. A brief moment for the downsides of this revolution: when carefully attended, glass will last a long, long time, but plastic will turn brittle and opaque with but a few years' exposure to the sun. Then what? It is unusable and becomes junk, or gets recycled into an even less stable form of plastic.
Back to the theme: cloches are helpful, and empty milk jugs are plentiful. So why not collect as many as you can, just in case you might use them later for something? I have one good reason, which is that someone else will eventually come along and have to clean up after you. In this situation we had about 500 cubic feet of milk jugs, some already converted to cloches by having the bottom cut off, some not yet converted, and many so brittle that they broke into a disagreeable number of shards that then had to be swept up.
I'd like you to know that I am not bitter about this. I am writing from a perspective of wisdom, which I would like to share. That is this: don't stockpile useless plastic things for some hypothetical future scenario, no matter how well-intentioned. If you find you want, say, 1,000 plastic milk jugs, call up your local elementary school. Present your idea to a bunch of the classes, and let them know what you hope to achieve. Your cup of milk jugs will runneth over, probably in a matter of days, and you will have captured the imagination of a whole school of children that will be excited for at least a few days about your garden.
Next up are the miscellaneous pots. Anytime you go to the nursery to get a plant, whether it be tomato, spice bush, or maple, it will come in a pot. A plastic one. Somewhere between 2-24” wide and deep. It might be black, it might be red, white, or green. It may be made out of tough plastic, or possible the really weak kind. It may be smooth, or have ridges. In fact, it may have vertical or horizontal ridges. Maybe 8 ridges, or maybe 20 or them. Maybe it will have holes by which to hang it, or maybe flanges by which you can clip a tray on the bottom. It might have indentations set so perfectly that, when stacked with others of its kind, it nests without sticking. But this measure is useless, because whatever it looks like, whatever its attributes, you can be guaranteed that it will be at least subtly different from any other pot you have. As you can see from the picture, this makes for beautiful variety. For effect, I put them all in stacks according to their basic dimensions. And, for the record, there were as many as 8 pots that were actually identical in design. But for each of those matching pots there were three that absolutely refused to nest with another.
All this is great if you are displaying your diversity of potted plants, but if you want to store pots for some other day such variety of design is a waste of space. So we are getting rid of them, giving them to a local nursery that fosters out such pots to more willing owners.
We are finally clearing out all the unwanted and space-stealing plastic from our storage space!

ps.
I kept some of the potential plastic cloche jugs. Just the ones that are in better shape. You know, because somebody might want to try using them sometime in the next couple of years...

Financial Advice from Those Who Know

2009-02-20T09:52:00.000-08:00

I guess I should start by saying that I am not offering any certified advice from this blog, so be forewarned. Margo and I went to breakfast to spend some quality time with EA's Garden Manager, and the three of us fell into conversation with a man in the restaurant. He is, among other things, a fiduciary something, and is getting into the realm of gardening. Now anyone familiar with Willits, or possibly even coastal CA north of the Bay Area, will know there are commonly held beliefs here that 1) the government is incompetent, 2) the government can't be trusted, or 3) the government is actively out to get our _______ (fill in the blank). I'm not passing judgment, just observing.

So I wasn't surprised when this person began telling us that he was getting into gardening, growing greens and things, because of the the economy. The economy? "Well you know," he said, "the government just gave out almost $1 trillion to the banks last year, and a little less than $1 trillion just now. They say it was for a a lot of other stuff, but it was really for the banks. And they don't tell you that the Treasury Department has given or is currently in the process of giving out around $10 trillion for..." (then he listed a bunch of banking things that I don't remember). The point was that you can't just go creating a lot of money without some repercussions. So he was telling us that when people ask for his financial advice he tells them "Hug everyone you care about as often as you can and tell them you love them. And tear up your lawn to start growing food."

What's funny about that? Well, folks in local agriculture have been telling people to do that for upwards of 35 years. Maybe when financial experts start saying it people will listen...

He went on to say that awhile ago he went into the grocery and saw that bread was $5 a loaf, which freaked him out. He went home, learned how to bake bread, and within a day had his own freshly made. Similarly, he recently found swiss chard in the grocery for 4$ a bundle, and decided it was time to get seriously into gardening. My first thought was "$4 a bundle? We must have about $250 worth of chard in the greenhouse right now! Sell! Sell!" My second thought, the one I acted on, was that I should suggest that he grow grains, too, so that when wheat goes up to $10 a pound he'll be a step ahead.

So there you go! Don't wait for some economic meltdown: tear up your lawn and tell your loved ones you care. Everyone involved will be happier :)

Grain Propagation 101

2009-02-11T06:42:00.000-08:00

If you can start anything from seed, grains are easy. If you have never started anything from seed, grains are a great place to break in! We start ours in 3" deep flats with a flat soil mix (I'll get to that in the next post). We broadcast them into the flat and keep it moist, well-ventilated, and protected until they are of a size to transplant. How do you determine what that size is? Well here is Goldilocks' assortment for us: much too small, much too big, and juuuuust right. You want to make sure everything that is going to germinate has, but you also don't want to worry about how big the roots are or how developed the plant. The plants in the flat on the right have germinated as fully as they will, and the roots have hopefully not hit the bottom of the flat yet. These look about 2 inches tall, and it takes them somewhere between 7-10 days to get there. By the way, if you are into wheat grass juice it is as simple as this. Get your flat, fill it with mix, broadcast the wheat berries that you got at the co-op or wherever on top, water and wait. When it looks like you want it to look, cut it!

But if you are trying to grow more grains, transplant them into a well-prepared bed. Maybe this means single dug, maybe double dug, maybe just weeded with some compost on top...
Here are our tools of the transplanting trade: a digging board, which distributes your weight on the bed; a trowel to open a hole; a hand fork to help you remove seedlings from the flat and to loosen the soil when the digging board is moved; a spacing stick, to help you put the plants on proper spacing (5" in the case of cold-weather grains); and your flat of grains. What I have here is Schrene Barley, which we all love.
Now we dive in! We lay our digging board a reachable distance from the end of the bed, and start transplanting. Each grain plant goes five inches from every other grain plant. Why? We have determined, in Willits' climate, that the best yields are achieved from that distance.
Most important is that each seedling receives its own space. As to the grains in question, they work best with 2.5" on every side, or a circle with a 5" diameter. Two plants put side-by-side must each get their 2.5" distance, so they turn out to be 5" apart. A seedling on the edge of the bed still only needs its 2.5" to grow happily, so it will be 2.5" from the edge.
A look at the picture will explain two of the terms we use to describe the spacing in Grow Biointensive: offset spacing, and hexagonal spacing. Offset, because rows are staggered, and hexagonal because each plant is surrounded by six others. We also refer to it simply as "close plant spacing", because they are closer together than those planted rows apart. I'll go into the intimate details of why in another post sometime.
This was all to say that, when we start at the end of the bed, the first plant will go half the prescribed distance from the edges of the bed. The whole first row of grains will be 2.5" from the end of the bed. Once you're moving, though, it will all be 5" except for the edges. I think we have all earned another picture. I usually only use one spacing stick at a time, but for the sake of an image I pulled all the stops.
The act of transplanting is simple and repetitive. Make certain of your distance, make a hole with the trowel, pull back and insert seedling (roots down, please), and fill the hole. Leave the grain upright and the seed buried. Water what you have planted every once in a while, especially when it is sunny, warm, breezy, dry, etc. Cover and defend as much as necessary.
I've been talking grains in this post, but the pattern holds for almost everything else we cultivate. The main difference is in the centers. For example, flour corn is planted on 15" centers, lettuce on 8" centers, cardoon on 36" centers, all depending on the space the mature plant will need. Exceptions to this process are the two crops we direct sow or broadcast (radish and buckwheat) and those root cuttings (like potatoes) that get buried entirely.
So happy gardening - It's that time of year!

One Big Week, part II

2009-02-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

All the while during the week we had three classes looming for further preparation. Two of them involved the Common Ground Garden Supply and Education Center in Palo Alto, CA. A project of Ecology Action, Common Ground sells garden supplies and also has a series of Saturday classes on everything from composting to beekeeping. John Jeavons, Carol the EA Garden Manager, Margo and I all take turns teaching the Grow Biointensive classes. For two years or so Margo and I have been teaching the Intro to Grow Biointensive, composting, seed propagation, and bed preparation classes. There is nothing like teaching to get a better grasp of what you think you know. Anyway, this past weekend I taught a new class of my own design: "Amaranth to Wheat, and All Points Between" about small-scale grain cultivation. It went very well, and many comments alluded to a desire for a longer class including more information. Now Margo and I are plotting one that will include processing and cooking.

Margo's class was on composting, and was also successful. Here she is at Common Ground's demo garden, preaching to the masses about layering and mature material (in the plant sense).

The third class of the weekend was also a new experience. A friend of ours who has attended Ecology Action's 3-Day Workshop, 5-Day Teachers Workshop and 6-month internship (hmmm... can we talk her into the 3-Year Apprenticeship next?) worked with some other very motivated individuals to create the Pacifica Gardens project in Pacifica, CA. The work they've done since breaking ground in April is astounding, and speaks volumes about the drive their volunteers bring. One of these volunteers got the inspiration to ask for a class on seed saving, which our friend then came to ask us about. So here I am presenting part of a two-hour lecture and hands-on class based on the principles of saving seed on a small scale. Pacifica blessed us with warm sun for the first time in three or four visits, turnout was great, and we all had a good time. It is inspiring to us to see the projects that so many communities have going on, and the constructive energy those projects involve.

One Big Week, part I

2009-02-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

Last week was a doozy, a confluence of events that would slide right off our backs in the middle of summer, but which, coming out of the winter season of sluggishness, caught us off guard. Of course, being as well organized as we are, we saw it coming. We just didn't realize it was actually 2009 already, that the Super Bowl was almost here, and that it was simultaneously time for planting Spring Grains, the week my sister would be visiting, and the weekend we would be teaching two days of classes.

First things first: having my sister here was great. Good conversation about lifestyle and lots of game-playing, plus she brought work with her to do. This meant that, since Margo and I really needed to work on our classes coming up, we could all procrastinate happily together in solidarity.
Next comes the planting of Spring Grains, justifiably capitalized because they are an annual point of reference. It marks the first time of the year that beds are cultivated and planted, and also, since these grains all go 5" apart, becomes a somewhat tedious two weeks. Almost all of the crops we grow are first planted in flats, then transplanted into the ground. This may sound ridiculous to a seasoned tractor farmer, but with the scale on which we work the time and care taken pays off big in yields.
First of all we have the bed: in this case 40-Bed Unit 3 North, or 40BU3N. There's a great gardening song I could quote from the Beetless' Gardening Book (filled with gardening-based parodies of Beatles songs - I recommend it). Called "One After West Twenty-Nine" it mocks the best efforts of gardeners everywhere who try to organize their beds by logical means. I understand it completely now.
Anyway, we started by clearing it. Here Margo is removing the cover crop we planted in late fall to 1) keep the soil covered and 2) grow some compost material. We don't leave any beds fallow. The beds in the 40BU are all four feet wide, which works well for me.
Next I double-dug it. This involves digging one trench about 12" deep and wide across the end of the bed (you stand on a board so the bed doesn't get as compacted from your weight). Next you use a digging fork to loosen the soil in the lower 12". This way you end up creating pore space about 24" down. Pull your board back about 12", dig another trench next to the first by moving that soil into the first trench, and fork that one. Repeat until you have the bed done!
This next photo shows how strong my chi is: having pulled up the fork after one go, there was something stuck on it. Potato, maybe? No - I speared this rock! I'm definitely keeping that one for posterity...
At this point it is important to mention that the soil structure is so good in the Golden Rule garden that double-digging is rarely necessary. The lower trench is usually very loose. Grains are the one exception to our non-double-digging, because they respond so well. To prove this to ourselves, 110 square feet of this bed will be an experiment. We'll plant 55 square feet of Red Fife wheat in d-dug soil and 55 sq ft in single-dug soil (only loosening the top 12" with the digging fork) . The rest of the bed will be Jet barley and the already-present alfalfa.
No photos of the planting for now, 'cause I left the camera inside. When we finished planting we covered the bed. This part always makes me grumpy. Up at the EA garden birds and rodents are a problem, but nothing like here. Up there a shade net on short sticks, drooping to the ground, is usually enough. Not here. Here we have fencing cut in small sections so that it bows over the bed, and then bird-netting is draped over that, tucked under the little wire prongs on the edge of the fence, and weighed down with rocks, sticks, rebar, or whatever else can be found. The bird netting sticks to everything, including your knuckles, so it is a big pain. The bows of fencing like to pull in towards each other, dragging tiny seedlings with them... It is not a smiley activity.
And now I can tell you that it gets worse. If I thought it was bad putting it down I didn't imagine what would happen if we left a little corner unsecured. Yesterday a brief glance showed that something had gotten in. A closer look showed that a mouse, bird, or maybe both had gotten in and eaten too many plants to simply write off. We ended up removing the whole contraption, replacing the plants, then putting the thing back on. This time we both walked around the assembly adding rocks and other objects, making very sure it was secure. Whew.
Poor Ellen's section was a little worse off. A heap of feathers showed that a bird had gotten in, eaten a bunch of grains, and then gotten attacked by one of the cats. Did the cat also get in, or kill the bird through the netting? Hard to tell, but it was a mess, and the head of the bird remained to look at us accusingly, as if it were our fault. I'm leaving that picture out, too.

Early Spring

2009-01-27T07:44:00.000-08:00

This may seem a little out of place for a post on "Early Spring," but I can explain. This is the main photo on the Bountiful Gardens seed catalog (which sells specifically open-pollinated, non-treated seeds), and what gardener isn't being inundated with all of their favorite seed catalogs right now? It is bliss, with a bitter twist: you can't try all the new varieties you want. Few of us have that much space. This photo is of the crew in late summer 2008- Dan, Ellen, David, Sandika, Margo and Philip. David and Philip were from (and are doing great work now in) Kenya. Sandika was from Sri Lanka.
What has Margo been up to while I have been toying with grains? She has been devising the garden plan for our coming season. It is based on a diet she planned during our 6-month course in 2006, and has been altered as we found we could not eat so much of some things and wanted more of others. Margo talks about this process as a movement toward a sustainable diet from both ends: a diet design that will provide more of what we actually eat, and a diet closer to what we can actually grow (hopefully someday we will meet in the middle of the two). The purpose of the diet exercise is to figure out how to meet one's caloric and nutritional needs in the smallest area, while growing enough biomass crops to supply the garden with its fertility through compost. In essence, this is the GROW BIOINTENSIVE method. You can see her previous plan, worked up in a 5-Bed Unit, on Ecology Action's website.
This deserves a new paragraph: Margo has also managed to create a crop rotation for the 4000 square feet we are currently managing. It will span something like 16 years, since the area is divided into that many beds, and few of those beds are one entire crop. A few are all flour corn or all potatoes, but not many. This is much more incredible than I can make it sound, not having spent the hours on it like she has. I'll try to come up with some graphic representation for a future post.
I'd like to stick a before-and-after set in here from the willow beds I am working on. As has happened in a few other spots in the garden, someone in the past has removed a bunch of rocks and dumped them all in one area, around a perennial or at the end of a bed. The logic, I think, was that they would make weeding easier and hold water better. Unfortunately, when there is a layer of rocks around something like basket-willow plants (which are only given attention once a year at harvest) the grass grows higher and people forget to water them. And willow needs water. Plus, once you do want to get in and harvest the willow the rocks interfere and mess with the pruners. And need I say rocks, in large numbers, are heavy? Better to put them in a pile somewhere you won't want to move them. Or on your [gravel] driveway. On the left you see a cleaned up bed, with almost imperceptible willow stumps.

Margo and Ellen spent some time two weeks ago pulling up the dead asparagus tops, gathering them into piles, and moving them to a dry spot for use in composting later. Here is the stash...

One last little bit for this post. This being a learning garden, and us all being observant and interested, we keep record of our daily temperatures. Though it might be easier and more informative to have a data-logger hooked up to a computer charting hourly temperature fluctuations, we would need the hundreds of dollars to buy it and would probably never look at the results anyway. Our (relatively) cheap solution to this is a standard min-max thermometer. It is a mercury thermometer shaped like a U, where when temperatures are rising, the mercury on the right raises, and when the temperature drops the mercury level on the left raises. Fun! There are little blue pins inside the glass column, and the mercury pushes them. Where it stops, they stick. A magnet is used to reset the pins, which you do by drawing them both down to the current mercury levels. We check them once a day in the morning, after the low has been reached and the temperature is rising. This thermometer reads a 24-hour high of ~74° F and low of 38° F. The high/low are then recorded on a 6-month data sheet, seen at the left here.

Thus we have records of yearly and monthly averages, highs and lows, nights above 60° F, and anything else we could hope for. Except hourly fluctuations...
Coming up next, the reasons I didn't post this last week!

Cats' O the Garden

2009-01-22T19:21:00.000-08:00

Sage advice from people who know. This is a good time to introduce our cats, two of which inhabit the garden, and two of which haunt our front door. I'll start with the one that tempts us to ignore the warning in this brief poem: Marcello. Once a good cat, probably, he has become mostly bad. Definitely the Captain Ahab of the feline world. While I guess we don't know what is going on in his head, we can imagine by how he rubs against you so sweetly then, without provocation, bites you on the elbow, wrist, ankle, shoe, or whatever is closest. He has good days, where he does no wrong, and bad days, when the mere act of walking past elicits a claw in your leg or, if you were wise, your cat-proof pants. Worst of all, in my opinion, he has that deplorable trait of attacking you when you walk away and running when you turn to face him. That always creeps me out in a pet. To sum him up, he's the kind of animal you really want to take to an animal communicator to figure out. We are probably going to send him off to the shelter soon, or find someone who doesn't care about how weird their cat is. Ellen had the good point that, if a dog went off regularly and bit visitors, the sheriff would take it away.

Next up we have Ricky, aka "Ricky-ticky-tum-tum" and "Rickle-Pickle-Pie." As you can see from the picture he is adorable. His most notable characteristic is that he drools slightly when you pet him. Not normal for a cat, but acceptable, considering he catches rodents nearly on demand. Three days in a row I was working in the grain loft all afternoon and he would leave, only to come back ten minutes later with a large, mostly dead vole in his mouth. He would then crunch it up beside me and leave the liver and some other less-identifiable part for me to approve of. Now that is definitely acceptable behavior. It is especially nice that, between he and Marcello (who does catch rodents, too), the grains in full view of any grain-eating animal are kept completely safe.
The only downside to the cats in real terms (since the terrorizing of visitors can sometimes be helpful) is that we occasionally find the head of an acorn woodpecker or a pile of feathers. We bird lovers disapprove severely. We once watched, in disbelief, as Marcello stalked and caught a California Towhee scratching nearby. Cats are fast, even crazy ones. We subsequently chased him all over the garden till he let it go, unharmed, to fly away.
Now for our front-door cats. Vanilla is older, so she goes first. Vanilla initially belonged to Ellen's daughter, and is still supported by her in Vanilla's old age of 19 (or so). This is no small contribution, since Vanilla now scorns hard, dry, tasteless food for that most deliciously palatable of treats, wet canned cat food. We learned from a friend in the Bay Area, who used to work as a meat inspector, what exactly goes into canned cat food. We're not telling Vanilla, though, because then she would demand grade A something. Vanilla, being long-haired, demands some effort for grooming. I am told she used to keep up her hair-care very well, but she isn't so diligent anymore. So Margo and I got a little pink brush to help her out. She hates it, but looks better as a result. Among Vanilla's other oddities is a spot on her head that has never had fur, as I am to believe, though I have never heard why. On a long-haired cat this is a little disturbing. I brought it up to my visiting Aunt who remarked, dismissively, "It's a cat. Leave all the bones in one room and it'll heal." Vanilla is the exception (in the case of this spot of mange, anyway). I'm pretty sure it's karmic. She used to be a hell-raiser, apparently, having once caught a squirrel, killed it, and left its head on the pillow of her young owner. Wow! This is the kind of thing she was capable of back in her time, and this is why Ellen maintains that Vanilla deserves whatever she wants. (This is also why Vanilla does not gain access to our house).
Finally we have Smootches. For the first few months we were here she was known as "Mark's Cat" and assumed to be male. Mark is our neighbor. Poor Smootches first met me when someone had left the door to the attic, which is externally accessed, open, and she went in to live. I crawled back among the rafters and insulation to get her, but she was pretty much feral. We were both traumatized. I left the door open and eventually she decided she didn't want to live there, but still hung around the house and garden. Ellen had fed her at the same place Vanilla ate, because she was there anyway, begging for food. At some point Ellen brought it up with Mark, who said "That's not my cat." That is when we started trying to make friends, and, between Margo and myself we have made great progress. We started feeding both Vanilla and Smootches at our door, eventually coaxed Smootches close enough to touch, then pet, then hold. Our long term plan was to take her into the shelter (because we're leaving in the winter and NOT taking a cat with us), but she was way too shy to come inside, and still very jittery. So we decided to introduce her into the house for short periods of time, but only when Vanilla wasn't around, since we had made it clear to her that we didn't want her inside. (Vanilla can be very demanding). But there is something endearing about timidity, so Smootches is welcome whenever. And she has occasionally caught voles, which makes any cat good.

I'm not a Coward

2009-01-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

In my reply to Jay's comment on the last post you'll notice he asked how people dehulled back in the day and, more notably, I gave suggestions that I had never tried and asked him to let me know if he learned anything. This was cowardly, which I realized shortly after posting it. I'll seek to redeem myself with this post, after a day of experimentation.

In her invaluable book on homesteading skills, The Encyclopedia of Country Living (which I would recommend to anyone who wasn't alive during the depression), Carla Emery talks about hulling wild rice. She quotes a description by the USDA in 1885 on the "parching" process Native Americans used to loosen hulls: "It [the grain] is laid on scaffolds about four feet high, eight wide, and twenty to fifty long, covered with reeds and grass, and a slow fire is maintained beneath for thirty-six hours, so as to parch slightly the hull, that it may be removed easily." Wow. Then they would put it in a skin-lined hole in the ground and stomp on it. Commercially wild rice is parched in bushel quantities in big metal cylinders over a fire.

Under hulling in other grain sections she refers to this parching procedure and recommends following this with a once-through in a grinder set at 1/16 of an inch. Garden Manager Ellen says she has often put it through our electric grinder, set wide-open.

This is all I knew this morning.
I started with a very small quantity (~4 ounces) of Perfectly Awnless (but obviously not hull-less) Wheat, and divided it in half. One half I ran through the grinder, set wide open. The other half I parched in a cast-iron skillet over a gas stove, stopping as some of the hulls started to seem scorched and some of the grains started popping. This I followed by putting it in a box with hardware cloth on the bottom and grinding it with my foot. I can say, from trying both, that the grinder worked fine, though it broke many of the grains and ground some flour even though it was set to its widest. The parching went well, and clearly loosened up the hulls, which allowed the grains to leave very easily. I secretly decided right then that I preferred the parching method because, though it required flipping grains smallish amounts at a time, things come out tidier and whole. The fact that the grinder produced flour, cracked grains and whole grains all at the same time seemed a bit sloppy.
This was educational, but it was on too tiny a scale to mimic even the small amounts of grain that we grow, let alone the amount someone would grow for sustenance. So I went a step further. I had a bag of Farro wheat, which has tenacious hulls paired with nasty awns, those pin-like things sticking out of picturesque wheat heads. It was about 24 ounces of material, so I divided it in half and went at it.
Notes:
First of all, each half had a number of grains that had come out during threshing, so I tried to remove as many of those as I could before proceeding. I set them aside (after weighing) as the seed stock to plant next year.
Grinding was frustrating for a couple of reasons. The awns did a good job of blocking the hole, so I had to keep poking at it. Once through the grinder I took the results outside, sifted the flour, then winnowed the chaff. I was left with plenty of broken grain of different sizes, some whole grains, some still in hulls, and a bunch of awns that were too aerodynamic to blow away. After spending a lot of time separating the remaining hulled grain out, I ran it through the grinder again. And then separated it out again. A point about growing your own food: you will never get all the dirt off, and you will consume a few more bugs and a little more fiber than store-bought stuff. I'm ok with that. I'm not sure about 1.5" awns in my flour, but maybe that's good for me too. The thing that would have made this a better possibility is using a hand-powered grinder, since then you can feel the resistance and work with the grain better. Being able to open the stones wider than our grinder permits would have been nice, too.
Parching was not as smooth as with the Awnless, probably because there was more of it. After trying to toast the whole thing at once I divided the batch into two, and it was still a lot. I am not sure I toasted it enough, as it was. When it came to the crushing with my foot many grains came out easily, but some were persistent. I parched these once more and they became easier. The nice thing about the parching vs. grinding was that after parching the awns all broke off completely and became a non-issue. Hooray! The resulting grain looked a lot nicer, because it was mostly clean and completely whole. The parching process took a lot longer than the grinding, but that was because This American Life came on in the middle, and I had to listen intermittently. It would have taken a little less time than grinding, I think, because I didn't need to spend as much time sorting it.
Starting out with 12 ounces of each I ended up with 7 ounces of "grinder-hulled" and 7.5 ounces of "parching-hulled." Not sure what that means.
Conclusion
It seems like it takes a long time to process a little grain this way. I'd imagine that practice and a perfected process would help some, but it is not a speedy thing. Something else to note is that hulled grains store much better in their hulls, so you might do this kind of procedure on demand. Maybe set all those farm kids on it. Also keep in mind that both processes affect the viability of the grains (they won't germinate after being cracked or heated up in a skillet) and the grain will germinate straight out of the hull when planted, so there is no need to hull the seed you want to grow out.
Why bother with hulled varieties, then, if they are such a pain? Because they are pretty and we love them. Also because you'll lose much fewer mature grains to birds, wind, and whatever else, since they are locked in. The last reason was mentioned in the last post, too, which is that some of the hulled varieties have nutritional benefits not available in hull-less varieties.
Whew. I think I'll take a break on grains for a while. They wore me out today! So let it not be said that I shied away from a challenge. I may be silly, but I'm not a fraidy-cat.

You Must Thresh It

2009-01-16T11:46:00.000-08:00

A request was put in for me to hit on the topic of grain threshing by some fellow agricultural enthusiasts on the other coast, Ryanne and Jay, who, much more tech-savvy than I, have a website (RyanIsHungry.com) on the theme of sustainability and survival. They came out to a 3-Day Workshop a bit ago. Check out their site and, especially pertaining to our work here, Ryanne's post on their garden. This gardening stuff is addictive and contagious.

Having just put together my class on grains (Amaranth to Wheat, and all points between) and presented it to the folks up at Ecology Action I am both primed full of grainy information and in possession of time to write all about it. While I am now hyped to write a fiery treatise on the transformational power of growing one's own grains I'm going to save that for another time, when my head is clearer of self-righteous grain-cultivating fervor.

Let's talk about threshing instead! Threshing is technically the act of removing seed from its stalk, though it gets more complicated with some grains. The trouble comes with the hull, a protective layer around the seed that, in the case of a few wheats, most barleys, and all oats and buckwheat, is a particular pain. These few grains, once threshed, remain in the iron grip of their hulls.

But let's leave this unhappy bit for a while to dwell simply on threshing.

Violence is the only answer when threshing. I don't know about Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., but I think Ghandi and Jesus would be with me on this one - they were in touch with their agricultural roots. Back in the day grain stalks were tossed on the threshing floor and beaten thoroughly with flails. It is energy intensive, but it works. The importance of this technique is shown by the fact that one of the pharaohs' symbols of leadership was the flail. At this point there are as many ways to thresh as there are grain growing inventors, and since Ancient Egypt people have developed many machines and techniques to achieve one simple result. I am expert in none of them except the marvelous device we use here in the Golden Rule garden. Before we delve into that one, though, I'll mention the other equipment I have used - two small-scale threshing machines. One is foot powered (with a treadle), a simple metal box holding a cylinder which spins on a horizontal axis. The cylinder has metal projections, which do the work of threshing. You get it going and, holding onto the stalks, put the heads against the spinning cylinder. The grain and chaff are, together, knocked out the open back unless you rig up something to catch it.

The other machine is similar in function, except that there is an electric motor to power the cylinder and a fan that blows away the chaff, and there is a chute to collect the grain in one place.

Both machines are produced by CeCoCO, a Japanese company, and must be purchased through an importer. The company is kind of hard to figure anything out about, so if anyone reading this does, let me know. I am told the machines cost around $2,000 and $5,000, respectively. They both look very nice and work well, but I wouldn't buy one because I am cheap. Also because I am completely happy with the setup we have here which is cheap, good and with more tweaking could be even better.

Our thresher was envisioned by a past intern, Tom, and constructed by Garden Manager Ellen and her husband. Patent pending, I'm sure :)

They started with a 4x8' plywood board, 3/4" I think, nailing it to a frame of 2x4's laid flat to make the whole assembly around 2" tall. In each end are pounded two big fat nails, about 1' from the corners.

Next they took a 4x8' piece of hardware cloth with 1/2" squares and sandwiched each end with two pieces of 3/4" plywood, 2"x4'. Finally, they drilled two holes in each end of the sandwich to correspond with the "big fat nails" in the platform. Hopefully the photos will be helpful.

What you end up with is a platform with hardware cloth stretched across and held in place, a state-of-the-art foot-powered threshing device. Spread your grains, imagine playing Dance Dance Revolution, and thresh away! When you are finished, take one end of the hardware cloth off the nails and pick it up to clear off the bigger material, sweep off the grains and chaff underneath, and winnow it to reap the cleaned grains.

Here are a couple of pictures from when friends Shawn and Ryan visited. They were, understandably, excited about grains and threshing. You'll see the feet of Shawn and me threshing Jet Barley and then of Ryan winnowing the chaff from another grain in front of a box fan.

So an ordinary person, especially one who has threshed with a machine, might say "well, that looks fun for a while, but generally is an inefficient use of time and energy." To which I would ask "Where are you getting the energy to power your machine, and what better do you have to do than spend some quality time creating your own fresh food?" But only if I was in a feisty mood. More likely I would say "In my experience, this technique can be almost as fast as one of the machines, when assisted by a couple of friends, and is so much cheaper it's almost funny. Almost."

If I may stand on my soapbox for a moment: Agriculture was never meant to be done individually, and suffers from being done in the fastest way possible. We're talking about food, here. It is work, yes, but can be a joy when done with others. Agriculturally there is nothing more important than creating the highest quality stuff possible. It is not about fast, and when you get stuck in that rut farming becomes a ball and chain.

Whew, I feel better now!

Ok, so now we have hulling, which I have put off to last because I have no easy answers. Similar to threshing the answers all involve either lots of time, money, or ingenuity. Probably a combination of all three. Here is a photo of one of the older varieties of wheat which, though they have less of the protein that causes wheat allergies, also have some wicked hulls. As I said, many varieties of barley are thus cursed, as are all oats and buckwheat. Mind you, all grains have hulls, some are just not as persistent. There are "hull-less" varieties of oats, which are simply a little less difficult to extract from their hulls.

How do we remove the hulls? Often by hand, though not by peeling them. That would be waaaaay too tedious, even for me. Rolling them between your hands can work, rubbing them between pieces of rubber can, too. I have seen some pretty cool hulling machines that have two big rubber-coated cylinders that spin against each other. That's all I know about that, except that you shouldn't try hulling oats with the above-mentioned hardware cloth thresher. They are soft enough that they get ground to a pulp. Very difficult to separate from the chaff...

Sorry about that lack of answer. I have bags of Early Stone Age wheat, Farro wheat, and two varieties of oats that I have threshed but not hulled, saving them for last because I'm not sure what to do with them. I'll let you know when I do.

One last little bit - that grain seed I had in jars? I checked the silica gel three days later, and it had already turned pink. Now I'm changing it out every couple of days until it remains blue and dry.

August 2011 Update:
Ecology Action has begun to put up a series of Self-Teaching videos on Youtube, and the one on harvesting shows the process I use above. The link to that video is here.

Sunshiny Goodness

2009-01-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

Willits weather is funny, because it is completely unpredictable. It can rain in the middle of the summer, though it almost never does. It can frost in June, though it almost never does. It can be in the upper 70's for a week in January, though it almost never is. But there are annual trends, strange ones, by which you can judge how relatively odd the weather is, and people will say things like "Huh, this freakishly cool weather usually comes in June, not May," or "Huh, usually this week or so of beautiful weather hits in February, not right now." Which is what our Garden Manager, Ellen, said today. People who have lived here for more than 20 years can talk that way with some amount of confidence. For the rest of us it just seems like someone up there is rolling the dice to see what the day will look like.

As a bit of trivia, we here are apparently on the border of the Alaskan and Hawaiian jet streams, so when one of them has the hankering to go north or south a titch, well, we get unseasonable weather. I have come to think of all of the weather here as unseasonable.

The unseasonably nice weather in the past 5 days and the coming 6 or 7 days has us doing whatever we can in the garden. Weeding takes a high priority at all times, as does harvesting whatever is ready to be harvested. And this time of year, not being able to count on the cold coming back to stay, we prune when it looks like it could stay warm. Which was today.

Here we have Ellen hitting the Asian Pear tree hard, because it went wild last year. In the foreground are two Persimmon trees, one of which is getting the ax this year.

Another bit of garden trivia: two years ago the whole region had an overwhelming fruit year, and some of our trees, not pruned for bounty and not quite watched closely enough, split down to the ground. We lost a couple of plum trees and a peach tree. Or two peaches and a plum. Something like that. At any rate, the remaining trees got a good pruning last year, and then some unseasonably cold weather came along late Spring and took all the blossoms. No one anywhere near us had any fruit besides berries and such. No apples, pears, peaches, plums, persimmons... We were sad. The trees weren't, though, and put all their energy into new growth.
So today in the garden Ellen pruned, Margo weeded, and I harvested willow from our basket-willow stands. And we all watered for the first time this winter.

The beautiful weather came at a difficult time for Margo and me. In the apprenticeship program with Ecology Action we each plan and teach six classes a year to EA Director (and Golden Rule Advisor) John Jeavons and EA Garden Manager Carol. Our next classes will be presented this Thursday, mine on Grains and Margo's on Seed Saving. Naturally we would have preferred cold, rainy, prohibitive weather that would keep us out of the garden definitively. But there we were, in shorts and short sleeves, getting our vitamin D.

To follow up on my last posting about putting all our precious grain seed away in plastic, I got out our store of silica gel and baked it. Silica gel is useful because it absorbs water, but it is fun because it's treated with cobalt chloride, which is blue when the beads are dry and pink when wet. Now I think it would be less confusing if blue was wet and pink dry, but we don't live in a Harry Potter world and cobalt chloride doesn't work that way. All the same, it's a good time, the agricultural version of a hypercolor shirt.

So for posterity I put some crystals in a bowl of water to take a picture. Then I baked the whole bunch of them in the oven for a while at 200°F (that's how you're supposed to dry them) and put them in the bowl for another photo. I made some handy 1 cup envelopes out of paper, which breathes just fine, and am in the process of transferring seeds from plastic to paper. I will sprinkle some silica gel in the bottom of each jar, and watch it for a few weeks. If it turns pink, I'll put more in. That's how we learn, I guess...
Coming up next, by popular demand, threshing :)

Pathetic Offspring

2009-01-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

We love our grains dearly, and so when one (or all) of them goes astray it pains us all the more. Especially when the fault can so clearly be traced back to us.

This is what a bad grain year looks like for the Golden Rule (speaking specifically in terms of fall and spring grains, like wheat and rye). Here is the entire grain harvest for the 2008 season. In the photo you have two points of reference, a CD in front and a gallon jar in back. A third point of reference that may be helpful is the area we grew in grains last year (1,318 square feet) together with the total weight of the grains (54.56 lb) and the fact that, subjectively speaking, we usually do much better than that...

Objectively speaking we have three categories of goals for yields in anything we grow: beginning, intermediate, and high. "Beginning" is for if the grower is facing impediments, like lack of experience, poor soils, uncooperative weather, things of that nature. "Intermediate" is what we aim for. We aim for "High" yields, too, but more in the way a child of a past generation might hope for a Red Ryder BB gun. Beginning, intermediate and high yields for these fall and spring planted grains are, respectively, 4, 10, and 20+ lb. per 100 square feet. So in a bed of 5X20' we might expect to get 10 pounds of grain and hope for more.

When you do the math, you see that we got an average of 4.13 lb/100 square feet. Now you would notice if you could see my spreadsheet that our 160 sq ft of cereal rye this year did produce 11.09 lb/100sq ft (of which we are all proud), but it was the clear exception. On the whole, for our fertile soil and doting love, we got abysmal yields.

At which point were our babies led astray? Well, one could point to the wildfires that plagued Mendocino County, despite the firefighters' best efforts, clouding the air with smoke and drastically cutting down photosynthesis for at least a month and a half. We're sure this was to blame for many of the other low yields we saw this year. But the sad truth is that the grains were at their last stages of maturity then, their chlorophyll having departed for greener pastures (ha ha ha).

No, we had no one but ourselves to blame, and let this be a lesson to all of you out there. Reap the wisdom from our thickly sown sloth: weed your grains virtuously! Also your garlic, onions, flax and things. But if you would not be thrown into strings of foolish excuses when your visitors say "Huh, I never realized wheat was so short," weed them when they need it! Grains just can't compete.

I guess I'll follow that up with a nice photo, cause even though they were really sad looking, they were our grains and we love them. Here you see some of them at the end of their lives. That green tint in the closer bed of yellowed wheat is volunteer chamomile, happily prospering. A little information: we plant nearly everything on offset spacing rather that rows. Fall and spring grains are planted on 5" centers. We put stakes and string up around the beds to give them support. The closer you plant grains the better they produce (to a point), but as they cram together they are also prone to "lodging," which is when they meet rain or wind and lose (fall over). Hence the stakes and string.

The winter season calls us to organize ourselves, and I attacked our seed shelves recently, trying to figure out how many species, varieties, and years of grains we had stored for use. There were many jars, bags, or packets from previous years, but since most of the grains were grown last year we can choose to store the freshest seeds. Then I consolidated them, made a list, and stored as much as we might want for seed in the coming years. (I plan to cycle those out when we have harvested and threshed this year). The picture shows the grains all packed in plastic bags inside jars. I just learned this morning from EA's Garden Manager that this is a big no-no. Any moisture in there will wreak havoc on the seeds, rendering them non-viable. So we'll go get some silica gel, which absorbs moisture, and put it in each of the baggies. The rest of the seed goes on the table by the flour grinder, ready to be turned into something tasty and healthy.

Grains are a joy to all of us here, but, lest you think we are more impressive agriculturalists that we really are, I must say we don't come anywhere close to growing all the grain that even Margo and I consume in a year, let alone the community. Grain, even intensively grown as we do it, demands a lot of space. We do it here a little for fun but mainly for experience, biomass for compost (more about these practices soon) and to acclimatize varieties to this region.

I will end this post by parading past you the names and varieties of grains we have in stock, like the abused but victorious personalities they are, proudly marching to the grinder...

Wheat: Pacific Blue Stem, Red Fife, Kamut, Huron, Lavras, Hard Red Spring, Hard Red Winter, Emmer, Black Emmer, Maris Wigeon, SS791, Square Head Masters, Chidham Red Chaff, Colona Lunga, Turkish Red Winter, Perfectly Awnless, Alaska Spelt, Early Stone Age, and Farro
Rye: Cereal and Akusti
Triticale: Pika, Musky and Juan
Oats: Paul and Shelly
Barley: Karan 16, Schrene, Tibetan, Sangatsuga, Naked, Ethiopian, Faust, and Jet

You Have to Start Somewhere

2009-01-07T15:33:00.000-08:00

And this is where it all starts for us - with our eyes on a tasty, wholesome meal. We try to reflect before breakfast, lunch, and dinner on where our food came from, and today we had one of those excellent meals that, except for a little salt, pepper, baking soda and powder and a pad of butter, came from our own garden. We had black bean soup with black beans, veggie broth, cayenne pepper, onions, green pepper (dried), garlic, leeks, cilantro, and lemon juice (from trees in the greenhouse). Our salad had lettuce, carrots, daikon radish, and flax seeds. The cornbread was made with corn (wachicha flint), barley (jet), thyme, and veggie broth for the moisture. It may seem a simple meal, but the background makes it fascinating as well as nourishing.
Our daily life here involves an intimate relationship with food as well as with weather, soil, wildlife, compost, tools, ingenuity, sweat, and every once in a while a forgotten greenhouse tomato, halfway frozen and consumed by mold.
In this blog I hope to record the goings-on of the Golden Rule Garden for family, friends, neighbors and other interested parties.
Now a little bit about the situation. The Golden Rule Garden has two goals in its scope: to meet some of the food needs of the community here, and to provide experience and a learning environment for Ecology Action interns and apprentices that help out. It has been chemical-free (not card-carrying USDA "organic") for its entire history, tinkered with Biodynamic principles for some time in the 1990's, and is now using the GROW BIOINTENSIVE® system (hereafter generally referred to as biointensive) which is researched and taught by Ecology Action. More on that in future posts.
In ~2001 the Garden Manager (whose name I will add when I get her permission) took part in Ecology Action's summer course, and it is since then that the garden and community have been host to EA interns and apprentices. They live on site and, in exchange for helping the Garden Manager grow food for the community, get a section of the garden to manage on their own, practicing the techniques they learn during the summer course. Currently there are two 3-year apprentices here - Margo and myself. The 6-month summer course begins in April, and that is when the interns will arrive.
As the side bar indicates, the garden is in almost coastal California (which means the extremes we experience are about 5 miles away from moderate). The area is approximately 11,000 square feet (about 1/4 of an acre), and is in the format of beds, between 3.5 and 5 feet wide. We get a lot of rain, but none of it comes in the main growing season.
Temperatures deserve their own paragraph.
It gets below freezing, but not far enough or long enough that we can't grow some things like Fava Beans, rye, wheat, lettuce, and the hardier greens through the winter. It can get very hot, with highs peaking at 115°F for a week or more. The fascinating thing is that nights, even during those hot times, rarely stay above 60°. For the folks in the midwest and south (I guess) this gives you cause to pity us. For those heat-loving crops like tomatoes, corn, beans, peppers, etc. processes really slow down below 60. So you may be used to coming out in the morning and seeing your plants a foot taller than when you left them the night before, but that's not what happens here. They pretty much pout until the sun comes out and warms them again. Then, when it gets hot in the middle of the day, they will shut down again. Corn, for one, does not like temperatures above 95°F, and will close itself up to preserve water. In certain weather, then, we have plants virtually shutting down twice in a 24-hour cycle in the middle of the main growing season. All our beautiful weather has its limitations, agriculturally.
That's the background, and that's where I'll leave the post for today. Many intriguing tidbits are on the way, and I have pictures to prove it. So stay tuned...