Jack Frost Nipping at our Beans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.