Late winter successes & worries

(CSA Newsletter: Early Season Week 5)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, we are in the midst of a big transition: from winter to spring. The consequent changes we see in the field are exciting: the kale is re-growing; the garlic has doubled in height since early February; more birds are returning to the island, including turkey vultures … And, we feel the change too. If sap can rise in maple tress in the spring, something rises in us too. Spring’s urgency has energized us. We’re ready to get out on the new field. We’ve begun looking at the worked up area and tapping our feet impatiently.

In fact, we even set out to sow peas and fava beans last Friday, despite the fact that there was visible cover crop still breaking down in the field. We very quickly realized how much we were rushing the breaking down process when our seeder filled with dying oat grass and clogged. We gave up for now, especially when we remembered that it had only been two weeks since we first chisel plowed that ground.

One of the difficulties of winter cover cropping is that it takes longer to get on the ground in the spring. If we had left that same ground bare, we could have worked the ground into a ready seedbed already and planted. We knew this from last year’s early ground prep; but we still feel good about our choice to sow a cover crop (for now, anyway). Since dramatic winter floods are always a real threat on the island, having a cover on as much of our ground as possible insures that we’d retain all our topsoil in a flood event. Plus, we love what cover crops do for our ground: the root penetration prevents compaction; the roots and leaves add organic matter; and the breaking down provides nitrogen for our crops.

So, we’re reminding ourselves of these good things and trying to be more patient. The forced patience will probably be good in the long run for other reasons too, since the ground isn’t quite as warm as it should be to sow some of our early spring crops.

Either way, the perceived delay in sowing has us thinking about the potential upcoming ‘gap’ in harvests: that seemingly inevitable moment when our over-wintered fields are emptied out but the produce in the new field isn’t ready to harvest yet. Hopefully that gap doesn’t happen in any significant way: perhaps we’ll just smoothly shift from one set of fields to the next without you even noticing. Right now, we’re thinking about everything ‘backward’ — rather than gauging whether a crop is ready to harvest yet (as we do in the summer), we wonder how long a crop will last before going to seed or otherwise being ‘done.’ Our goal is to manage our harvests to keep the longer-keeping produce out there as long as possible, while still providing you with a diversity of tasty veggies every week.

We have some experience to guide as we look at different crops, but it’s still a bit of a gamble. And we’re learning more this winter about when certain crops begin to lose quality. We probably won’t hold carrots beyond February again — the last two week’s carrots have begun growing ‘roots,’ a sign that they’re done being good for eating. Similarly, the potatoes are beginning to sprout in the ground. After next week’s harvest, we may dig the rest and replant them for new potatoes.

The reality is: although we have some great mentors, we’re figuring out much of this on our own. Winter harvesting is still a less common farming practice, even on small diverse market gardens such as our own. Not much has been written about winter growing that applies to the west coast. In much of the country, over-wintering produce in the fields as we do is impossible due to the extreme cold temperatures. Even in milder climates such as our own, not every farm has soil well drained enough to hold produce through the rainy season without seeing significant rotting.

Our farm is well suited in soil and climate for the winter CSA experiment (part of why we purchased this land, since we knew we wanted to grow year-round eventually), but now we have to fill in some of the knowledge about how to best go about winter planting, managing, and harvesting. We planted many items last fall that we honestly had no clue about what to expect — especially our late September direct-sown field. Who knew that you could sow things like turnips, arugula, and tatsoi that late and then harvest them in February? We didn’t as of last fall, but we count those harvests as our most successful results of this year’s experiments.

Our efforts certainly haven’t all been successful, however. Fortunately as we entered fall and winter we adjusted ideas about yields and appearance, because our harvest yields of every single crop significantly dropped over the winter. No surprise. Right now we’re experiencing that on a dramatic scale in one crop especially: our potatoes. We grew over a quarter acre of potatoes last year, which we’ve dug only as we need them (rather than dig at the end of the summer and store above ground).

Overall, we feel good about our choice to leave the potatoes in the ground (thanks to Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm for the original idea to do so). Our potatoes’ quality has remained high: we haven’t seen any of the drying out or shrinking that’s common in stored potatoes. But they’re also exposed to field rodents by staying in the ground. Consequently, we have lost a ton of potatoes to voles. In the fall, they were fine: almost every ‘hill’ (the group of potatoes surrounding one seed potato) was intact and beautiful. After the December and January break, probably half of the remaining potatoes were eaten. And now, probably 90% of the remaining hills have been decimated by voles.

The voles themselves are a concern right now. In case you don’t know, a vole is a hungry, ground-dwelling, mouse-like rodent whose population cycles in a boom-bust rhythm (much like the infamous lemming or the American housing market). 2005 was a notably bad year for voles in the Willamette Valley. Unfortunately, some folks are predicting that 2008 might be another peak for the vole population. That prediction mirrors what we’ve seen in our fields. Vole ‘runways’ (holes that mark their underground tunnels) are everywhere on our property: in the potatoes, in the cover cropped field, in roadways … everywhere. We felt foolish for awhile about over-wintering so many vegetables, thinking that perhaps we created this rodent problem. And we may have contributed to their diet, but their presence is much wider spread than just near our vegetables.

Regardless of where this current boom came from, we’re faced with the decision about what to do now. They breed in the spring, and we can’t really imagine what an exponential growth of these voles would look like. They’re everywhere already. We have a lot of predators hunting in our fields every day: red-tailed hawks, feral cats, great blue herons, but I doubt they can keep up with the population. A farmer friend recommended putting Vitamin D3 in their runways, which is an organic approved (with restrictions) product for controlling rodent populations. Apparently it ‘decalcifies’ their bone, resulting in death.

Considering the size of the population, we could probably justify the use of the product. But … we’re fairly hesitant to introduce outside substances to our farm other than seeds and some organic sources of fertility. Products such as organic approved pesticides make us nervous. We view our farm as an incredibly complex ecosystem, one which contains many more life forms than the crops we focus our attention on: soil micro-organisms, earth worms, insects, birds, rodents, coyotes, cats, trees, fungi, weeds … Whether we interact with those organisms on a daily basis, we know they affect our farm and consequently your food and our livelihood.

Out of respect for that great importance, we have thus far chosen to not use any products that actually cause death on our farm. We know many organic farmers who employ organic approved pesticides, and maybe someday we’ll find them necessary on our farm too. But we worry about throwing a delicate harmony out of balance. Not to imply that our farm is a static environment; it is always in flux — but the factors are so complex and subtle that we can’t perceive the ongoing adjustments in populations that might be happening. We know that we have many predator insects that live in our field in the summer — lady bugs, soldier beetles, the occasional praying mantis — and we daily observe the predators mentioned above.

What would happen if we chose to intervene and kill our voles? As our vitamin D3 advocating farmer friend said, we put the food in the field, therefore we have almost an obligation if not a justification to remove the voles. That’s one way to look at it. But from my understanding, this current vole population is bigger than our farm: farmers are talking about it across the valley. I don’t personally understand how a rodent population can boom across so many diverse farm settings at once, but that makes me think that the forces at work are much more complex than what we can perceive.

Obviously we have more questions than answers. These questions are practical as well as a pseudo-eco-ethical. We are very aware that our presence affects our local ecosystem already — no denying that. So, from our standpoint we question how we can make our presence the most beneficial — beneficial for the health of the system and for our own crops. Every choice we makes affects the place, and the place in turn dictates our success. As farmers with a long-term vision, we can’t deny how much we’re at the mercy of our environment.

So, we’re thinking. And observing. Recently, in addition to seeing live voles, we’ve found a few dead voles hidden in potato hills — dead voles surrounded by food. (Sorry if that’s a gross image: none of the potatoes we give out are from those hills.) It makes us wonder where we’re at in the population cycle. Maybe that’s wishful thinking …

When it makes sense, we’re also employing our tillage methods to break up vole runways and potentially reduce their numbers at the same time. Perhaps it seems to contradict my earlier statements, but we feel fine about physical control methods (of pests and weeds both). I think it’s because it’s a known effect: a blade cutting through a vole (sorry again) is a finite action. The vole dies — that has an effect certainly but it is immediate and knowable. Substances, whether they’re technically poisons or not, seem muddier. Our farmer friend insisted that there are no known cases of secondary poisoning, but still … Our conservatism makes us skeptical.

So, we have more than just seeds and ground prep to consider as we begin our third season as a farm. The lessons and experiments continue. Farming is never dull. Nor is seasonal eating. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers,

Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics