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.

Corn Pollination

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.