Slugs?

We may have a slug problem in our greenhouse. We have row after row of seedling flats which have been diligently soil-blocked, seeded, watered, and warmed for the seedlings to come up. 2 or 3 days after their emergence, they have been chomped down.

This is a bit puzzling since the flats are on top of a table. These have to be some industrious slugs. So tonight, a reconnaissance mission is planned. We are heading down to the greenhouse well after dark to check out what has been devouring our brassicas. We will do what needs to be done to save the remainder and to prevent the future seedlings from becoming slug food.

Yesterday when I woke up I thought it was March

On Wednesday, our friend Shelley came over and helped me plant some peas.  We planted most of the sugar snap peas.  It was nice to have some one else in the field helping out.  My friend Tim, is coming pretty soon to help me out for the season.  I cannot wait to have someone dependable to regularly assist me with this season’s mayhem.  Progress will be swift.

Then on Thursday we had some friends over.  It sometimes is a little overwhelming here, and a couple hours of forgetting about it all was needed.  We ate and drank, and got a small dose of socialization.

P

We need to get more crocus bulbs.  Although it seems like March, it is not even spring.  With more crocuses we could give spring the welcome it deserves.

Once again the subsoiler sneaks its way into a picture.  It helped work the first onion bed we amended.  The soil looks kinda nice, but it is still really sandy.

OK.  We are feeling very accomplished, yet there are mountains of work to be done.  The planting of the onion sets lasted most of this week.  We were not as prepared as we thought to be able to plant them out with efficiency.

It was too wet out for the mechanized tiller to work properly, and the shovel worked beautifully.  A 4×40 bed was double dug extending our allium bed to a total of 120 ft.  This took about two days .  Then composted manure was hauled by wheelbarrow from our neighbor’s house down the drive.   This activity took another two days to finish.  The actual planting of the onions took minimal time compared to building and amending the soil.

All of our brassicas are germinating really well in the greenhouse.  They enjoy the warm dampness; it has also encouraged the growth of some yet unknown insect pest.  The pest seems to have a taste for only brassica seedlings.  The second picture shows only little green stems of decapitated seedlings.  This is clearly insect damage, and there seems to be a few possible culprits: slugs, snails, aphids, earwigs.

Sadie, what a lovely lady you will become.  She was in the field with us rocking out to The Stooges, and eating horse manure.  We dress her real good in overalls and John Deere apparel.

Gabrielle went to the grower’s market and food safety meeting.  She returned with some interesting information about maintaining food safety on the farm for produce to be sold at market.  Most of the information we already know from working in kitchens, but somethings can be easily overlooked when you are outside and in the dirt.  Somethings that we need to keep in mind for farm food handling is keeping as many animals as possible as far away from the produce as possible.  This means dogs, cats, and all wildlife.  Another is having labeled food handling bins only for food.  We cleaned all our bins thoroughly last year, but we used them for several purposes.

It is called the Grower’s Market in Grants Pass instead of the Farmer’s Market because there is already a store by that name.  We are going to sign up to be at market this year to be able to have another available outlet to sell our vegetables.  There are still some CSA memberships that are waiting to be filled, so sign up now.

Lastly, we started planting our second round of brassicas, onions, flowers, and tomatoes in the greenhouse.  We ran out of our plastic flats for our soil blocker during the first succession.  We thought we could easily scrape together some more flats from local nurseries, but they all return them to the supplier.  These plastic flats are not cheap, and they cost well over a dollar even if you buy a hundred of them.  Instead, after much debate whether to buy some or not, I just started cutting all the extra plywood around the place to the exact size to fit 98 soil blocks.  They are just boards now, and maybe they will get some sides.  They work pretty well so far.  That is some bitchin thriftiness.

Eggs

We have found a new outlet to sell our eggs. Unknowingly, they seem to have their own advertisement.

We are bringing them to the cooler at Runnymede Farm in Rouge River to be sold.  Every Friday we go there anyway to get our gallon of delicious raw cow’s milk. The egg milk tango makes everybody custard, preferably rum flan.

Cebollas.

Before the session of onions today, the recently tilled earth needed to be subsoiled. When the tiller passes through the soil it breaks up the top layer how it should. However, at the point where the tiller’s tines can dig no deeper, the soil is actually compacted. The end result is about the top 4 inches being loosened while the soil underneath that 4 inches is compacted and hardened. The subsoiler self descriptively loosens the soil underneath the tilled top layer.
Using the hand subsoiler is a lot of hard work. And it got me to thinking about how it would be nice to have a tractor to ready the soil. It would be even nicer to to have a draft horse. A draft horse would be really sweet if it was equipped with kinetic energy capturing devices.  And then what would happen if you used the energy created by the horse to for electrolysis to make hydrogen.
I have been reading a lot about piezoelectric energy systems like the dance floor that powers the club, and the watches you never have to charge. But what if you had a bloody horse that was pulling a plow or subsoiler and was creating storable energy from its physical activity. That would be sweet.  Not that this would work out paper, but it is just a thought.
This was all conceived whilst exerting a massive amount of my own physical energy preparing the onion’s bed. Then I began planting onions.

1,2,3,4 Bulb, Frog, Orchid.

The Snow Bells are finishing up.  Again, the land is really starting to come to life with greens busting through the brown layer of forest cover.  All around the property flower bulbs are rearing their appendages.  The garlic, the iris, and the crocus are all showing signs of vigorous life.  Our randomly planted assorted bulbs patch of tulips, frittaleria, crocus, and anemone is coming to life.  Also covering the woodlands, the wildflower Shooting Star is preparing to send up its flowers.

Even on the inside we have flowers blooming.  Our windowsill orchid now greets us in the morning.

The yellow crocuses we planted last fall in our front yard.  The yards of both the houses here are in disarray.  They are better than when we began, but there is always more work to be done.  The yard on the west side of the houses needs to be landscaped to prevent erosion from lots of foot and animal traffic.  The landscaping will be designed with the goal of isolating where people walk, planting as much edible plants, and planting plants that prevent erosion.   This area of the property actually gets decent sun for being on a north facing slope, and being surrounded by trees and houses on all sides.  It has poorer clay soil, which we think would be really good for planting grapes, possibly a couple short rows of preferably muscat.  Once we get grapes and other landscape going, we need to fence in another whole chunk of our property to keep out those pesky deer.

The grapes would be planted down the hill to the left in this picture.  Here, I tilled up some area on the south-ish side of our house.  It is going to be bordered in with more wine bottles.  Thank you, Martha Stewart.  This bordering scheme is pretty awesome because it demands that we drink wine.  And now that Gabrielle is working at a vineyard, wine bottles, and the vesseled liquid are all the more abundant.  In this area, I amended the the clayey soil with compost and some chicken fertilizer.  Then I made another random assorted planting.  We have a lot of seeds that are not going to be planted for profit.  This bed was a perfect recipient of those seeds.  I broadcast hollyhocks, kiss me over the garden fence, allysum, and a hummingbird mix of annual and perennial flowers that we got from Territorial seeds.  We do have a lot of hummingbirds in the summer, and hopefully this mix will help attract more.  On top of all that I broadcast a slew of parsley seeds that were gifted to us.  What is the worst that can happen?

The soil might have been a little wet to till.  This seemed like the only chance that I had though.  The forecast says it is supposed to rain the next couple days.  In the field I extended one of the allium beds out to 120 ft.  Yesterday I got all the onion sets that we ordered from Texas, and they need to go in the ground ASAP.  Room needed to be tilled up and amended for these onions to be planted so we can have them ready for our CSA, and so we don’t waste any of them by letting them rot or dry out.

In the greenhouse today I got some more onion planted from seed.  I planted Copra F1 storage onion.   Just one flat for now was planted.  In two weeks we will do two more flats on onions.  Also, I planted tomatoes today.  I planted for transplant some early ones called Stupice and Stiletz that will be planted in the ground inside our greenhouse.  This just a random experiment, and it better be successful.

Lastly, life is now blessed with constant frog song. The warming wet weather welcomes the amphibious cantor’s anthem.  It is not only their song that we enjoy, but we also dig their migration down to our field to eat bugs, especially those molesting our brassicas.  It is a great show of diversity, and cooperation between manmade and native ecosystems.

Finally Planting.

We all got together for the first round of planting. The soil blocker is a  must have small farm instrument for seed starting. Our soil mix could be a little better.
So last year we purchased a pallet of potting soil mix. This year we want to use it as seed starting mix with our soil blocker. There are several recipes for seed starting and soil blocking mixes and the ingredients are very similar to the potting mix we have. The problems with the potting mix is it has bigger chunks of organic matter, mostly woodchips. We working on amending the potting mix to be a finer texture. With a finer textured mixture the soil blocks would also adhere together better.
No matter though, we planted a good amount of seeds today. What was planted constitutes most of our first succession for spring planting. Succession planting seems pretty scientific and thorough, but right now it is equally guess work. There is a pretty good idea of how much we need to plant to make this year work: but still.
So in two-ish weeks we have to plant all over again with more variety and increased frequency.
We planted Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Bak Choy, Leeks, Escarole, herbs, and flowers. We put 35 row feet of peas. We are planning for a total of 140 row ft of peas.
Of the peas planted outside today, we covered them with plastic. The plastic was scrap from our greenhouse, and the hoops that the plastic was on was scavanged from pvc and irrigation line.

Here are pictures of the first round of planting, and of the field.  In the picture above, where the plastic row cover is, is where we planted the peas.

Soup Dinner

We were not able to concern ourselves with seed starting today. It is true what they say, there is always tomorrow.
A friend told me today that it is going to be a long season. He too has noticed that has already been significantly warmer; sooner this year. He was gearing up.
This means that we need to get our shit together.
We need checks to arrive, and seeds need to be started.
While we procrastinate, we eat.
We had a meal this evening that adequately represent how well we eat.
Simple, and without waste.

Sweet Potato Soup
3 large Sweet Potatoes, whole roasted
5 Carrots. med. dice
3 yellow onions, med dice
1/4 bulb fennel, I just actually used one thick stalk, small dice
1 head garlic, chopped
1-10# fresh ham
1.5 c. long grain white rice
2 c. veg stock
1 magnum chardonnay
1 c of tomato sauce.
1-16 oz can unsweetended coconut milk
3. bay leaf
6 Tbl Mustard Seed
2 Cinnamon Sticks
10 Cloves
Black Peppercorns
1/2 c brown sugar
3 Tbl Ginger Juice

1 Tbl tumeric
1 tsp nutmeg.

This may seem like a lot. It is. It took about a 4 days.
1. Toast  5 tbl Mustard, the Cinnamon, Clove, and bay leaf.
2. I forget the total amount of liquid. The total amount of liquid will be enough to completely submerge the 10# fresh ham. I used a 1 cup to 1 gallon ratio to make brining solution. Pour brining solution over toasting spice. Add Brown sugar and bring to boil to dissolve salt completely. Cool. Add ham.
2. I brined it for 2 days. I read somewhere that you could do it up for three days. Brine the ham at least overnight.
3. Remove the ham from the brining solution and drain. Preheat oven to 250 degrees.
4. Pan sear entire ham. Place in braising dish.
5. Deglaze pan with some of the white wine. Add liquid to braising dish with ham. Hard Sautee about half onions and carrots.  Quickly sweat about 5 cloves of garlic in the same pan and deglaze with the rest of the wine. Add this to the braising dish with pork in it.Adding water, bring the liquid to covering the pork by 2/3s.  Add bay leaf.  Cover and placeS in the oven overnight.
6. Remove pork. Toss it to scoundrels. Take braising liquid, bring it to simmer, and skim off crud.
7. Meanwhile make rice with the veg stock and the tomato sauce in a pilaf style.
8. Take the last of the onions, carrots, and the fennel. Sautee until very tender. Sweat garlic, then add the last of the mustard seed, the nutmeg, and tumeric.  Cover with ham jus.  Add Ginger juice.  Simmer together for a while.

9.  Scoop roasted sweet potatoes out of their skin and add to soup.  Add coconut milk.  Use and immersion blender to make soup more or less homogeneous.  Then add cooked rice.   Add water to adjust thickness.  Cook together for 5 minutes.

It is even better the next day.  It is good to share with Sadie too.  Could it be our inspiration to get our asses in gear and start planting?

The ham, carrots, onions, garlic, and tomato sauce were obtained directly from the producer.  The ham local to southern Oregon and USDA cerifitied.  Finding USDA certified meat around here is hard because there are no local processing facalities.  The pork has to be shipped as live wieght to a government approved facility few hours away, and then has to be shipped back to be sold in local marketplaces.  The prices this ham, and products like it are reflected in its cost.  The bureaucratic hoops that have to be jumped through are many.  And the overhead cost are sustaintial.  Too large for smalls producers to own, run, or operate, or cooperate.  It is undermining local production of meats here in Southern Oregon.  Non-USDA meat cannot be sold to the general public by way of stores or restaurants.  Therefore, the market for non-USDA meats has to be out of public view.

Lets put it like this.  Consumers are taught to go to the store to get stuff.  If that stuff is food related items, especially meats, it has to go through USDA inspection and regulation.   The overhead costs of having USDA inspected meats are most affordable to larger meat produtions.  This also goes for restaurants.  High costs make it difficult for small producers to get food on market shelves.  People shop at markets and eat out at restaurants.  Local food is not featured, and people have no other choice but to buy non-local.  Here is a disconnect between producer and consumer that is an issue affecting small meat producers.

We got this ham locally from Willow Witt Rance in Ashland.  It did good.

February Chaos.

So on Friday I met up with local farmer, Chris Jagger, owner/operator of Blue Fox Farm in the Applegate Valley. I spoke with him briefly about the greenhouse that he was installing. This is his fifth greenhouse that he has erected, and with contractor background he has a lot more practical experience with this sort of thing.
Since the debacle of putting up my greenhouse last year, and this year’s major corrections to it, I used this chance to learn and relate my mistakes to someone with expertise. Chris and I chatted it up, and it was relieving to hear that he had dealt with a lot of the problems that I encountered. Problems such as the baseboards on the greenhouse, endcaps, leveling, why the prefabricated holes never line up, and just the general process of getting the greenhouse structurally sound.
Now I just need to get my hands on another greenhouse frame so I can practice what I have learned.
After this pleasant chat, I went to the Enchanted Forest. Oolala. It was actually a really nice old growth forest. Luckily it was near the vineyards. After a brief hike, I met Gabrielle at her place of work for a nip of port. I watched Sadie till Gabrielle was ready to leave.

It was actually oh so nice on Saturday, as compared to right now. It is snowing. Lee helped me get the tiller working. We really need a bigger tiller, but all we have is a 5hp walk behind. It struggles with the fescue grass that grows in very tight clumps. We really need a tractor to get this initial till underway this year, but this small one is all we have at the moment. We are creating a new flower bed, a wildflower/cover crop bed, and extending all our rows from last year by at least 20 ft. Some rows will be extended up to 40 ft just to even things out a bit.
It has been extremely dry this winter, and that gave me the opportunity to till up a new 4ft wide by 130ft long bed for tomatoes. After a painfully slow process with our small tiller, I limed the soil to add calcium and balance the pH, and then I planted more crimson clover.
The soil that I tilled up looked really good. It is closer to a big pine in the middle of our field and there is a more noticeable amount of organic matter in the soil. It has a darker richer color than the soil in other parts of our field.
We really need to start planting. We just haven’t had the mojo yet. Sadie doesn’t want to sleep. And on Sunday shit went a little bit crazy to say the least.
So Sunday was nice. Gabe was at work, I was watching Sadie the whole day. Sadie sleeps seldom, and it takes incredible patience to get her down for a reasonable amount of time. As she slept I handed the monitor over to Kirby, and went out to do some chores. When I checked on the goats, something was terribly wrong with Rodeo, our male Boer goat.
He was twitching, shaking, and could barely stand. I really did not know what to do. No friggin idea. I am generally kind to animals, and this poor goat was no exception. He was in bad shape, and if it was up to me, and I owned a gun, or I knew of a humane way to kill a goat I would have done that immediately. I do not own a gun, and I do not know how to painlessly euthanize a goat.
However, it was WAY more complicated than that. I have on many occasions wished death upon our two goats because of their annoying behavior, and the focus of the farm was not coherent with adequate care of these goats. The goats under no conditions were to be killed because when Gabe and Ben obtained them from a rescue, they signed a contract not to kill them. I did not sign it, but I honored that contract.
Before the shit went down over the weekend, and after much internal debate we decided to return the goats to their previous owners. We would not get our money refunded, but we learned a valuable lesson that we had no time for large animals on our farm (yet). The owners were going to find a new home for the goat pair. They were going to pick the pair up today and deliver to a new owner. One side note, goats are easier to sell/give as a pair because a herd mentality promotes good health among them.
Back to Sunday; I really had no experience in goat health, and I did not know what my next options were because I was required not to kill this goat. I got a hold of Ben and Gabe to ask for ideas on what to do. They had little to no help for me. I proceeded to call the previous owners about the status of the goat they were rehoming for us. The were alarmed about his health, but I do not think that they understood what was actually happening. Rodeo was dying.
He went from being healthy on Saturday, to barely able to stand on Sunday. I kept the previous owners in the loop about his health, but know one knew what was really going on. They were sure he would snap out the state he was in, but both Dr. Calvert and I had serious doubts. We both saw that Rodeo needed to be put down.
Sunday night I tried calling emergency vets to no avail. I carried Rodeo’s unstable body up to the covered porch so he would not get rained on. He was in pain, and barely conscious. At this point I think that was inhumane to keep him alive. But we wanted to return the two healthy goats. By the look of things that was just not going to happen.

We woke up Monday, Rodeo was still alive.  He was worse.  He looked like he wanted to die.  I avoided him all day, and made Gabrielle check on him.  The optimism of the previous owners was hard to combat over the phone,  they said, “he will just snap out of it, goats can go from looking really bad to fine in no time.  All they need sometimes is a shot or two.”  The goat was miserable.  Dr. Calvert said he was seizuring more.  All from being perfectly normal on Saturday.  All Monday we looked for  a vet to treat him.  We finally got a local vet who had a good knowledge of goats, our appointment was at 5:20.  Until then, Rodeo suffered, and I sympathized.  It seemed like I should have done more.  During all of Sunday and Monday Sadie screamed and would not sleep.  It was extremely stressful.

When the time came  around to go to the vet, we had to pick Rodeo’s seizuring body up and put it in the back of our station wagon.  On the way there Rodeo had a nice rain shower, a rainbow, and beautiful sky over the mountains.  His seizures were long and frequent.  The vet advised us to put him to sleep.  We did just that.  We communicated to the previous owners of Rodeo and Blossom that Rodeo was put down, and they were in complete shock.  Gabrielle and I were beat.

We don’t know what happened to Rodeo, but the onset was so quick.  We didn’t know how to treat him, and we had to draw the line somewhere on whether to save him.  He was not our pet, he was just a goat to us.  Now we need to regroup, put Sadie to bed, receive our soil blocker in the mail, and start bringing plants to life.

Check This Out

February, the checks for this years CSA memberships started trickling in. We really need this money to get all of our shit together and prepared to serve our customers this year. We have one check in hand, and got a call this morning about someone signing a check to give to us. This early money will help us get our much needed supplies.
So far we have been scrounging together what money we have to purchase the equipments that are a must. An item that is a must in efficiency for our farm is a soil blocker. We purchased one from FedCo last night and it should be here in a week or so. A soil blocker reduces the amount of waste, and increases planting efficiency by not having to use pots. With pots we have to wash them, and sanitize them every year to ensure healthy plants, they are flimsy plastic that break and put into landfills, and plants in pots may not have nearly as healthy roots. A soil blocker also improves the amount of pots/blocks can be made at once, and since the plants are not longer in pots the do not have to be removed from those pots before being planted outside.

In Sadie’s sandy soil, she sows seeds

Well most of the seeds will be sown in the greenhouse as transplants because that allows us more planting accuracy.
In theory seed saving is a great idea. However, we as a farm have not quite figured out the logistics of seed saving enough for the coming year. Ben saved some of the tomato seeds that we enjoyed last year for both flavor and productivity. Tomatoes are easy to seed save because they don’t cross pollinate. In the mean time we buy almost all our seeds.
This year we had a combination of leftover seeds, and lots of gifted seeds. This slightly reduced the amount of total seeds we had to buy. We bought all or our seeds from 4 catalogs. It just became way too mind numbing to comparison shop through more than 4 catalogs. The catalogs that we used were Bakers Creek heirloom Seeds, Johnny’s Seeds, Seeds of Change, and Territorial. These gave us enough diversity in seed types to be able to choose seeds that would best fit our operations. Characteristics that we were looking for in seeds were unit size, uniqueness, flavor quality, and most importantly how well the plant would handle in our ecosystem. Spending about 300 dollars on seeds this year in this order is in line with our projected cost.
Yet this doesn’t include the cost of seed potatoes, cover crops, garlic, and starter onions. The cost is then increased if we consider plants purchases, such as trees, shrubs, herbs, and other perennials. We are projecting the cost for all new plant life on the farm to be about 1000 dollars.

We actually went to look at some fruit trees today.  Gabe saw some she liked.  The trees from this nusery in Murphy were pretty large, and the price reflected their size.  The bigger the trees thes sooner we get some fruit.  2 years instead of 5 years.