Quotable Sunday  04/21/2013


Two Large Steps Forward, One Giant Step Back


Wow, what a week!  We worked our tails off and provided a huge amounts of cut flowers to everyone who wanted them.  We reorganized and prepped for our first of the season summer farmers' market and cut a thousand more stems for the market.

 

It is was a great day at the market, the sun came out, the kids were in costume for the Earth Day celebration and  folks wanted pretty flowers.  We were busy and excited to see our faithful customers and meet a new bunch of folks who were first timers or just visiting the market from out of town.  We sold about 90% of the flowers we brought and all of the ranunculus we had.  It is a very popular flower for our springtime customers. Wow, what a great day!

It was a really big week for us and we were making plans for how we can continue to improve, grow more and meet the demands of friends.  We were really excited and felt we were really kicking butt and moving this little operation forward!!

But then, reality checks in and kicks our ass and knocked us down to the ground.  We have discovered we have a problem with our well, or really with the power to pump the well.   A couple of weeks back we had a leak of the well pipe that comes up to the house that irrigates all the fields and greenhouse.  Our house is on a separate well. 

 Farmer Tony dug out the driveway to have the pipe repaired and while the expert  pump guy was checking things out, he noticed that the electrical connection from well pump to holding tanks up in our garage were not as they should be.  We could possible have a system failure at any time.  It appears that the system failure is now.  There is no water in the greenhouse or any of the irrigation stations in the field.  The possible fix will be several thousands of dollars and so the many hoop houses we had planned to build, will go back on the waiting lists again.  Just can't grow flowers without a water system. 

So this week ends on a bummer of a moment, all we worked for and earned now goes to repair bills.  For the moment we think this sucks but we will move past that in the morning.  It will be a new day, with lots of chores and new ways of working around the water issue. The weather is warming up this week and our flowers will need to be watered.  We can't be bummed. We have to pull our buns out of the mud and get back on the road of growing flowers.  This is what owning a farm is all about, two steps forward and one step back. It is still progress even if it isn't at the speed we want. This is a labor of love and not a get rich scheme.  My father always said that to make a million dollars in farming, you start with 3 million. 



Determination gives you the resolve to keep going in spite of the roadblocks that lay before you.
Denis Waitley

Quotable Sunday 03/03/2013

In the Greenhouse

Flowers are starting to bloom for us, we have anemones and daffodils with ranunculus a few weeks away.

The majority of my day is spent in our little greenhouse and I truly mean little house. When we first built it about 12 years ago, it was for raising veggie starts and flowers for around the house and the many pots we had everywhere.  There were no plans to grow flowers for sale until one day my friend said "why don't we raise a few flowers and sell them at the local farmers' market".   Thinking it would be fun and not too hard we launched our little business.  We were together for 2 years when she went back to full time work and Farmer Tony and I have continued on for the last 9 years.  Anyway, the greenhouse was not built for flower production to sell flowers and yet somehow we have made it work.  Mostly out of necessity because money is always tight and there is no where to built a larger house yet.  Our open flat fields have no power to them and dragging in a power-line would be expensive.  Getting off topic, here is how we make this little greenhouse work.... it is about planning, scheduling, and parking my butt in there pretty much all the time.

 As you can see the greenhouse is a 8' by 12' kit we built on a slab that has a tiny free standing heater and a fan for cooling.  No irrigation or misting except by hand.  There are two banks of lights for seeding and germinating and shelving to hold trays.

We have 4 shelves with heat mats on them and that works the best for germinating seeds for us. For flower seeds that germinate in the cool, the greenhouse is fairly cool with the heat mats running at about 72-78 degrees of warmth.

We are growing more seedlings in our mini soil blocks for one main reason, I can seed 300 seeds in one standard 1020 tray of mini blocks and it only takes up one tray on the heat mat.  Doing the math, that is 4 trays of 300 times 4 heat mats which hold 4 trays each and you have 4800 potential seedlings in not much space.  Those numbers work for us.  But when they germinate this is when it gets a bit more tricky.  

Here is an example of  Snap Dragons transplanted into 2" blocks after 2 weeks. Again because of space constraints we  put 50 blocks in a standard 1020 tray. To get the best air pruning of roots leaving a little more space between the blocks by putting fewer blocks in a tray would work.  However, as you can see, even with the tight spacing the roots do come out of the block but don't intertwine so much as to cause major damage or transplant shock at planting time. The blocks easily lift from the trays separately.

 The mini blocks have to be bumped up to a bigger 2" block which takes up more space in our propagation house. We love making the bigger blocks but they fill a tray with just 50 blocks versus 72 in a plug tray so for now to conserve precious space, we have to bump about 40% of our seedlings into 72 plug trays.  Last year we had hoped to make the full transition to soil blocks in 2013, but unfortunately we didn't get our new propagation house built.  Our new goal is to complete our transition to all soil blocks next year after we build our larger propagation house this summer. (Farmer Tony swears to it this year!)

There are upsides and downsides to using  plug trays.  They are quick to transplant, uniform in size and the plugs are sized well for our pottipuki.  The downsides are that they don't give as robust a transplant as a 2" block, don't last many seasons and ultimately end up in the landfill.  They cost money to repurchase and one of the biggest downsides is that they have to be washed and cleaned before use each time.  This is the LOUSIEST job of all jobs to do in flower growing.  All these downsides plus the poorer transplant quality are why we are switching to all soil blocks.

Waiting to be washed

We have a deep utility sink in our greenhouse which will hold quite a few trays to soak and clean.  I found baby bottle brushes at the dollar stores that clean the gunk out of the plugs trays. Buy a few, the season of cleaning is hard on them.

We also have a mini hot water heater that provides hot water for the sink and helps keep your hands from freezing from water from the well.  Very handy!!

In terms of actual seeding, here are some of the highly technical instruments that we use.

 The only method we have to seed is by hand, we would love one of those machine seeders or even a automatic tray cleaner but way too many dollars.  So this little green seeder is my best tool.

It has slots for different size seeds, from teeny tiny to big seeds. The big seeds work great with the seeder but the tiny ones are harder to use for me.  So we came up with a way to seed the little specks of seeds without any waste.

A finely honed Popsicle stick and a little vial of water.  You dip the stick to moisten the tip and just touch the seed with the damp tip and place it on the soil of your block or plug.  Works great, rarely drop a seed and then we have one seed per block and no waste. If the seed is pelleted and colored its easy peasy and I can use this on all the seeds we grow with the exception of one... the snapdragon.

Even with my magnifying reading glasses, I cannot see if a snapdragon seed is on the block, they are incredibly tiny, black and my eyes are bad!  Farmer Tony seeds the snapdragons.

A couple of other necessities include a indestructible old radio.

It is really old but works and can be heard over the fan.

  A great old bar stool that you can park your butt on all day and saves the feet for another day of hard work.

The biggest necessity is good record keeping.  Farmer Tony, the former manufacturing guy, always says " If you don't measure it, you can't control it; and if you do not know if you are in control you are by definition out of control."  Not a good thing, so we count everything.  We count seeds we buy, seeds we plant, germination rates, seedlings to transplant, seedlings to the field, plant survival, flowers cut for market or wholesale, flowers sold at the market or wholesale giving us the cut stems to stems sold ratio.  We count things so often, that I found myself counting things that don't need counting, just numbers on the brain.  All this record keeping helps us with succession planting,  the timing of seedlings, builds our own data base for how long seeding to flowering takes for our area and how the flowers perform in the field, at the market and overall popularity of the flower.  Flowers have to earn their keep by being profitable per square foot of growing area.  Flowers that are too labor intensive especially when cutting (there is only the two of us) are removed from the mix even if they are really pretty. Good record keeping is a must and sometimes we fail to do a good job at it, but we keep trying.

We have another seedlings stand in our home in the basement which will hold 12 more trays and it is warmer because the basement is heated with our pellet stove.

Finally all seedlings that have germinated or have been transplanted end up in our unheated propagation house (18'X20') where they grow, harden off and become ready for the field or hoop house.

It is vented on the side and has a back window for cooling, no heat but has the capillary watering mat system we have previously blogged about, to keep the seedlings well watered.

This is the way we have come up with to do our seeding, but we are so open to any other tips and or techniques that others have used.  If you have a good method, please share it with us, we are always looking for ways to improve.  

So if you were to stop by for a visit, you would find Farmer Tony out in one of the hoop houses or on the tractor. As for me, I am always in the greenhouse,  come by and I will put you to work washing trays.

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.
Gertrude Jekyll

I Stopped Fighting Nature.

Quotable Sunday  5-27-2012

I Stopped Fighting Nature.

Our farm is an interesting organism.  The soil drives everything we do and everything that nature creates for us.  When we started in this business I took advantage of our soil and treated it in a conventionally poor way. Every Spring when it was time to get the seedlings planted I'd strap on the ole rototiller to the back of the tractor and proceed to beat the soil into submission. Submission meant a fine light fluffy seed bed, apply some conventional fertilizer, lay the drip tape and plant.  I did this for the first 6-7 years and what I noticed is that each year the quality of our soil was declining.  Its productivity was dropping and it was getting harder and harder to get our clay soil dry enough without the tiller creating huge chunks  that never broke up.

Philosophically speaking we had to change our entire mindset. We had to stop trying to dominate and control our soil, but respect its nature and find a natural way to heal the damage we had done over the years. After reading Masanobu Fukuoka's "The One-Straw Revolution" I realized a that it was quite possible to work within the nature of our farm, to feed the soil, to feed our flowers, to feed ourselves and to do so eventually without huge inputs of fertility having to be purchased from outside our farm.

This last summer I decided to take a journey into the land of "No-Till"  I had been following the experiments that Jeff Moyer at Rodale Institute's New Farm for several years. Jeff and other farmers had been using a combination of cereal rye with a legume like hairy vetch and mechanically knocking it down creating a No-Till mulch that has successfully been used to raise corn and soybeans.  The mulch did an outstanding job of weed suppression and moisture conservation as well as providing large amounts of biomass back to the soil.  This idea seemed like a perfect fit for what we were attempting to do here on the farm.

Since we had the space  we used the tiller and tractor one last time and created a series of permanent raised beds  that are 4' wide and 100' long.  We made these beds into groups of 3 with a 8' wide buffer between each group. The pathways between the individual bed within each group is approximately 2'. This design is so that in the future we can  put temporary hoop houses over the beds and rotate these hoop houses to a new 3 bed group every 4 years.

We then top dressed the beds with 1-2" of local urban compost. We did not work this compost in but left it on top of the beds for the worms to feed on and pull down into the soil.  In mid-September we planted each bed with 60% cereal rye and 40% hairy vetch.  Between the beds and in the 8' buffer we planted Oregon annual rye-grass to provide next season weed suppression and additional biomass.

By early this May we had a fair stand of rye and vetch on each of the beds. The Rye reached an average height of about 4-5' with the vetch climbing up the rye.

Once the rye had reached pollination stage we then manually crimped down the rye/vetch mixture. It took about 10 minutes to knock down each bed.  If this no-till experiment is a success we would make a roller crimper attachment for the tractor to automate this process.

The finished product looked nice and smooth and was ready to cure in the sun. Note ,we also knocked down the Oregon annual rye in between the rows. The annual rye will die down and provide a weed suppression mulch in between the beds.  Cereal rye has alleopathic properties inhibiting a lot of weed germination in the first 30-60 days. This gives our transplants a good head start.

Technically we could plant this row right away with transplants but due to timing we won't be able to get to this for about 7-10 days.  During this time the vetch and rye will die back and the roots of this cover crop will begin to loosen in our tough clay soil.  We did one additional processing step in this first year we used a broad-fork on the bed to loosen any compaction that may have occurred during winter. We think the need to fork our beds will lessen as the soil tilth recovers in 1-3 years.

This is another view of one of the recently crimped & forked 100' beds. Note that the rye/vetch cover yields a good 1-2" mulch coverage.

Checking the soil underneath we noted that the earthworm population was definitely up and the soil tilth was beginning to improve.

Our  soil type is called a Dayton Silt Loam.  This soil tends to have a high percentage of clay and silt together that when we worked this conventionally it was near impossible to get a smooth tilled bed. The clay also  was extremely slow to drain in our wet Willamette Valley Springs particularly the last two years we couldn't even begin to till this ground until late June, let alone plant anything until almost the 4th of July!

The vetch was not inoculated before planting in this rotation so nitrogen fixation is a little less but, you can see this nitrogen nodule by my thumb  and if you look closely you can see others in this clump of soil. A very good sign that we may be on the right track!

This is a multi-season experiment to be able to judge the effectiveness of this technique.  We thought we'd share this first year's journey through our process.  The things we will be looking at are:

• Soil tilth improvement & fertility improvement year to year.
• Soil organisms, good and bad, slug control in particular.
• Rodents, voles could be an issue.
• Soil Temperature....even though tilth improves does the  mulch cover keep the soil too cool, too long for some of our flower varieties?
• How do we reseed  the next years cover?  what to do about late maturing crops and the need to reseed the cover?
• What do we do about crop residue from the prior cash crop?

There are lots of things to still work on but we think this was worth exploring and sharing with others. As we move forward  through the season we'll keep this updated with the good and the things that still need more work.

Any thoughts or ideas you would care to share, are encouraged.

"I am happy simply to work joyfully on my farm, which to me is the garden of Eden.  The way of natural farming is forever uncompleted.  Nature can never be understood or improved upon by human effort."     -Masanobu Fukuoka- 1986

The Best Laid Plans.

Winter is a time of planning, imagining and dreaming.  Plans were made for more flowers, brighter flowers, more variety and earlier flowers.  We made the plans and actually worked really hard in executing the plan.  The hoops houses were planted, and the low tunnels were built.  We seeded and grew and field planted the tunnels.  We were excited that we would have earlier flowers for this season.  But sometimes, the wheels fall off the cart, the plan falls apart and there you are, bummed to the max and tired as hell and asking the question, " What are we doing and why is this SO hard?" 

But after a night of self-pity and crabbiness, you wake up and look around and decide well..... "What did we LEARN?" ..... That there were mistakes but also some things worked out okay.

The mistakes:

The poly tubing for our low tunnels does not work under a snow load.  It works great keeping the rain of the beds for early planting, stands up to the wind also and gives us a chance to have earlier flowers but it will not hold under 9 inches of wet snow.   Some of the tubing has snapped back but most will have to be replaced.  All the tunnels now have to be reworked.

The hoop houses held up which is wonderful but the piles of snow is blocking the venting of the house.  And sure the sun comes out, things warm up and ranunculus are getting hot and sweaty.  So you need to shovel the snow away.

Things that  did worked:

The pvc pipe held up nicely on the iris and tulip tunnel.  They are coming along nicely and are still on plan.

                        Although the daffodils got hammered, the hydrangea is still leafing out.

                            The stock survived and  looks good and the ranunculus are budding up and just starting to bloom.

Although there is standing water and running water and little creeks of water running through the farm, it sounds lovely, like a babbling brook.

You look around a bit more and you see that the snap peas in the veggie garden look good and on track.

So sometimes plans go awry, but in the end you remember you live in a pretty great area which USUALLY isn't too cold or too hot.  You are only a hour or so from the beach and a couple of hours from the mountains.  You remind yourself it is still only March and your season is still out ahead of you.  You look back at the plan and you start working it again.  Thank you to all who sent us their good wishes, you have no idea how much we appreciate the support.  It is really great!