Fall & seeds

(CSA Newsletter: Week 37)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

We’re in the thick of fall now: over halfway through October, and all the signs are here. After a seemingly long delay, the leaves have suddenly burst into color — yellow, orange and brown amidst the remaining green. Geese are slowly returning to Grand Island. The weather has continued to be warmish, however. Despite the daytime fog and gray skies, recent nights have been startling warm — almost as warm as summer nights!

Here on the farm, we’re turning our attention to closing up shop for the year. The last of our cover crops have been drilled and are popping up all over the fields. Our interns, Daniel and Erika, finished trimming and putting away the last of the storage onions last week. And, we finally pulled the irrigation pipe out of all the fields — a sure sign of summer’s end.

Casey, Daniel and Erika have also been working on a new type of fall project for us: cleaning the vegetable seed that we grew this year!

Casey and I attended an organic seed growing conference two winters ago with the idea that someday we might want to try our hand at seed growing too. Incorporating seed production into a market garden isn’t as straightforward as it might initially seem, however, since each type of vegetable requires a particular ‘isolation’ distance from others of its type in order to produce ‘true’ seed. On a diverse farm, finding a place far enough away from other varieties can be challenging.

Letting a plant get to the flowering and seed stage also takes much longer than producing the same plant for eating. For example, we cut lettuce long before it begins to ‘bolt’ or throw up its seed head — waiting for the seed to mature and ripen would add many more weeks to the growing time. When we learned more about the complexities of seed growing, we felt a little daunted as to how to blend seed production into our current operation.

But Casey was determined to figure it out. Seed growing is a step towards further independence from big businesses, and we loved the idea of producing seed that is specially adapted to our growing conditions here in the Willamette Valley. We were further enthused after visiting Seven Seeds Farm, a diverse market garden and seed growing operation in Williams, Oregon.

So, last fall, Casey began saving seed with a very simple crop: sweet peppers. We already had the red ripe peppers — all we had to do was cut them open, pull out the seed, dry it, and put it away for planting in the spring.

And, you know what? It worked! We grew a bed of peppers this year from the saved seed, and they were delicious — big, beautiful red peppers.

So, we expanded. This spring, we selected a bed’s worth of two of our favorite winter crops: Brilliant celeriac and Castelfranco chicory. Both crops are ‘biennials,’ which mean that they produce seed in their second year. Into new beds, we transplanted full-grown plants that had over-wintered in our fields and survived the exceptionally cold and snowy period. Our hope was to select for further hardiness and also to produce organic seed for varieties not currently available organically grown.

Both beds produced beautiful — and kind of crazy and wild — flower shoots and eventually set seed. We pulled up the plants toward the end of the summer to let them dry and cure in our hot house. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working to ‘clean’ the seed — separate out individual seeds from the plant material they start out in (the chaff). After crushing the plants, we screened the material through varying sized screens to separate out differently sized bits. And, this weekend, for the almost final cleaning step, Casey employed age-old technology: winnowing.

Winnowing is a beautifully simple concept: slowly pour out seed and chaff in a strong direct wind (in our case, produced by a simple house fan), and let the wind separate different weights of material. Lighter materials (usually unripe seed and chaff) will fall farther from the wind source, and heavier materials (usually ripe seed or grain) will fall closer.

Although we’d seen winnowing demonstrated before, it was still amazing to see it work on our farm. After experimenting with the winnowing technique, Casey was able to get the seed about 95% clean. We still have some work to do to get the final 5% of unwanted material out of the seed, but we’re pleased with the results so far.

Of course, if you grow a bed or two of vegetables out for seed, you end up with a lot of seed. We now have enough celery root and chicory seed to last us several lifetimes. So, we’re tackling the other complicated side of seed growing: selling your seed to catalogs. It isn’t nearly as simple as selling vegetables at market. Even though we have the advantage of being certified organic and good recommendations from other seed growers, we still have yet to prove ourselves as seed producers to the catalogs. So, the first lots we send to most interested catalogs will probably be just for them to trial and test. They need to make sure the variety is one they want in their catalog and that the seed is high quality. Unlike fresh market vegetables, seed quality isn’t immediately obvious to the eye but needs to be tested and observed over a period of time for things like good germination rate, vigorous growth, and purity or cleanliness.

At this point, growing seed is still a very minor side experiment on our farm, but we’re excited to continue trying out more types of veggie seed growing and seeing if it could become a more lucrative aspect of the business in the future. But we’ve learned this much this year: growing seed is fun, and cleaning seed is fun fall work.

And, for more fun fall play, we hope you can join us this Sunday for our pumpkin patch open house! We have lots of big orange pumpkins for you all to take home to carve!

And, for more fun fall flavors, enjoy this week’s wide range of fall vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

P.S. Last week, we handed out the 2010 CSA Commitment Forms. If you didn’t get a copy, be sure to grab one this week at pick-up (or you can also find it on our blog: www.oakhillorganics.org/blog.html/). To save your spot for 2010, please return a filled out form by November 3. Thank you!

You are invited to join us this Sunday afternoon from 2 – 4 pm for our annual pumpkin patch open house event! We have a special patch of big orange jack o’ lantern pumpkins that we grew just for you, and there are enough for everyone to take home as many as they want!

There will also be cider to drink, and we’ll be giving farm tours. This has been a fun low key event for our CSA for the last three years, and it’s the last opportunity to visit the farm until 2010! We hope you can join us this year!

(If you want even more seasonal excitement, you can also stop by the famous Heiser Pumpkin Patch while you’re on Grand Island.)

Directions to Oakhill Organics from HWY-18: Take the Dayton exit and head straight through downtown Dayton. Stay on that road (Wallace Rd/HWY 221) for about six miles. Eventually, you’ll see big signs directing you to the Heiser Pumpkin Patch. Turn LEFT onto Grand Island Rd. Stay on that road as it drops down over a bridge onto the island. At the first four-way intersection on the island, turn RIGHT onto SE Upper Island Rd. Our driveway is immediately on your LEFT. We share our driveway with our next-door neighbors, so please stay on the RIGHT side of the driveway. You can park in front of our greenhouses and red pole building. Call if you have questions: 503-474-7661.