(CSA Newsletter: Early Season Week 10)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
The brief warm dry weather late last weekend allowed us to get back out on the fields again. We were itching to plant but had to wait until Sunday to let the ground dry out as much as possible.
Saturday’s hot weather, however, allowed us the perfect opportunity to finish spreading our organic fertilizer for the year. We spread small amounts of rock phosphate (a mined product) and feathermeal (ground feathers) — the combination provides a small boost of phosphate and nitrogen for our crops. Since both are non-chemical sources of fertility, they are only made ‘plant available’ through the processing of soil microorganisms.
Since it uses a natural process, the release of fertility is slow and over time. The feathermeal’s nitrogen (13-0-0) will be available over our entire season in small amounts at a time. The rock phosphate (0-3-0) will be available to our plants over the next three years. In order to gain the benefit of our fertilizers, we have to maintain our soil’s healthy ecosystem, one of the basic concepts of organic growing.
In contrast, chemical fertilizers, such as ammonium nitrate, are immediately plant available and require no active soil life to process. Because they are immediately available, they also must be used quickly by plants or risk leaching out of the soil into ground or surface waters by rain and irrigation. From our perspective, the appropriate application of chemical fertilizer sounds tricky. We prefer the long-term solution — it’s slower but much safer and acknowledges the natural processes at work in the soil
Anyhow, spreading our fertilizer took up one dry day. At the end of Saturday, after only two real dry warm days, we were still looking at fairly wet ground. This spring has been tough. It certainly hasn’t been the wettest spring on record, or even much wetter than average. But precipitation has fallen on almost every day, which hasn’t been enough to cause huge puddles or other dramatic flooding but manages to keep our fields at holding capacity.
It has, however, been a cold spring thanks to the La Niña weather phenomenon. A farmer friend in Bellingham related that March was the coldest there in 50 years. The Oregonian reported last week that this spring has been the coldest since 1950 and Portland’s high temperatures have been normal or above normal only 11 of 42 days at that point. The cool temperatures have made the wetness feel wetter as the ground doesn’t dry out as readily.
Plus, those soil microbes I mentioned earlier than make our organic system possible? Many are dormant at soil temperatures below 50° … which is where the average air temperature has been this spring … which means that the soil life we rely on has been mostly just hanging out napping rather than breaking down our cover crop, soil amendments and producing the fertility our plants need. Yes, it’s been an interesting spring for a couple of still mostly inexperienced farmers.
Our lack of experience has been making decisions especially difficult. At this point, our experience with each season has been distinctly different. We’ve farmed in three different locations over the last four years, and each year has brought varied patterns, benefits and challenges to us as growers. Because each year has looked and acted different, we don’t have anything exactly like this spring to reflect back upon and remember how that year went.
What’s been unique about this season is our ground prep situation. We feel confident about most of our programs on the farm at this point: we’re able to produce healthy transplants in a timely manner; we know how to take care of early spring plants in the field; etc. But this year brought us a triple change in our ground prep: 1. We over-wintered a dense oat cover crop that resulted from a series of unavoidable incidents last year — it may not have been ideal for spring integration, but we have to deal with it either way. 2. We’re trying out new tillage equipment, namely the chisel plow and roterra. Since they’re both new to us this year, we don’t know what to expect from them and how much of our ground prep situation is related to other factors or these new tools. 3. The cold spring has slowed everything in general, but we still never know how much to blame on the weather or on our pushing the conditions.
Earlier this month we planted our first twelve beds in ground that in retrospect wasn’t ready to work. Because we worked it when it was too wet, we formed clods that we then weren’t able to smooth out this last week. There’s no question that the ground prep is less than ideal, but where our inexperience leaves us wondering is: are we right to go ahead and get on the ground? or, should we wait, even though waiting might lead to planting weeks from now? or, are we rushing the season and maybe waiting would result in better plantings despite being later?
Also, this is only our second year growing on this ground. We don’t know how vegetables will perform on this good soil when prepped less than ideally. We’re doing our best to meet the rest of their needs for fertility, space, protection, etc. — so how will they respond? Also, even the clods we see are different than clods we’ve seen elsewhere — they still have soil texture and drain well. Just how bad is our soil prep this spring and how will the plants do in it? We just don’t know.
(And, how much do I sound like a character in a Woody Allen film right now?)
I suppose we’ll learn some of these answers soon, since this Sunday we went ahead and planted another 17 beds with everything from cabbages to peas to radishes. We’re pulling out our full arsenal of tricks to help them thrive, including row covering everything to help get the plants through this cool spring.
Either way, we feel really good about at least one decision we made this spring: we decided to keep the CSA the same size this year rather than continuing to expand. Now that we’re looking at an uncertain late spring and early summer season, we’re grateful that we’re staying the same size.
Even though we’re not technically expanding our markets this year, we have slightly expanded our actual production. We’ve been trying to streamline our production and keep our field organization simpler, so most of our beds now contain just one item (rather than blocks of different items or varieties), and we’re planting out more beds of each vegetable at a time. We’ve also reduced our beds from three to two rows, and increased row spacing, so each bed contains fewer plants than last year — but the new planting style still represents an increase in production so far.
At this point, we already have 29 beds planted, many more than this time last year (although last year, we started planting in mid-March rather than early April). We’ll see how the adjustments go — we’re just trying to have more quality product ready to harvest at one time so that our harvests go quicker and feel less like gleaning. This spring, however, our new approach might just save us from an otherwise dismal harvest prospect.
Before I sound too negative (is it too late?), I should report on Sunday’s big successes. As I alluded to in my headline, Sunday felt like two steps forward and one step back — the step back refers primarily to our soil conditions, but everything else on Sunday’s planting round was a huge improvement over previous years.
For one thing, last Wednesday we purchased a used Drängen, the tracked vehicle we mentioned in a previous newsletter. The purchase was quicker than we had anticipated and meant that we were able to put our Drängen to work immediately in this round of early planting. The difference on our bodies was glorious. Previously, we did all our planting by hand, literally tucking every single plant into the soil with our hands. On Sunday, we planted about 2,800 starts — that’s a lot of potential bending (and back pain!).
Instead of bending or kneeling to reach the starts on Sunday we were able to ride the Drängen over the beds and reach the soil from a comfortable, relaxed position. Amazing. As Casey remarked after planting ten beds, ‘It’s a revolution!’ In addition to keeping our bodies feeling better than ever, we still had energy after planting seventeen beds in our far south field, so we turned to another project late on Sunday: our small new perennial planting.
Late on Sunday, we planted six beds of asparagus and one bed of rhubarb — the beginning of our first ever perennial planting. And, unlike the ground we prepped earlier in the day, the perennial field (at the far north of our property), prepped beautifully, especially considering the conditions. So we felt good about tucking the asparagus into their happy little furrow homes. Of course we’ll have to wait now for two years before we can start harvesting the asparagus for the CSA, but doesn’t that just sound amazing? Right at the season when we’re all sick of cabbage and onions, asparagus pops its head out of the ground. A spring miracle.
So, we have things to look forward to. And, even amidst the cool sometimes dreary spring, our farm environment reminds us of the bigger picture: the ospreys returned to the island recently, bringing with them their haunting wild call; our neighbor’s cherry orchard is in full bloom, white blossoms lining our horizon; and the Cottonwoods along the river are leafing out, the first trees here to put on green. It does all feel a little late though: we still have daffodils putting on new blooms when we’re expecting to see tulips. But I know summer will arrive before we know it, and then we’ll all be panting and nostalgic for the cool spring.
One thing is certain: after reading a book recently about life on a South Pacific atoll, I wouldn’t trade the seasons for anything. Life is interesting. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers,
Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics
