July 27th, 2024 Changing Things Upward

 

Lilly's babies are a week today

This is the fifth Summer of trying to become a Market Garden Farm. This is a specific term used to describe what those guys you see at the Farmer's market do for a living. And so far . . . it has been a winner when it comes to learning how to grow things, but a real loser when it comes to making a profit.  We have been working hard to improve the planning and execution of our plantings. We have learned how to make fertile soil without chemicals, make the ground ready without tilling, steward the soil and the plants from seed to compost. In fact, if the only goal was to grow things, we have done it. But as a business it has been a real buster.  So we have decided to change things up.

There is always a Grand Plan, something which was in place long before we found this place and built our home and business. The bare bones of the Grand Plan was to find some way to build a home and business, which makes money, without too much effort. And it's not as if we are afraid of working or there has been no success either. But this past week, when we were sitting vigil over our newest litter of beautiful baby Basset Hounds, we had time to talk things over and do a bit of math. Here is the short answer to the question of Market Garden Farming: If we are doing well, which we are; and we have food to sell, which we will eventually have; and we sold every speck of it at two dollars a pound, which we cannot do for many reasons; then we will make a net profit of minus two thousand dollars without paying for the labor it took to lose that investment. 

Our ducks have kept the bugs down

So farming, as a business, something which has always been a part of our next step of funding our next investment, for five years now, has pushed us in the wrong direction even if we did learn so much. And if we scaled the whole thing up to every inch of space we would only go farther behind in other parts of the Grand Plan. So it is time to change things up, free up the time and money, and move forward.  But this takes a bit of time and effort to figure out the next move and we still have a lot of crops in the ground to sell this year, even if we do so at a net loss. It is no use to leave what little money there is on the table, about thirty-five cents on the dollar (best case). 

The problem is not growing things.

Some of the things we do pay off, if a bit too modestly. Our Basset Hound business is a happy one and, if things go well, it adds to our ability to move forward into the Grand Plan. For the past five years we have been putting the Rocketdog returns into farming so this move out will free that money up for other uses once we figure out what to do next. So Rocketdog stays and might even grow a bit, as it always was part of the Grand Plan. Bigger boarding, same amount of puppies. We haven't been able to move into boarding and grooming as we had always planned. 

Our Grand Plan was to terminate in becoming a wedding venue, where the real money may be. But the plan was made over ten years ago and we have aged quite a lot since then. We are now five years behind in our goals, so perhaps the wedding thing won't happen. Some plans, especially those with lofty goals, fail to make it to the end. We planned for this and included failure into the plan. If we never add anything new to our income stream we will be poor, but happy and not uncomfortable. So perhaps this is where we are headed. But there are some good ideas to work on and we have the time and spaces to do them.

The problem is not growing things.

One of these things is perhaps going into herbal remedies based upon the herbs we have space to grow. We have been using our products for a few months and the results are nothing less than fantastic. One product we are using is a tincture of Purple Dead Nettle, a seasonal herb which grows in our rows in early Spring before our crops have gone into the dirt. This herb, once steeped into a daily dose, has made our lives so much easier and reduced our pain tremendously. So perhaps I can find a market for it. But there are many other herbs which we are trying out, things with potential. We might be able to grow these things and make useful remedies for sale. 

For now we will continue to work the Farm, but next year we will scale back the planting effort and begin rebuilding our plans. Time will tell whether we ever do make anything of the place. But if all we get is good food on our table and enough income to keep eating, we are going to do just fine. 

June 24th, 2024 Purple Dead Nettle Farmacology Experiment

 

An Update on our purple Dead Nettle Experiments from early April.

We found out about this wonderful little plant this Spring when it was growing voraciously throughout our garden beds. I looked it up and found this cousin to the mint family had certain medicinal qualities and tried it out simply by chewing a bit of it and spitting it out. The anti-inflammatory effects were nearly immediate and a problem which has caused me endless knee joint pain for years decrease significantly because the swelling went away. So we did some research and decided to make a medicinal tincture from it.

The process took eight weeks and used a quart of organic potato vodka (so it doesn't trigger Ann's gluten allergy) to draw out the medicines. The processing was simple and we had done extracts before, so knew something of how to keep the downsides out of the mix. In the end we made three different jars, one was straight Purple Dead Nettle (not purple, not dead, and not a nettle at all). The second jar was Purple Dead Nettle with some Spearmint leaves thrown in for flavoring. The third we added Chocolate Mint. All three jars had to sit in the dark for eight weeks.

When we pulled them out I tasted them all using a kitchen teaspoon and put about a tenth of a teaspoon under my tongue at a time. Taste wise, the Chocolate Mint brew was better tasting so we bought a few tincture bottles, the sort with an eye dropper in it, and filled one of them with the stuff. Then the real experimenting started.

I began using this last Tuesday at breakfast. I simply pulled about a half of a teaspoon into the eye dropper and squirted it under my tongue and left it sit there for a half minute before washing it down with juice or whatever I had in my glass. Because of the alcohol content, putting the stuff under your tongue imparts the medicine almost directly into the bloodstream and the effects are nearly immediate.

For the past three days I haven't thought much about my knee, the pain dissipated, any swelling disappeared, and the joint became useful once more. When I sleep I am no longer awakened by twinges of pain from my knee and it is no longer sensitive to being positioned less carefully. The knee joint was always painful, even when sitting or laying down, and it caused me to limp noticeably most of the time. I injured it by misusing the thing and never wearing knee pads, so this has been a long time of often intense pain which could not be avoided. The pain is mostly gone today.

Today I am walking almost normally and beginning to put weight on the leg when climbing stairs and rising from the ground or chair. Being able to work on conditioning will only make things better over time. There simply is no swelling and the nerve endings have calmed to a point where I can walk naturally. I gave up using Voltaren (a topical analgesic with side effects and warnings) this week as unnecessary and go half the day before noticing my knee except to notice there is nothing wrong with it. My knee is still physically injured, this is only going to be fixed by surgery on the meniscus tendon. But using the tincture of Purple Dead Nettle it looks a though I won't need to have things fixed at all. The stuff is amazing.

Ann has had Osteo-Arthritis in her lower back and hands for the past four years, some days nearly debilitating, all days suffering some ill effects. She too was doing half a teaspoon in the morning and it was doing her some good. She was using Voltaren on her hands at bed time and in the morning to help stave off the pain and allow her to work. Today she upped the dose to a teaspoon and is moving around normally. She still has some twinges of pain, but the pain is not associated with the swelling, it is of the bone itself. Her pain was much more acute than mine, but it too is beginning to slack off and allow her to do the work we have to do here.

If you want to try some of this tincture out. Get in touch and we will hook you up. No side effects to be expected. Nothing in it that might hurt you that we know of. It is something of a miracle in a two ounce bottle and makes me wonder what other good ideas we might find out in the garden.

May 12th, 2024 Hurrying Up So That We Can Wait.

 

Our two rows from
last year as of today.

We've been pretty busy here on the Farm. Working the planting plan, sprouting seeds, and putting what plants we can into the ground. But the Springtime weather is a bit too wet and a lot to cool to make a while lot of headway in growing things. Still and all we are getting some things going while we wait for the Summer.

Our two rows when
we started this year.

Right now there are many hundreds of plants either in the Greenhouse or on benches nearby. Every type of seed. We have quite a few varieties of Peppers, tomatoes, corn, beans, peas, and most other garden veggies that come in seed packets. There were enough plants this year that we had to come up with some way of keeping track of them. Managing what we have, what we will need, and where they are in the growing cycle takes a lot of time. In the past years we tried jotting things down on paper, but this got confusing and really didn't tell us too much unless we spent hours compiling the numbers for analysis. Then we started journaling things using Google's Calendar, and this was a bit better because the numbers would show up on a wider variety of computer screens and fit in our pockets. The calendar almost made it work, but again we had to pull the information off of the computer and put it into a spreadsheet to make sense of it. Last year we moved everything over to a Farm BLOG, something like what you are reading right now, but without all the great writing. But in the end we raand into the same problem, pulling out data and then trying to analyze it.  All of these things had one central theme, journal what you did today. 

So this year we are trying to do something simpler. We came up with a string of numbers for each type of seed and are journaling each type on a separate page. The form is simple and handles one thing well: planting seeds in dirt. This is the form:

z-x/y-1:2-3:4 ______________________

• z is the seed name. Usually we are planting more than one type of seed of the same kind. Like two varieties of watermelon or three varieties of lettuce. So we give each a separate letter for each variety at the top of each page. 
• x/y is the date of the entry. The x is the month, y the day. 
• 1:2 are greenhouse numbers where 1 is the number of seeds we have showing leaves and 2 is the number of seeds we have planted in the Greenhouse. (So if we have planted eighty seeds in trays or otherwise and eighteen of them have shown up bearing leaves the thing looks like this 18:80.) 
• 3:4 are the plants in the dirt out in the garden where 3 is the number of plants growing in the garden, 4 is the number of plants we need growing in the garden. (So 5:24 mans we need 24 but have 5)

Since we get around to looking at trays of seeds as we need to, the new numbering system keeps track of what we have, what we need, and where we are in the process. This cuts way down on  journaling what is actually going on.  There's room at the end for notes. Like fertilizing, or if we run into something out of the ordinary.  A typical record changed to look like this for watermelons:

 Sb- sugar baby - 48

W - watermelon - 48

W-4/11-0:44-0;48 greenhouse

Sb-4/11:0:36-0:48

W-4/23-37:44-0:48 sprouting 11

Sb-4/23-25:36-0:48 sprouting 50

W-4/26-39:52-0:48

Sb-4/26-24:24-0:48

Sb-4/29-21:66-0:48

W-4/29-57:74-0:48

Sb-5/1-31:96-0:48 

W-5/1-44:52-0:4

So we can tell just from looking that we have ten sugar baby watermelon sprouts out of thirty we have planted in pots, there aren't any out in the garden yet, but we plan for forty-eight eventually. If there's something that doesn't make sense we can find out what just by counting the plants and looking at the trays.  Eventually we might develop something that tracks the harvest, but we decided to keep it simple for the time being. In the current format we can see how long it took to sprout the seeds, then how long it too to get them planted in the ground. And since we track plants separately we've got nothing to sort out later. we're hopeful this will work, but journaling is a big part of getting things going in the right direction.  

Other than this I am spending a lot of time preparing rows for planting. Each row must be weeded out because we don't weed them in Winter. We don't weed them because in our no-till system the roots of weeds is part of the natural cycles which add soil organic matter below the surface. Weeds can help protect the soil from ice and rain damage too. After clearing things off the surface, I use out broadforking tool to make sure the soil isn't compacted. Since we don't till the dirt and don't walk around on it either there's little chance the soil is going to be compacted, but we check anyway. Then I sift out a load of leaf mold compost and spread it onto the beds. This compost will feed the soil, the worms, and the microbes that make nutrients available to the plants. In the end we have a nice light and well drained soil that holds water and plants well. Planting is a cinch and the plants have plenty of room to grow. 

Eventually, once we have plants in the dirt, I will put the irrigation system together and make sure things get water in Summer. For now the water in the ground that comes to the surface from below is plenty enough, and it rains all the time anyway, but once the plants start fruiting we need to keep the leaves dry as best we can. 

As it turns out, farming is hard work. But it gets a bit easier every year as we learn how to do things better. Right now we're doing the hurry up and waiting thing. We go out each morning and get all that we can do done until we tire out. Eventually we will be forced to wait until stuff starts ripening and then we'll have to market everything the best we can. 

It takes a marketing plan to sell produce, this is certain, but until the crops become reliable putting anythiing more scientific to the plan makes little sense. But we will get there.

March 27th, 2024 Fertilizers and Planting Tables

Our new Strawberry rows

We're spending the year working on things which improve growth, which are not the soil itself, as our New Year's Resolution Project. A few weeks back I spent a few words describing how much of what we will do involves using mycorrhizal (root fungus) powder to increase our effective root systems. We began planting right after my last post so here's a short update: 

We learned last year that Blood Meal as source of organic nitrogen works, even if a bit slowly. We also learned that Fish Bone Meal worked to soften transplant shock, allowing our plants to recover after being planted and begin growing more quickly. After I wrote the last post we began adding the mycorrhizal powder in planting holes along with a bit of Fish Bone Meal when we planted our ten new rows of strawberry plants. A week later we have really great growth to show for the effort. In the case of the seven hanging baskets we planted, to use some plants we had no place for, plant growth is explosive. The Strawberries we have planted this year have doubled in size in just over a week. So this part of the experiment has worked well so far. But the Mycorrhizal fungi hasn't really had time to develop effectively so things will likely get better in the next few weeks. Since we put those strawberries in the ground we have begun planting seed in the greenhouse and there's quite a few new things going on in there too.

We're trying a new way to plant onions

In an attempt to speed seed sprouting up a bit, maybe get a bit lower seed attrition, we began soaking our seed in a one percent solution of hydrogen peroxide. The idea here is that hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) has one more oxygen atom than water and this spurs seed into sprouting quicker. There's a secondary benefit to this as well. Hydrogen peroxide kills off any viruses or fungi living on the surface of the seeds so we aren't putting bad stuff into the soil which might retard growth of cause plant diseases. In one case, the feminized Maui Pineapple Chunk Kush marijuana seeds sprouted five out of five. Since this is a eight dollar seed which we usually only get a three of five return on we are doing really well.  In three days we had sprouts, in five days we had secondary leaves. We're also getting a much higher rate of sprouting with tomato seeds too. Since we just planted about four hundred seeds this week we don't have better numbers to report, but it looks pretty good from this point. 

Five days after soaking
and we have leaves.

I began sifting the potting soil we made last year before packing the flats for seeding this year and this did some good things. The first is that the remaining planting soil is excellent with no rocks, twigs, leaves, or bugs to work around. We pack the flat, or the pots on the flat, and then dust them with mycorrhizal powder and fish bone meal. Then we sift a light coating of planting soil on top and pat the thing down tightly. Afterward we poke a hole in the surface and put seed in, then sift a bit more soil on top to close up the holes.  All of these are new practices, so the outcomes aren't known.

I have been studying next steps for a few weeks. One of the next steps is to "up pot" the sprouts into larger pots while we wait for Spring heat to arrive and outdoor planting to begin. Eventually we will take the greenhouse starts we have in smaller cells and move them into bigger pots. To accomplish this better we found two new organic fertilizers to help kick things into higher gear. The first is a product called Garden Tone, which is a fish bone meal based potting fertilizer. We will mix this into the soil we pack into the larger pots and then move our sprouts into them to feed the plants once they get past their transplant shock. The fish bone meal shortens the time it takes to get past transplanting shocks so once things get growing again we will start root watering using a light solution of Chilean Nitrate fertilizer, in solution. 

Our new planting routine in action

Chilean Nitrate is the only high nitrogen fertilizer that comes plant ready, meaning that the  plant can use the stuff right away.  We have been using Blood Meal for nitrogen, but Blood Meal takes four to six weeks to become plant ready, so this is better. 

I will soon be building a sink in the greenhouse to soak fertilize flats in and then wash produce later.  Soaking the flats in a half inch of fertilizer water will feed the plants very well without the problems of leaf watering. We will drain the excess fertilized water off into a watering can and use it to feed plants already in the garden, so there won't be much waste. We have a few choices of sinks sitting out in storage, I think the laundry sink we used in the Tiny Home Cabin will work the best because it's lighter and smaller. 

All in all I am very happy with the results we have so far and hopeful that our new plans will give us the early results we need. The goal is to make this place profitable from produce and we seem to be headed in the right direction.

March 10th, 2024 Thinking About Soil Science

 In the weeks coming up to early Spring, most of our plans are made and in place. We know pretty much what we are going to grow and where it will all go, before actually starting to put stuff into the ground. And, as we have in all previous years, we fail in enacting a large part of our plans for many reasons. Weather is the ecstatic part of our plan. Nature will do what it does and nothing we plan can change things. Planning is a static thing. We spend time learning new things, looking for pieces of a puzzle aimed at making the Farm produce stuff people will buy. Every year brings a new opportunity to do what we came to do when we bought this place and took up the work. The Farm has it's own schedule, if we fought this idea we'd lose. Despite all of this, every year I try to come up with ideas on how to get the job done. The New Year's Resolution habit has been something I've done for decades. I would pick one thing to learn, one thing to do, and learn to do it; the list of stuff I've learned is pretty overwhelming (you'd think one of them might have made money). Two years ago I spent my spare time looking at Compost stuff. Last year it was all about Pest Control. This year I'm hip deep in soil science. My focus is on improving the soil below the surface, without actually going down into the dirt to get there.

Last year's no-till effort was all about attracting the right sort of animals, worms, and discouraging the wrong sort, beetles. My brother remarked that he had left a straw bail on our soil for a week and when he opened it there were literally hundreds of Compost Worms trying to eat an entire Straw Bail,this  tells me the Compost Worms are abundant and happy. The questions of improving worms is the Earthworm population that actually lives in the soil, not Compost Worms  live in stuff above the soil surface, like piles of leaves and this prepares the compost for being made into Soil Organic Matter (SOM).  But Earthworms take in the clay, sand, and Soil Organic Matter and pass the mix through their digestive system. It comes out behind the worms in clumps which are covered over in digestive microbes.

These microbes release the nutrients they find pre-digested in these clumps. The microbes eat the clumps, they accumulate nutrients in their little bodies, and when they die the nutrition is released into the soil ready for plants to use. Clumping soil is also better because it has space for roots to grow where they will find water and ready nutrients ready for plants to use. But there's one more peice of the puzzle to think about and it takes a bit of learning.

Fungus is among us.  For our purposes I won't go into how fungi are everywhere, on everything, in the air we breath . . . The truth is Fungus is everywhere. But this is about garden soil fungus and there are a few basic types. The first are the Mushroomy sort of fungi that live on rotting wood. This sort of fungus s helpful to farming because it breaks down large wood that worms cannot eat. Permaculture farming is often based on putting logs under the dirt and eventually this leads into some really nutrient heavy soils which don't require much water. There are fungus that break down animal and vegetable matter and these are the things I am writing about today. Fungus processes dead things so once the microbes I wrote of earlier die off this makes room for fungus to come and break their little bodies into their useful parts. Once particular sort of fungi, the mycorrhizal  (literally "fungal root") type,  live on the surface of living root systems.  There are two basic types of mycorrhizal fungi I am spending time learning this year.  Both do basically the same job so I'll treat them the same.

Endo and Ecto Mycorrhizae live on plant roots and connect the roots to the soil in a broad web. The fungi finds loose bits of nutrition and water, carries it to the surface of plant root systems, and trades it for stuff the plants make, like sugars.  These fungi extend the effective size of a plant's roots, so less root is needed to support more plant, more fruiting. Endo Mycorrhizae does this best for annual plants, like Summer vegetables and flowers that live through the Winter in seeds. Ecto Mycorrhizae does this too, but with perennial plants that live through the Winter in the roots of plants.  Both of these types of fungi do much the same job, and just like other fungi they are literally everywhere, but the difference between a good garden and a really great garden is in making the conditions right for these two types of fungi to thrive in the soil all of the time. There's competition to think about.

There are a lot of fungal types, most do something of the same job, breaking down the dead into parts that life can use. These two types specialize in carrying this stuff down to plants in a symbiotic relationship, but the size of the fungal colony waxes and wains, depending on what is being grown. The right conditions are not always present to maintain a huge colony of Endo or Ecto types the whole year around, so colonies have to be re-established and those colonies have to re-grow into a useful size to support great plant growth. So the question becomes: If the soils is right, the worms are there, the microbes are dying in their millions . . .  How do we encourage the right sorts of fungi so that our plants can develop into living their best lives? So my experiment this year is to do a few things and see what happens. 

The first thing I will do has already started. The first things we did were to build a great soil mix so that the worms would come. part of this is to be really aware of soil compaction so that our worms weren't driving around harder soils, part of this was to establish a no-till system that didn't chew our worms up.  The worms brought the right sorts of microbes. Not mixing air into the soil encourages the right sorts of microbes and discourages the wrong sorts. Too much air encourages microbes that eat plant matter very quickly, so it isn't there to hold water or clump behind worms. Too little air ar the microbes we get work very slowly and give off methane gasses. The right sort carefully breaks down plant matter. These steps are already working today.

The second thing we need to do, the part of this year's plan where we make the change, is to put a bit of these Mycorrhizae type into the soil when we plant starts and seeds. Then maintain the soil with an eye toward encouraging the fungi to remain alive and healthy all the year around, so when we plant our veggies and flowers, there is already a thriving fungal community in place with stuff to offer the plants. This ought to encourage rapid plant development and make our short -bottom of a narrow valley- growing season to produce more and produce it more quickly. 

Our no-till system puts worm food on top, keeping our worms happy. Keeping our feet off the planting spaces and using soil watering systems keep our worm habitat happy. The worms spread the microbes, making the microbes happy. Feeding the worms and protecting the soil makes the microbial growth environment happy. If we put some of the Endo and Ecto Mycorrhizae directly on the roots of plants, or in places where seeds will sprout roots, our fungal colonies won't need to find roots to work with, making the fungi happy. And, finally, if the fungi become well entrenched in soils where things grow all of the time, the environment for plants will be completely happy.  Then we might be happy with the increase in produce that we can sell and spend the money on stuff that will make our farm happier.