Kind Words and Pretty Pictures

My friend Dana put up some beautiful photos of our place this Spring (including this one at left) and some very kind words about our homestead on her absolutely delightful blog, "Dana-Dee," which I regularly read aloud to Christopher in the evening.

Ms. Dana Dee has an incredible eye for beauty, a fabulous way with words, and all kinds of useful and unusual skills (hide tanning and bird taxidermy and choreographing dance routines to be performed in unexpected public places all come to mind). She is an excellent cook, a knowledgeable herbalist, a gifted gardener, and a general all-round star. Tender-hearted and whip-smart and goofy as all get out, she is one of the funniest people I know and a very fine singer and dancer.

Here's the link to Dana's sweet-as-pie post about our place with lots of gorgeous pictures of little details. I sure am grateful to Dana and to Ashley at Small Measure for their words and for taking the time to capturing images and impressions of this place, especially since I've been neglecting my documentarian duties since in the frenzy of garden work and general Spring madness.

I so much appreciate the perspective I gain when friends and family visit -- their presence reminds me to pull my head up out of the weeds and seeds and look around at this beautiful place that I am so lucky and grateful to call home.

Bustling

I have been spending as little time as possible inside these days, hence the lapse in posting.

Thanks to Ashley over at Small Measure for picking up my slack and documenting some of the happenings here at Red Wing Farm! It's such a complement to see glimpses of our little homestead featured on Ashley's lovely collection of writings on "homemade living."

Pictured above: Blauwschokkers - Dutch Blue-Podded Peas. Seeds available from Seed Savers Exchange and Local Harvest.

The garden is lush, with something new bursting into bloom or shooting out of the ground every day. Some early spring vegetables are already past their peak (winter greens) and others (peas!) are coming on strong.

And we've entered the period of what I think of as "vegetable ephemerals" -- those special treats that are only available for a short window of time. Garlic scapes. Fresh fava beans. Sugar snap peas. And soon, since the first potato flowers appeared yesterday, there will be new potatoes.

Lettuce and borage.

Sugar Snap Peas.

Celery, purple onions, mustards, arugula.

It's also an exquisite time of year for the medicinal and culinary herbs and perennial flowering plants, which are in full leaf by now with many starting to flower. The medicine garden is bursting with blooms: valerian, foxglove, chamomile, feverfew, thyme, yarrow, meadow arnica, rue, columbine, Chinese red sage, skullcap, peonies, lavender, rosa rugosa, motherwort, and love-in-a-mist.

Rue, meadow arnica, and elecampane.

Feverfew and chamomile.

Skullcap.

Chaste Tree and Love-in-a-mist.

Foxglove.

May has just bustled right along with tailgate markets, teaching gardening classes, farm interns moving into their quarters and starting work, and lots and lots of planting.

I look forward to more time for writing and documenting things once the spring rush is past. Perhaps this is a fantasy since my day job is ratcheting up as political campaign season gets underway. I always feel like there is a slower time in my life just around the corner, but it rarely works out that way.

This evening will be a nice respite, though: our intern Nicole is "coming over" (walking down from the schoolbus camper) for a dinner of risotto with homegrown fava beans and garlic scapes, wild lambsquarters, and homemade hibiscus mead. Mmmmm, spring!

Looking into the garden...

Volunteer magenta spreen lambs- quarters

Fruition

Our first tailgate market of the season was yesterday afternoon, and it was fabulous.

I harvested greens all morning while Christopher washed and prepped produce, dug spring garlic, and loaded the truck.

It's nice to feel like all of the gardening madness is coming to fruition a bit already, with so much food coming out of the hoophouse and kitchen garden beds that we had a bountiful offering at the market.

We sold out of pretty much everything, and loved connecting with the other vendors, friends, dogs, babies, and customers. A cheese and scallion scone from the Herban Baker with a dollop of Wild Ramp Goat Cheese from 3 Graces Dairy topped off the day.

More photos of our spring harvests are on our farm facebook page.

Today the rush continues: after I squeeze in a little non-farm work this morning, I'll be back at it in the garden, planting potatoes, giving all of the seedlings a little fish emulsion/kelp snack, potting up perennial herbs for the herb festival, and watering, which is a monumental task at this stage with all of the thousands of thirsty plant babies in the hoophouse. But yesterday it was nice to pause and reap the rewards.

Sorrel

Spring Garlic

Heirloom lettuce by the head

Spring mix

Kale and Stinging Nettles

Spicy Mustard Greens

Deep In the Thick of It

The season of spring busyness continues!

After a week of cramming in farm and garden work in between taxes, grant reports, and meetings, the next three days are all about the garden.

Genovese Basil seedlngs perched above French heirloom lettuces

Arugula and Mizuna

Today I'll be trellising heirloom blue-podded shell peas (Blauwschokkers, to be exact), planting Red of Tropea onion seedlings (beautiful Italian heirloom red bottle onions that we started from seed back in February), building a bed for brassicas and shallots, pinching flowers off of all of the winter greens that are trying to bolt, cutting potatoes into chunks for planting tomorrow, potting up sorrel plants and Canturbury Bells for the herb show, and watering everything. The watering of everything takes about an hour a day at this point, which is entirely inconvenient but essential.

Onions!

There are thousands of baby plants growing in the hoophouse, on our porches, on our kitchen counters, tucked into every available cranny. Winter-planted lettuce is growing to gargantuan proportions in the unheated hoophouse, spinach and beets are doing their slow and steady thing, chard and collards are kicking out the jams. In other words: it's Spring! Plants are doing what they do best in Springtime: putting on some serious growth.

Italienischer lettuce

This goes for all plants, including the plethora of weeds and wild plants that are sprouting up everywhere I look. Some of these wildsters I'm happy to see: beautiful medicinal agrimony, nourishing dandelion, prolific creasy greens, medicinal nettles. Others I have a love-hate relationship with -- blackberries, lambsquarters, wild onions. I'm grateful for their gifts of food and medicine but I'm tired of pulling them out of my lettuce beds. So I pull some and leave some and turn loose of the ridiculous notion that I can control the force of nature that is plant life.

It's a good metaphor for life in general for me these days - I'm deep in the weeds, best to just take a bite here and there and relish the chaos!

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!

Signs of Spring

Witch Hazel blooming in the garden today

It was a beautiful sunny day today (high of 62!) and I spent a good chunk of the day in the garden before I had to shower and get into professional mode and drive in to town for a meeting.

It felt so much like Spring outside today. I had to keep reminding myself that there's likely plenty more cold in store for us. We still have two more

months before the average last frost date here, but I couldn't help it, I just let the Spring fever flow and planted some seeds.

Crocuses!

In my defense, I did plant the seeds in a cold frame and in another raised bed we have covered with a mini-hoophouse type structure, so it really is possible they will germinate, grow, and produce food. I planted several spinaches (Bordeaux, Space, Winter Bloomsdale), Ruby Streaks Mustard from the OGS Seed Swap, carrots (Oxheart, Scarlet Nantes, Napoli), radishes (French Breakfast, Easter Egg), a little lettuce (Pinetree Winter Mix), and beets (Early Wonder, Golden Detroit, Chioggia).

While I was getting the beds ready for planting, I encountered this little critter: one more reason I am glad we do not use a tiller. She was a little disoriented when I uncovered her with the fork I was using to work in manure, but she would have been dead meat with a rototiller.

You can see how she's barely visible in the soil. This was a moment when I felt really good about using hand tools, which are slow and gentle enough to allow life to go on in the garden beds despite our disruptions.

Another highlight of my time in the garden today was watching

the honeybees forage. I was kneeling in the herb garden to enjoy the crocuses up close when one of our honeybees landed on a tightly closed crocus bud and proceeded to open it up and get inside. It was really amazing to watch. She opened three buds this way, with

efficiency and enthusiasm. A good reminder, too, of the importance of early food sources in the garden for beneficial insects. This meal will help her and her hive sisters get

through the rest of the winter! (They're all sisters at the moment; the females kick the males out of the hive to freeze to death when resources

get scarce in the winter, and make more in the Spring.)

I was lucky to have my camera with me, and at some point remembered that it has a video feature. So here's a little photo

sequence of bee/crocus Spring

celebration, followed by my first HOME VIDEO posted to the Milkweed Diaries! It's just 14

seconds, but you can really get a sense of the crocus/bee lovefest in action....enjoy!

Total Garden Immersion

My brain is tired from two days of immersion at the Organic Growers School. We in Western North Carolina are very, very lucky to have this amazing event happening here every year. Somewhere around 1,300 people gathered yesterday and today for the OGS at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and it was fabulous as always.

I always learn so much, and love communing with other growers, plant lovers, garden geeks, and lovers of organic foods and farms. It's always so inspiring to be there, and I find myself scribbling notes to myself the whole time with brainstorms about things we could do in the garden, new plants to grow, little known facts, and resources to check out later. There is also always an excellent seed swap, and I got to meet some of my "internet friends" from the seed and garden world online and swap seeds in person - delightful!

All in all, the OGS contained way too much information and to try to summarize here, so I'll settle for a couple of greatest hits lists.

Top 5 Quotes from the 2010 Organic Growers School:

1. "Plants' mission is to cover the earth. Plants are the skin of the earth." ~Joe Hollis
2. "To me it is an ecological crime to heat greenhouses to grow food." ~Patryk Battle
3. "Clear communication is a learned skill." ~Elizabeth Gibbs
4. "Future farmers are one of the main products of our farm." ~Tom Elmore
5. "To me, plants are innocent until proven guilty. Just like every other living organism, they want to be fruitful and multiply. No need to demonize them for it. Outbreaks of exotics are nature's efforts to clean up our mess --plants trying to heal a wound that we created" ~Joe Hollis

Top 13 Things I Learned at the OGS:

1. How to make a germination chamber out of a bakers' proof box.
2. To find out if legumes are fixing nitrogen well, you can pull one up, cut open one of the root nodules, and if it is RED inside, nitrogen is being accumulated (the red substance is a form of hemoglobin!)
3. To cure sweet potatoes for optimal storage life, close them in an 80 degree room at 80% humidity for 10 days.
4. All grapes in Europe, even in the Frenchest of French vineyards, are grafted onto native American grape root stock.
5. Rufus Mayhaw is both a productive, hearty, edible variety of hawthorne and a good name for a hound dog.
6. There are two kinds of creasy greens, and one tastes a whole lot better than the other. The one that tastes good has 6-8 small lobes and one big terminal lobe. When you find the good one (there is some in one of our production beds) you can just let it go to seed and "anoint the soil" with a stalk with a seed pod on top.
7. Lambsquarter seeds are edible and comparable to quinoa (though smaller).
8. A single muscadine grape vine can produce up to 100 pounds of grapes in a year.
9. To get all or most of the nitrogen benefit from a cover crop, the plant has to decompose into the soil.
10. One piece of science that supports the traditional use of hawthorne for heart medicine is that hawthorne leaves, flowers, and fruits contain high levels of antioxidants, specifically the flavonoid procyanidin.
11. There is an excellent organic wine made from Baco Noir grapes produced at a vineyard near Boone, available for $18.
12. How to make a DIY greenhouse heat table with gravel and plywood and heat tape.
13. Even though there are over 15,000 known varieties of grapes in the world , 99.5% of the world's grape production is from only 100 varieties.

And here's a little photojournal of our DIY greenhouse and germination equipment class building a gothic arch hoophouse on the quad at UNCA: