Cover Crops and First Harvest

In early October I returned from tour and tried to put myself straight to work. I spent two full days clearing what will become our garden plot next spring. The space we're using was a pasture for goats and sheep some 15+ years ago, but now it has become completely overgrown with weeds and and other underbrush. Once cleared, we had the soil tilled by a neighbor and found ourself with 2,800 sq. ft. of healthy soil eager for something to be planted in it. For now we've made a late planting of Winter Rye as a cover crop to help protect against erosion and feed the soil additional nutrients until we can start our real work in the spring whwn we will till it under again, adding more organic matter. We broadcast the seed over the soil and even in mid-November we can see a small sprouts coming up everywhere. Now I just need to send a soil sample off for soil testing over the winter.

We made a fall planting of 40+ cloves of garlic in one of the raised beds for harvesting late next summer. A few weeks later I covered the bed with a few inches of straw to insulate the garlic from the frigid temperatures quickly approaching.

Next we used salvaged pallets collected through Freecycle to built our future humanure compost site. We built a simple, three-bin compost container for easy storage of brown materials and easy rotation year-to-year.

We found some old wire fencing inside the old shed adjacent to our garden plot and used it to build two containers for leaf mold. Each container is about 3.5 ft. high and 3 ft. in diameter. We reused fiberglass stakes from an old fence to sturdy up the wire fencing, filled them with shredded leaves from the front yard, wet them down thoroughly, and covered each with a tarp held down by a few rocks. They will now "hibernate" for the winter, as the leaves slowly cook into a leaf mold that will make a great substitute for peat moss in the garden next spring, and also as a mulch to protect against weeds on top of the soil. We stuck our hands down into the leaves a few days later and could already feel the extreme heat building up, even as the cool fall winds blow.

About a week before Thanksgiving we harvested our first salad from the cold frame garden and it was quite tasty. We mixed together some baby romaine leaves, mustard greens, winter purslane and mache topped with apple slices from a local orchard, honeyed goat cheese, chopped pecans and a homemade apple cider vinaigrette (cider also from one of the many local orchards) for a delicious lunch salad.

As the cold moves in the outdoor work begins to wind down but there are still burn piles to tend, leaves to rake and wood to split. Soon we'll be spending more time inside, planning our beds for the spring and pouring over seed catalogs.

First Steps, First Seedlings.

Our first step was to build some cold frames. The idea with the cold frames is not to extend the growing season (as is the case with some greenhouses) but rather to give cold-hardy plants a semi-sheltered environment that protects them from the harshest temperatures and prevents the cold from killing them off, which will hopefully allow us to extend the harvesting season, with fresh greens all winter long. So, on Labor Day we built six cold frames, each made out of 3/4" plywood screwed together into a box and topped with lids made from old double-paned windows that Sadrah's dad brought home from work.

We started digging out 6 plots on the hill just above the pool and amended the soil by adding some organic compost and peat moss. Thankfully Sadrah completed all the digging, soil preparation, and planting after I left for Philadelphia and the three-week Giving Chase tour in Europe.

So far most of the plants are thriving even though we got them in the ground a few weeks late. The spot receives limited sun, usually only a few hours a day even on the sunniest days, but the frames have them well protected from the cold. I can't say the same for the slugs, who manage to slither through small gaps between the frames and lights. They've devoured our Asian greens and taken bites out of few other plants. They almost took out our radishes, but with a few preventative methods we managed to keep them at bay. Slugs are nothing but a bunch of lushes so we've been filling up-turned bottle lids with beer to drown the slimy little things a few times a week.  We've also covered some soil with coffee grounds and/or crushed egg shells to slow their slithering and spread ash around the outside edges of the frames. All together these methods seem to be helping, although I'm fairly certain we've lost the Asian greens for good.

Life is Short...and So is the Growing Season.

After a long break we're back and ready to blog! I say "we" because Sadrah and I (Mike) have decided to morph this blog into an account of our attempts to grow our own food here in Skaneateles, among the Finger Lakes in upstate NY. We'll both be contributing our thoughts and accounts as we move forward with our project. We hope to become more self-sustainable in other areas of our lives in the future, but for now we're starting with something we both love and feel passionate about: the food we eat.

I hope the blog will actually be much more than that--you can no doubt expect some mid-winter food porn from the head chef--but for now we're actually way behind on our blogging, so I'll try to start catching up.

While I was out on the road with Billy Squier in June, July & August, Sadrah spent the summer as an intern on Monarch Farm, not far from her parent's house in Skaneateles, NY.

All the food on Monarch is ecologically grown, which means they don't use any chemicals, pesticides or herbicides of any kind. It is essentially an organic farm, without the expensive, time consuming organic certification or signing a deal with the devil, er, government. The farm is run by Brendan on land that he has rented for the last six years and staffed by a few rotating interns throughout the season. I got a chance to spend three great weeks there with Sadrah--getting up at 6:30am or earlier, working hard harvesting and processing vegetables, swimming in a secluded pond and enjoying some of the tastiest vegetables I've ever had.

It might sound tough, and it was at times. There were definitely some ups and downs to the experience, but overall it was a invigorating three weeks and I learned a lot. I guess that's not saying much when I didn't even know what swiss chard looked like, but now I can recognize chard, kale, leeks, radicchio, 3 kinds of onions and more! I particularly enjoyed working the farmer's markets in and around Syracuse--it was great to see the smiles on people's faces as the fruits of our labor filled up their grocery bags.

As our time on the farm started to wind down, we both realized we wanted to devote our time to something we could call our own. We comtemplated returning to Philly, guerilla gardening the nearest vacant lot or begging for jobs at Greensgrow and making our own way in the city. But Sadrah's parent's offered us a great opportunity--the chance to use some of their land to garden. They used to keep animals and grow much of their own food when Sadrah was young, so they've been very supportive of our aspirations. It was a tough decision, but we decided to jump in sooner rather than later and see if we could make it out here in the country. Maybe this is where we want to settle, maybe it isn't. Long, cold, hard winter? We'll see! We wanted to go for it and find out.