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- Kale starts.
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- Here come the daffodils!
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- Spring buds!
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- Compare this week to last week – the greenhouse is filling up!
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- We are trying something new this year, planting seeds in blocks of soil.
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- Onions or may leeks?
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- Rosemary transplants.
Last time we left off speaking about the earliest plant harbingers of spring, skunk cabbage. The first amphibious indicators of spring have begun to sing their songs to the world. Spring peepers and wood frogs have noticed the longer and warmer days and are becoming active. You can hear them beginning to sing their songs on the first warm days in March. Wood frogs are particularly fascinating because they are one of the few animals that freeze solid in order to survive the winter. Much like a seed the frogs go into a dormant state, or torpor, where they contain the potential for life but are waiting for the first cues of spring until they germinate, or in the case of wood frogs, thaw out and reanimate. The frogs achieve this through many complex physiological changes within their body. The main change is that they increase the amount of sugars in their body. This acts just like the antifreeze you put in your car. Plants, like those in the cabbage family also increase the amount of sugar they produce in order to deal with cold temperatures in the fall and early spring. This is why many vegetables, notably carrots and brussel sprouts, taste so much better after being exposed cold weather.
We like to think of the farm as its own ecosystem. We try to mimic the adaptations that nature has to deal with the changes in seasons but have to take many measures to make sure we can grow enough vegetables when we need them. These schedules don’t always work with the cycles in nature and we are always looking for creative and sustainable ways to mimic the efficiencies we find there. Our greenhouse is a major way we extend the growing season and we discussed the reasons behind it in the last post. Right now we are working backwards from when we know we need to have veggies ready to harvest and when the temperatures will be warm enough to plant outside. We are busy planting and adding new additions to our greenhouses almost on a daily basis. Two weeks ago we had onions, kale, and lettuce. Since then we have added beets, celeriac (a relative to celery grown for a root veggie), tomatoes, broccoli, hakurei turnips, bok choi, and mizuna (an Asian green). The space is quickly filling up.
Because we farm organically and don’t use any herbicides or pesticides it means that we have to pay even closer attention to the way that nature controls problems like bugs and weeds. No healthy forests or field need people to weed or spray pesticides to control pest problems. Instead we study how and why forests function so well and try to apply those lessons to our gardens. This year we had an outbreak of fungus gnats in our greenhouse. These would have potentially been a problem for all the young, tender, and yummy seedlings we are trying to grow. Instead of spraying some chemical to kill them all off we placed sticky traps where they like to fly and the problem is almost gone without the use of any pesticides. We call this type of an approach a cultural one. Cultural practices are ones where we use physical practices to control or nip potential problems in the bud. Another set of practices we use are biological. These are practices where we grow certain plants together because they grow better together. This is called companion planting. A classic example of this is the three sister’s garden where corn, beans, and squash are grown together. Each plant provides something that helps the other grow! Sometimes we grow certain plants not because they help others grow but because they deter or attract organisms, usually bugs, that we don’t want in the garden. This year we are growing pyrethrum. This plant is a type of chrysanthemum that will add not only the beauty of its flowers but it also produces a substance that acts as a safe, organic, pesticide. We are always sure to plant a wide variety of flowers as well so that we have plenty of pollinators to help up grow all our different vegetables.
We use all of these different approaches in order to minimize our ecological footprint and produce the healthiest produce we can.
Hilltop Farmers
