End of Peas.

There are lots of items taking the pea’s place.  The change will be gradual, maybe sad, but pea’s substitutes are acceptable.

We started all our fall crops in this little aluminum greenhouse last week.  It fell down yesterday taking most of our starts with it.  The greenhouse was quickly rebuilt out of wood, and all the starts of lettuce, celery root, cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage were replanted.  It makes a wonderful addition to our shanty town that is taking form in the middle of our field.  Next to our shanty town there is some raised beds of yellow raspberries, and then a non-celestially aligned wooden representation of Stonehenge that was here when we got here.

On Monday we planted about 50 tomatillo plants.  We are attempting to seed save for FedCo this year for a little extra loot.

Garlic! What’s not to love.

A bucket of chicken heads from our chicken killing sessions last week.

There is an overhead picture of our tomatoes that are trellised on barbed wire, and inter-planted with buckwheat.  There will be a glorious haul of tomatoes this year.

New Equipment!

One of the first things we said we wanted for the farm over a year ago was portable electric fencing (PEF) for the chickens. This more easily allows the whole pasturing thing to occur. Well, a few weeks ago, we invested in it, and today it finally arrived!

Chickens need to be free, yet their movement needs to be restricted.  PEF is the perfect compromise.

Ben and Tim installed it with ease; beer aided them.   Our chickens were scared into their newly electrified range.   Now we observe.   We have lots of hawks, and we will be watching them as well.

Week 2, Peas are the best

Both shelling and snap varieties are coming off the vine in abundance.  Both are equally sweet and delicious, and provide an awesome snack when working in the field.  Now they provide us with energy to swing our new chainsaw;  for fire prevention, firewood, and just general property maintenance.

The kale is ready to cut finally.  In the picture in a Rogue brand hoe.  My god, this hoe is amazing.  Great construction.  Anyway, this spring the curly and red kale varieties seemed to grow a lot faster than the flat leaf green varieties.   There is no good explanation, they just grew better, and we have to role with it.

The potatoes are interplanted with bush beans.  There are wax, green, dragon tongue, garbanzo, and tiger eye beans planted between our potato rows.  The potatoes all have names too.  Robert Paulsen?

Crimson clover tints the whole field red, and feeds the soil with nitrogen.  We are just letting go to seed, and have undersown buckwheat with other crops.

CSA Week One

This is the first week of our CSA! It is so exciting! We are including the following in this week’s basket:

peas, strawberries, escarole, head lettuce, spring mix, turnips, broccoli, garlic scapes, and spring onions. We will also have a bundle of various fresh herbs.

This will all be available at our market stand Saturday at Grants Pass Growers’ Market, so if you aren’t a CSA member, come on by!

If you would like to join our email list and get our weekly CSA newsletter and recipes, email us at mudpuddlefarm@gmail.com

This is what our field looks like currently:

Straw helps to keep the weeds down. We got started late with the mulching.

Yeah, we know we have a lot of weeds. It happens.

These foxglove flowers are taller than Gabrielle

Economic Woes Striking Close to Home

We take a lot of classes at the OSU Extension in Josephine and Jackson Counties. And we bug the 2 women (Hi, Melissa and Maud!) who teach and organize those classes a lot with questions about bugs, and irrigation, and seeds, and mulch, and water rights, and farm insurance, and greenhouse erection, and farmers market rules, and all sorts of stuff.

We found out this week that there is a threat of all non-tenured OSU Extension staff being cut due to budgetary blah blah blah. The bottom line is that Southern Oregon might lose the Small Farms Program we have down here.

All I have to say is that if they weren’t here, we probably would have given up last year. We certainly wouldn’t have expanded our cultivated area, upped our number of potential CSA customers, have market stands at two area growers’ markets, and have a contract with a national seed company.

PLEASE write to the OR state legislature and tell them how vital this program is to our area. Rep. Peter Buckley is the Ways & Means Co-Chair. rep.peterbuckley@state.or.us