Taking a Break

After five years of working on borrowed land, we’ve decided that it is time to find a place of our own, where we can establish long term projects. We will also be trying to start some small agricultural businesses to fund our projects. If you have ideas or are interested in joining us, please contact us.

Despite some terrible weather this past year, we had a fairly good harvest of tomatoes, summer squash, and other produce. Our melons, butternut squash, and some other heat loving crops were a failure. And we continued to learn a lot and have a good time!

We are currently building a new hoop tunnel in a member’s back yard that we hope will overcome the disadvantages of the temporary structures we had been using on our farm sites.

Update week of June 12th

We are finally done with spring planting! We have got potatoes, eggplant, peppers, summer and winter squash, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, peas, and a dozen or so tomato varieties in the ground. Our cherry tree escaped the late snow and has cherries on it!

Update the 4th week of May

We got another snowstorm on May 19th. Not only did we have squash planted, but we had also set out 45 tomato plants under wall of water protectors. I try to avoid planting tomatoes till the beginning of June, but we had run out of space under grow lights for them all; we had some 250 total. The forecast at the time looked fine. But the wall of water proved adequate, and the tomatoes are still alive, though not very happy.

Our pie cherry tree flowered after all the storms and has green cherries on it! All the other fruit trees in the orchard lost their blooms.

The potatoes got frosted but are coming back nicely. Salad greens are doing well. The peas, however, are lagging, having gone through a few too many weather swings since February.

As well as all the snow, it has been pouring rain in the desert, which has slowed work but produced rapid growth in everything, including all the weeds.

 

Update 1st week of May

As usual, spring has been very busy. We got one heavy snow storm at the end of April, but otherwise the weather has been fairly mild. We’ve got a lot more planted: squash under wall of water protectors, potatoes, grape vines and gooseberry bushes.

We held a Rogation day procession on April 25th, and installed a new shrine with a picture of our patron, St. Isidore.

I’ll update with some pictures when I get time.

Update week of March 20th; St. Joseph’s day, Greenhouse, Mary garden, rain

We had a tool blessing ceremony and potluck in honor of St. Joseph on March 19th; thanks so much to all who helped to make it a success!

The weather continued warm and dry, so we have got a lot of work done on the farm. Most of the beds are dug and amended, and we have planted cover crops on some of them. Our peas, kale, and broccoli are growing well under their row covers. We pulled down the hoop house and plan to rebuild it with removable end walls, more ventilation, a higher ridgepole, and the ability to be easily uncovered. Our old house started to build up pests after a few years under cover, was too hot on sunny days even in the winter, and was hard to work in due to the low clearance. We are completely rebuilding our Mary garden, and I hope to have some pictures soon. We upgraded the fence to keep rabbits from squeezing through.

However, the weather has now shifted. The spring rains have started; we got an inch yesterday, and there are several more inches in the forecast, accompanied by lower temperatures. I hope all the flowering trees will not be damaged; they are well ahead of schedule this year.

Farm update week of February 20th; Caring for the soil, part 2

Winter came back a bit since our last update, and limited the amount of work we could do. But things are supposed to warm up again by the end of the week.

We planted out first batch of peas, under a row cover and a plastic covered tunnel. The peas were pre-sprouted in a can of warm water. Pre-sprouting helps seeds to germinate if the soil temperature is too cool or warm. Once the seeds start growing, they will continue to do so even if the soil temperature is not optimal. We used lots of bent rebar pins hammered into the soil to hold down the tunnel, in the hope that it won’t blow away. But since our farm is in a particularly windy spot, we will have to wait and see. I still don’t have pictures of this, but I’ll get them up soon, if it works!

In my last post on caring for the soil, I mentioned that there is an excess of potassium in the soil. Organic matter typically contains a large amount of potassium in it relative to other elements; potassium is used to build the structure of plants, and thus materials such as wood chips, straw, and leaves contain a lot of potassium, while the other more mobile elements have been leached out or moved by the plant into roots and seeds. So adding organic matter to our soil will increase the relative imbalance of potassium. This is a problem, because organic matter is very important to soil health. It helps the soil form a good crumb structure, hold water and nutrients from leaching away, and most importantly, feeds the microorganisms, which protect and feed the plants. The more life there is in the soil, the better, and organic matter is the fuel for this life.

To add organic matter without unbalancing the soil, we will be growing lots of cover crops, particularly rye, sorghum, oats, and clover. These plants will loosen the soil, protect it from the sun and wind, and add organic matter to the soil when they decompose, all without adding any more potassium. This is also more sustainable then importing organic matter from other soils to their detriment. Legume cover crops, such as clover, vetch, and field peas, also fix nitrogen from the air with the help of symbiotic bacteria. Eventually, we hope to grow all our own nitrogen in this manner and avoid purchasing nitrogen fertilizer.

Avoiding the importation of organic matter will also help us avoid any potential contaminants. Recently, new herbicides have been developed that do not break down in the composting process; they can contaminate straw, manure, hay, and grass clippings, and when applied to a farm or garden, can inhibit the growth of broadleaf plants for as many as seven years.

We recently borrowed a broadfork to assess its performance on our farm. A broadfork is a larger version of the standard garden digging fork, with specially shaped long tines, a wide crossbar, and two handles. For pictures and video of a broadfork in action, here is a link to the version made by Valley Oak. I’m very happy with it; using it allowed us to loosen our hard soil a foot down, without the smearing and destruction of soil life and structure associated with tilling or plowing. Using it is also more enjoyable then using a tiller. Over time, the roots of the cover crops mentioned above will fill the soil voids produced by the broadfork, making the improvement permanent and creating a deep, rich topsoil.

Farm Update, Week of February 6th

The weather has been warm and springlike here in Littleton, and so we’ve been having fun digging in the dirt, spading up beds and mixing fertilizer.

Our biggest project this week was building low tunnels to protect some early plantings. In previous years, we’ve had two problems with these structures. They tend to get wind damaged; and, since we used long rebar stakes to hold up the PVC hoops, they were hard to move once the rebar had rusted into the ground. But we are working on a new design which should solve both problems. I’ll try to have a full post on this, and pictures of our tunnels, up next week.

We pruned the orchard; all the trees are still alive! And we hope to put in more perennial plantings this spring, particularly a hedge to block the North wind.

At the end of the week we held our annual planning meeting. We spent a lot of time discussing our new membership structure. Alongside the main gardens we will be providing members with individual plots where they can plant whatever they are interested in. Soil preparation and watering for the plots, and the care of the orchard and infrastructure, will be done by the group as a whole. We hope this arrangement will combine the best of the community planting and the individual plot models.  We also discussed: upcoming events, particularly our tool blessing on March 19th; garage sales as fundraisers; planting more trees and shrubs on the farm; taking field trips to agricultural sites in the area; and beautifying the Mary garden.

A new year ahead!

As the new year starts, we are busy pouring through seed catalogs and drawing up plans for the spring. Hope springs eternal within the Gardener’s heart. There is always next year!

Not that 2016 was a bad year. We had a usual share of failures and wild weather, but still managed to harvest piles of produce; the St. Mary’s food bank and the Carmelite Convent were pleased to receive lots of heirloom tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers, as were the volunteers on the farm sites. The trees planted on our Littleton farm were all still alive going into their second winter.

Due to erratic spring and fall weather over the past few years, we plan to build some mini-frames which can be easily moved around the site, and covered with plastic, row cover, shade cloth or pest netting as conditions change.

We will be converting more of our crops over to landraces instead of named varieties this year. For more on landraces and their adaptive potential, see my earlier post here.

We have lots of other activities and projects planned; if I find time I will be posting about these in the upcoming weeks.

O God, please give us favorable weather and an abundant harvest through the intercession of St. Isidore.

Middle of July update

It has been a busy few months! We got our spring crops in, and our tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and zucchini are doing great! We are just now starting our fall crops. And we are still working on our infrastructure build, improving our greenhouse, fencing, and irrigation.

April and May Update

The weather stayed fairly nice through April and May, and we got a lot done. We did a lot of work on the greenhouse interior, adding thermal mass, interior row covers, and capillary wicking beds of wood chips. The last were built by spreading out building plastic in the form of shallow troughs, poking a few small drainage holes, and filling them with wood chip mulch, which was then saturated. They showed promise but were not perfect; we may replace the wood chips with perlite. We moved most of our 500+ tomatoes to the greenhouse to wait out the last few weeks till planting. Our peas and broccoli are growing in the open beds, and we will soon be planting the warm weather main crops; squash, cucumbers, beans, etc. Salvaged raspberry plants were moved into the hugelkulture we build last year. All of our year old trees survived the winter and are now in full leaf. We also rebuilt our compost piles and a shade structure for growing salad crops over the winter.

 

On the 25th of April we held a Rogation day land blessing procession, and toward the end of May we held a May crowing of our statue of Our Lady. Our shrine was built from a hollow tree trunk cut on the property, and we will be building a traditional Mary garden around it during the year. Thanks so much to all those who participated in these events!