Farm Blog
What's happened most recently? This will have more pictures of dirt than is really reasonable.
Okra getting taller and taller with autumn barrelling in
Valiant okra plants
The okra put out another flush of growth in the last few days, knots of buds at the very top that would open into entire candelabra of branches and flowers and fruit... if the winter wasn't coming.
Full beds in late summer
Clockwise from upper left: a sea of squash plants, including some vines I've wound around T posts; white-blossoming buckwheat in the foreground and red corn behind, pole beans behind that; and the part of the plot that small plants grow in, looking all patchwork as various plants finish up and the last plantings of summer size up (maybe).
If I had a whole bed for each crop, the CSA would be really boring, we'd be eating too much of fewer things all at once, so I estimated how many feet of each crop should guarantee a CSA-worth of two or four servings each week and worked backwards to fit a culinary spread of things in every week of the season. Time-to-harvest is from 25 to 80 days even for "quick summer crops", so having even a decent chance of having some of many kinds of things every week is very spreadsheety. Also I try never to follow one crop in the ground with another from the same botanical family, because that probably increases the chance of family-specific root diseases. The result gets more and more mosaic-like as the year progresses. The mosaic looks both backwards and forwards: I don't want to plant, say, kale where kale just was; but I also want to have enough not-kale space now that I can plant kale first thing next spring. That's another good reason to wedge in a cover crop, but a cover crop planted after our last harvests is so late that it might not even germinate this year. No free lunch, even if it's kale.
From weeds to crop, no-herbicide no-plough
A photo essay
Left to right; woven landscape fabric folded back; yellow weeds that have been under the landscape fabric for a week or three; grasses and weeds.
After weeks (how many? depends on the weather and the weeds) *most* of the weeds will have died and been eaten, or decayed into soil, or been dragged into burrowing-creatures burrows.
These are either mole or gopher burrows that were right under the fabric. They bite holes through airtight silage tarps but *mostly* don't bite through breathable woven plastic fabric.
Spreading amendments, anything the crops need to be healthy and nutritous to us. The decayed weeds returned a lot of nutrition, but I still add lime, calcium, everywhere. PNW soil is mostly acid to start with and calcium washes out with every rainy winter. Plus, the crops take it up and then we eat it.
The BROADFORK, which is a full-body tool; nearly as tall as I am and wider than my shoulders. You step on the crossbar to jam the four big tines into the ground and then lean into it to rock forwards and back. This does some of what tilling would do (opens space for the calcium to get down into the whole root zone; gets oxygen into soils that have been waterlogged all winter; loosens the soil physically so crop roots can grow really quickly). Unlike tilling or ploughing, it leaves big chunks of soil with the original structure, so we believe it lets more of the natural processes keep going.
Another ecological advantage of broadforking is that it's tiring enough that no-one does extra.
After broadforking big plants might be planted directly into the loosened soil. Small plants, or seeds, need the top few inches broken up into a finer texture ("tilth"). The plants and seeds need soil-particles small enough that there's always good contact between soil and even the tiniest roots. Lots of cross-raking with a heavy rake will do it, or a tilther, which is like a small shallow tiller (motorized, toothy).
These small tools can work row-by-row, which allows many different kinds of crops to be at different stages close to each other. Top photo is of squashes transplanted into recently broadforked beds, with the weediest bed in the middle still tarped. The second photo has a bed being "flipped" from one crop to the next, in one season. When the snap peas finished I pulled down their vines and laid a tarp down over them between beds of flourishing chard and scallions &c so that the pea-vines could rot for a bit before the next crop went in. The tarp is what keeps weeds from taking over while the previous crop decays. No light, no weeds, no herbicides!
The lower field full of summer crops. Bottom to top: the last winter squash to be planted; cover crops under row-cover to keep the crows from eating the sprouts; a bed of amaranths; Rond de Nice summer squash; posts where I'm trying some tomatoes outdoors(!); greens and low beans right before the hoophouse.
Heaviest work almost done for the season
Finally, finally, all the beds have dried out enough to be tarped, weeded, amended, broadforked, tilthed, and planted. The uphill beds are getting their second plantings, in fact, so I am at more than 100% growing food on this land.
Friends and family came out for a morning of stuff that's much easier to do with more than one person -- moving 50' tarps around in the wind without accidentally scything down baby crops, especially. I am enormously grateful.
Weeding, harvesting, weeding, harvesting, weeding, harvesting and a little more planting to come. Also putting up more posts to try and keep crows off the sweetcorn, okay, a little heavy work.
I'm at row 164 of the crop plan spreadsheet.
Flowers now, fruit to come:
Big hibiscus-looking okra blossom; corn silk wafting in the breeze waiting for pollen; closeup of a pole bean flowerbud.
New potato harvest
The green plants at the top of the picture, connected to a mass of very fine roots with potatoes connected to the occasional fat white root; the pitchfork that pries all these up at the lower right.
More corn and beans
Second succession of corn, third kind of beans, more beds of squash in the middle distance.
My idea with pole beans around an end of my plot was that keeping the vines picked is the labor-intensive part, and if they're at the edge where I can walk around without stepping on adjacent crops that would be easier. OTOH the deer have better access too. OTOOH better the *deer* don't step on adjacent crops. We'll see.
You'll be eating plenty of beans after the peas, and when I can fit in cover crop mixes those are likely to include beans. I like peas and beans, and also plant as many as I can because they are so good for the soil. I can feel and see the difference from last year in adjacent beds I'm broadforking this year. The beds that grew beans last year are darker, softer but still cohesive, wormier... good tilth.
Tomatoes getting going
Green tomatoes starting!
Summer crops finally getting in
Near to far: string trellis for pole beans; recently heavily weeded corn bed; corn; lots of tarped beds; first squash plants; and the edge of the hoophouse.
Potato blossoms
About two weeks after they bloom is the earliest you can dig for new potatoes.
Some of the blossoms are setting seed, but (a) if you dig up the plant for potatoes, it won't have time for seed, (b) potatoes do not come true from seed so only an experimentalist saves them. I'm tempted, I just don't have the space.
Twining tomatoes
Some tomatoes will grow up a string, if you twine them around it (and prune a bit to help). The strings are tied to a wire overhead and an end buried under each tomato. This uses much less covered space than letting them do their natural sprawl.
Woven tomatoes
Other tomatoes are shrubby not vining. To keep them from breaking stems and dropping the fruit on the ground, they get steel posts down the row and are "basket woven" with each other and the posts as they get taller.
Wet spring
Remember the big rainstorm in late May? I spent the Sunday digging all my ditches deeper and there was *still* standing water even in my hoophouse days later. The tomatoes in the soggy patch are Not Happy. (I have extras, that's why the propagation table picture below.)
The row cover -- that's the white gauzy stuff -- did keep some of the tiniest plants from getting beaten down. Multi-purpose stuff.
Propagation house
A shared hoophouse with mesh tables to start our seedlings on. Potted seedlings make a head start for plants that need a longer warm season than we have in the ground (basil, tomatoes, squashes). Even for cool-happy crops, letting them get a few inches tall while protected and then transplanting them lets them outcompete weeds and slugs, so we get more crops without herbicides and pesticides.
Some things dislike being transplanted -- root crops especially -- though there are people who do it successfully anyway. And some things I can't get going in pots but are okay seeded directly into the ground; spinach for me, though lots of people transplant it.
In cold weather each table gets a second cover of nonwoven fabric, draped over wires. I bent mine to shape to allow the tallest seedlings down the center under the standard width of fabric. This may have been overkill, but you know, I only had to do it once...
Whirlwind
Amazingly, we had a small tornado or large dust devil in Woodinville a few weeks ago. Wrecked half my neighbor's hoophouse, I lost a couple of pots (collected most of them out of neighboring fields), and it scared me to heck. Mostly after the fact, when I realized how much rebar got thrown around when the hoophouse tiedowns popped loose.
I was kneeling, concentrating on planting tiny plants, and wondering what the chugging sound was -- did someone have a new tiller attachment? Then I looked up and thought, has my far neighbor caught their hoophouse plastic in their tiller? Then I looked UP and there was a fifty foot silage tarp dancing in the sky, turning its white side and its black, and I realized the rhythmic noise was ... a small whirlwind. Coming straight for me and not a hundred feet away, spiraling seed flats and small tables into the clear blue sky.
I was surrounded by trip hazards and not sure which way the funnel would go, so I lay flat behind the only solid post on my plot. (Lower right in photo. Not a large post.) Readers, the whirlwind going over TUGGED ON MY CLOTHES. And when I stood up my near neighbor's hoophouse was as you see above.
Spent the next hour finding everybody's lost stuff in everybody else's plots and being amazed.
Whirlwind
Silage tarp -- very heavy plastic, with dangling tiedowns -- thrown across several farms and a river and draped on top of a tree
Getting ready for 2024
It's still pretty darn wet in the field, but all the beds are at least partly above water. (It's a wet site!) The first few rows are under giant breathable tarps to kill weeds and dry out the soil; I'm looking forward to blooming dandelions because I like making jelly from them; and it's seed starting time under cover.