Fall 2011 Update (Part 1)

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.

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.

Happy Fall Equinox!

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...

Happy Summer Solstice!

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.

Happy Spring Equinox!

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