There Is a Season (Turn! Turn! Turn!)

April 18, 2014 by Caroline Potter

This past weekend, we got quite a bit — though not quite as much as I wanted — accomplished (And isn’t that *always* the case?). Curt did a big clean up of the gravel driveway to the farm, raking, blowing, weeding (Already! I know, right?), we got the grapevines planted (more on that later), and I prepped two new beds for direct sowing.

The prepping was easier than most years because we were super-smart when closing up for winter. For overwintering, we always mulch the Victory Farms beds with straw at the end of every fall. However, we made sure to first put down a layer of fall leaves. This protects the soil and the worms, giving moisture and warmth as the ground — but not the weather — starts to warm up. So, I raked off the straw, putting it in a fourth compost bin of sorts (It will be straw only/brown only), and then I removed the leaves. What lay beneath? Black gold, baby. The soil, despite a completely abusive winter, was rich, wormy, and not at all compacted.

Even lacking the compaction, though, you have to turn or agitate the beds in some way. In years past, we would use a spading fork and painstakingly turn the entire bed, going down more than a foot. This was a) backbreaking work, b) time consuming, and c) wildly disruptive to the hundreds of worms that live in our beds. I recently discovered that we’ve been doing it wrong, and that you don’t want to constantly disrupt the profile of your soil multiple times each season. So, I went out and got a new toy, er, I mean, tool: Johnny’s 520 Hardpan Broadfork.

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Sowing the Seeds of Love

April 18, 2014 by Caroline Potter

Every year, I panic and think I am completely late to the seed sowing party — and every year, I am right on time. The perks of keeping a scratch-pad of a written journal in your gardening bag includes being able to figure out when you’ve accomplished major milestones each year, at the very least. On Sunday, April 6th, we pulled out all the trays and cells to clean. Fortunately, we had a bunch of new ones in Curt’s shop (Hello, over-orderer!), so there wasn’t any cleaning involved. We unearthed the Johnny’s seed starter from the tool shed (I still have two more enormous bags, in case anyone needs some.), and then I set about mapping what seeds would go in which trays and who would be tray neighbors.

The idea of tray neighbors is important as best sowing practices include putting slow germinators with other slow germinators. That way, your seeds are germinating at relatively the same time. This matters as most seeds need to germinate in darkness. But once they begin to rise, you must remove the dome and set them under lights or you’ll get leggy, scraggly seedlings. With this in mind, I remembered peppers were terribly slow on the uptake, so I put them in their own trays, and tried my very best to put like with like. Obviously, my system is never perfect because there are so many variables when it comes to seed starting, from the seeds themselves (Are they new? Have they been treated kindly?), moisture levels, temperature, and, of course, luck.

After our initial sowing prep on Sunday of filling the cells with the seed starter material, writing out labels, and marking what each and every cell would hold (336!), we left the actual sowing to Monday. This may have been on account of an impromptu visit to Patio for cocktails with our friends Michael and Trish. On Monday afternoon, though, I cranked through ’em all before Curt even arrived home. We wound up with eight trays of starters in all: three 32-cells of tomatoes (with the determinate ‘maters grouped into one and a half trays), one 32-cell of peppers, one half 32-cell of eggplant and assorted Brussels sprouts, one 32-cell of cabbage, and then two 72-cells — one of lettuce and onions and the other of basil and marigolds.

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Should I Stay or Should I Grow?

March 4, 2014 by Caroline Potter

Every year, right about this time, for the past six years, we’re usually sowing seeds, or we’re at least fixing to. This arctic polar freeze of a winter, however, has rendered that all but impossible. My planting shed is frozen shut, so I’m not sure if I have seed-starting mix from Johnny’s in there or not. And I’m not wholly certain about how many seedling trays I have either.

As I go through seed catalogs and ponder what to fill all our rows with, all the while stuck in limbo, there is one thing I can do: I am officially committing to high yield/high consumption/low waste. Like, tomatoes? We got that. Tomatoes are a success story at Victory Farms. And, even with 80-100 plants every season, we’ve done very well with managing yield and loss. This makes me less interested in low-yield plants (such as broccoli) and, beyond that, any plant that I waste (and by waste I mean winds up in the compost or rotting on my sill).

I have a better idea of what will wind up in Victory Farms, but it’s nowhere near set in stone. I’m just trying to get there by studying shopping lists and our crisper in the down months. Getting back to yield, I’ve done so-so with peppers, even though I grow more than 50 plants each year. I think I’m going to scale way back, but go big on the love and get them in the garden way earlier and harvest much more regularly. I think I can increase production and ultimately increase it with the peppers if I can grow an amount that I can really micromanage and see how they respond.

It all feels like wild speculation while the garden resembles the tundra. I am so grateful that Curt hauled in 10 bales of straw to protect the beds.

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