_loonatics_

Last week brought us welcome warmth and thawing ground.  The frost has come out up to 8-12 inches in some areas on the farm that are on full sun.  Our irrigation pond is filling up quickly.  We have been observant of where and how water puddles, streams, and runs through the different parts of the farm.  We are lucky that most of our farm is already covered in grasses and/or cover crops so that with all the water moving through, there is very little, if any erosion.  On the wet, low-lying parts of the farm there is a different type of grass species altogether, which gives us a clue about where we want our field edges and borders to be.  I saw an awesome dark green salamander on Sunday heading straight for the pond.  Probably have to wait until April for those frogs though... The temperatures have been dropping into the 20's at night now.  Those temps really do a number on your greenhouse heating bill.  We are aghast at how much propane it takes to heat a little plastic house just so you heat the air to heat your soil to get your plants to germinate and grow.  It does not feel very "green".  Our greenhouse mantra then is to come up with a better source of bottom heat next year. 

Adam put on the finishing touches on our hoophouse, digging some drainage around the outside edges to minimize puddling.  Note to self and anyone else putting up a hoophouse for the first time.  Dig your ditches and level your ground inside the hoophouse FIRST. before you put it up.  We also tightened the plastic on Saturday, with the help of our great, local intern Katharine.  Sunday we had 40 m.p.h. gusts from the east--exactly where we have no windbreaks.  The structure groaned, muttered, and creaked with the wind, but plastic stayed tight.  We were waking up every morning and peering outside from our bedroom window, saying "it's safe. plastic's still there."  What a wild ride this farming thing is.  And we've only barely begun the season!  

My photo of the week (the only one I managed to take) is of our hens and rooster checking out the lean-too of their new dwelling.  We stole our dog's house and moved the chickens out of the barn and into the dog house so we can begin clean-up.  Don't feel too bad for the dog.  He has a comfortable dog bed in the mudroom and hadn't slept in his house for months.  


    





 

This is our 5th tractor, our 2nd IH 140, and probably the last tractor we will be buying for awhile. Knock on wood.  We bought this last year and finally it got delivered to us yesterday to complete our fleet.  It sure is cute with its red paint job.  Our other 140 is a later model from the 1970's and is yellow.  This red one is an Industrial 140 and is one of the earliest models.  They (yellow and red) are virtually the same tractor though.  The basket weeder will be transferred over to the Red 140, and the Yellow 140 will be outfitted with our homemade plastic mulch layer to lay plastic mulch for our outdoor tomatoes, melons, and cukes.  

I don't like using plastic mulch, however for cukes and melons we feel the benefits outweigh the waste.  We use a silver reflective plastic mulch that repels cucumber beetles by reflecting sunlight underneath the Cucurbit leaves.  The cuke beetles often hang out on the undersides of the Cucurbit leaves, munching, spreading disease, and mating.  There is significantly better yields, plant health, and less disease when we use silver reflective mulch.   

The bitter cold and wind this winter is making an indelable mark in our memories this year.  There's just nothing to stop the wind out here on the edge of the prairie.  Luckily we have a pretty good windbreak around our house and farm buildings so that one can be outside even on sub-zero days and have a bit of shelter from the wind.  It has got us thinking good and hard about a north windbreak to provide some shelter to our fields, both for the benefit of the farmers and the benefit of our crops.  We also get to see first-hand how much soil erosion happens even in the winter in semi-snow covered fields.  We have snow drifts allover the farm with patterns of black soil imprinted.  We know it is not likely from our farm, since there is barely any bare land here, but all the corn and soybean land around us ( and everywhere else in corn country) is bare, black soil.  A reminder to us to cover as much ground as we can with a fall cover crop or green manure.   

The poor chickens are stuck inside the barn most of the time, and most are also molting so are left looking small, bald, and slightly miserable.  Days will go by without even one egg, or the egg will already be frozen by the time we get to it.  Although we did get an Araucauna egg today--that was a first since we moved in last October basically!  The light green-blue was an especially beautiful surprise of color today.  I have heard the same egg drop-off from larger organic egg producers--stories of 3 dozen eggs a week from 500 layers.  We are doing our best to treat our hens as queens, but there's not much we can do about the cold.  The 2 barn cats hang out in the lean-too greenhouse that gets pretty warm for them during the sunny days, although the younger one loves to "roost" next to the chickens and eat kitchen scraps.  It's a hilarious sight to go out and see him crouched in the middle of all the hens.  He's definitely after their food, but spends quite a few nights in there with them as well.

Despite the cold, we are still enjoying ourselves and quite content to be here, even in the midst of a memorably hard winter.  Doing A LOT of farm planning, which is exciting and semi-frightening just in terms of how much work there is to do and making the budget stretch to cover all the capital improvements needed.  It would be even more frightening to go into it with our eyes wide shut though.  There will be a crew here next season to help!  Three lovely ladies with farm experience, and both Adam and I will be here full-time.  The stillness and quiet of January will vanish rapidly come March and April. 

Last week brought the MN Organic Farming Conference, with a special Thursday session on Winter Hoophouse Growing by Eliot Coleman.  It was good to see this esteemed author in person and hear about the myriad of season-extension techniques they are doing in Maine.  It did prompt us to think harder about getting a moveable hoophouse.  They give you so much more flexibility--we wouldn't have to get our fall tomatoes out early in order to plant a fall spinach crop.  However, they can be 3 times as expensive as a plain old hoophouse.  Food for thought for the future as we plan to put up at least 2 more hoophouses in the coming years.  What I wouldn't give for some fresh hoophouse spinach right now...

Be well and stay warm!


We need more of these here:

I liken Terra Madre as sort of the Olympics/U.N. of food and sustainable agriculture.  The Opening and Closing Ceremonies were especially powerful: uniting with a global sea of people who are in solidarity about remolding our food system left me with indescribable feelings of inspiration, validation, and hopefulness.  During the actual conference activities, I was struck by great conversations and friendships found in long lunch lines, long bus rides, and happenstance encounters.   Over 1,300 of the 6,000 delegates were youth (people under age 30) including myself, and everywhere I turned there were young faces.  I felt like we brought incredible energy directed towards renewing and revitalizing sustainable and traditional agriculture. 

Many of the young people I got to know at Terra Madre were actively working on social justice issues within the food system.  I was most blown away through talking to some organizers for Immokalee, Florida tomato workers.  Immokalee workers have been getting paid the same wage since 1978, just 45 cents for every 32 pounds of tomatoes they pick! A wage so horrendous I could barely believe it was true, even in '78.  Although they are legally prevented from unionizing, they have formed a coaltion: Coaltion of Immokalee Workers, and they are currently in a wicked battle to get the Florida Tomato Growers Association to agree to a pay raise of 1 cent per hour that Food Giants like McDonalds, Subway, and Taco Johns already agreed to pay for!!!  Go to CIW's website to see the incredible work they are doing to end modern-day slavery in this country: www.ciw-online.org.
 
Other youngsters I met were working to get CSA shares to food shelves and poor neighborhoods in New York City, setting up farmers markets in urban food deserts, or saving nearly extinct indigenous seed varieties in Ecuador. Those social justice projects inspired me to try to move forward on similar social justice issues in our local MN communities, and to find a way for our farm to provide organic and local food to all.  How to do that and keep our farm financially sustainable is the balancing act, but many creative farmers and non-profits have found a way, and I talked to many of them to get ideas and impetus to move forward.

On one of the last days I participated in a youth breakout session on finding access to farmland—one of the biggest hurdles for beginning farmers regardless of where you live.  There were around 20 of us from all over the world, perhaps with 5 of us that already had land and were successfully farming.  Most of us spoke English, but one fellow brought his own translator.  (One of the coolest parts about communicating at Terra Madre was that there were "roving translators" that would wander around and translate between delegates.  In sessions, there was simultaneous translation into 8 different languages, and we all wore these headsets that broadcasted in our language.)  The energy in the breakout session was palpable as “youth” farmers and farmers-to-be shared their stories and provided feedback and ideas to other young people from all over the world trying to figure out how to make their farming dreams a reality.  We had just closed on our farm a week before, so I felt like the real poster child of success in terms of getting access to land, especially not growing up on a farm and not having family access to land. 

Notable speakers included Carlo Petrini, Alice Waters, Vandana Shiva, HRH Prince Charles of Wales (in video), and the youngest star, 15-year-old Sam Levin from Massachusetts who started a garden at his school, got the cafeteria to serve their garden's salad, thereby increasing salad eating in the lunchroom by 80%.  He was just an inspiring kid, and I think we were all wowed by his presence to speak eloquently to over 6,000 people.   There were not many dry eyes by the end of his inspiring speech.  Vandana Shiva rocked in every single session and speech I saw her at.  She was hands-down the most succinct and intelligent person I've ever heard address food security, climate change, and GMOs.  Best of all, she'll be at the MOSES Organic Farming Conference in February. 

To see my photos from Terra Madre and Italy, go here
I think I need another post just to address the food....

One of my favorite photos

1st row (from left):
Brandywine. Quintessential tomato flavor. I think this is _the_ original tomato flavor that we are all after. It is meaty, gorgeous, Huge, and sets the bar for all other tomatoes that come after it.
Green Zebra, followed by Red Zebra and a more unripe Red Zebra. G.Zebra was popularized by Alice Waters, bless her heart. It has a tangy, but substantial flavor, and you can't beat the coloring: A deep yellow with streaks of green stripes. Red Zebra is new to us this year, and from the moment I saw it dangling in the vines, I loved it. Here's what Seed Savers says: "Gorgeous fire-engine red overlaid with golden yellow stripes. Top quality, extremely uniform strain, very productive. Great sweet flavor."
Italian Saladette (Juliet, I believe). This is a hybrid, but I am sold on the Saladettes after spending so much time at Gardens of Eagan. They are like a roma, but also a great fresh eating tomato, perhaps for salads? With the bonus of disease resistance and high-yields. My one observation is that there could be more leaf cover at times--a few Juliets have already suffered from sunscald.

2nd row (from left):
Nyagous (2 next to eachother). I started calling this a black roma at market and it kindof stuck, even though some fruits are larger than a roma. They have a beautiful duskiness to their sheen that distinguishes them from the other black tomatoes we grow. I can't tell apart a Black Krim from a Black from Tula, but I always know a Nyagous. That's helpful when sorting them at market. Awesome flavor.

Currant (Gold Rush-Orange, Matt's Wild- Red). Itty bitty tomatoes that we usually snip off the whole truss once they are all ripe. Picking each of these babies by hand would equal $10/pint, but we did throw in a couple of the loose ones in CSA pints. Matt's Wild Cherry might have the biggest tomato flavor in such a little bite, and they are constantly neck in neck with Sungold sales at farmers markets. More about the unbeatable Sungolds later....

San Marzano Paste (4 next to eachother). High solid content which makes it great for cooking. An Italian variety, an heirloom I believe. First year of growing this--we've never grown a true paste tomato, but I've heard good things about San Marzano. They are beautiful--I do love the shape of the traditional Italian paste tomatoes. The taste test will come once we make a fresh tomato sauce with them.

3rd row (from left):
Washington Cherry. These are big red cherry tomatoes. So big that I barely consider them cherries. I like my cherry tomatoesa little smaller, however these have nice flavor and hold really well on or off the vine. Plants don't stake well, and they are the only tomatoes that are showing signs of blight. I won't grow these again--there are better red cherries, but that doesn't stop me from eating copious amounts of them.

Sungold. If I could only eat one tomato, Sungold would be it. They have nearly perfect flavor--very fruity, very sweet, literally they taste like a sunny summer day. They are the crack of the tomato world (in more ways than one, Ha!) and drive customers to do things they would never want to admit to doing over a few handfuls of orange tomatoes. BUT with good reason. These are fresh market treats only. They are prone to cracking and bursting with mere drops of rain and the cracking precludes any ability to ship cross country. This is always the best kind of produce no? Well, not always, even for us fresh market growers. The cracking drives a picker insane, especially towards the end of last season when it started to rain non-stop in mid-August. We would pick pints and pints of sungolds only to find that half of them cracked in the pints within a 1/2 day of being picked. Then the fruit flies would descend unto the cracked fruit. These will go in the hoophouse next year to control water flow.

Cherokee Purple OR Black Krim (below Sungolds). I forgot to keep track while I was picking, and I can never tell these black tomatoes apart. It hardly matters because they both taste so damn good. Seedsavers states that Cherokee is their favorite purple tomato (it is more a rosey color) that rivals Brandywine's flavor. I agree. It can be smoky sometimes. That goes for Black Krim too. I used to maintain that Black Krim was my favorite heirloom--now I cannot say that with certainty since I can't really tell Cherokee, Black Krim, or Black from Tula apart. They are both equally delicious I guess. More research needed here.

Eva Purple Ball (far right, last row). These are a purty deep rose color that are supposed to have a fine white mottling. It's our first time growing these. Recommended by Carolyn Male's 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden. Carolyn stated that "there are no obvious faults with this outstanding variety....Taste is...sweet, luscious, and quite juicy." Very good yield, disease resistance, despite variable weather. "Originally brought from the Black Forest region of Germany in the late 1800s." I have yet to taste these since we want to have enough to give away to members tomorrow, but I'm sure we will not be disappointed.

We have even more tomatoes, however these are just the ones that have started to ripen up first. Profiles will be forthcoming on the Yellow Riesentraube, German Pink, Green Grape, among others.