Cold nights, Cool season hoophouse crops, CASA conference

Ginkgo Golden Puddle Day
November 10 2017.
Photo Pam Dawling

We had a few 24F nights and the ginkgo trees responded by instantly dropping all their leaves. A beautiful sight.


At the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association Sustainable Agriculture Conference I gave a presentation called Sequential Planting of Cool Season Crops in High Tunnels as part of the Friday morning High Tunnel Crop Production Intensive workshop. It’s a new workshop I prepared especially for the CFSA. I usually call the structures hoophouses rather than high tunnels, but either name is fine. It used to be said that farmers called them hoophouses and researchers and academics called them high tunnels. Nowadays there is not such a binary distinction; farmers do research and teach, researchers and academics grow crops. Here is the longer version of the slideshow, including “bonus material” I didn’t include in the 60 minute presentation. Click the diagonal arrow icon to view full screen.

On the Sunday I gave a presentation on Year-Round Hoophouse Production which was a back-to-back presentation of the Hoophouse in Spring and Summer and the Hoophouse in Fall and Winter.  You can view those slideshows by clicking the links to them on the SlideShare.net site.


I’ve added a new event to my calendar for January. You can see all the events I plan to speak at, by clicking the Events tab at the top of the screen on my home page. This one is the Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture Future Harvest Conference January 11-13, 2018 at College Park, MD.

On Saturday January 13 11.30am -12.30pm I’m presenting Cold-Hardy Winter Vegetables – Why farm in winter? Information includes tables of cold-hardiness; details of four ranges of cold-hardy crops; overwintering crops for spring harvests; scheduling; weather prediction and protection; hoophouse growing; and vegetable storage.

I might also be participating with other speakers in a new format Lightning Session, where we each get 10 minutes to tell the audience the top 5 things we want them to know about a certain topic. That isn’t decided yet.

I also hope to be signing books at the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange booth at some point.


Meanwhile here on the farm it’s got colder, as I said at the beginning, and even dreary some days. We are getting our winter carrots harvested, getting ready to plant garlic, adding draft-proofing strips to our hoophouse doors, and admiring and harvesting our hoophouse salad crops.

November hoophouse lettuce bed.
Photo Wren Vile

Sustainable Farming Practices slideshow, garlic planting, annual crop review

Here’s my updated slide show Sustainable Farming Practices (for Vegetable Growers). You can view it right here, clicking on the white arrowhead, or you can click the diagonal arrows to get a full screen version. This is the second workshop I presented at the Carolina farm Stewardship Sustainable Agriculture Conference. The handout for the workshop is on the CFSA website as a pdf.


We’ve just completed our annual Crop Review meeting. We prepared a spreadsheet of all the crops we grew, when we planted them, what varieties and so on. We went down the list alphabetically and shared what we could remember about how well each planting did. I’ve written about this process a couple of years ago, in my book, and also in Growing for Market magazine back in December 2007.

This year we had a hard spring, with El Nino. Cold wet weather prevented us planting everything we planned to. We didn’t grow spring potatoes or turnips this year. We did sow snap peas but I think they all rotted in the ground. We had good spring crops of carrots and beets (once germinated, things grew well!). Our spring broccoli and cabbage were good, but our fall ones got lost in weeds, when we didn’t have enough workers. We failed to get a timely delivery of the pedio wasps to deal with the bean beetles, and our beans had low germination rates this year. Our sweet corn did well all season, after the flooded end of the first sowing was forgotten.

Leeks and scenery Kati Falger
Leeks, sunflowers and buckwheat
Kati Falger

We had plentiful cucumbers, and enough zucchini and yellow squash; our leeks this winter are the best ever (thanks to attention to weeding, and to side dressing with compost in the late summer). The lettuce supply was good all through the spring and early summer, and is great now. We lost lettuce to cutworms in August. Okra was very abundant, as were eggplant – the hot summer was good for them. Our peppers did well, our Roma paste tomatoes were a bust, mostly because we didn’t keep up with string weaving. Sweet potatoes and June-planted potatoes yielded poorly. Our cherry and slicing tomatoes did well, but came to an early end. The fall greens (kale, spinach, collards, senposai, Yukina Savoy, turnip greens) are now doing really well, after an early battle with baby grasshoppers. Our fall turnips are the best in many years.

Purple top turnips. Photo Small Farm Central
Purple top turnips.
Photo Small Farm Central

At the Crop Review meeting we popped our hardneck garlic bulbs apart for planting. On the next two days we planted that (3180 row feet). The day after that we popped our softneck garlic and planted that (1080 row feet) and also planted all the reject tiny cloves for garlic scallions. Click the link to read about growing and harvesting these yummy spring treats. We’re up to date with preparing for the end of garden shifts and the transition to one person each day taking care of the hoophouse, greenhouse, weather station and harvesting the remaining outdoor crops. We’ll work that way until the end of January, and then start pruning blueberries and grapes.

Garlic planting crew. Photo Valerie Renwick
Garlic planting crew.
Photo Valerie Renwick
Covering garlic cloves. Photo Brittany Lewis
Covering garlic cloves.
Photo Brittany Lewis
Garlic scallions in April. Photo Kathryn Simmons
Garlic scallions in April.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Events I’ll be speaking at, error found in SMF, book update

Cucumbers and squash in our hoophouse. Photo Nina Gentle
Cucumbers and squash in our hoophouse.
Photo Nina Gentle

First of all, I’ll get my confession off my chest. A savvy reader spotted an error in my book Sustainable Market Farming: Take a red pen and correct your copy!

In Chapter 20, Sustainable Disease Management, on page 135 I said “Pathogens can infect the seed via several routes . . . Insects that feed on the plant can transfer the disease (striped cucumber beetles vector bacterial wilt, which is caused by Erwinia tracheiphila)”
It is true that striped cucumber beetles vector bacterial wilt, which is caused by Erwinia tracheiphila. It isn’t true that this disease is seed-borne. I don’t know where I got the wrong information from. I don’t yet know of an example of a disease spread by insects that can become seed-borne (that I feel confident about!).
I’ve asked my publishers, New Society, to correct that mistake next time they reprint. I wrote to the attentive reader, thanked her, and asked her for leads on where to find  information about seed-borne diseases brought in initially by insects.
Organic Seed Grower by John Navazio, Chelsea Green Publishers
Organic Seed Grower by John Navazio, Chelsea Green Publishers

Meanwhile, I can recommend two books on seed growing (that weren’t out when I wrote my book), that contain good information about which diseases are seed-borne. I reviewed the impressive The Organic Seed Grower by John Navazio a while back..

The Seed Garden, from Seed Savers Exchange and Organic Seed Alliance
The Seed Garden, from Seed Savers Exchange and Organic Seed Alliance
Newer is The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving from Seed Savers Exchange and the Organic Seed Alliance. Including “advice for the home gardener and the more seasoned horticulturist alike”, this is also a book from people who work growing seeds, and know their stuff. I plan to review it one week soon (when the work pace slows a little!)
If you’re a seed grower, you might want to add one of these to your wish list. Both are beautiful books, as well as clearly written ones.
This year I am not doing quite as much seed growing as some years. For sale, we are growing Carolina Crowder cowpeas in our hoophouse. Click the link to see photos.
For ourselves, we are selecting and saving seed from our Roma tomatoes and Crimson Sweet watermelon, as well as West Indian Gherkins. We are also saving garlic and shallots for replanting.

It’s that time of year when I line up events I’ll be speaking at in the fall and winter (and to some extent, into spring). Here’s my plan so far:

2012-festival-slideshow Friday and Saturday September 11-12 2015
Heritage Harvest Festival, Monticello, Charlottesville, VA.
On Friday, 1.30-2.30pm I will be offering one of the Premium Workshops, Crop Rotations for Vegetables and Cover Crops.
That’s at the Woodland Pavilion, Visitor Center.
Then I will be doing book signing at the tent called The Shop at Monticello (at the Visitor Center), 2.45-3.13pm.
On Saturday I will be offering another premium workshop, Producing Asian Greens. This one is at the Vegetable Garden Tent at the Mountaintop (where most of the Saturday events are). It’s immediately followed by another book-signing, 5.30-6.0pm. The Festival ends at 6pm. All day Saturday is packed with events, and a General Admission ticket will be all you need apart from tickets for premium Workshops.

MENFairLogoThe following weekend, September 18-20, I will be at the Mother Earth News Fair, Seven Springs, Pennsylvania. The schedule is not yet firm, but I will be presenting The Hoophouse in Fall and Winter probably on Friday September 18 4-5pm at the Mother Earth News Stage, and The Hoophouse in Spring and Summer on Saturday September 19 10-11am at the GRIT stage.

I will also be signing books at the Mother Earth News Bookstore at some point and doing some scale demonstrations of string-weaving for tomatoes at the New Society Publishers booth.


Hoophouse greens in November. Credit Ethan Hirsh
Hoophouse greens in November.
Credit Ethan Hirsh

The weekend of October 24-25 I plan to be at the Mother Earth News Fair in Topeka, Kansas with the two Hoophouse workshops. In February 2016, Mother Earth News is running their first fair in Belton, TexasToo soon for detailed information yet, but watch the site, if you live in Texas.


CFSA

November 6-8 I will be at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association Sustainable Agriculture Conference, in Durham, North Carolina. Click here for the Conference page. I’m doing two workshops, Cold-Hardy Winter Vegetables – on Saturday November7, 8.30-10am, and Succession Plantings for Continuous Harvests – on Sunday November 8, 10.45am-12.15pm. I will also do book signing at the BookSignAGanza, Saturday 5-6pm.


SSAWG

January 27-30 I will be at the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group’s Practical Tools and Solutions for Sustaining Family Farms Conference in Lexington, Kentucky. On the website you can sign up for the e-newsletter and around October 15, you can do Early Bird Registration. I hope to be a speaker, but it’s too soon to say. . .


logoFebruary 3-6, 2016 I will be at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture Conference  at the Penn Stater Conference Center, State College, PA. Save the date.