First Fruits and First Falls

I have good news and bad news.  First the good news:

 

10#'s of Baby Yukon Golds 6/30/09

The potato harvest has begun!  This is actually the third  mini-harvest, but the first 10#’s was eaten so fast we never got photos.   These are small – the largest barely the size of a croquet ball – but OMG are they delicious.  Harvesting this small severely cuts yields - Yukons only yield 3-4 spuds per plant on average – but I have over 2000 plants in the ground so sneaking some early is not a bad thing!

Now the bad news:

While a 35 year old, 190# man playing soccer against a bunch of 19 yr olds may be bad enough, what this picture does not show is the nasty digger I took in the game before this that separated my right shoulder.  I had a awesome time in my first competitive soccer tournament  (I was drafted Day Of due to several players not showing), but as the glow of the event fades I am left with the reality of  2-6 weeks of rest for my right arm.  

2 to 6 weeks!!! Are you kidding me?!  We are less than 3 weeks from prime potato harvest!   I am currently open to any and all options for harvesting 2500#’s of potatoes with one arm.  I am seriously considering switching the plot to the state’s only “Dig your Own” potato farm.  This sucks.

-Rob

Potato Tower Month #2

So we are now 60% of the way to Potato Tower Harvest (average harvest date for spuds is 100 days) and things are progressing rather well.  With 60 days of growth in, I have added three more rungs, and the more vigorous plants are on rung 5.

This really exemplifies the need, as “Walker” stated in the Month 1 comments, to place only one variety in each tower.  The vigorous variety (likely Yukon) would be on rung 6 if I had been able to push it with hilling.  The slower growing varieties are definitely struggling to keep up – actually  having their growth retarded somewhat due to the hilled soil washing over their top growth more than I would like (we’ve had some hum dinger rain events).  Still things are progressing nicely – other than some flea beetles they are disease and pest free right now.

This is the tower after its latest hilling.  In a perfect world, the left plant would have received more hilling, and the right plant less.  The plant in the back is about right by my guess.  There are actually 5-6 plants that I have had to “train” into these three piles to facilitate hilling at 3 different levels in such a small space.

I just harvest my first (baby) spuds from my field sown plants.  They were Yukons and only producing across about 8″ of soil.  Even in this first attempt at Towering, I have potentially over 20″ of tuber production, perhaps doubling the yield or more when you factor in the TLC that such a small planting allow me to give it.  I have lavished water, the best compost, mycelium inoculation, and fish emulsion on this tower.  I can’t wait for Month 3.2 when I harvest!

As I have already gleaned many learnings from this, I wanted to put them into practice as early as possible so I have started 2 new towers – a Purple Viking and a Kennebec.  Main changes:

• Single Variety per Tower
• Hilling every 2 weeks leaving 3-4″ of Top Growth
• Fencing to keep my crazy dog out.
• Placing the towers where I want 12 cu feet of compost next year (edge of my permaculture guilds)

Even with the foibles of the First Attempt it is still going strong and I am very optimistic about the harvest.  Look for a recap towards the end of July!

-Rob

MREA Energy Fair Workshop!

Just wanted to put a shout out there to all you Midwest Types to come up this coming weekend to the MREA Energy Fair in Custer, WI.  To say that this is one hell of a good time is a complete understatement, and given the focus on “Green” this year it should break all attendance records.  I will be there with our county’ Sustainability  501C3: Sustain Jefferson with a booth showcasing our Gasifier and our Earth Victory Garden concepts.  I will be getting up there Friday morning and should be manning the booth starting after lunch and it would be awesome to see some readers there!

To top things off, I was asked to host a workshop again this year on our Earth Victory Garden. Last year I had no idea what I was getting into, but 450+ people showed up and I talked through systems thinking, composting, permaculture, and household ecological thinking.  To this day it is still a blur, but I do remember having people lined up 30 deep to ask follow up questions afterword.  Gardening is still a great “trojan horse” to get people to start thinking sustainably and I am uber stoked to give another talk.  Might try to use a power point this year as well, but we’ll see.

I would love to visit with anyone that is able to come up – we will be camping on the grounds all weekend and it should be a great time.  The MREA Fair is truly one of the highlights of the year – AMAZING energy and mind blowing discussion all day long, and then after 8pm the beer tents open up, live music fills the air and its a fantastic party.  

Hope you can make it!

-Rob

Primed for Permaculture

Due to giving a series of farm tours over the past serveral weeks I’ve been thinking about Permaculture more than usual lately.  The farm where we have our market gardens is a 20 acre passive permaculture plot – nothing as intense as Robert Hart’s Food Forest, but certainly an intensely designed working farm focused primarily on perennial agriculture: orchards (peach, apple, pear, asian pear, cherries, plums, mulberry…), nut tree groves (pine, hazel, hickory and others), asparagus (.5 acres!), huge patches of chives, comfrey and horseradish, rhubarb, sunchokes; hundreds of feet of grape vines and brambles… you get the picture.  In all there are hundreds of fruit/nut producing trees interplanted within several thousand native forest trees providing seemingly infinite niches in an attempt to maximize ecological output for both wildlife and humans.  I’ve been an active participant in the property for 3 years now and I still learn a staggering amount about the property every time I take a tour led by the owner.

For a variety of reasons, I am becoming convinced that the Developed World is waking up to the possibilities of permaculture.  We held a tour this past weekend specifically on permaculture (for the record I have not taken a permaculture certification course) and we had over 25 people from 4 counties in attendance.  There are articles featuring permaculture techniques in the BBC and even being recommended for major carbon sequestration schemes (finally!).  People are listening to smart Ethanol more than ever, and I was asked to come return to the MREA Energy Fair to give my workshop (3pm Sunday 6/21) on our Earth Victory Garden system – which is essentially a “trojan horse” to get people to listen to a 45 minute talk about permacultural systems thinking.

Perhaps most telling, these days when I talk about linked systems and turning wastes into resources (composting, the 3 sisters, biodiesel) at work people are now calling it Common Sense rather than refferring to me as Leftist Pink-o Commie.  Between the economic crash and $4+ gas people are waking up to the fact that the status quo is Not OK.  And I am convinced that Permaculture will provide the answers.

When Bill Mollison and David Holmgren first coined the theories back in the late 70’s, PErmaculture was primarily a homestead based gardening system for tropical areas with firm roots in the Back to Earth movements of the 60’s and 70’s with some very good ecology science mixed in.  It was modeling agricultural systems on nature to ultimately reduce inputs and increase yeilds permanently.   But as the decades have rolled on, Permaculture Thinking has shown its true depths and thanks to the updating in Holmgren’s incredible work Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability.  Thanks to Holmgren’s work, Permaculture has evolved out of the garden and into a true philosophy that can shed massively important insights on everything from civic planning, to energy production, to livestock management.

We are an incredibly wasteful society that is awash in enough problems to collapse our society. But the very tenants of Permaculture: turning wastes into resources and treating problems as the sources for solutions seem perfectly designed to provide us the answers to this mess.  

 

Tomorrow can be better than today as long as we are Plan-ful and work towards a more Permanent Culture – a Perma-Culture.  Society is waking up, but needs teachers, examples, and more than anything: Do-ers.  

We know what to do, and time isn’t waiting around for us any longer… grab a shovel or a hammer; find a podium or keyboard and get to work.  Its time to get busy living or stay busy dying.

Be the Change.

-Rob

You take the Good, You take the bad…

So I noticed some crazy effed up leaves on my peach trees this past week.  Looked like a leaf roller or something – yeah, it turns out I have a fungal issue with peach leaf curl.  Treatment this year will be taking the affected leaves and composting them – and next year it looks like a simple copper spray, or perhaps compost tea, may be enough.  Still, pretty frustrated that my first years buds and growth were rendered moot.   Live and learn.  The trees aren’t really big enough to support much fruit this year, but you still hate to see them in such a state.

On the Good side, – the potato tower is doing fabulous!  The two larger plants are putting on an inch of growth a day thanks to the compost rich soil, slow rain, and 1″ of worm castings.   Thus far it is VERY encouraging.   To top it off, I (finally!) bought a pair of gooseberry plants from a local native/edible landscaping nursery.  I am excited to see how big they get, how the fruit tastes, and how bad the thorns are.  They are fruiting out already so updates will be coming!

And finally, my personal favorite of the day – two of my compost bins crested 152 degrees today!  I typically struggle to get enough nitrogen in my piles as they are mostly coffee grounds, and with an entire winters haul of materials (almost 3 yards!) I needed to get the piles cooking HOT before I run out of room.  So I mixed in 2 cu ft of lawn clippings for each 6″ of partially cooked compost, wet it down a bit and let ‘er rip.  The first week I hit 142, but I must not have had it wet enough, because after several days of rain, they settled down about 4″ and are cranking along at 150+.  That is a personal best and should net me a very fine finished product if I can keep it up.  Hopefully I can let every other cutting lie on the lawn and still keep the piles going this strong.  How exciting!

-Rob

Potato Tower, Month 1

Last month I built my first potato tower, filled it with 6″ of compost, and planted it with a variety of spuds.  Now 4 weeks in, 2 of the plants are up and running, and the other 6 are finally breaking ground.

Unfortunately, due to my dog digging through the tower after I planted it, I cannot say for certain which plants are doing better, but I would guess its the earlies (Yukon and Kennebec).  I have done one small “hilling” when I added an inch of worm castings a week ago.  Yesterday I added about 3″ of soil to cover the two more vigorous plants and next weekend will add the next row of side boards and fill it with another rich soil mix (1:1:1 compost, soil, worm castings).  

I am considering building an 8′ version of this to push the productivity of the backyard a bit – we do have some unused space along a fence line or two.I still have 150#’s of spuds to get in at the market farm (another 50#’s going in today) so seed is not a problem.  Even if I only net 15:1 pounds in harvest, it will be worth it to be able to condense the plantings to this degree.  The 8 pieces in this tower would have taken over 20 sq feet of space, so from a harvest per sq foot perspective I am already at a 500% improvement even if I only get 8 lbs of spuds, as I a only using 4 square feet in the tower.  For sub acre agriculture, where success is measured more in harvest per foot, this is huge.

All in all its a fun expirement for the summer!

-Rob

Choices

May 23, 2009,  8pm and Intermission at Wisconsin Fashion week where my 30 something wife is making a stand for Real Beauty against the insurgent tide of all but 2 dimensional (literally) teen-something “beauties” that have come to define what it means to be pretty in America.  She is stomping the runway against all odds through incredible skill, vit and vim and I am damn proud of her.  And yes, its hot to be married to a model. For me, sitting in the Fashion Show was interesting to say the least.  Pretty sure I was the only potato farmer there…    Now, placed on a bench on the sidewalk of State Street and People Watching.  Just amazing to see the world passing by and I am waxing philosophical.  Go figure. 

 

State street is so vibrant, so unlike the subdivision where I live.  So many people; so easy to go all existential… what are they doing, where are they going.  Who do they love what are they thinking about?  Diversity everywhere with swallows and nighthawks to boot.

 

Country living – is it an escape or a quest?  Am I running from something or towards something?  Times like this I really wonder as the city certainly has its allure.  I was raised in the suburbs of Chicago – and never felt at home.  The competion, the sameness for mile after mile after mile.  Going to school out in the plains – Nebraska and South Dakota literally opened me to new horizons and the vastness and the cleansing emptiness of Nature.  Wisconsin brought what I thought to be a compromise.  For a year we lived right smack in the middle of down town Milwaukee – but it was nothing like this.  Where we now reside.. in a small bedroom community of 1200 on the freeway with no infrasctuture other than its HOA’s and Outlet Mall will likely never feel like “home”; there is simply not enough there.  Should the free way cease to exist the town would shrink to nothingness again.  There is no purpose; no community.  

 

At the farm, I do feel more connected, but the communion is more with Gaia than my fellow sapiens.  The earth is so alive there as to create an almost visceral reaction – the vibrancy fills your nostrils, your mouth, perhaps even your soul.  Bringing life from the soil is less a matter of coaxing than of daming; an attempt to hold back the bounty of the  Earth so as to get only what is needed/wanted rather than the profuseness that Nature desires.   

 

But the farm is not my home either – at least not yet.  And truth be told, I am not convinced it will be.  The farm entails so many finalities.  Livestock ends most travel, affordable land removes us from most to all of human contact as we get further and further away from civilization.  And removing ourselves that far – is that sustainable?  We  cannot create *everything* we need on the farm, and post oil is we are 40 miles from a population center is that workable?  With whom will we barter and share labor?  With whom will I drink my home brew?  What village will help raise my children? That desicon is a bit off, but it is not a forgone conclusion despite me soul’s yearning to bring forth bounties from the Earth.

 

Here on State Street I know that the denisty is not sustainable either – too many people even in this lightly populated metropolis for the solar energy falling in its square mileage to produce enough calories.  But I think that this may be closer to the sustainable ideal than a 20 acre oasis an hours drive from here.  I look around and see the collee youth, the educated culturata, the hedonists and know that much will change in the coming years – the years that my children will grow to witness.  As the Flobots say – we are the architects of our Last Stand.  The key to that battle, as any military strategist will tell you, is in choosing your ground.  I have many of the tools and am learning the skills – the choice looming now before me is to where I sink my own roots.   

 

Much thought on this in the coming years.

 

Be the Change.

-Rob

The War on Quack

I have a dream: a backyard filled with no till beds, deeply mulched and brimming with worms producing a fertility so rich you can literally smell it.  Weeds pull easily from the humus rich tilth and most of the toil is spent in harvesting, making compost, and sipping tea while watching the kids play.  My reality is far different thanks to my arch nemesis: Quack Grass.  

We tried no till last year.  The soil came alive seemingly instantly, only to be completely overridden by Quack… that bed had hundreds of 7′ long (yes that’s feet) rhizomes in it this spring. The problem is primarily that my lawn is riddled with quack which can gather energy and send it through the rhizomes shooting into my garden beds giving them insane tenacity.   But I don’t give in easily.

My dream will be a reality: I’m stubborn as a mule, am possessed of wicked amounts of energy, and just happen to own a $4000 rototiller.  I will not be denied.

First step is get he effin quack out of the beds.  The beds that I did not no till last year were easier – I forked them and shook all the soil through the times – that’s 3 yards of soil per bed – and chucked the rhizomes into a wheelbarrow.  

The is the extreme opposite of "No-Till"...

Next up is getting the quack out from under the field stone I use for bed edging.  That means moving 100 30# stones per bed throwing them about 4′ and taking the Grillo to the perimeter for 3 passes to hack the rhizomes into bitty bits that are less able to outcompete my clover.  The picture above is a bed in complete disarray - the stone is removed, the soil was tilled last weekend and left to bake in sun.  The quack (of course) resprouted, but the rhizomal supply lines to the lawn were severed.  The bastards are mine!

Once the border is secured, I then rebuild the beds – in this case it is on a slope so

The sick thing is that all that stone came from my yard...

 I am terracing it with stone again.  As I move the soil, I throw it up into a mound and let it cascade down, this exposes most rhizome bits over about 2″ and these I pull out and throw into the ‘barrow.  I took this bed down to the underlying clay – about 8″ – and found another layer of uncut rhizomes several feet long.  I loathe quack at an almost unhealthy level, but I absolutely respect its evolutionary hutzpah.  This plant is incredible!

 

That tilled quack will sit in the sun for a week, get tilled again, and seeded to clover.

I have 7 annual veggie beds (about 70 sq ft each) as well as 4 permaculture guilds about the same size.  I am about half done with irradicating the quack from them.  The goal is to remove the vast majority of rhizomes within my “productive” yard and then cut a 5′ swath of lawn out as a veritable “Maginot Line” against the lawn’s quack.  This, as well as all the paths, is being planted very thickly with White Dutch Clover.  WD Clover is the only plant I have found to outcompete quack – as long as it is mown short and kept wet.  It greens early enough in the year to prevent the quack from getting a jump, and its stolons and uber thick root mass form a nice defense.  Plus I love clover almost as much as I detest quack: it fixes nitrogen, makes a great mulch, and attract beneficials.  

This is a syck amount of work – I spent 8 hours on 120 sq feet of bed and my arms are aching from schlepping 3 tons of stone and 6 yards of soil, but there is an Endgame here.  After 3 years of experimenting with ways to beat the quack, I am convinced that this system will work; that it is possible to eradicate the quack, though it will likely take 2-3 more years before I can no till it.  

In the mean time it is fantastic to see how far I have come with the soil building,  from grey clay and stone to 8″ of deep humus rich soil which is only waiting for me to stop tilling it 3 times a year to allow it to explode with life.  Plus, I was able to mix in half a yard of Russian Comfrey and Mammoth Red Clover cuttings (cut ever so nicely with my scythe) from my fence line mulch crops and will get at least 4 more cuttings from them.  The system is really beginning to work; all that remains is to purge the quack and switch to no till.

I have a dream,

and I will not be denied. 

-Rob

Spud-tacular Start

Things are getting a slow start at the MArket Garden this year.  The soil is quite cool and most of the farm completely waterlogged.  However, I was able to get into the potato patch the past two weekends.  Below is 100#’s of potatoes – 50 each of Yukon Gold and Kennebec.

 

720 row feet of potatoes

The Grillo does OUTSTANDING work in this application.  The Berta Rotary plow will cut a 1′ wide, 1′ deep furrow through the soil, neatly mounding everything to the right.  I then rake out the furrow to an even depth (not really necessary) and plant the seed spuds.  Then comes my favorite part, I turn the Grillo around, putting one wheel on the mound and cut the next furrow working my way back up the plot.  As I work along, the plow throws some of the soil from the new furrow up over into the seeded furrow neatly burying the seed, and leaving enough soil mounded between to “hill” the plants as they come in.  The result are seen above.  Working at a leisurely pace, I can see 360′ (40-50#’s) in a couple of hours including chasing chickens out of the plot and stopping to chat with the other tenants.

Soil prep on this plot was done about a month ago – it was planted with a rye/vetch mix last October and very heavily grazed by 100 chickens and 2 dozen geese all winter.  There was very little top growth, but decent root mass.  More importantly, there was significant manure, so I tilled it in lightly with a rototiller to get the soil breaking that down.  That is the only fertilizer this plot has received in 2 years.

Counting that hour of tilling, I have about 5 hours of work so far in this plot.  There will likely be another 5-10 in hilling and weeding, and it will take me about 10 hours total to harvest it.  Worst case scenario, I about 25 hours for 800-1000#’s of potatoes, which I can sell for $2/lb.   Time to market will be another 5 hours in delivery.  That works out to 30 hours of labor.  Seed was $200, cover crop about $10, and fuel less than $2.  Net Profit will be about $1500.  That works out to $50/hr.  I love growing potatoes.

-Rob

4 sq ft Potato Tower

A huge focus of this blog is finding creative, sustainable ways to eck more produce from small spaces.  I also love growing calorie crops, especially potatoes, and furthermore I really enjoy building things.  So when a friend recently recommended the use of potato towers, I was very interested.  So yesterday I was off to buy materials for several compost bin orders I have and wouldn’t ya know?  2×6 pine was on sale.

 

The theory is simple – solancea plants will root from any stalk that has ground contact – I’ve seen both peppers and tomatoes rooting from their stalks.  The important part with potatoes is that they will lay tubers any where between the original “seed” potato and the soil surface.  Every time the potato plant gets about 6″ above ground, add  more soil – this is why you mound potatoes in the field.  These towers just take the mounding to crazy logical conclusions- the tower is essentially a 3′ “mound”.  What I like most about this kind of tower is the ability to “sneak” potatoes as the season progresses by removing a lower strip of 2×6 and grubbing around.  As most suburbanites don’t have root cellars (yet!) this is a huge plus if you are growing 100#’s of spuds.  Also, as the sides are opaque, spud production will occur right up to the sides, maximizing space and using less water compared to wire mesh designs.  Also, the lumber avoids some concerns that may be present with using old tires.  Old garbage cans, etc would also work.

The only major change I did for mine was that I used 2×4’s for the uprights as I had 10′ of them laying around the garage and I also put a sheet of cardboard under it to thwart the quack.  Speaking of which, this could be considered a hyper productive way to sheet mulch - cardboard out next years beds, and build potato towers along them – one could get (in theory) 600#’s of spuds form one 20′ bed (6 towers with 18″ spacing) and when the towers come down you have a raised bed about 2′ deep with compost when you’re done.  Hmmmm…  

Planting the tower is easy, I took 4 medium seed potatoes (1lb exactly) and cut them in half.  In the spirit of science, I used one each of Kennebec, Purple Viking, Carola, and Yukon Gold to see which liked this method more.  The growing medium I used for the first layer is 2 year old leaf mould, to which I added some pelletized chicken manure for nitrogen as it looked a little “carbon-ey”.  Weather here is mild and rainy, so they should be sprouting in no time.  The only down side is that right after the photo shoot, our new adolescent dog decided that this was a fantastic play pen and tore into it with abandon – I think I found all eight seeds, but she may have eaten one or two.

The claim is that the towers will produce 100#’s of spuds with about 1# planted in 4 sq ft.  That is freakish considering a record yield for field sown spuds is about 14:1; I was very pleased with my 8.5:1 last year.  In typical culture, 100#’s would take at least 75 sq ft, but more likely 150.  I am stoked to see this work and will certainly keep you posted.  Other great advantages – you do not need any heavy equipment to grow these – and harvesting is super easy.  Just be sure to save the soil somewhere for next year – mixing it with fall leaves and grass clippings in a compost bin would be a fantastic way to rejuvenate the soil.

Couple of post scripts. This thing is crazy overbuilt – I would feel comfortable parking a car on it if it had a cross tie across the top!  I think the prime driver of the dimensions is cost.  In the irony of modern economics, 2×6x8′ lumber is cheaper than 1×6x8′ lumber.  Also, pine rots quickly, so using 2x lumber will buy you a few extra years -though by yr 4 I expect these to be falling apart.  If it works I will likely build the next one using cedar decking for the sides and 2×2 cedar for the uprights.  That should last a decade, but would cost about double.  Another advantage would be that it would weigh half as much – this thing is heavy when built!

To make it more fun, we will likely be painting the sides with the kids – I have the idea of making each side a different person, and then we can mix and match the parts each year to create silly combinations.  I would also like to enlist my wife (waaaaay more talented artist) to paint a picture of a potato plant with a “soil view” of roots on one side.

All in all the total cost was about $30 (8 2×6x8, screws, and 12′ of 2×2) and about an hour of time in the workshop -mostly becuase my kids were running the screw guns and they are 5 and 7.  If you can truly get 100#’s of spuds that is crazy cheap – down to literally a few cents per pound over the lifetime of the tower.  Combine that with the ability for literally every single homeowner to grow all their potatoes for a year in as little as 8 sq ft this could be huge!

Be the Change.

-Rob