spring is always long to come

i remember as a child every year it seemed like winter would never end.  my grandmother would take me shopping for new shorts and tank tops, and i would bounce around the house in my new garments, anxiously awaiting the snow to melt.

easter.  2013.  snow and ice

spring 2013 is one of those springs that seems will never come.  it's been snowing for the past few days here in MN, and if it weren't for a nasty stomach bug i contracted, i might have even gone skiing again. everyone around me (which i might note, is only people in the cyber world, since this stomach flu has made me bedridden for a whole week...) is wishing it would stop snowing and start being like last april when it was a balmy 70 degrees.  this is how i feel about the situation:

i would like to take this time to remind everyone that the midwest had a massive drought last summer and we are STILL in it.  we need precipitation of any form, snow, hail, sleet, ice, rain, whatever. now everyone step back a minute, stop complaining that you can't wear your daisy dukes yet, and remember that this snow is vital to your LIFE.

ok i'm done now.

if you want spring to come early, just start some seeds.  it's a great way to have some green around while there is still snow outside.  just plop 'em in some dirt, water 'em, and voliá, seedlings!  right....?

unfortunately, i've found that starting seeds to be one of the more difficult parts of farming.  a lot of it has to do with the timing.  every vegetable/flower/herb is different.  and even different varieties can have different seeding needs.  this all becomes more difficult when the only place you have to store your seed beds is your grandparents sleeping porch(my house doesn't get enough light), which is in a different city (luckily only across the river!).

however, this year I was determined to remember that seeds need to be started EARLY!  the spring equinox was march 20th this year, and I started tomatoes, onions, peppers, and eggplant right around then.  it wasn't as overwhelming of a task as i thought.  a lot of plants prefer to be started outside after the ground is no longer an ice block.  it is mostly plants that here in snow-in-april-mn need a little extra time to get going, otherwise they won't make it to harvest.  it is a little nerve racking, starting seeds, it seems like for some reason, they are never going to come up.  but, miraculously, seven to ten days later:

this all brings to mind a great quote from an, ehem, awesome movie from the early nineties, Fern Gully. if you haven't seen this movie, you should. i'm pretty sure it partially made me who i am, watching it as a malleable three year old. anyway, one of the characters says:

all the power of creation lies in a single seed

it is amazing how a tiny, dry seed can (if cared for properly) produce delicious life sustaining fruits.  and people say magic doesn't exist.  sheesh!

i am not going to go on here about the finer details of starting seeds, books have been written about this subject!  i find that the packets the seeds some in, or the website/catalog you buy from give pretty good instructions for the beginning farmer.

another cool thing about starting your own plants is that if you have Food Stamps, you can buy seeds with them, rad!  since they will eventually be food, the government justifies purchasing them with EBT.

i am excited for the snow to melt and get outside.  i have lots of spring projects planned for my yard.  it's by no means a farm, but you've got to start somewhere!  it might be a while though, this was the view from my window last night:

april 12, 2013, minneapolis

on the other hand, around 5:12 this morning (i don't need to tell you why i was up, remember, stomach bug?) while it was still snowing, the birds were chirping.  that is definitely something you don't hear in the dead of winter.  

spring is here.

winter break

After, ehem, a bit of hiatus, I am back.  I guess it's harder to find time to write when it is peak harvest season than I thought!  I do enjoy writing, especially about farming, so I promise I won't let you down for months at a time this go 'round!

To pick up where I left off, you really didn't miss much.  There is only one word to describe my July and August: TOMATOES.  Red, juicy, molding, pungent, sticky little bastards.  Seriously.  I couldn't eat tomatoes for the entire month of September.  Why you ask?  Because that became my sole task on the farm, picking the three high tunnels clean of the tomato harvest:

largest harvest of the season, 8.3.12, over 20 bushels

devil tomatoes!!!!

I wrote my college senior thesis on farming, and one of the things I focused on was how farming as a career can lead to a satisfying, meaningful life.  One of the reason was because of the multiplicity of tasks that are performed each day.  Well, this was the opposite of that.  The only other thing I regularly picked was cucumbers, but they were in the same high tunnels as the tomatoes.  And scratched your arms like no ones business if you didn't wear elbow high gloves:

It didn't matter how early in the day I started, because it took a good six to nine hours to pick all the greenhouses, depending on the day.  All day in a hot, sweaty, buggy high tunnel picking only two crops.  It starts to get to you after a few weeks!  Luckily, starting in August, also the peak of the tomatoes, I got some help with the task, otherwise by my lonesome it would have taken me literally twelve hours a day to finish all the picking.

So the end of my farming season wasn't particularly enjoyable.  I still helped out at the farmers market which I always loved.  However, I did learn a lot about farming and am thankful for the relationship I created with the farmers I worked for.  It was an invaluable experience. 

drinking fountain soda after a particularly hot day, hair looking particularly awesome

I have also attended two sustainable farming workshops, one that was a waste of my day and I won't even bother telling you about, maybe another day, but the other was extremely educational.  It was no wonder though, it was taught by Atina Diffley.  If you are from the Midwest and are in the sustainable farming loop at all, you have probably heard of her.  If not, you should check her and her husband, Martin, out.  They farmed for years in Farmington, Minnesota and their experiences are invaluable to beginning farmers. 

The workshop was called Wholesale Farming for Success and was put on by the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture.  The workshop focused on growing vegetables for wholesale and also on food safety practices for farmers.  As someone who has worked in numerous restaurants and also a food co-op, I could really understand the importance of food safety. 

This ties in really well to my tomato harvesting experience.  I learned that the farm I worked for was doing a lot wrong in terms of food safety.  That said, it was less of an issue for them because they were not selling wholesale, so their products did not have to keep as well.  However, it is still important to make sure your product is getting to the consumer clean and safe.  I wouldn't want to be responsible for someone getting sick! 

Atina talked about many different food safety issues, but there are a few that I unknowingly documented:

This photo looks like a romantic pastoral vision of tomatoes, but there are so many blunders exposed in it.  First off, those green crates never got cleaned.  Second, they should not have been sitting on the ground.  Thirdly, we let the tomatoes sit out in the sun until we were completely done with the harvest.  Also, that black bucket you see was also never washed out.  All of these mistakes are easily remedied.  The only one that would require a significant amount of work would be keeping the tomatoes out of the sun.  The farmers would have to build/buy some sort of shade provided tent or cart as there was no out-of-the-sun spot near the high tunnels.

This is another photo of food safety disaster.  DIRTY crates sitting ON THE GROUND and not protected from SUNLIGHT.  These tomatoes would not be suitable for wholesale.  Which didn't matter for these farmers because they were selling at a farmers market.  However, for me personally, again, I would never want to be responsible for making someone sick because I was careless with the food I was growing. 

I know that food safety can get dry and meticulous to talk about, and sometimes you feel like NOTHING IS EVER SAFE!!!!!!!  Obviously, if that was true people would be dying all the time form foodborne illnesses.  That said, it is something that, as farmers, it is our responsibility to provide the cleanest product humanly possible.  When I start farming, I want my customers to trust the food that I grow for them so that they keep coming back to buy more! 

That leads me to my last point for the overdue, over-lengthy post!  Potentially the most important thing I learned from my farming experience this summer is that I most definitely absolutely no questions about it without a doubt, want to be an ORGANIC farmer.

The tomatoes that I spent too many hours a week with suffered from an attack from the evil cutworms early on in the season. 

all curled up

cutworm nibbles, mold to follow

gross

Cutworms are truly a nightmare, and if you don't already have organic systems in place it is almost impossible to get rid of them.  Tomatoes were the best seller at the market and income provider during the summer that the farmers had invested thousands of dollars in.  No way were they losing the crop.  They were propelled to spray a pesticide called Sevin on the tomatoes.  Before they sprayed we were losing over two thirds of the crop to cutworms, and afterward over 80% of the crop was cutworm free.

cutworm free!

great harvest

But Sevin is a nasty chemical that isn't the greatest for humans or animals.  It isn't the worst pesticide out there, but you still have to be careful when handling it.  I wasn't too happy to be picking tomatoes that were covered in it....  I also wasn't very excited about eating them.  This non-organic way worked for the farmers, but it isn't how I will run my farm.  It is definitely easier to fix a problem by spraying or adding a fertilizer, but I know that these methods aren't sustainable for the future and aren't chemicals that I want to be putting in my body, my customers' bodies, my animals' bodies, or the earth. 

Well this should satisfy us all for a while.  I'll keep you updated on things I learn and the exciting things that I am planning for this upcoming season!  Until then, hope for snow and happy holidays!

summer comes in a flood!

I leave town for a week and come back to a flood in Duluth! Over eight inches in one day in places!  I was in southern Wisconsin for the week and found out about the flood on my way back up north.  I didn't know if I was going to be able to make it home, Duluth was in a "state of emergency"!  I had to take a different route home since my normal route was washed right out to the lake in places.  The rivers were rushing and a rich caramel color.  The whole bay in Duluth was brown for two days.  Roads are closed in and around Duluth, there are sink holes and piles of dirt and rocks on the roads.  I was extremely worried about the farm, we were too wet a few weeks ago when we got eight inches over EIGHT DAYS...luckily they had no damage.  The pond rose three feet and came up to the high tunnels, but went down to the normal level within a few hours.  Whew!

It almost seems fitting that this flood happened, because the day before I left for the week the farmer warned me, "It's not the $10,000 catastrophe that will kill the farm, it's all the little $10 mistakes that will get ya!".  Even so, I couldn't imagine what they would have done if all 8,000 pepper plants had washed away!  Do you have any form of farm insurance at your farm?  How do you prepare (or are you prepared at all?!) for disasters?

Now that the flood has passed, things are really kicking at the farm.  I was gone for almost a week and my how things have grown!  The high tunnels are now scary, scary jungles full of buzzing bees and angry biting insects!  Snakes hide beneath the undergrowth, awaiting to jump at my unsuspecting hand!  Ok, so I am exaggerating, but they do look a little like a jungle:

I remind you, this is about a month ago

The same high tunnel yesterday! Wow!

These tomato plants are over my head! I am only 5'1'', but still...

Before I left I planted 1,400 broccoli seeds and 200 lettuce seeds.  These will be used for succession planting later on in the season.  Planting seeds is always a little nerve racking for me, what if they don't grow?!?! is always going through my head.  Luckily, they did grow!

Week old lettuce seedlings

Planting the lettuce seeds was relatively easy, they are about the size of this letter: O . The broccoli on the other hand, was a nightmare, the seeds were about this size: . And after the farmer's warning of the "ten dollar mistakes" and commenting that the seeds are expensive, I was stressing about not wasting the seeds and planting them correctly!  I'm musing that the "ten dollar mistakes" might have been directed at me....

But, I haven't made any major mistakes resulting in serious crop failure yet, indeed, things are growing quite well!

Ace Pepper, out in the field

Cabbage, no wait, cauliflower! They look so similar at this stage.

Grape tomatoes in the high tunnel

Tomatoes in another high tunnel, I think these are either "Early Girl" or "Sunstart" variety

Almost ripe!

Nothing else says summer like a ripe strawberry!

Something's been munching...might be the cutworms that are attacking the tomato and basil plants in this high tunnel.

Almost perfect except for the little munch spot.

Zucchini plants in the field, these will be ready for market next week!

It is extremely exciting/rewarding to see everything growing.  I got to take home some cucumbers yesterday, so crisp and tasty! When you eat things fresh and in season, you are reminded of how terrible produce in the grocery store can be, even if they are organic.  No Driscoll's strawberry can live up to a fresh, ripe one from your home! 

In other farm news, things are getting a little noisy around the barn due to the growing:

Chickens! These big guys are almost two months old, they are no longer cute looking to me (meaning I can envision them as supper), and will be the first batch to get slaughtered in a week.  They are the "Cornish Cross" breed, most often used on small farms.

This little guy is three weeks old.  The rest of his brood was in the corner of the barn.  The older chickens won't let them go outside yet, but once they are, ehem, gone, these guys will go outdoors too.

And these little peepers are only a day old! They are still, obviously, adorable and fluffy, I can't imagine them on my plate quite yet.

Here is the chicken's pasture.  At this moment most of the chickens were in the barn, probably to stay out of the heat.  

 

 

I can't wait for things to pick up full swing.  The farmers still don't need me at the market on Saturdays, today they brought some early beets, lettuce, and basil to the market.  Once July rolls around, things will need picking almost everyday. I took home my last cart full of transplants yesterday, plus the cucumbers, and I can't wait for fresh strawberries (hopefully) next week!

Benefits of working on a farm: Tomato plants, chive, squash, basil, cucumbers, lettuce! Yum!

And one more thing for today, just because she is so darn cute:

Ginger is growing too!

What are you bringing to market or putting in a CSA share at your farm?  How is the weather for you? Not enough rain? Too much? Or just right?

Let the War Begin

Against weeds that is!  After too much rain and chilly days, leaving my boots and hands looking like this:

We finally have nice weather that seems to be holding.  That means everything is going into overdrive in terms of growing, including WEEDS.  Yesterday and today I weeded the raspberry acre of what the farmers say is a type of creeping honeysuckle, but I think it might actually be a type of nightshade.  A brief search got me to thinking it might be Solanum Dulcamara.  It is TERRIBLE!

A few notes on weeding:
Get 'em while they're young! The smaller the weeds the easier it is to hack 'em down with a hoe.  Once they start growing bigger, like any plant the roots get more established and then hand weeding is necessary to pull out the roots.  Weeding by hand takes MUCH longer than with a hoe.
Weeding on a sunny, dry day is preferred to weeding on a wet, rainy day.  If it is wet, the roots of the weeds have a better chance of reestablishing themselves.  On the other hand, if they are pulled out on a sunny day, the roots will get scorched by the sun and burn in weed hell never to return!

In other farm news, the cucumbers in the high tunnel are going to be ready in about a week! The tomato plants have little green tomatoes springing out everywhere. It's very exciting seeing everything come to FRUITion.  Now all we have to do is weed and wait, and then picking begins!  

How are things coming along on your farm?  What do you do to battle weeds?

I promise to have more pictures soon, I'm unfortunately notorious for forgetting my camera when I need it!

Until then!

Sunshine, Finally!

Today there was finally sun and warm(ish) weather!  What a relief, after about two weeks of rain and bone chilling days we need the sun to dry us out!  I was starting to think I was living in Portland again.

Yesterday I couldn't finish planting the peppers because there was a FROST advisory (I remind you that it is June tomorrow), but then again this is northern Minnesota.  Luckily, the peppers were all covered in AgriBon row cover and the farm, by some luck, had a low of 32.5 last night.  Whew!  Needless to say the sun and dry wind was quite the blessing today.  We are now going into planting overdrive!  Lettuce is in, green leaf, red leaf, and romaine.  Lettuce is easy to plant and grow.  We just plopped the transplant plugs into hole made by the hole punch, and off you go!  Lettuce, according to the farmer, is divided into three categories, earlier producers, mid-summer producers, and late summer producers.  The romaine they grow is an example of a late producer.  Lettuce prefers cooler, wet weather so it is usually a spring, early summer crop, but this romaine can tolerate the heat and will keep producing into early August.  The red leaf they grow is a favorite, both farmers proclaim to "not like lettuce very much", but love this red leaf!  Bob, the farm cat who is actually a female despite her name, seems to like lettuce too.  She was hanging out all day between the rows of lettuces, and kept trying to scratch her back on the tray of transplants!

Bob enjoying the sun between the lettuce transplants

I can tell that summer is truly coming, because I've been running into more creatures.  Yesterday a garter snake crept out from under the plastic covering the strawberry row.  Today, I found a toad hiding amongst the lettuce transplants.  Also, we found some Portabello mushrooms growing next to ta cucumber plant in the greenhouse the other day!  The soil in the greenhouse is part compost, some from restaurants, so it wasn't surprising.  Apparently wild portabello's grow rampantly in the US now due to an increased level of consumption.  A note on wild mushrooms:  DO NOT EAT THEM UNLESS YOU ARE 100% SURE THEY ARE EDIBLE!!!!  I checked and doubled checked to make sure they were indeed portabello, before sauteing them with butter, onions, and garlic, YUM!  Just because there is a mushroom growing in your greenhouse, doesn't mean it is going to be tasty.

Probably the most exciting creature that has arrived on the farm is......GINGER THE PUPPY!!!!

She is quickly learning the ways of the farm, no chasing the guinea foul! 

 

Let's hope this good weather holds and we can get everything planted!

Planting

It is that planting time of year! Although today I did not go out to the farm due to rain yesterday and more today.  Duluth is reminding me a lot of the Oregon coast today....50 degrees, foggy, and windy!
But a lot has already been planted at the farm.  I am in the midst of planting 8,000 pepper plants....Halfway there!  They are Ace Peppers, which are a sweet green/red bell pepper.

Ace Pepper Planting:
Planted in double rows, a foot apart and about six inches between rows, about three feet between double rows.  The rows are raised and covered in black plastic to keep the soil warm, moisture in, and weeds down.  To plant the transplants, I poke a hole in the plastic and then open it up a little more with my hands, gently place the roots in, making sure there is good contact with the soil, and the loosely fill in the hole.  The roots of the pepper transplants are delicate, so you want to disturb them as little as possible.  I also cover the space between the plastic and the ground with dirt, creating a little seal.  The farmers say this help keep the soil that much warmer.  I was a little surprised that I was planting peppers already, because I thought that they needed consistently warm soil.  But the farmers said that they used to wait to plant peppers till it was too hot, and then a lot of them would die.  Excited to see them grow!

Other things I have planted:

Onions
Leeks
Broccoli
Strawberries
Tomatoes
Snaps (Flowers)

The strawberries and tomatoes are planted in the high tunnels, along with cucumbers.  Onions and leeks out in the back field along with beans. That back field is farthest away from the house, closest to the woods, and therefor most vulnerable to deer, but the hope is the will leave the onions, beans, and leeks alone.

Four rows of onions, rows are three feet apart and each onion is about three inches apart.

Done!

Something I have learned from planting:  Properly tilled soil makes planting A LOT easier.  If it is too wet or too dry, it will be a sloppy mess or hard as a rock.  I don't know what kind of soil the farm has (I should ask!), but I think it is part clay, because it is hard when dry, and a clumpy mess when too wet.  I do know that it is REALLY ROCKY.  Remind me never to farm soil that is rocky.  It wears down your equipment and your hands. Speaking of equipment, a older Howard Rotavator is what the farm uses to till the larger fields. The cultivate 12 acres, so some heavier machinery is a must for efficiency.  They suggested the older models from the 60's and 70's opposed to the newer ones because they are not built as well today and a older model will be cheaper, but harder to find!

What have you been planting?  How many acres does your farm cultivate? Do you use any machinery? Do you have any special planting tips?

Beginnings

hello and hi!

I wanted to start this blog at the beginning of the season (but I didn't), so I am about a month behind, but better late than never they say!

A little introduction first:
I'm a twenty-three year old graduate from a liberal arts college, with a degree in sociology and anthropology, but I want to be a farmer (I think).  For my senior thesis, I studied young, new farmers in Portland, Oregon and I simultaneously got hooked on farming.  All the farmers loved their lives as farmers, and I had already had a fabulous farming experience; I WWOOFed in Italy for five weeks in 2009 (For those of you who don't know what WWOOF is, look it up!).  I think I want to be a farmer because all the hard work gives me a reason to eat copious amount of eggs and bacon.....er, I mean I want to be a farmer because I love being outside, working my body, being my own boss, growing food, and learning a variety of different tasks!  Truly, all the aforementioned aspects about farming make me want to farm (the bacon and eggs are an added perk).

It is trendy these days, wanting to become a farmer, it seems like all my super trendy friends and acquaintances want to break ground, myself included.  I really do think I want to be a farmer, so instead of dreaming about farm fresh eggs and bacon (which I do often) I spent the entirety of January and February, and even some of March, trying to find a job on a farm for this season, to test it out.

I finally did!  And seeing as there are a lot of folk like myself out there, young, well-educated, hard-working, and maybe even a little starry-eyed, I thought it would be beneficial to us all to document what I learn this season, my first step to becoming a real farmer.

I've been working on a small farm outside of Proctor, Minnesota (outside of Duluth) for a little over a month now, and I have already learned a lot.  To avoid cramming it all in to one post, I think I will start with the most essential things that I have learned thus far!

1) Farming is HARD WORK
No really, it's really hard work.  I've always been a flexible person, but after a day of bending over and planting thousands of onions, I couldn't touch my toes for the first time in my life, SERIOUS NEWS! After a week of pruning an acre of raspberries single-handedly, I could barely make a fist and in the morning, barely spread out my fingers.  Farming is seriously hard on your body.  So take 'er easy!  Stretching seems all the more important to me now, as well as taking walks or bike rides to stretch out my limbs.  To me this is probably one of the most important things I've learned so far, if I am sore after a week, I better take care of my body so I can keep it up for the next 30+ years! And so should you!  This leads me to my next important lesson:

2) Farm with Friends
The aforementioned thousands of onions and acre of raspberries done ALONE, was, well, lonely.  The farmers I work with have hired me as a farm hand, not an intern, so even though I get paid (MUCH) better than an intern, they are not there holding my hand the whole day.  They show me what needs to be done and get on with other tasks.  This doesn't mean I am not learning anything, absolutely not! It just means that I am by my lonesome most of the day.  I don't get bored or really even that lonely (no tears are shed), mostly just overwhelmed by the HUGE task I have to do with only my two hands and maybe a Rototiller if I'm lucky.  And you can only listen to so many episodes of Radiolab before your brain is over saturated.  So when I have a farm, I will definitely not being doing it alone.  Many hands make light work!

I think I will stop there and move on to what I did today:

Got super dirty! Notice my finger hairs, I think they look like little fungi growing.

My hands looked awesome, but felt not so awesome.

The culprit of my filthy mitts

I said I like to get dirty, and today I got real dirty (my hands at least).  I started the day out planting Christmas trees, another venture of the farm I work for, which was fun because it was something I have never done before and because I didn't have to BEND OVER, something I have quickly come to appreciate.  Rain canceled that task before it was done, so I moved into the high tunnel to prune tomatoes.  The rain on the plastic roof sounds great, also accompanied with the best radio show I've heard thus far, KUMD's Blues Alley.  Pruning tomatoes is relatively simple and also fast, which makes it a nice task for a rainy afternoon. But you do have to bend over/squat/kneel/occasionally plot your bum on the ground.  I was able to sit on a bucket for most of this, which was a nice relief for my back (jeez, I already sound like I'm an old geezer!).

Sometimes I think (I know) I am still a five year old, because I always want to know WHY.  Why do the tomato plants turn my fingers black?!?  I am assuming it is some sort of resin from the tomato plant.  Whatever it is, I CANNOT get this resin off!  Also, when I washed my hands for the fourth time, my suds were NEON GREEN, COOL!!  Anyone know what this resin is and/or why it is so sticky?

Have you pruned tomatoes?  How do you do it? What kinds of tomatoes do you or the farm you work on grow? What is your favorite thing to eat with tomatoes? Mine is bruschetta with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, olive oil, on crispy bread! Mmmmm!