(CSA Newsletter: Fall Week 6)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
Our trip to Bellingham this last weekend went off without a hitch, despite the unprecedented I-5 closure. We had wonderful visits with many old friends and reconnected with a place we loved dearly. The three day trip felt much longer as we forgot our daily farm worries and immersed ourselves briefly in our former urban life: eating out, shopping at our favorite used bookstores, watching the sun set over Bellingham Bay …
But the farm is never far from our minds and some of the best parts of the trip revolved around farming. On Friday morning we attended a workshop with Eliot Coleman, author of Four Season Harvest and other seminal market gardening texts. His talk touched on his experiences with growing and harvesting vegetables all winter long in Maine — a unique proposition made possible by an intensive greenhouse program. He accompanied his talk with slides; the photos of his winter crops were pretty darn impressive.
Although they are inspiring, we probably won’t attempt to exactly replicate Coleman’s innovative moveable greenhouse system on our farm. In fact, as we listened to his discussion of Maine winters, we were led to consider what exactly the challenges are here in the Northwest to growing/harvesting food late into fall and winter. As we approach our first-ever winter share, this question of place specific challenges is especially relevant. Coleman’s main challenges are extreme cold and heavy snowfall. His moveable greenhouses plus row cover provide cold protection.
Challenges for growers here in the Northwest are different. As we considered the differences for our own planning purposes, we identified the following issues facing winter growers in the Northwest:
Because these factors are so different, we’ve found that our approach to winter growing differs significantly from Coleman’s. We have the advantage of a warmer climate, so we here at Oakhill Organics are much less dependent upon plastic cover to prevent hard freeze damage. In fact, at this time, our entire garden is completely exposed to the elements, without any covers at all.
However is is cold here, so we have to carefully plan our fall/winter garden to prepare for the above listed factors. We start by choosing vegetable types and varieties selected for their winter hardiness: cabbages, greens, root crops, and so on. Then we sow and plant them early enough that they will enter fall fairly mature — with our low light levels, a seedling will put on little growth in fall while a mostly mature plant will continue to slowly form a head or root.
Unfortunately, that means we have to sow and plant heat sensitive plants during some of the hottest months of the year. These are also months when insect pest pressure is high, especially on ‘brassicas’ (cabbages, kale, etc.). Without protection from flea beetles and cabbage root maggots specifically, we would most certainly lose entire plantings. In our fields, protection comes in the form of ‘row cover,’ white bed-shaped clothes similar to cheesecloth — they allow light and moisture through but keep 95% of bugs out. Row cover has its own problems later on in a plant’s life, but we find the pros to outweigh the cons in establishing a new planting.
The difficult part about all gardening, but especially fall/winter growing, is that you can’t easily change course mid-season. Fall and winter gardens must be planned far in advance; by the time you begin harvesting the ground is completely unworkable and newly sown seeds would grow slowly to maturity (i.e. not mature until spring, if at all). In other words, we can’t gauge our success until it’s too late to change our methods.
Now that we’re in mid-December and can see how we’ve fared, we’re overall pleased with the quality, size, and quantity of items in our fall garden. The beds are still full of undamaged food, and the winter season CSA no longer seems quite so uncertain as when it was months in the future.
However, we see many things we would do differently next year for our fall garden: sow the parsnips earlier so that they germinate (they don’t like heat — oops!); sow more root crops in general, such as turnips and radishes; thin our beets more; and sow our cabbages even earlier.
We also do want to integrate an over-wintering hoop house into our fall garden. We’re currently working on making our Haygrove-style field houses (in which we grew tomatoes this year) more weather sturdy so that we can leave it up year-round. We’d love to grow our lettuce and other greens under cover, for protection from rain more than cold. The heavy rainfall we receive here makes the lettuce more susceptible to all kinds of rotting diseases, which then slow down growth even further and damage the product. Since we want to decrease the humidity around our greens, we will leave the house ends open to air as we did with the tomatoes in summer. We also still want to move the houses once or twice a year for crop rotation purposes, so our current challenge is finding a compromise between strength and mobility.
A new aspect of winter growing that we’re excited about experiencing this year for the first time is the potential for very early spring crops. This is something we haven’t experimented with before and have seen few references to in texts. Fairly late in the season this year (Sept. 21), we direct-seeded fifteen beds of hardy faster maturing veggies, including spinach, beets, arugula, peas, fava beans, carrots, turnips and more. We had just enough warm weather left in the year to germinate the seeds.
Today, almost three months later, the field is beautiful: full of small baby plants, which appear to be holding up in the weather just fine even though they aren’t producing anything yet. Most plants are only one to four inches tall, although the peas and fava beans are growing steadily. Our hope is that in late winter, when the days begin to lengthen again, the deep roots developed by these over-wintered plants will then ‘kick-start’ spring growth, before we can even get onto the ground again to plant. Perhaps we will be enjoying carrots and peas weeks earlier than we might have otherwise … perhaps. The risk is that many of these vegetables, technically biennials, will simply go to seed rather than producing edible parts. We also still run the risk of losing everything to especially cold weather between now and spring, but the planting has already made it through at least several nights with lows in the mid-20s.
Between Eliot Coleman’s talk and our own planning for 2008, winter is definitely on our minds. Visiting Bellingham also reinforced winter’s arrival as the days were consistently below freezing. When we visited Cedarville Farm, where we trained, the fields were frozen even at midday. Of course, the weather was sunny and beautiful, so it was hard to begrudge Whatcom County’s weather much in that moment.
But we were reminded of how much easier we have it with winter growing just over 300 miles to the south: Sunday morning we drove out of Bellingham in the midst of a brief but icy winter storm. We get our share of winter weather here in Yamhill County, including windstorms, but overall we farm in a place well suited to our goals of winter growing. Winter presents challenges to the Willamette Valley grower, yes, but certainly not insurmountable ones. Today, we are excited about continuing our harvests into the cold and dreary months of February, March, and April!
On that note, next week is the final CSA pick-up for the 2007 season, but we will be sending 2008’s payment and sign-up details in the mail soon. We hope that you will join us again in our ongoing eating adventure. For now, enjoy this week’s fall vegetables!
Your farmers,
Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics
P.S. Our apologies to the CSA members on the coast about last week’s missed delivery. We hope that everyone survived the storm with little or no damage, and thank you for your understanding regarding fall storms and transportation issues.
