On Fullness

Onion seedlings

Life has been incredibly full since the beginning of 2010 - and consequently my posts here at the Milkweed Diaries have become become woefully sparse.

My Real Job (working with nonprofits and political campaigns) has been at full throttle since the first week of January, a rude awakening after a relatively sleepy 2009. I'm not complaining though: income is a wonderful thing.

Adding to the fray, I worked as a cook at a Permaculture Design Course in south Georgia for two weeks last month, sharing kitchen duties with my kitchen co-conspiriator and dear friend Puma, cooking three meals a day for 30-60 people using local and regional in-season foods. Though I didn't blog about this Great Cooking Adventure, I did chronicle the experience on facebook.

And then there's Red Wing Farm, our homestead garden that has very quickly grown to market-garden proportions. We're selling at two tailgate markets this season, hosting our first farm interns this summer, teaching classes on the farm, and ramping up our production fast and furious with an eye toward both Christopher and me being able to quit our day jobs.

Lettuces, mustards, and kales growing in the unheated hoophouse

Homemade heat table for seedlings (salvaged lumber + gravel + heat tape) with tatsoi & bok choy growing in a raised bed underneath

Christopher has been in non-stop construction mode, building the first section of our duck and goat barn, a heat table for our hoophouse, and various other structures and contraptions, and I've been prepping beds, making soil blocks, and planting seeds. Thousands and thousands of seeds. And stepping up plants. Thousands and thousands of plants.

Tomato seedlings

Cardoon!

Our Starting from Seed class planting peas in the garden

Life is good. And full.

So apologies in advance, dear readers, for the less frequent posts in the next few months. I promise to post images as often as I can of what's going on on the homestead, in the garden, and in the kitchen.

You can also follow Red Wing Farm on facebook, where I'm posting more frequent albeit briefer updates.

In the meantime, here are some images of recent goings on at the farm...Happy Spring and good gardening to all!

Home

I was up early this morning, weeding the raised beds in the hoophouse. The cold-hardy greens are growing faster now, and the lengthening days are providing lots of sunlight for them to soak up and turn into green and growing plant energy.

Being away for two weeks offered me a lot of clarity, and absence definitely made my heart grow fonder of my life. I love being back to cooking on a wood cookstove, back to soaking up the sunlight and warmth in our house on winter mornings thanks to passive solar design, back to my community and my family, back to walking across the muddy fields and even back to weeding. It's good to be home.

After 12 days of cooking three meals a day for 30-60 people, it's so luscious just to make a small meal for myself and Christopher, to pull weeds, to check on the tiny spinach and carrot plants in the cold frames. These small mundane activities feel so good after being away from them. I feel powerfully, intimately connected to the land here, and glad to be back in my own homeplace, touching growing things, watching a Cooper's hawk fly low over the pastures, hearing the first Red Wing Blackbird of the season.

Dead of Winter, Promise of Spring

It's the dead of winter, and not much is growing in our gardens, but I thought I'd post some pictures of our various 4-season gardening contraptions.

Above is a simple, temporary cold frame made from straw bales and salvaged plexiglass windows; carrots and spinach are growing inside. And below are some shots from inside our hoophouse, including a close up of one of the 2000+ babies growing in there: Merveille des Quatre Saisons lettuce, a cold-hardy French heirloom.

In ancient, earth-based cultures in climates similar to ours (specifically: Northern Europe and the British Isles), this time of year was seen as a turning point. The snow is thick on the ground, but the earth underneath holds the possibility of Spring. Our bones are chilled, and we are weary with winter, but we know Spring's green shoots are coming. Pregnant farm animals literally contain new life at this time of year, the babies that will be born in the Springtime. Even when its hard to imagine Spring, we know it will come.

The ancients conceived of this time of year as the time when the goddess changed shape from her winter form --crone, hag, wizened and wise and bony old woman--to her spring form--maiden, bride, supple and fresh and pregnant with possibilities. Candlemas was the Christian appropriation of festivals honoring this transition, and Groundhog Day is the modern remnant of these ancient rites. Neopagans observe the transition as "Imbolc," but it was called by a variety of names by the peoples who celebrated the moment of turning from winter to spring. Whatever we call it, I'm grateful for this time of year -- when the bright blue sky and warm sun reminds me, even on cold winter days, that Winter won't last forever.

I'm grateful for the ways we capture the warmth and light, even in Wintertime. I mean this on a literal level: with coldframes and hoophouses and row cover and passive solar technologies. And I mean it figuratively: with the sickness and sadness in our household (see my last post on Frankie the cat), sparks of sweetness and levity are all the more precious.

In the dead of winter, there is light inside our cold frames and the hoophouse. Christopher cleaned out the ashes in our wood cookstove, and a new fire is lit. Our fridge is full of jars of seeds ready for Spring planting. Tiny carrots and kales and chards and beets and winter-hardy salad greens are growing in various contraptions throughout the garden. And we're holding on to a tiny light of hope for our beloved Frankie, for whatever may be for her.

So happy Imbolc, Candlemas, Groundhog Day, Bridget's Day, whatever you want to call it...and here's to cleaning out the ashes and lighting new fires.

Pushing the Babies Out of the Nest

Saturday and Tuesday we had our first plant sales with seedlings from the hoophouse.

Saturday was a leisurely all-day affair at our home -- friends came by to visit and pick up plants, and we sent hundreds of babies to their new homes in gardens in Asheville and environs. MT, LJ, KT, and LK stayed for much of the day, along with Sadie the dog, and we all weathered a brief thunderstorm together up under the porch roof.

Butternut Squash seedlings

Heather R. and her friend Beka win the prize for Most Harrowing Yet Triumphant Journey to the sale, surviving an encounter with a snapping turtle in the driveway with all unscathed. 

Red Ursa Kale

We ended up selling quite a lot of starts despite or perhaps because of the relaxed atmosphere. And we bartered some too, trading plants for plumbing and broadforking hours, both sorely needed in these parts.

Edmondson Cucumbers

Burgundy Okra

Waltham Broccoli

The aforementioned visiting.

Lettuce

Herbs

Tuesday we had a smaller, more business-like evening sale at the WWC garden.  We packed up a bunch of flats and trucked them over to the college garden just next door for a sale for students, faculty, staff, volunteers, and other college-related folks.  It was a gorgeous evening and we thoroughly enjoyed our time with the WWC community.  There were numerous gardening tips exchanged, and a number of customers took their babies directly from the sale to their community garden plots and put them right in the ground.  Quite satisfying for everyone involved.

Scenes from the WWC plant sale:

It is surprisingly not hard at all to see the babies go after all of these weeks of nurturing -- perhaps because I know they're all finding such fabulous homes and because I'm READY to let go of the responsibility of all of these thousands of tiny plants!  

So thanks to everyone who took home seedlings, and happy gardening!  

Seedling Update with Feathered Special Guest Stars

The hoophouse seedlings are all growing like mad, despite some cold nights.  We took some pictures at the three-week mark today.

By far the heartiest are the brassicas, with Red Ursa Kale (above) looking the most impressive.

The heirloom tomatoes and peppers continue their slow and irregular progress (below: tomato seedlings).

Lots of other things are looking lovely - some of the lovliest are the Burgundy Amaranth (left-the photo doesn't do them justice) and various types of nasturtiums (below, with their magical droplet-holding powers).

Lettuce, squash, artichokes, okra, herbs, flowers, and all of the 4,800 babies continue to grow and thrive.

Brassicas busting a move

Various lettuce babies

Over the past few weeks, we have nurtured these little plants every day and some nights. We have fretted that they are too hot, or too cold, too dry, or too wet, worried about "damping off" and pests and whether we should have sterilized the flats before planting.  And the plants have grown.  

Seedlings are so strong, determined, and full of sheer green life energy.  Watching them grow, I have felt intimately connected to these tiny bits of plant matter.  Almost invariably I head to the hoophouse first thing in the morning, sometimes even before caffiene, to check on "the babies."  

And there have been all manner of greenhouse adventures.

For example:

This afternoon when CF and I went in to check on the babies, there were two sparrow-sized birds inside the hoophouse.  They were flying around back and forth up near the ceiling, and at first we assumed they had gotten in through the door and couldn't figure out how to get out.  

But we watched them for a few minutes, and it was clear that they were not trying to get out--they were hunting!  They were zooming back and forth through the air, feasting on bugs.  One of the birds flew expertly out the door and then right back in. They knew exactly what they were doing. They had discovered a big plastic bug trap that collects and holds live insect prey for them -- a bug buffet.

We watched the birds hunt and feast for a while, and delighted in the wonders of natural bug control in the greenhouse.  We were so excited about what they were doing that we didn't pay very much attention to what they looked like.  I do remember that they were stripey and brown and the size of a largish sparrow. Perusing Peterson's later in the day, I thought they could have been female finches, or any number of types of sparrows, or maybe if I was really not paying attention to things like tailfeathers, even wrens of some kind.  I looked up the eating habits of wrens, sparrows, and finches and discovered that all three eat insects, so that was no help.

In my googling, however, I did turn up a good article about birds eating insects and how to attract insectavorous birds to the garden. It starts out with this great teaser:

"Imagine a device that could kill 1,000 insects in a single afternoon without doing any harm to the environment. Unbelievably, such a device has already been devised and could be flying past your window right now."

Read the full article by Darcy Logan here.  I especially recommend Part Two of the article, which offers details about specific insect-eating birds.

So the moral of the story is that nature has everything under control. Special thanks to the feathered agents of pest control in our hoophouse. . .and onward to frost-free nights!

The beloved hoophouse, full of baby plants.

Tiny Plant Babies

This morning while Christopher was inside getting dressed and ready for a day of office work, I was up at the hoophouse, giving him updates on the babies via 2-way radio.  "We have collards!" I shouted into the walkie-talkie.  "Lots of broccoli!  Lettuce!  More kale!"  

C. radioed back: "It's magic."

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As promised, baby pictures:

Lettuce!

Kale!  

Broccoli!

The First Sprouts!

The first of the babies are showing their heads: a dozen or so red ursa kale and dino kale seedlings have emerged!

Photos tomorrow.  I'm too tired today from planting somewhere between 30 and 40 more flats of flowers and herbs in the past two days.

Just when you think you have enough seeds...

Christopher, LJ, and MF tucking in seeds.

The whole world seemed to be swimming with seeds on Saturday. With help from our friends MF and LJ, Christopher and I mixed up four wheelbarrow loads of starter soil and planted 3,500 vegetable seeds.  An old friend from out of town arrived midway through the seeding frenzy, and pitched in to tuck in some pepper seeds.   As the day flew by and the seed packets kept on coming, I was beginning to feel that I had crossed some sort of threshold -- going beyond ordinary gardening passion into certifiable gardening madness.  I had clearly gone way beyond overboard with the seed catalogs.

It rained most of the day, and when the rain let up for a bit I walked down to the river with my old friend and her partner.  Our boots made sucking sounds as we mucked across the wet river valley, down past the pond and through bramble thickets to the banks of the Swannanoa River. The river was swollen and beautiful, and as is usually the case when there's been a big rain, trash was scattered along the water's edge, having washed down from somewhere upstream.   

I bent down to gather up the pieces of trash at my feet, and picked up a piece of plastic about the size of an index card.  I was about to tuck it in my pocket when I noticed words printed on the plastic: 

Cosmos flower seeds.  

Plant these seeds and watch them grow!  

The piece of plastic was actually a seed packet from a promotional event sponsored by a business association.  The packet was still ziplocked shut, and the seeds inside looked perfectly dry.  

Just when seeds were spilling out into every corner of my life, the river had brought me even more seeds!  

The gift of seeds from the river felt like a blessing on our day of planting.  I took it as a reassurance that the abundance of seeds in our lives was a powerful goodness.  I'll scatter the cosmos seeds in the garden later this Spring, and see if they turn out to be viable after a trip down the Swannanoa River from who-knows-where!  

Waiting for the first seedlings in the hoophouse to show their bright green heads, I am feeling deeply grateful for community, for growing things, and for unexpected gifts.

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Mixing starter soil using the fabulous Sugar Creek Farm recipe ... the masks are to avoid breathing particulate minerals and dust.

Filling the cell packs.

Pepper seeds.

This is almost all of the flats full of seeds...I think we did another 7 or 8 trays after this shot.

Hoop(house) Dreams

Well, our hoophouse was was finally finished Sunday night and is now ready to house our thousands (!!) of spring starts.  

The photos above are from several weeks ago, when C. began work on building the east and west walls, wearing his stylish insulated onesie.  As the snow was coming down, it was great to imagine the warm little cocoon that the hoophouse would provide for greens through the winter months and seedlings in the spring. We'll also grow tomatoes in there this summer, rolling the sides up as it gets hotter, with the plastic above protecting the plants from rain to prevent blight.  

The hoophouse is 40 feet long by 16 feet wide.  We built its side walls with sustainably-harvested lumber -- 2 x 4's from the Warren Wilson College sawmill just across the river from us -- and salvaged plywood from several years of construction-site dumpster diving and various other salvage endeavors.  The hoops and plastic we got super-cheap from friends who had to quit farming several year ago.  Back in 2007, we had a hoophouse raising on my birthday, and friends and family helped us put up the main body of the structure.  With a free salvaged door and a soon-to-be-purchased exhaust fan, the hoophouse will be grow-ready for about $500 total.

As the hoophouse walls went up, we participated in a time-honored February tradition among gardeners: dreaming of luscious summer vegetables while slogging through cold, wet weather waiting, waiting, waiting for Spring.    Now that our first greenhouse is finally ready, we'll fill it up with flats full of seeds next week and commence to growing. After seed-starting season is over, we'll build raised beds inside that will be used for tomatoes in the summer and greens and brassicas over the winter.  

Here's to the hoops!

Spring Vegetable & Flower Starts

Hillbilly Flame Tomato, one of the heirloom varieties of which we will have seedlings available for sale this Spring.

For a complete listing of Vegetable and Flower Starts available for Spring 2009, email: milkingweeds [at] gmail [dot] com.  

In my experience, there is no better time than February to fantasize about gardening and green growing things. In that spirit, I'm posting a link (above) to the list of starts that we are planning to have available from our greenhouse this Spring.  

We created this list for friends to peruse for pre-ordering purposes, and if you're local, feel free to let me know if there's anything on the list you'd like to purchase.  

All of our starts are grown in our homemade super-starter soil and we plant only heirloom, open-pollinated varieties unless otherwise noted (this year there is only one exception, noted in the listing, Sungold cherry tomato, a hybrid).  We use certified organic seed whenever it is available, and guarantee no GMO seed and no Monsanto seeds. Starts will be available for purchase in early May.

Hoop House Raising

Earlier this year, for my birthday, we had a hoophouse - raising party and friends and family helped put up our new-used hoop house, bought at bargain basement prices from friends who were moving.

(Above: the Hoophouse Raising)

It was a beautiful day, it was easy work, and of course there were many opportunities for "hooping it up" puns for those so inclined, and we got the whole skeleton raised so we could stretch the plastic cover over it the next day.

Now the hoophouse is all ready for its new life on our land (below), and we have many plans for it, of course.

We had already been thinking about putting raised beds in the hoophouse for season extension and winter crops that need a little protection, using it for seed starting in the early spring, and so on, when I read this inspiring article: Growing Trust in Mother Earth News.

The article is an excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable Miracle, but with photos .... including this one (below) of a hoophouse at Amy Klippenstein and Paul Lacinski's farm. In this hoophouse, the hoops are trellises to grow pole beans during the summer. In winter, the bean vines come down and the plastic goes up and salad greens in grow in the hoophouse through the cold months. So now we've added trellised beans to our list of hoophouse plans.

Temperatures have been in the teens this week, and we're fast approaching the shortest day of the year. Not much is growing in our small garden this month, but visions of early tomatoes, greens through the winter, and a tunnel of beans dance in my head.

Bright Solstice Blessings.....

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More information: The Hoop House Handbook is online at Growing For Market (click on "books" from their main page)