Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Salad mix — Good things about this cool spring — it’s been great for the greens in the hoop house! They just keep growing tender and mild! It’s true for the lettuce, the Asian greens, and more. Now, we just need to get the greens in the field to start growing faster …
- Asian greens — Your choice between bok choy or “yukina” (a similar Asian green that can be eaten raw as a salad or sautéed).
- Rapini
- Broccoli
- Cooking greens — Your choice between mustards, kale or chard.
- Romaine lettuce
- Salad turnips
- Sweet spring onions — Hip hip hoorah for spring onions! These are super sweet and mild — perfect for eating raw.
As I promised last week, here is more information about the new land we just purchased!
The almost 31-acre parcel is adjacent to our current farm, directly to the east on the other side of the treed waterway slough. Because it shares a boundary, it is a very similar shape to our current 17.49-acre farm — curvy on one side and straight on the others. But this new property is much longer from north to south, giving us almost twice the amount of acreage (and more than that in farm-able acreage).
The new land is also slightly lower overall than our existing farm, meaning that parts of it flood more frequently. A low spot running through the middle has flooded every year that we’ve lived here, but there are many higher spots that that are big enough to provide lots of space for year-round growing and perennials (especially since the soils next-door are even better draining than our current ground!).
This year we are continuing to rent out over half of the land to the existing leasing farmer (which was part of our purchase agreement deal). He is growing conventional spinach seed or cannery sweet corn. We have already worked up the remaining 10 acres and will be sowing a cover crop there soon.
Even though we will be taking over management of the entire parcel next year, we don’t plan to crop any of the new ground in vegetables until 2013. The land has been in conventional commodity crops for over a century, and we would like to give it some time to “rest” during the transition to organic status. We can tell by the color of the soil that it is low in stable organic matter — fairly typical of conventional soils. The first year we will simply sow a cover crop that we will work in after a year (or longer on some sections).
Our first plan for actual crops is to start putting in some long-term perennial plantings. We have heard repeatedly from CSA members that they want organic berries and fruit — and especially U-pick berries — so we will be planting berries! Eventually we would love to build a farmstand near our berries so that folks can come out and buy other produce at the same time that they enjoy our organic U-pick berry operation! (We will also pick berries for the CSA of course!)
We already have two small fruit orchards on our current property, which are getting closer to production every year, but we’d love to plant at least one more orchard next-door. As we watch our current trees grow and begin producing, we’re getting a better sense of which varietals are best suited to our site and organic production and we’ll plant those in larger quantities next-door.
Casey is also really excited about planting some nut groves, specifically walnuts and filberts. These will take even longer to come into production.
We also want to build a few more high-tunnel greenhouses on the new land, because this cold spring has proven that they are so valuable to us as a year-round CSA farm. We also hope to plant our strawberries in the high tunnels, which will help us avoid the common and pervasive fungus diseases that plague strawberries in wet Oregon.
These perennial plantings and greenhouses will be placed primarily in the curves and along the edges of the property, but in the larger higher areas we will mark out several large fields that we will bring into our vegetable and seed crop rotation starting in 2013. The long-term plan is to have four-acre fields that we can manage in a longer-term rotation. Right now we “flip flop” between two four and a half-acre fields, but after four seasons of year-round growing, we’re realizing that the ground could really use a longer period out of vegetable production in order to reduce weed seed and disease build-up (as well as to produce fertility through cover crops and reduce our dependence on off-farm inputs).
Our plan is to have a four-year rotation, where one year each field is in vegetables, two years in cover crop “green manures” (crops we plant and then work in, such as clovers), and one year in our most exciting new crop: grains and dry beans!!!!!!!!!
We obviously have a ton to learn about growing grains and dry beans on a larger scale (still tiny compared to most grain and bean producers of course), but it feels like a good extension of the knowledge we already have with growing field cover crops and producing vegetable seed. The three areas (fresh vegetable production, cover crop growing, and seed production) seem to overlap logically with grains and dry beans.
While we will learn a ton, we won’t be starting from scratch in terms of equipment and knowledge (in contrast, for example, to adding a goat milk dairy, which was another idea we seriously considered … in that scenario we’d really be starting from scratch for infrastructure and knowledge).
Yet, we’re also excited at how grains and dry beans will add a completely new crop for our customers to eat — one that fits into a different dietary niche. Once we have our grain and dry bean operation up and running, one could easily prepare an entire filling and nourishing meal just with Oakhill Organics’s farm products!!!!
In our own kitchen, we are constantly seeking ways to eat more whole foods, sourced as close to home as possible. This year we’ve really gotten hooked on whole cooked grains, especially as we’ve experimented with the culinary possibilities of the grains we want to grow someday. We’ve been eating wheat berries, rye berries, teff, oat groats, amaranth, barley, quinoa, millet, popcorn and flour corns.
Sometimes we eat whole grains as porridge in the morning, but more often we eat them as a significant portion of a main meal. Our current favorite is to make “salads” by tossing a cooked grain with oil and vinegar and then mixing in various other ingredients (chopped roasted asparagus, hardboiled eggs, dried fruit, nuts, chopped turnips, etc.) — these salads are just one way that whole grains have added to our diet in such a delightful way!
Cooked beans are also a mainstay of our diet (and have been for a long time) — they’re such an easy way to add more filling protein to a meal without always eating meat. Dry beans come in such a variety of sizes, shapes and flavors that we’re excited about trying many new types (some of which are so beautiful that they almost resemble small jewels!).
Grains and bean production also allows us to consider livestock production in the future. Right now, feed is such a huge cost in livestock production, especially for organic. Having our own grains to feed animals could be much more profitable and help us integrate animals into the larger farm system. Our first thought in livestock production would be layer hens, since we consistently get asked about eggs. Larger animals are still rather daunting to us, simply because they require such specific (and expensive!) infrastructure and they add so much to the daily workload (including the weekends). Perhaps if we have farm workers who are living on the farm again someday …
So, there you go … our plans! It might sound as though I’ve just listed almost every kind of crop production possible, and that’s almost correct. I think there a few we’re missing, but most of the edible plant crops are in our plans. As you can see, our farm is about to get a lot more complex as well as bigger.
Seeing it all on one paper like this can be daunting (and sort of crazy looking!), but we actually have written plans including a very realistic relatively slow timeline for adding each new venture to our existing farm system. As I said, the veggies will get bigger first, since that’s what we are already set up for and know the best. We will add each of the other crops as it makes sense and warm up to being a very diverse farm. There is no rush to make any of this happen immediately. As I mentioned in the newsletter two weeks ago, we have begun marking time by the growth of trees — our current pace of expansion feels like it will be doable.
But we are heartened by the many years before us, especially as we look behind us. We have only owned our farm for four and a half years, and in that time we have grown, learned, and developed all of our current infrastructure. It has been a busy period, and we anticipate the next five to ten years to have similar moments when we feel extra busy or slightly overwhelmed. But we have many winters of rest in the future too, and we have friendly intelligent excited folks by our side (and we will hire more such folks as the years roll on).
And, we have a lot of passion and vision for all of this. The hard moments are worth it, because every expansion or new crop means that we are helping more and more people eat good quality food, grown close to home. To us, eating locally (and outside the commodity food system) feels healthier, more fun, and ultimately more secure. It is comforting to think that we can someday produce a larger portion of our daily calories and nourishment needs right here in Yamhill County.
These are very exciting times for our farm, as we embark on the next phase of our farm’s life. As always, thank you for your important role in this entire process — every time you choose to stay a member of our CSA, we receive a vote of confidence and support in our evolving farm efforts. We hope that as our future changes, additions and expansions will be most welcome to you and that you will enjoy eating more and more of our farm’s delicious crops! Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Reminder to Newberg & Dundee folks
Our Newberg CSA begins on Thursday, June 2. Those of you who have decided to switch from Mac to Newberg will pick up your final CSA share in Mac next week, May 24! After that, you will be picking up in Newberg for the remainder of 2011! (Haven’t made the official switch yet? Contact us so we can adjust your invoice for the year and get you Newberg pick-up info ASAP!)
