Dropstone Farms

Yesterday we spent the day preparing to have mushrooms in the fall. Friends Joanna (who interned at a farm out here last summer) and Jacob came out for the day, bearing safety gear and two giant bags of plugs (basically dowels) inoculated with shiitake mushroom spores from Fungi Perfecti.

The first step (after eating delicious cinnamon rolls) was to find and cut down suitable hardwood trees and/or branches of 3-6 inches in diameter. I stayed out of the way for that, so no dramatic photos of timber falling (also no photos of Garth in his silly-looking hardhat with attached ear protection). But there were no chainsaw-related casualties, so that’s good.

The process is simple, if somewhat time-consuming, but once you get a rhythm down it goes pretty smoothly, assembly-line style … though we learned it would work better with a corded drill; the battery life on our 3 drills was our limiting factor.

You take your 5/16″ drill bit and put a bunch of holes in your logs, about 4 inches apart, in a diamond pattern. After you drill up a log, hand it over to the hammering section, where the next person puts one little plug into each hole and hammers it in. This was my favorite job.

After it’s all full of plugs, the next person uses a little plastic syringe to suck up cheese wax from the dedicated wax-melting crockpot, and puts a little puddle of wax on top of each plug. This helps protect the log from being colonized by other, non-delicious spores.

And now, we wait, and keep them from getting too dry (water them or cover with burlap or shade cloth). And in the fall, we harvest (we hope) lots and lots of organic local shiitake mushrooms! I’m already planning lots of beef stew …

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… but we got to stretch two days’ worth of work out over three days, and a good thing too — it was too hot to work outside between 12 and 4ish every day this weekend, so we got to take breaks and drink gins and tonic and read our books. But all the same, we got a lot done and of course there is a lot left to do. We are at least six weeks behind the season, I feel like, which is especially sad since it has been super sunny and warm here for about that long.

The various (50+) squashes and pumpkins just got in the ground at Johnson Farm on Friday and Saturday. They have been living in the greenhouse in gallon pots. Many of them have several blossoms. I don’t know if that’s good (yay fruits) or bad (plant growth is now stunted?).

Today we cleared out our bolted radishes, chicken-pecked and side-shoot-producing broccoli, and crowded lettuces (destined for lettuce kraut) finally, and fertilized, composted, and got 21 tomatoes, also in gallon pots, into the ground at home. There are probably 80+ plants waiting to go in at Johnson Farm and at our New New Farm (which Garth has referenced but we haven’t yet introduced properly — that’s on my list). Tomatillos and eggplants and peppers are in the same boat.

I shall stop now lest I fall asleep at the keyboard, but suffice it to say, we are feeling pleased and optimistic with FINALLY making progress … and there is more to come.

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It appears that, if you’re rototilling a garden that’s gone to grass and blackberries for the past six years, watering prior to tilling makes it easier to remove the vegetation. It looks like a softer, wetter soil allows the tines to pull plants bodily out of the soil instead of chopping them up but leaving the rhizomes. Of course, when you’re tilling mud the tractor gets stuck more easily. If, like me, you’re running a walking tractor it’s not a problem but just takes some muscle to get moving again.

Of course, I still hate rototilling and want to find an affordable, labor-efficient, and less intrusive method of soil preparation.

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Lots done this weekend, despite a super-busy week for me with both work and socializing. Followed it up with a busy weekend full of farm chores and seedlings! Yay.

The greenhouse is not yet done, but it is serviceable, so we moved four seed trays out into it. They are under lights but not on heat mats. We rigged up a rack to hold four 48-inch light fixtures, and each end can be raised and lowered independently, so we can have older, taller plants at one end and younger at the other end. I moved the two Meyer lemon trees and one fig tree from the laundry room, where they overwintered, to the greenhouse, and also brought the two blueberry bushes in. All the above are in buckets. Then with the new space on the inside seedling shelves, we started one whole tray of onions, one with lots of leeks and lots of parsnips, and one with a whole bunch of random things, including cabbages, sunflowers, Imperial Star artichokes, and more. I also stuck a row of Mexican Strain tomatillos in the tray that got tomatoes last week, since that tray is on a heat mat and the others aren’t.

Meanwhile, Garth prepped the beds that were tomatoland last year and got ready to put hoophouses on them. Four rows mixed radish seed, four rows Olympia Hybrid spinach, three rows red carrots (Red Samurai), three rows purple carrots (Purple Haze), four rows orange carrots (Mokum). And then we set out the last of the Feb 21 greens, mostly chard and some kale, and also some of the bigger lettuces from the same date.

Upcoming this week is planting potatoes, more peas, getting another table and bank of lights in the greenhouse, and starting to prepare for ducklings (April 15) and turkey poults (early May).

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Local food friends Anne & Ryan got us a packet of crimson-flowered fava beans from Seed Dreams, a small seed company in Port Townsend. Yay! I have put them in water to chit, also known as pre-sprouting.

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Mundane news

• Neighbor Claire brought over some rhubarb roots today; she was dividing and moving her patch, growing mostly unattended in the middle of the yard, to her new garden area. The rhubarb we transplanted last year didn’t take, sadly, so we were happy to have some new.
• Started some herb seeds today — seven cells each of sweet basil, Genovese basil, cilantro, dill, oregano, and scallions (I know, not an herb, but my last cells didn’t germinate yet so I tossed some more in this batch).
• I made pasta from scratch for the very first time today. Proof-of-concept pasta, we are calling it, because it wasn’t super wonderfully delicious, but it was good, and we both decided it’s worth learning to do better. We tossed it with homegrown leeks, homegrown Brussels sprouts, and homemade sausage, and garnished with imported parmigiano reggiano and the zest and and juice of an organic, non-local meyer lemon. (I can’t wait for my lemon trees to start doing things and making lemons for me.)

Fantastic news

• When we were considering moving here, a friend told us about the Trust for Working Landscapes, which manages some city-owned designated farmland that has been waiting for people to farm it; that possible opportunity was part of our decision to move here. So, a few weeks ago we met with some of the board members from the trust, and last Monday we finally turned in our application. Wednesday we met some board members out at the proposed site. Apparently, the whole process seems to be more informal than I thought, because instead of having a several-week process to review and approve our application, we spent an hour putting stakes in the ground where we wanted the corners of our plot to be. We also got the go-ahead to start buying equipment and seeds, so I guess it’s a go? I guess. Yay! If all goes well we will be selling veggies, maybe eggs, and maybe chickens at our farmers’ market and maybe at an unstaffed farm stand.
• As part of the aforementioned equipment-buying, Garth promptly went out and bought a BCS 720 walking tractor. I don’t really understand it completely, but as far as I can tell it is pretty awesome.
• Araucanas are coming in at our feed store this Friday, so we’ll be getting two more chickens, for an even twelve total, ten laying brown and two laying blue/green.

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So, network issues at work provided my with a day to research various greenhouse options.

We’ve had such success with the hoophouses that I’m really fired up to get a real greenhouse going in the spring. My first inspiration came from the Westside Gardener whose site is full of Cascadian goodness. Minus incidentals, this is $110 for the frame of a 10′ x 20′ greenhouse. This is awesome. I’m a little concerned about keeping plastic attached in our periodic windstorms and I don’t relish the thought of coming home and finding a springs worth of starts wind damaged. Can’t beat the price though.

What I really want, however, is a shiny, pre-made Solexx greenhouse. I mean, Solexx! It’s got *two* Xs which makes it twice as cool as competing coverings. The deal with solexx is that it’s a semi-rigid double-walled plastic that diffuses sunlight and provides insulation. It’s also fairly expensive at almost $600 to cover a 10×16 greenhouse. It’s got an 8-year warranty though, and I count myself lucky to be able to reuse plastic a second year. Actual greenhouse plastic might last longer though. Plus, solexx wants braces every 16-24″, which means more costs for the frame and more time invested in building the structure.

A third option is clear plastic corrugated panels which cost $30 each. They do have the advantage of being permanent but I haven’t spec’ed out the costs of building a structure robust enough to support a rigid panel that can’t flex in the wind like plastic or Solexx.

My biggest question revolves around whether it makes sense to spring for Solexx? It may be that, in our mild climate, the amount of sunlight is going to limit growth much more than temperature. I’m not planning on heating the greenhouse but I’ll expect to run growlights for seedlings. The other constraint is that I want a semi-portable structure. Lauren and I need to be able to drag the greenhouse around out lot depending on need, soil rotation, and available light. I don’t want to get into anything that would allow justify purchasing one of those tractors I’ve had my eye on.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Requests for starts?

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I had some chicken stories to tell, but there really are other things going on in our lives, which isn’t evident from the past few posts, so I will discuss those other things instead. So here is a list of things I meant to write about when they were current, and didn’t.

• We built 3 raised beds. Spent the hottest weekend of the summer so far hauling dirt across the yard to fill them up. Planted one immediately, with kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, chard. Planted the 2nd one a few weeks later, with a second succession of winter squash, peas, beans, and carrots, as well as new parsnips (which we overlooked before). The third we started planting just this week, with 2 more rows of carrots, some lettuce, and 2 rows of beans. We’ll put more in this weekend.
• We made friends with folks who run the stable down the street and our compost area has grown from one pile to three. One (Ruby’s old haunt) is half-rotted leaves and kitchen scraps. One is horse poo and sawdust from the stable, and grass, and leaf litter from our woods. And the last one is the bad evil weeds I pulled up, mixed in with horse poo, so that it will rot hotly and the weeds will all die and not propagate. Thanks, horse poo!
• We have been haphazardly measuring our garden foods and photographing the meals thereof. I always mean to, but yesterday, for example, I forgot to weigh and photograph dinner with E&K that included a second round of potato and fava bean salad. At some point we’ll get a spreadsheet up and running with harvest dates, weights, etc., so we can figure out what produces best. An initial observation is that the Swedish Peanut potatoes don’t produce nearly as well as the Red Clouds, which are crazy prolific.

All my posts always have lists in them. I like lists, I guess. I’m going to try to have more frequent, shorter, non-listified posts.

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I came home from work early today and put in the ground one caribe potato, three all blues and five swedish peanuts. They went in the ground in a row 18″ apart with ~4 feet^3 of compost and a quart of complete organic fertillizer (COF).

Half of the potatoes I planted in the second week of April are sticking tiny little vines out of the ground. They are very cute. I love potatoes.

We also have approximately 40′ of hoop houses as of Monday as well. They’re so cheap and easy I’ll need to write a post about them at some point.

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This is for archival purposes; sorry for the delay, the listification, and the brevity; more posts, which I hope will be more interesting, coming soon.

All row feet measurements are approximate.

• 14 feet of Mokum carrots
• 10 feet of Merida carrots
• 8 feet of beets
• 16 cauliflower starts from Persephone Farms
• 3 Brussels sprouts plants
• 12 feet of Guardsman onions
• 12 feet of Tropeana Lunga torpedo onions
• 3 newspaper pots full of leek starts
• 9 feet of cabbages
• 3 edamame seeds
• 7 Etna (cranberry beans) seeds
• 9 green bush beans
• 10 feet of green pole beans
• 10 feet of Scarlet Emperor pole beans
• Scattered seeds for: mustard greens; Simpson loose-leaf lettuce; Capistrano romaine lettuce; Sylvetta arugula.

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It was 70° here on Saturday, which is approximately late June weather, rarely in mid-April. It was also the first day of the Bainbridge Island Farmers’ Market, so we rode our bikes into town in the morning and did some shopping. I had my bike all tricked out with my removable wicker basket on the front, and my new REI-dividend-purchased pannier on the back. We strolled around for an hour or so, had lunch at the pub, and returned home with my front basket full of seedlings, pannier full of groceries from the regular store, and Garth’s messenger bag and front basket full of veggies and eggs from the farmers.

When we got home, we immediately took advantage of the heat — seriously, it was actually hot — to bring all manner of poultry outside. Chickens were in the electric fence, until we discovered they could get through the holes of the fence regardless of zapping, so we moved them to a smaller, but still large, area with a smaller-holed. It was pointless, really, as they huddled together in one section for an hour or two, although it was definitely above 70° at that point.

Our charming young next-door neighbor Calvin, who is almost four, inquired with volume and frequency as to the location of the very cute ducklings. So we brought them out to enjoy the sun too, though Calvin was napping by the time we wrangled them outside. Turns out ducklings like a dog-dish full of water and bits of weeds and grass nearly as much as a four-year-old likes ducklings.

The chickens spent their first night in the coop on Saturday, but we didn’t get much else done. Saturday was poultry day, I guess.

And Sunday was planting day. We had bought broccoli, chard, and onion seedlings at the market, and we picked out three kale seedlings from our seed tray. Chard (multicolored) and kale (1 Winterbor and 2 Nero di Toscani, I think) went in between the two rows of peas (Oregon Trail and some Sugar Snap, both of which have germinated almost 100%, which is awesome). The greens should keep sort of shady there, and not bolt too quickly, I think.

Broccoli went sort of alongside the rosemary bush, which we had to trim to get the deer fence in place. I don’t remember which variety it is — the broccoli, that is — but I remember it was from Persephone Farms, so I’ll ask them when we go again this weekend.

The onions are Egyptian walking onions, which are funny looking and awesome. Instead of making a bulb underground and a flower on top, they make a group of small bulblets on top. If you don’t harvest them, the weight gets too much and the stalk bends down to the ground, where the bulblets plant themselves and grow. Hence, walking. The 4-H kid we got them from at the market said they make good scallions, too.

Earlier this week, Garth planted potatoes, too. Rather than marking them with the little flags, he drew a map in his notebook. He says it’s “four plants of everything, and six of All Blues.” I don’t know what “everything” means, but I’ll find out eventually, I’m sure.

As always, pictures are up at Flickr: Chickens; Ducks; Little farm (not very up-to-date).

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