Remember Today While Eating Carrots in July

 

I will think about today while eating carrots in July.

We attempted to flame weed our carrot beds before seeding them this April, with the hopes that would scorch some of the early season weeds that spring back up from wet soil after tillage that time of year. It didn’t work too well. The weeds grew like crazy anyway, attempting to overtake the wimpy carrot tops that somehow support those orange taproots we love to cook with and eat.

So, we weeded them by hand all afternoon in a light spring rain. An effort at reclamation. Hopefully, more carrots remained in the ground than in our muddy hands!

These days move quickly, though they are already quite long. Dusk falls at nine PM and the birds are chirping before I can usually wake up. There is so much to plant, weed harvest and till. Our work does not seem to end now, but it is satisfying to know that it will pay off in ripe summer vegetables.

We work because we love what we do, and we work so that our people will be fed….

Down With Cover Crop!

Rye and vetch cover crop that survived this winter in our filed on the westide of Vashon.

Sometimes it feels like we bully cover crop on this farm; building it up only to tear it down — akin to the low self-esteemed mongers that ravage middle schools everywhere.

But our chopping up of green manure is an act of love, as is the way we till it in, building soil with organic matter in an attempt to restore fertility to this farm rather than deplete it through exhaustive, industrial methods that are found elsewhere.

We just got finished tilling in the overwintered cover crops planted last fall, and they are breaking down in the soil as we speak. We plant a good deal of  vetch and rye in the fall — which we grow together consistently through the winter, as rye is a unparralled achiever in the tall- growth category, depositing lush amounts of green material to break down in our soil each spring as long as we get to it early enough, tilling boot-high stands before the grain’s seed pods start to form and the plant shifts from  being primarily nitrogenous in nature to wielding a composition that is heavier on the carbon end of the scale.

Lush cover crop at the perfect stage for tillage in the field that will become this season’s home for our dry bean crop.

Carbon is good to us in the soil — as are humus, lignin and the simple microbial life that comes from allowing nearly anything at all to decompose in the soil — but let’s be honest, nitrogen is even better, which is why we rush to get our cover crop tilled before the plants run away from us and start to dry down in the field. Most of the vegetable crops that we grow love nitrogen, conventional farmers douse it on their fields by the truckload full of petroleum-based, synthetic fertilizers, and we are not at all above the stuff, either. But at Island Meadow, we add nitrogen gently, using organic compounds and relying heavily on cover crops and compost to build the fertility of our soil.

Vetch is the perfect companion to our rye. While rye takes off early in the fall, creating a good canopy and root material to prevent erosion and mineral leaching through the saturated winters that we know well and somehow come to love in the Pacific Northwest, vetch really shines come spring by climbing the tall rye strands (which look very similar to grass) and reaching for the sky once the spring equinox passes and our days begin to stretch out to sanguine lengths. And vetch hails from the pea family, therefore fixing nitrogen in our soil in a way that no other plant family can. It’s almost magical.

In a nutshell, Rhizobium bacteria live on the roots of plants related to peas, like vetch — the fabacea. These bacteria allow pea-family plants (clover, fava beans, vetch, peas, and others) to pull nitrogen from the air that is unavailable to any other plants. The nitrogen is drawn into purple nodes where the bacteria lives on the roots of our vetch. When we till, the bacteria, roots and nitrogen all break down in the soil leaving plant-available nitrogen in a form that was not there before.

For all these reasons, we plant cover crops again and again and again. We sow them in the fall to cover the soil through the rainy season, but we sow them in spring and summer, too. Some, like the field peas we get locally from Nash’s Organics, in Sequim, we are able to harvest and sell as food. Others, like buckwheat and phacelia that are planted in the warmer months, attract beneficial insects and pollinators that help our cash crops to thrive. But all the cover crops allow us to build our soil, which is a tendency we rely heavily upon — for if the soil we humans depend upon for food is depleted, as much of the world’s soil has been over time, we’ll be hard-pressed to find more in this late-stage of human development.

This is one facet of what makes our farm “sustainable.” At least we hope. Stay tuned…..

Gathering Seeds — a look at what we sow

All winter long we have been neglecting the blog, and now it is well past the idle season of flipping through seed catalogs and anticipating warmer months when life springs forth, anew. Already we are pulling seeds out of their storage containers, sowing them in greenhouse flats, and rotating an armada of seedling trays from the heated coils where they get started to unheated benches nearby. The propagating greenhouse is packed with beets, allium, flowers and brassica seed sown in February and March, and we haven’t even begun the process of direct sowing seeds into the farm beds outdoors.

But we want to take a moment and look at what seeds we are using, and why, at Island Meadow Farm.

When possible, we purchase organic seeds to be used at Island Meadow. Organic seeds are grown in organic farming systems, and therefore are more well-suited to producing plants that will succeed in the growing culture we employ on this farm. Conventional seeds are produced by plants offered synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. It follows that the plants grown from those seeds will thrive under similar conditions — which we are not going to give them! We would rather use seeds produced by plants that flourished and successfully made viable seed with organic farming methods similar to how we grow our vegetables and flowers around here. They are more likely to do better that way.

In addition, seed crops generally are left in the ground much longer than the vegetables they grow from. To grow biennial crops like carrots, chard and beets, the veggies are grown a full season, left to overwinter, and then make seed only in their second year of life. For a conventional seed crop, this means that pesticides and fertilizers are added to the environment for a full two seasons just to get the seed that growers will then sow. Even annual crops like lettuce must be left in the ground for a long time to produce seed. First the lettuce plants have to grow, but then they are left in the ground long beyond the point where harvest would typically occur, for the seed heads have to develop and the seeds must dry down on the plant before collection. In purchasing and using organic seeds, we are less concerned about exposure to residual chemicals on the seeds themselves than to the environmental impact of using those chemicals during seed production.

That brings us to another decision — to grow open pollinated or hybrid seeds. At Island Meadow Farm, we grow both.

Open pollinated seeds are those older varieties whose genetics have settled down enough to produce a relatively similar plant generation after generation. As long as your open pollinated plants are isolated from other species with whom they might cross (don’t get your cucumbers too close to the summer squash, for instance), their seeds can be collected and used the next year with predictable results. We love using open pollinated varieties because it feels democratic. By growing open pollinated seeds, communities are more likely to be able to maintain their own seed stock independent of the large businesses edging their way into control of the seeds we depend on to survive.

Hybrid seeds, too, have their merits. Hybrid seeds are produced by crossing distinctive varieties in order to get a new, different strain. These strains are often extremely consistent in their size, color, and in the days it takes to grow them to maturity — making them convenient for farmers who want the whole crop to be ready at once. Sometimes, that uniformity is great for us. In addition, they have a certain “hybrid vigor” often observed in both plants and animals, often growing vigorously and well. The downsides to hybrid seeds are that saved seed is unpredictable and usually produces plants that vary widely from their parents. Also, the seed stock maintained for crossing the hybrid species is consistently owned and controlled by large seed corporations —  a nefarious approach to food production, in our opinion.

We save some of our own seeds at Island Meadow Farm, although not many. It occupies a good deal of space to keep the crops in the ground long enough to harvest seed. It also takes a unique set of skills. We’ve started with some simple species like dry beans (in the picture above), sweet peas, potatoes and garlic — thought we hope to grow more in the future. Stay tuned!

For more information about seed production, take a look at the Organic Seed Alliance.