Juney Gloom

While June stays gloomy, we keep our spirits high

Reach clouds without floating; we're on the weirdest climb

Kind of like a pea stock, curling up the vine

Look down from wherever; the world that we find.

There's a world inside the soil

A world inside your mind

No straight edges yet we read between the lines

One big sine wave, but please don't wave goodbye

I'll see you next time yes we'll meet between the chives

I'll dress in freshly woven fleece

Crisp Lettuce Tie.

Not a single crease yet sleeves are rolled up high

Nothing can go wrong when you're needless and you dine

In fresh Salad sneakers, bleachers built from Rye

Find comfort in the creatures!

Find comfort in the slime.

Without them we're not human whats a cone without a pine?

Fingers made of cucumbers... ludicrous reminders!

We come from the soil : shes a beautiful designer

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June 13, 2017

Discovering very little flower germination

Another oddly wet and cold June day. We started our Tuesday with the usual walk around the terraces in preparation for market day. I planted a wildflower seed mix in the area once occupied by green onions, but we have yet to see any flowers germinate there. Mike took the opportunity to give us a bit of a lesson in weeds (there was lots of opportunity presenting itself).

Picturesque Green Onions

Amongst the supposedly germinating wild flowers there was barnyard grass. This plant can be quite a pain in the butt if established (as can many grasses). It is invasive in North America and quite the terrible agricultural pest. It can spread by rhizome, so even if you pull it out of the soil, leaving any small bits behind can allow it to recuperate.

Black Nightshade

The way I like to think of it is, we aren't growing anything at all - all things grow themselves, if they can. We just hang out and try to give the ones we want the biggest boost. What else is farming but selective plant planting and speciation? What is a 'weed' other than a plant getting in the way of human plantings? We desire green onions, and so we plant and water them but that didn't stop these other individuals from showing up. They are all weeds if they are interfering with our green onion dynasty. In the above photo we have Black Nightshade. Below we have several more. The one with the dark spots on the leaves is called Lady's Thumb. There is probably some chickweed in there as well.

Various weeds happily invading green onion territory

Below you will see the Swiss Chard is doing a good job of shading out weeds. Planting space can have a big impact on weed establishment, because once that canopy grows it takes away all the light and sun that the weeds need. Jean-Martin Fortier talks about this in his book, The Market Gardener.

Chard shading out weeds

Spinach seedling

I also planted Spinach a couple weeks ago. We are finally seeing some germination and seedlings coming out! Its great when you zoom right in and look at them. However, weeding them becomes an issue when you have lots of grasses in the bed! You can see what I mean in the picture below. Its not so easy to distinguish the grass from the young spinach when you are standing with your eyes 5 feet or more away from the soil with a hoe in hand. But I have yet to see any farmers wearing binoculars while they weed. Maybe it will be the next innovation in organic weed management.

Can you spot the young spinach amongst the grass? Of course you can't 

Can you spot the tomato plant?

In this case, we have a tomato plant that is a weed. We are growing peas in this section, and the tomatoes from last year are actually quite unwelcome here (according to Mike). Who ever thought a tomato could be a weed?

Sunflowers behind peas

Here we have sunflowers growing behind our second stand of peas. These sunflowers however, are not weeds. Why not? Because we planted them, thats why! We planted them such to minimize interference with the peas, but they are probably still competing below ground for nutrients, etc. The peas might think the sunflowers are weeds, but since in this case sunflowers are amongst the plants we desire, they are not weeds in our minds.

Sprouting Zuke

Sprouting Cuke

After doing the morning walk around, a truck full of us headed off to the orchard to harvest strawberries and garlic scapes.

Weedy Garlic Field

On days with fortuitous aromatic conditions, one smells a lovely garlic scent when waltzing past the garlic patch. Garlic season is coming ever closer, and one sign of that is seeing the garlic scapes at the market.

Garlic Scape

Garlic scapes are the immature garlic flowers. We cut these off so that the garlic plant will spend all its energy growing the bulb, and put no more into flowers. Turns out they taste just like garlic, and can be use deliciously just as you would use bulb garlic.

Will harvesting Garlic Scapes

The strawberries are various. Our instructor Rebecca is running a trial of a few different varieties. The mutant looking variety below is called Cabot. I have yet to taste one because they haven't quite ripened yet, but I'm sure they will be just as delicious as the other strawberries of more typical morphology. While we were harvesting we were remarking how great it was to be able to see such a diverse group of strawberry plants all in one place. Cabot was the only one with consistently unconventionally shaped fruit, but all of them were quite different from each other. Some are bushier, some are taller, some grow more densely, and they all have subtle differences in flavour. Its really neat to have all that diversity on display.

The 'Cabot' strawberry

After harvest, both the marketable and non marketable fruits are weighed and recorded. Then its off to market!

Torin and Isabel, collecting sweet
strawberry data

Before and after shots of the truck interior.
On the way back we were crammed full of strawberries.
Isabel mentioned it was a bit of a jam 

On the way to the orchard, Jordan informed us that Train to Busan is the best zombie movie he has ever seen. On the way back from market we contemplated our capacity to be artistic. E.E. Cummings and Charles Bukowski were recommended for inspiration. Then we spread some wood chips in the terrace pathways to suppress the pathway weeds and called it a day!