Potatoes...

Today we ordered our seed potatoes for next year.

It really makes the season seem like it is coming fast to be starting seeds and ordering major items like hundreds of pounds of potatoes. With luck (and good management) we should have a yield of a more then a couple tons, and that is a lot of potatoes.

It is also strange to be ordering items in quantities like hundreds of pounds, but 500 pounds of seed spuds is what we will be planting this year.

But to keep that in context it still costs less for 500 pounds of seed potatoes then one ounce of the cheery tomato seed we will be planting this year. Thankfully, we only have to buy 25o seeds, at about 10 cents a seed.

Suprises in our seed catalouges...

This year we are noticing an interesting trend in our seed catalogs.

In our more commercial ones we are noticing quite a few little stars next to certain veggies (particularly summer squash.) Why are those stars there? Are they really good?

They look really good, without exception these seeds have amazing descriptions, diseases resistances, tolerance to bugs, and overall amazing qualities! But wait? These stared seeds cannot be shipped to Vermont, Maine, or Canada.

Want to venture a guess why?

In 2005 Vermont passed a bill that holds seed manufacturers liable for the impacts of genetically modified genes.

If the seed manufacturers felt that GMO seeds were really harmless than what would be the problem? The problem is that we don't know what they will do in 100 years or 200 years? We don't even know what they are doing now!

I guess the point is be sure your farmer knows what varieties they are buying. It used to be that most GMOs were corn, soybean, canola, and (most recently) sugar beets. But now more and more veggie seeds are GMO.

Know your farmer so you can know your food. And remember there is no requirement to label GMO food, so if it is important you need to know your food.

The Genetic Diversity of our Seeds...

We think that the genetic diversity of our seeds are a precious and irreplaceable gift. So we do our best to balance our need for varieties with tons of different considerations, leaving us with over 80% of the varieties we plant being heirlooms or slightly newer open pollinated ones.

We end up buying seeds from all over in our quest to do this, and are members (though non-listing (meaning we do not actively save and offer to others seeds)) of Seed Savers Exchange from whose catalogue we buy a lot of seeds.

So my question is... What is going on at Seed Savers? I found this on another blog... A pretty long letter but worth reading... The first couple pages on the seed vault are what interests me...

Spring is here!

It is SO beautiful this evening! I got home and hubby was on the tractor, a sure sign of spring on the farm. After I changed I went to say "Hi!" and marvel at how well the ground was turning over...

We are so blessed to have good soil here, at our old farm we fought with a high water table and heavy clay. The two together mean MUD! At the old house there is still water in the yard, here we plowed today, and tomorrow will till...

Granted, it was not dry enough to turn everything, but we got enough turned to give us a good start at the early spring crops (remember it is still spring!) so if the weather holds (18% chance of rain in next 24 hours) we will be able to start some turnips, radishes, and spinach in the ground. We have 1800 onion starts and 1800 leek starts which need to go in as well, and we have a few hundred beet starts ready to go in a week or so (a new experiment.) We also have Chinese cabbage, regular cabbage, lettuce, and a few other starts which will be ready to go in within a week or two...

We have a market to stock on May 31 (first CSA pickup is mid-June) and right now the only thing in the ground is Kale! We will start this years season as we ended last years, with LOTS of Kale! :)

Our hoophouse is here, but putting it up needs to wait, when you can turn the soil, that takes priority! In any case we have thousands of starts under grow lights in our basement. I need to remind myself, they always seem to grow slow at first, but they have 4-5 weeks before we'd even consider transplanting peppers, eggplant, or tomatoes. Our average last frost day may be early may, but that means that half the years see later frosts... So we will wait for the relative safety of late May, with the assurance of a warm 10 day forecast...

The season is going! Wish us luck, and good weather.

1588 pounds...

Our hoophouse shipped yesterday! We should see it on Monday morning, all 1588 pounds of it, which we are responsible for offloading from the truck. One pallet alone is 1,200 pounds! So we paid a little more so they will send a truck with a lift gate to help us unload it. They are also sending it in a stubby truck, so hopefully it can get up our driveway...

It will be good to have, as soon as we get it set up. I have hundrends of lettuce, cauliflower, and cabbage starts in my basement which would be fine in a less heated space... The tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and basil still need a little more heat... It did come with a propane heater, but we will need to wait and see if we actually need to set that up this year, it may be late enough we don't have to...

Junior Rangers...

Do you have a kid between 3 & 6? This summer we will be hosting 3 programs on our farm for the Junior-Junior Ranger Program. (Other Junior Ranger programs are available for older kids.)

Little Sprouts will be an opportunity for kids to come learn about seeds and actually have a chance to go into the field, plant a seedling, and pick something. One of the new farmers in the program attended with her little boys last year and shared some photos with me...

Ranger Katie helps teach the kids about seeds, after which they plant the varieties and then water them in...

Details of summer Junior Ranger programs will be coming soon...

Weekend tasks...

First let me say it was a beautiful weekend! The weather was SO nice, unfortunately, this farmer did not get to enjoy much of it. It is still to wet to get into the fields, and honestly, just a bit early to plant much. If the weather holds till the middle of next week we will put our first seeds in the ground on some hills left over from last year. We are eager to try our new seeder!

This weekend was dedicated to seed starting and transplanting, as the next couple will be as well. Hubby worked on building a new propagation rack so we can expand our space for seed starting from 2ft by 8 ft to 2 ft by 24 ft! At 360 plants on each 1 ft wide tray that means our capacity to start is expanded from 2880 seeds to 8640! That is HUGE when we are starting some things that take a while to germinate like our peppers and eggplants which were started last weekend and are just now popping (8 days).

Meanwhile I worked on starting seeds and transplanting seeds that we have already started including transplanting 288 basil plants, 30 Mexican sour gherkins, and 72 eggplants. We also started 144 lettuce plants, 144 cabbage plants, 360 broccoli, and 1,800 tomato plants. This coming week I will start more seeds as I am able to begin transplanting the 1,440 pepper plants, 600 eggplants, 360 cauliflower, and 300 celeriac seeds which were started last weekend.

We start our seed by using a soil block maker which compresses a fine mix into little 3/4"X 3/4" blocks, 20 at a time. We put these on cookie sheets and the cookie sheets on the heat mat to germinate. As soon as they pop (within one or two days) they need to be carefully moved to trays, so their roots have more room to grow. Using this method means an extra step, but space on our heat mat is so precious it is worth it for us. Doing this lets us start up to 2,880 seeds on one 2X8 ft mat instead of just 288, which is all the room you have using the trays they end up in.

When more stuff is up and transplanted I'll take some pictures. All of these are currently hanging out under a 1000watt grow light in our basement, where it will stay until our hoop house is up in a couple weeks. But that is why I spent much of this wonderful weekend in our basement, listening to my iPod and carefully putting seed in tiny little blocks!

Other weekend tasks included finally ordering our seed potatoes and onion starts, taking some time and evaluating our fields and space needs for this year, and some basic cleanup around the farm (which hubby did while I was planting tomatoes.)

Also, as some of you have asked, we think that our bee hives have survived this winter! At least their were bees working at our hives today and coming and going! On Tuesday, if the weather holds, hubby will open up the hives and check that the queen is their and the remaining bees are doing good.

Googling me?

What kind of Google searches have brought people to my blog?

Here are a handful of recent ones - these are not edited...

why do farmers have ducks on their farms?

• Um? Because farmers LOVE eating duck? At least my husband and I do. But as of now we have no ducks and no immediate plans for getting any...

beaver dam pepper

• We are growing these this year as one of our Ark of Taste Heirloom varieties. I just started the seed this weekend. 180 of them... They should be available at the plant sale if you'd like some...

Amish pie squash

• Another Ark of Taste variety. These things are HUGE! We should have some squash available at the plant sale but we will not know how they start until right before, as they get started much later.

random passage

• Huh? I have a lot of these I guess...

northeast ohio csa farms

• Our CSA is full but we are taking names for our waiting list, so contact us if you are interested.

e&r seed

• We get some of our seeds here. They are an Indiana Amish company - no phone! We were kind of hesitant first time we used them, but now we get some seed from them every year. They have a lot of open pollinated items...

is filtered honey heated

• I actually did a blog post on this last year... It turns out YES. To get unheated honey you need strained, not filtered honey.

farm jobs northeast ohio

• Sorry, no jobs or internships this year. Want to work for free???

Seeds seeds everywhere....

Imagine being a kid at Christmas and you are able to actually BUY anything you want. It would not be long until you would be sitting in a room of toys...

Some years, around now I feel that way. We spent the dark days of December and January paging through seed catalogs, making selections, being by the end rather selective. Then the seeds start coming, and coming, and coming! And there are always surprises... I thought we bought more of that! Or WHY did we buy a pound of that turnip seed?!! The answers are always there, the 1000 seeds of the one we should have gotten more of cost $22 while the pound of turnip seed was only $3! 1000 seeds may should like a lot, if it is something that is direct seeded it may not go very far at all... But that's OK, because as I look around at the bags and bags of seeds we have, there should be no problem in variety this year!

None at all...

Seed saving...

As we are leafing through the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) Yearbook we are feeling some seed envy.

The book is 500 or so pages long, no pictures, just page after page of variety listings and the mysterious code that tells who has the seeds avilbale. OH WA H - Has - means that someone in Ohio with a last name strating in WA and a first name in H has the seed avilable for anyone (who is a member of SSE).

Seeing L.Q. on the end means that they have it in limited quanity and to get it you have to be a listed member (meaning you are offer seeds to others, which we are not this year) and M.R. means you have to promise to offer the seeds the next year (or in two years if it is bianneil.)

Anyway, the book is amazing to go through. Descriptions of item after item, antique apples, heirloom veggies of every description, and wondourous potatoes. More then once I gasped and yelled to my hubby "They have _____!" Fill in the blank. (I admit to being a seed nerd!)

But here is the the catch. None of the items are offered in commercial quanities. Of course not, the goal is to trade seeds for the purpose of seed saving, but that means I will need to save seeds. To be honest, my intrest in seed saving is not in the "easy" varities. The book has over 100 pages of tomatoes listed. I joked to my husband "I think the genetic diversity of our tomatoes are safe!" And honestly they appear to be.

No the things that intrest me are root crops. Turnips and beets and the like. To save the seeds we need to grow them year 1 and then in the fall dig up the roots, save the best of the roots all winter at 40 degrees and controled humidity and then in the spring replant it, at which point it will go to seed. All of this needs to be isolated by 1/2 to 1 mile from the closest adjacent variety of the same family. That is a lot more involved then the humble tomatoe or pepper.

So in 2008 we will save only a couple varieties for seed. The first will be rat tailed radishes, which I LOVE, and are avilable fewer places then they were just a few years ago. The second... I don't know, still decideing, maybe Gilfeather Turnips, an Ark of Taste variety.

But for now, until we have more time at the farm for fussy activities like seed saving, we will have to be satisfied (and so will our members) with varieties which are commercially avilable in large enough quantities, because the when you get something from SSE's yearbook you only get a few (20-30) seeds, which is not enough when you are talking turnips which we typically order in ounce multiples.

Rat Tailed Radish!

Our germination tests are looking good.

I was VERY happy that our Rat Tailed Radish seed germinated. This is a radish pod variety, meaning you wait until it grows a seed pod on top and eat that not the root!

Very yummy, and great in salads or stirfry (he German's pickle it!)

We bought 4 oz of the seed in 2004 from Johnnies, we have 2 oz left and it is at the end of it's life span. And now Jhonnies does not carry it and most places only have it in small quantities.

This is a great canadiate for seed saving this year as we don't let any other radish go to flower!

So maybe in 2009 our Rat Tailed Radish will be our own!

What to get?

It is hard to explain how the seed selection process works.

First, we get all the catalogues and are filled with optimism at the possibilities. We flip through them casually, again and again, reading descriptions to each other. Marveling at what is available.

Then reality starts to hit. We have a list of items from previous years we know we need to grow...

• Matt's Wild Cherry Tomatoes - an unbelievably long producer of cherry tomatoes.
• Pink Brandywines - which even through we have had mixed luck with we almost HAVE to grow if we say we grow heirlooms!
• Padron peppers - which we feel there HAS to be a local market for.
• Santa Fe Grande peppers - which I need for my jelly.
• Mexican Gerkin Cucumbers - which are just fun!
• The list goes on on and on...

Then there are items which we did not grow last year and miss! This list is maybe 4 or 5 things long.

Then we have the "staple" items. We need 2 or 3 varieties of green beans, of beets, of turnips, of radish, of lettuce, of lots of stuff.

Then there are items we are still looking for the best in. What is the best variety of green pepper, of jalapenos, of zucchini?

When we are done with all of this sometime in the next couple weeks our list will be too long. It is a guarantee! Then the hard work of cutting begins. We will only grow 4 types of radishes! We only need 10 types of tomatoes. 3 hot peppers and 2 sweet.

The pea shown above is SO cool. It is an edible yellow pod pea from Seed Savers exchange. But it will not make the cut. The plants require trellising (we are avoiding trellising peas this year) and grow 6 feet tall. And we already have 3 types of peas on the list!

Eventually we will have a list of somewhere near 100 items that we will grow. The list always creeps a little, but a goal is good! So seed varieties, here we come!