Tag: Clara Coleman

Sweet potato slideshow, phenology article, Ira Wallace awarded

I’ve just got back from the Carolina Farm Stewardship Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Durham, NC. There were about 1200 people, five workshop slots, 12 tracks, lots of good, locally grown food, a whole pre-conference day of bus tours and intensive workshops, a courageous and inspiring keynote address from Clara Coleman on the joys and challenges of family and farm life. She and her two young sons are now living and working alongside Eliot Coleman (her dad) and Barbara Damrosch at Four Seasons Farm in Maine.

My sweet potato slideshow from my first workshop at CFSA is viewable above. Just click on the forward arrow. To see it full screen, click on the link below the image and then click the diagonal arrows when the new page opens. About 70 very engaged people attended that workshop. My other workshop was Sustainable Farming Practices for Vegetable Growers, which I’ll include next week.

I have also recently written a blog post for Mother Earth News Organic Gardening blog  called Saving Sweet Potato Roots for Growing Your Own Slips.

I enjoyed meeting old friends, making new friends, learning some good tips about different drip irrigation parts, how to sharpen and use a scythe, how many years half the henbit seeds are viable for (23 years!!), and picking up literature from the trade booths to digest later.

sac-16-banner-960x330Save the date: 2017’s CFSA SAC will be November 3-5 (Fri-Sun)

nov-dec-2016-gfm-cover-300The November/December issue of Growing for Market is out, including my article about phenology. Phenology is the study of recurring animal and plant life cycle changes in relation to the weather. Some changes are temperature-dependent, rather than (daylength-) calendar-dependent. The opening of some buds and the emergence of some
insects from the ground are related to the accumulated warmth of that season. Observations of certain changes can be used to help growers decide when to expect outbreaks of certain insect pests and when to plant certain crops. For instance, we look to the leaves of the white oaks to decide when it is warm enough to plant sweet corn. The oak leaves should be as big as squirrel’s ears. We have plenty of squirrels! Phenology is especially useful when the weather is extremely variable, which we can expect more of as climate change gets us further in its grip.

Also in this bumper edition of Growing for Market are articles on growing heading chicories (Josh Volk), milling your own logs on your farm (Mark Lieberth), online weather tools for farmers (Eric and Joanna Reuter), image-front-cover_coverbookpagea review of The Farmers Market Cookbook by Julia Shanks and Brett Grohsgal (Andrew Mefferd), and favorite perennials for flower growers (Jane Tanner). There are also two pages of cameos of books available from GfM. A seasonal tip about gift giving, I think.

I am working on a review of Soil Sisters by Lisa Kivirist, which I will tidy up and post soon.

Ira Wallace receives SFA award
Ira Wallace receives SFA award. Photo by Sara Wood

Ira Wallace, my long time friend and one of the members of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has recently been awarded the 2016 Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award by the Southern Foodways Alliance. Sara Wood took photos at SESE and at Twin Oaks while preparing the SFA oral history interview with Ira Wallace. You can watch the video clip, read the transcript and ass the photos at the link. Well done Ira!

Home from PASA Conference, starting seedlings

Where we're headed - our greenhouse with flats of seedlings. Credit Kathryn Simmons
Where we’re headed – our greenhouse with flats of seedlings.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

Today is our day for sowing the first broccoli, and also the celery. This year we are trying Redventure celery from Fedco Seeds. We’re hoping Twin Oakers will like the red color and still find it tender enough for their palates.This spring we are growing five broccoli varieties with varying days to maturity, so we can get a long season. We also do two broccoli sowings two weeks apart, to further extend the season. We’re growing Tendergreen (47 days from transplanting), Green Magic (57 days), Green King (65 days), Arcadia ( 68 days) and Diplomat (also 68 days). Green Magic and Green King are fairly new to us. The others are tried and tested here.

Our hoophouse tomatoes have already germinated, and are in a plastic tent on a seed heating mat by the greenhouse windows. We have the 48″ x 20″ size, and later we’ll extend the plastic tent and graduate the older seedlings off the mat, but still under the tent for extra protection.  Also germinated, but getting no special coddling, are lettuce, cabbage, scallions, cipollini, more cabbage, spinach and collards. Sown, but not yet germinated are the hoophouse peppers, some kale and senposai.

We’re about to spot out the first lettuce and cabbage into bigger flats, with about 2.5″ between plants. My favorite tool for this job is a butter knife! For lettuce we use 3″ deep flats, but for most crops we use 4″ deep flats, so the roots have plenty of space. We use a dibble board to make the evenly spaced holes in the compost in the bigger flats, to move the tiny seedlings into. It’s a piece of plywood with fat dowel pegs glued into holes at the right spacing, 40 in a 12″ x 24″ flat. On the other side of the board are two small wood handles to make it easy to use. Here’s a photo of the result:

Where we're at now; Flats of spotted out lettuce seedlings. Credit Kathryn Simmons
Where we’re at now: Flats of spotted out lettuce seedlings.
Credit Kathryn Simmons

Many of you are finding your way to our Twin Oaks Month-by-month Garden Task List without special help. It’s my goal when I have more time to make a permanent link to useful lists and charts from our garden on my website. One day. . .

Here in central Virginia, we have no snow, just flurries of icy stuff that isn’t settling. This past weekend, though, I was up in State College, Pennsylvania, where they had piles of old snow. We were lucky with the weather at the conference and on our travel days. The PASA Farming for the Future Conference was a lot of fun and very inspiring. I don’t know how many were there. I did a rough count of chairs when Frances Moore Lappe was speaking and got to 1500.

I gave two workshops: Cold-hardy Winter Vegetables and Growing Great Garlic. Both went well and had about 70 participants. The bookstore sold 18 copies of my book, and I also signed other copies that people brought with them. Rhino Technologies made sound recordings of the workshops for sale, and they will soon be available via their website. My slideshows are available to view at SlideShare.net, so if you weren’t able to get to the conference, you can still catch up!

I also got the chance to go to some great workshops by other people too. Clara Coleman from Four Season Farm Consulting gave an inspiring presentation on the Latest Innovations in Four-season vegetable production from a Maine perspective. Yes, she is a daughter of Eliot Coleman, a great pioneer in extending the seasons growing vegetables sustainably. I love getting new ideas, and it’s also useful to me to be able to compare growing in different climate zones, so I don’t say something silly when someone asks me about growing a crop, and I forget Maine is not Virginia! I also enjoyed Lee Reich‘s presentation on No-Till Vegetables. Mostly for homestead scale gardens, but including photos from a a nearby farm using the same principles. I got a lot of inspiration from Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens‘ workshop on Finding Your Cover Crop Repertoire. I’ve heard them speak before, and I know they have a wealth of carefully-observed information and a clear way of explaining how to put it into practice. At this conference I didn’t go the workshops by Jean-Martin Fortier, even though they are so inspiring. It’s always great to meet him at events, and I did eat dinner with him, and exchange progress reports in the elevator one day.

Now, back to farming.

Wintry garden beds. Credit Ezra Freeman
Wintry garden beds.
Credit Ezra Freeman