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!

Let the Seed Starting Rumpus Begin!

Last week we started just over 2,000 onion, leek, and shallot seeds, plus a few cardoons and a couple of heirloom varieties of celery. And after just 24 hours, the sprouting began! Within five days, all of the seeds had sprouted.

This time last year, our onions and celery took weeks to sprout. Why such fast germination this time around?

First, we followed Eliot Coleman's advice and did not cover any of the seeds, but left them all sitting on top of the soil exposed to the air. According to Coleman, this allows the seeds to have much better access to oxygen, which is critical for germination.

Second, rather than heating the air we're using a propagation mat to heat only the soil in which we're starting seeds. (Ours is a Pro-Grow mat, available here). This is a much more energy-efficient way to ensure that seeds have what they need to germinate, since soil temperature, rather than air temperature, is the critical factor in germination time. Soil temperature without a heat mat will be 10-20 degrees lower than ambient temperature, so you would have to get the air temperature up to 95 or so and keep it there to maintain the 75 degree soil temp ideal for germination for most garden vegetables. The heat mat prevents temperature fluctuations (a big problem in our passive solar hoophouse) and allows you to keep conditions just right for the short period of time needed for germination. Then you can move the plant babies off the mat into a less controlled environment once they're up and growing.

Third, after our experience starting our winter greens in soil blocks rather than black plastic cell packs, we decided to do most of our germination for the Spring in mini-blocks. These 3/4 inch homemade blocks allow us to fit somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,300 seeds on the germination mat. So we germinate seeds in the soil blocks, and then step the babies up into bigger containers without bottom heat. It's a far more efficient and speedier system than starting seeds in cell packs in the hoophouse, which was our old method.

The eventual goal is to have a well-insulated unheated greenhouse where we can start seeds on the propagation mat, but for now the plant babies are growing just fine in our kitchen. We'll have onions in the ground in early April if all goes according to plan...til then, it's so heartening to see the tiny plants curling up from the soil. Spring is coming!

Heirloom Torpea Rossa onions (also known as Torpedo Red Bottle onions) sprouting.

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.

Late Snow and Green Things

Woad, an ancient and hearty medicinal and ceremonial plant, holding its own in the snow

Sometime before the sun went down yesterday, the snow started falling. We stoked the fire in the hoophouse, tucked row cover over our raised beds, checked to make sure everything outside was mulched heavily, and generally battoned down the hatches.  

The snow is still coming down, in heavy wet flakes, and the thermometer is hovering around freezing.  But it's in the 60s in the greenhouse, and the young plants are looking perfectly happy in their warm black plastic homes.  And even in outside in the garden without the protection of the hoophouse, the hardy early spring stalwarts  are looking strong.  

I've been literally keeping the home fires burning today.  As the sun has gradually burned off the fog, it's turned into a beautiful snowy spring day with robins hopping around on the bright green spring grass while delighfully incongrous fat white snow flakes swirl around them.

Garlic

Valerian in the garden

Leeks and Catnip

Basil seedlings in the hoophouse

Tiny rainbow chard already showing its colors

Cucumber babies!

The first artichoke

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."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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.

~~~~~

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.

Invoking Spring

The snow is melting today, pussywillows are beginning to bloom, and the redwing blackbirds have returned.   The expectation of Spring is so thick you can taste it!  

It feels like time to summon Spring.  

 

Invocation

by May Sarton

Come out of the dark earth 
Here where the minerals 
Glow in their stone cells 
Deeper than seed or birth. 

Come under the strong wave 
Here where the tug goes 
As the tide turns and flows 
Below that architrave. 

Come into the pure air 

Above all heaviness 

Of storm and cloud to this  

Light-possessed atmosphere.  

Come into, out of, under  

The earth, the wave, the air. 

Love, touch us everywhere  

With primeval candor. 

May Sarton

1912-1995

Presente!

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.