Late Winter Goings On

So much has been going on out here, it’s hard to know where to begin…. I suppose I’ll begin with today and work backwards…

Today, we finished building our second of three 30×90′ greenhouses.

These two greenhouses I found used on Craigslist. All of the hoops are slightly to severely bent, the purlins are curved, the swages are squished…. but they are done and relatively plumb and square (for hoop houses). We seeded arugula, radishes, turnips, and bok choy into greenhouse #1 on Monday. And when we finished greenhouse #2 this afternoon, we moved our seedlings into it from greenhouse #1. Soon, we’ll till the rest of #1, to get it ready for the seedlings now residing in #2. Greenhouses #s 1 & 2, we consider our practice greenhouses. Tomorrow, we begin building the new greenhouse we bought from Steuber’s. It’s also 30×90′, but has a gothic arch roof, instead of a round one. Ultimately, that will be the house in which our seedlings live. The other two will get tomatoes.

Yesterday, we had our new 1951 Farmall Cub tractor delivered!

Why buy an antique tractor? One of the funny parts about the kind of farming we do is that they don’t make equipment for our sized farm any more. Today, most farms are hundreds, thousands, or dozens of thousands of acres. But back in the ’40s and ’50s, farms and farm equipment were smaller. They also didn’t use as much herbicide, so they had to use their tractors to kill weeds. A Farmall Cub is a really neat, eleven horsepower tractor designed for seeding and cultivating small acreages. The engine and driver’s seat are offset to the left so the driver can watch the cultivating knives kill weeds (the black dart-shaped things under the tractor) as they pass by rows of vegetables.

We bought our Cub last month, but until yesterday it was being worked on by a neighbor, who was helping us figure out how to mount our fancy new Jang seeders to it. Initially, I wanted to put them in front of the driver so he or she could watch the mechanisms on the seeder to make sure everything was working properly. However, the seeders are too tall to easily fit under the tractor. So we opted for the significantly easier rear-hydraulic mounting system. As it turns out, all the finicky parts we felt we needed to keep an eye on when we were seeding with Planet Jr. seeders aren’t visible on the Jang anyway. And mounting the seeders behind the tractor will make it way easier to change seeds.

We also had a new used field disc delivered, which we’ll use to level recently plowed fields to prepare them for the year’s first seeding.  We’re going to start with garlic, field peas, turnips, and radishes. We have also seeded (in seedling trays we keep warm in the greenhouse) over 50 flats of vegetables, including onions, shallots, kale, chard, lettuce, and tomatoes.

Speaking of plowing, as I just mentioned, we had a neighbor plow two acres when we got a lucky weather window at the end of January. We are hoping that the predicted dry weather this weekend will allow us to have another four-five acres plowed.

Those are our biggest accomplishments recently. Along with all that farm work, we are also still busy  working on the financing to buy this farm and, oh yeah, raising a baby. Felix loves working with us. He was an integral part of the greenhouse construction…

and helped us put the plastic up on greenhouse #2 this morning.

 

Warning: advertisement

I usually avoid using this blog for shameless commercial promotion of our capitalist ventures, but today I will make an exception.

We are expanding our Community Supported Agriculture program this season, and are looking for new subscribers. Here is the run-down on Local Roots’ CSA:

CSA subscribers receive a box of vegetables from our farm every week from June to October. We harvest, pack, and deliver the CSA boxes to various drop sites on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Most produce in the boxes is harvested the same day that it is delivered to you, so it’s super-duper fresh, and everything in the boxes is grown on our farm in Duvall.

Each week, CSA shares contain a good mix of  between eight and twelve different vegetables. We avoid over-loading you with the same thing week after week, although we do give delicious salad greens and lettuce almost every week. We mostly include items that most people are familiar with, plus one or two vegetables a week that are a little more unusual, like pea vines, baby turnips, mustard greens, fennel, purslane, escarole, and sprouting broccoli. Staple items include lettuce, mixed salad greens, Swiss chard, carrots, kale, beets, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, radishes, onions, zucchini, cucumbers, potatoes and winter squash.

The price for the 20 week season is $400 ($500 if you want more veggies). We estimate that the average $20/week cost buys you more than $25 worth of produce at market prices. We have pickup sites in Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, Maple Leaf, Phinney Ridge, Madison Valley, Downtown Seattle and on the farm. If you can round up a group of six or more people, we may be able to add a location in a new neighborhood. CSA members are invited to the farm for open houses in the early summer and fall, farm dinners, and work parties throughout the season.

Want to sign up? All you have to do is email us: csainfo@localrootsfarm.com. Or, if you want more information, visit the CSA page on our website: www.localrootsfarm.com.

OK, end of paid commercial advertising. Next, we will return to the regularly scheduled assortment of farm news, botanical interest stories, and occasional political screeds.

Community Supported Agriculture

So, we’re buying this new farm, and basically starting everything from scratch. At our new place, we have a fabulous huge garage, two houses with lots of… potential, and 40 acres of beautiful farm land.

What we don’t have:

greenhouses for starting seedlings

greenhouses for growing our tomatoes

running water for washing vegetables and irrigating

a wash station/packing house

internet access

etc,

etc.

Other things we didn’t have, but now do, include a tractor, several essential tractor implements (seeders, disc harrow), a heated indoor space for germinating seeds, and all the parts we need to build three 30’x90′ greenhouses. Actually, we even have one of those greenhouses completely constructed (so I was exaggerating a little before when I said we didn’t have greenhouses yet). Here it is:

Between buying this property and acquiring all the items we need to grow and harvest vegetables, we’ve been spending a lot of money. Real estate transactions involve all kinds of upfront costs, like getting inspections and surveys, and we’re still in the process of applying for two government-guaranteed beginning farmer loans, so we don’t actually own the place yet. It’s a little bit of a scary situation, but we do have an agreement with the seller to rent the property until our loans close, or through the end of this growing season. That means we’re sure to be able to complete our growing season here, even if the worst comes to worst and our purchase agreement falls through.

In the meantime, we’re moving ahead, getting the houses cleaned up, chopping wood, building greenhouses, starting our first seeds, and taking subscribers for our community supported agriculture program.

When I tell the story of how we started Local Roots, back in 2007, I say that the three of us “founding farmers” each put up only $500 for our startup costs. To be sure, we were starting out at a piece of property that already had a greenhouse for starting seeds, and our landlord/partner allowed us to delay paying rent for the land and use of his equipment until the end of the season. Still, we had lots of costs in January, February, March, and April, and didn’t sell a single vegetable until markets opened in May. We had to buy seeds, seedling trays and soil mix, harvest bins, tools, and a van, pop-up canopy, and tables for the farmers market.

Me, at our first farmers market, almost five years ago.

We spent over $5,000 on all these items, but with careful planning and judicious use of a credit card, we were able to buy everything we needed. How did we do it? With the miracle of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). In January of 2007, I sent an email to everyone I knew, saying that I was starting a farm, and that they could send me $300 and I’d promise to supply them with a season’s worth of vegetables every week. Even now, I can’t believe that a) I had enough confidence to believe we’d actually be able to live up to that promise and b) anyone took me up on it. In fact, 60 people took us up on it our first season. $300 checks started appearing in my mailbox in early February, allowing us to pay off our first credit card bill, and start shopping for a market van.

As it happened, we did manage to grow plenty of food our first season, and supplied our wonderful CSA members with a box of vegetables every week for 20 weeks.

A CSA box in early July 2008. Lots of green in there!

By the end of our first season we had made a little money. Not enough to live on, but enough to believe that we could someday make a living farming. Each spring, our CSA members help get the farm up and running by sending in their subscription payments several months before they will ever see a single radish. As we’ve grown, we’ve been able to set aside more money each fall to carry us through the lean winter months, and have become a little less dependent on the CSA money for our spring purchases. We’ve been able to invest in better equipment, a second delivery van, and pay for health insurance.

This spring, though, is more like our very first year. Jason and I are lucky enough to have a nest egg that will be our down payment on the new farm, but we’re spending our cash hand over fist right now buying seeds, equipment, and greenhouses, hiring a neighbor to plow our first field, and considering the costs of a well upgrade and a new roof for the farmhouse. Today, I’m more appreciative than ever of the community that supports our farm. Although I’m again watching checks arrive in the mail without yet having planted a single seed in the ground, we’ve been here before, and I have about 1000 times more confidence about our ability to grow a bounty of food than I did five years ago at this time.

If you want to be part of this adventure in farming, we are currently taking new subscribers for the CSA. You can find out about it here: Local Roots CSA.

Urban Farmers

Yesterday, I watched the UPS delivery man haul two extremely heavy and awkward packages up the long stairway outside my apartment. He was bringing two rolls of 24’x100′ clear plastic that we’ll be using to build hoophouses on our new farm. Each roll weighed over 100 lbs! Other items that have arrived by delivery truck recently include hose nozzles, a tractor mounted three-row seeder (150 lbs), and 30 pounds of pea seed. I hope our UPS driver doesn’t hate us.

Jason and I are busy trying to get our new farm up and running, and we’re at the stage where we spend a boatload of money buying stuff. At our old place, we had accumulated all these things over the course of four years – as we grew bigger and figured things out better, we acquired the right tools and equipment gradually. Now, we’re trying to take our existing farming model and move it to a new place – leaving behind all the infrastructure (greenhouses, irrigation) and many of the tools and supplies that we used before.

At the new farm, we’re putting up greenhouses, marking out fields to be plowed (if it ever stops raining and flooding), and cleaning up the houses and garage. Each step of the process involves some tool or supply that we don’t have yet. To mop the floor in the old farmhouse, we need water to fill the mop bucket. We still haven’t figured out where the shutoff valve is, so we currently don’t have running water in that house. But we’ll be needing hundreds of feet of hose anyway, so we’re buying it now in order to bring water to mop the floor.

Until we get one of the houses on the new farm cleaned and furnished enough for us to stay there overnight with a three month old, we are doing the commuter farmer thing. That means all our extremely heavy purchases get hauled up 20 steep steps, just so we can turn around and haul them out to the farm. Since we never know exactly when we’ll be out on the farm working, we can’t have stuff delivered there. Instead, we have many large boxes cluttering up the living room of our 450 square foot apartment right now, waiting for the floodwaters to subside so we can move them to the farm.

Yes, that’s right. The good ol’ Snoqualmie River is flooding again. Tonight we’re watching the flood gages on the internet from the comfort of our Capitol Hill living room, wondering exactly what height the Carnation river gage has to reach before water will get into the garage on the new farm where we’re currently storing all our farm equipment. When we left the farm yesterday afternoon, the National Weather Service was predicting a 57.5′ flood, which made us feel very comfortable about the safety of the vehicles and miscellaneous items we have piled in the garage. This morning at 530, when Jason took baby Felix out of our room so I could get some much-needed sleep, the forecast had been updated to 59.3′, a much less comforting prediction. We know very little about how floodwaters behave on our new place, so we’re looking at the various river gages and historic flood photos and trying to put everything into a new perspective. On top of the newness of it all, Puget Sound Energy has been tinkering with the river bed at Snoqualmie Falls throughout the last year, and a lot of people think that this has caused water to come over the falls into the lower valley much more quickly than ever before. Preliminary reports indicate that, in fact, this event did not result in the normal flooding above the falls in the town of Snoqualmie, although it has turned out to be the 12th worst on record for the lower valley. We’re no experts here, but that seems to corroborate the theory that Puget Sound Energy’s work at the falls is making lower valley flooding worse. I plan to write more about the impacts of flooding on our farm and our farming community in future posts. For now, if you want to know more about the Puget Sound Energy project and efforts to stop the ongoing work, please visit our friends at the Snoqualmie Valley Preservation Alliance.

So, we carry on. I’m itching to get our first seeds planted, but we need to get some plastic over that greenhouse first. Also, we have to wait for the flood to subside so we can actually get to the farm. Our first farmers market is in less than four months. Spring is coming.

New Year, New Farm

As you may have picked up on from our earlier posts, Baby Felix isn’t the only big change happening this year. We are very excited to announce that we are buying a new farm. Over the last four years, while we’ve been farming on leased ground,  Jason and I have been on the lookout for our own farm. With Felix just a few weeks old, we learned of a 40-acre farm for sale that seemed like it could be the right place for us. Although the timing was difficult, we decided to go for it. Over the last two months we have been very busy negotiating, inspecting the property, and wading through the state and federal loan applications for beginning farmers (more on this topic in a future post).

The new place is on the Snoqualmie River just south of Duvall, about 12 miles downstream of our old place. The location is one of the three best things about this farm, because it means we’ll be farming the same wonderful flood-plain soil that we are familiar with. The two other best things are 1.) It has two run-down houses, so we won’t have to raise our baby in a travel trailer, and 2.) Although squarely in the flood plain, the ground seems to be relatively high, and floodwater has never gotten into either of the houses. This means that we have the opportunity to grow more food over the winter with a lower chance that it will all go underwater. We drove out to Highway 203 during the last flood (18th worst on record) and by peering across the valley were able to observe how the water flowed across the property and confirm that several acres stayed dry. That’s where we’ll be putting the greenhouse.

A new greenhouse is just one item on an incredibly long list of projects that we need to accomplish before the growing season begins. Because the loan approval process is so lengthy, we will be renting the property from now until our loan comes through, so fixing up the houses isn’t on that list yet. Besides a greenhouse to start our first seedlings in (which we need ASAP), we will also be putting up hoop houses to grow tomatoes. We need to figure out where to place our fields and get them plowed, build a wash station/packing house, buy a tractor or two and the attachments that make the tractors useful. It turns out that starting a new farm is mostly about buying a lot of things.

We’re looking forward to sharing our progress here on our blog. For those of you reading in the Seattle area, we’ll be planning some work parties and an open house in the spring. If you want to get on our Farm News email list, please send an email to  news_at_localrootsfarm.com. About once a month we’ll send an email about special events on the farm.

Well, that’s the news for now. We’re heading out to the new farm today to mark out sites for our greenhouses.  In the snow.

Farm in flood - December 2010

Transitions

Lots of changes are taking place at Local Roots. The arrival of baby Felix is surely the biggest change, but as fall transitions into winter, more changes are afoot.

Sometimes I feel like a broken record when I talk about the weather, but the weather is an ever-present force that we are constantly monitoring, trying to predict, adjusting to, or dealing with. To wit: On Sunday, November 21st, we set a new farmers market sales record! We sold 100 bunches of carrots in only two hours and had sold 60 pounds of Brussels sprouts by the end of the market (thanks Thanksgiving!).

The following day, the snow came, followed by a few nights with temperatures that dipped into the teens. Two days later, what had been a field filled with vegetable abbondanza, had turned into a wasteland of rotting cabbage and kale. Now, we are down to just parsnips, celery root, loose carrots (frozen tops), and radicchio. Because of the reduced variety, the freeze put an end to farmers markets for us, leaving us delivering one day a week to restaurants.

Now, the National Weather Service is predicting moderately bad flooding for the Snoqualmie Valley. As of Thursday morning, it looks like we’ll be getting a 56.8′ flood. Now that’s almost 6 feet lower than the all-time record, but it’s high enough to put nearly our entire field underwater.

The really scary thing about floods, though, is how hard they are to predict. Half the time, the predicted high-water mark doesn’t materialize. But the other half, it’s higher than predicted. In the record flood in January 2009, the predicted height was about 59 feet. When it was all over, the flood was 62.3 feet, causing much more damage than we anticipated.

 

Freezing temperatures, flooding rivers, a departing workforce, these are all events that make the late-fall and early-winter a time of transition for us. But it’s also the time when our favorite seed catalogues begin arriving and we start planning for next year. A time when, in our mind, every crop is a success, each new variety the answer to last years’ failures, and the newest tools or equipment are the solution to last years’ problems.

This year, for us, there are even more transitions in the works… but more on that in another post!

Spigariello – a Botanical Mystery

We like to grow weird vegetables. One of our favorites is spigariello, a member of the large and diverse brassica family. It looks like this:

We get our spigariello seeds from “Seeds from Italy,” a great little company that imports Franchi brand and other Italian seeds for sale in the US. They’re also the source for many of our favorite chicories and beans.

We first grew spigariello at the suggestion of our friend Justin, who had cooked with it in Italy. We didn’t know quite what to expect when we read the description: “many small broccoli tops that will resprout when cut.” It turned out to be a big, bushy plant that eventually formed a very small central flower head that looked a little like broccoli. When you pick the central flower, the plant begins to produce small side branches, which each have a tiny floret of their own. This growth habit allows us to harvest continuously from the same plants for many weeks, since the plants continue to make new shoots to replace the ones we pick.

Botanical side note – this growth habit is typical of brassicas, and is also found in basil and other herbs. Plants produce flowers in order to reproduce, and when you pick their un-opened flowers, some plants are moved to continue to produce these flowering parts ad infinitum. From the plant’s perspective, these flowers are its only chance to reproduce and keep its genes in the gene pool. When we pick them, the plant somehow knows what has happened, and makes more. Pole beans and climbing peas have a similar trait – if you leave a few pods on the plant long enough for the seed inside to mature, the plant will slow its production of new pods. In the “mind” of the plant, it has successfully produced the seeds it needs to pass on its genes, and so has less of a motivation to make more new seed pods.

OK, back to the weird Italian greens. When we harvested our first crop, we cooked it a few different ways. In texture, the leaves of spigariello are similar to a hearty kale, like cavolo nero (aka Lacinato kale or the hated moniker “Dino” kale), but it also has tender, meaty stems (see picture above) that are probably the best part. The stems are a little like broccoli rabe, but less juicy, and a little like chinese broccoli, but less crisp. When we pick them off the plant, we break each flowering shoot at the point where it snaps off easily, which ensures that the whole sprig is tender enough for eating. The flavor is also most similar to kale, but more complex. It’s a little bitter and a little mineral-y, neither of which sounds particularly appealing, but for those of us who love strong flavored vegetables, spigariello has a taste that you can’t find in other greens.

Spigariello’s unusual appearance and funny name make it an attraction at our farmers market stand. Someone will pick up a bunch and say “I’ll take this. What is it?” We usually recommend the following simple preparation:

Cut the stemmy parts into small bits, reserving the leaves. Put the stems in a pan with some olive oil, crushed garlic, and maybe a little water. Cook until softened, turning up the heat a little if you want a little browning. When the stems have slightly softened, roughly chop the leaves and add them to the pan. Cook until done to your liking. In Italy, they might then toss the spigariello with sausage and some red chili flakes and perhaps then add it all to pasta. Come vuoi.

Botanical mystery

The real reason I wanted to write about spigariello today is because I’m hoping to solve a botanical mystery. The internets tell me that spigariello is just a variety of broccoli, Brassica oleracea, Italica group. All the varieties of Brassica oleracea that I’m familiar with have yellow flowers, with the exception of Chinese cabbage (gai lan) which is in the Alboglabra group. The internets also tell me that the Alboglabra group originated in the Mediterranean. So, what I’m hoping someone will be able to tell me is whether spigariello is actually more closely related to gai lan than to other broccolis. Anyone, anyone? Also, given that these different varieties are all considered to be the same species, can Alboglabra cross breed with Italica?

In my perusals of the internet in search of spigariello information, I have come across other interesting broccoli-like plants. For photos of some other Italian broccoli-like plants, check out “Amici dell’Orto.” The site is in Italian, but if you click around you can see photos of other Italian oddities, like red-veined arugula and lots of crazy melons and squash. However, every site I visited insisted that spigariello, despite its white flowers, is just a variety of broccoli. I don’t believe it’s true!

In any case, I hope you’ll come to the market and try some spigariello for yourself. We’re in the midst of the great freeze of 2010 at the moment, but if we’re lucky, the hardy spigariello plants will survive to see another day. If not, you’ll have to wait until next spring.

Talkin’ on the radio

Last week I got the chance to be a guest on KUOW’s Weekday for a show on “Young Farmers.” You can listen to the show here. It was really fun to go the the KUOW studio and Marcie Sillman, the program host, did a great job directing the conversation – not an easy task when it comes to the topic of “sustainable farming.” Issues that came up during the show included economic viability of small farms, farm labor and the legal status of farm apprentices, and barriers to entry for beginning farmers. There are many many more equally interesting and important issues that farms of all sizes and types deal with, particularly here in the Puget Sound basin, where many farms exist on the narrow borderline between highly developed urban areas and protected resource lands.

Whenever I try to answer even the seemingly simple questions that people ask about our farm (Are you organic? How’s the weather affecting you this year? Why don’t you live on your farm?) I find myself quickly digressing into explanations of really complex, interrelated subjects. For example, a simple question about the weather can be answered by saying “it’s not so good this year,” but the real answer starts with the importance of growing a diverse mix of crops and goes into the topics of marketing strategies, wet soil and mechanical tillage, the difficulty in getting a permit to maintain a drainage ditch (salmon might live there), and goes on and on.

The most important thing we do on our farm is grow food in a way that we feel proud of. The second most important thing we do is to talk about all this stuff, constantly, to anyone who will listen. At the farmers market, on the radio, at the dinner table, and on this blog, we love to share information and learn from others. Some of our past blog posts have taken a stab at one issue or another, and we’ll keep at it. If there’s something you especially want to know about our farm, farming in the Snoqualmie Valley, selling at farmers markets, or anything else you think we might know something about, please let us know in the comments section. We’ll try to come up with something relevant in response.

There’s an ongoing debate in the world about the pros and cons of various agricultural practices and policies, from genetic modification to “locavorism” to new food safety regulations. People with opinions on all sides of the issues have evidence and anecdotes to support their positions, but the complete picture is terribly complex and probably no one actually understands it all. The big question that all of us want answered is “how should we feed ourselves?” I certainly don’t contend that small diversified farms like ours are the paragon, but I also am pretty sure that current conventional farming practices, reliant on finite and vanishing resources, will eventually have to be replaced. I hope that by writing about our specific experiences farming here in Puget Sound, we’ll be able to get past some of the clichés and generalities that people sometimes throw around when discussing food and farming. I look forward to hearing from you!

Here are some gratuitous and irrelevant pretty pictures:

 

 

Baby Felix

As you might already know, we grew something besides vegetables this season. Our first baby, Felix Ebey Salvo, was born on October 12th at 9:26 in the evening, weighing 8 lbs 8 oz and measuring 20.5″ long. He arrived just at the right time of year, when Jason and I will have several months to stay warm at home and plan for next season. We are completely thrilled with our new baby, and having lots of fun getting to know him and adjusting to our new life. 

This blog won’t turn into a baby photo gallery, but I’m sure I will be writing more about the joys and challenges of raising a baby while running a small farm. We’re expecting a lot of changes for our farm and our family in the 2011 season and we are so thankful to have such a supportive community of friends and family surrounding us. Stay tuned for more farm news, and the occasional baby photo or two.

 

Straight lines

The photo I used in my last post is now the first thing you see when you come to the blog, so even though I don’t have the mental fortitude to write a whole post on a complex topic at present, I want to put up a new post with a happier picture. So – here are some nice pictures of well-maintained, beautiful rows of vegetables on our farm. (n.b. It doesn’t always look like this. Editorial discretion allows us to omit pictures of overgrown, weedy, or otherwise unpleasant plantings.)

little lettuces

potatoes about to bloom

adolescent Rainbow chard

purslane

green onions

spring crops in the greenhouse

Yes. I like these pictures better than the picture of the refrigerated pre-cut produce.