I talked about our winter gardening in our newsletter earlier this week and thought I should follow up with some photos of the garden itself this time of year. All of these photos were taken this week:
Above: Casey and Nelson in a transitional winter field. On the left is a spent fall broccoli patch, followed by a growing chicory planting, a spent lettuce bed, a holding cabbage planting, and two beds of celeriac (from which we’ve been harvesting for weeks now).
Above: Our experimental direct-seeded planting — 15 beds of veggies that we hope will over-winter in their current small state and then ‘take off’ again in the spring to produce very early edible veggies. On the other hand, they might just ‘bolt’ (go to seed), so that’s where the experiment comes in. What we have planted here: turnips, arugula, spinach, carrots, fava beans, kale, collards, mustards, and sugar snap peas.
Above: Our most southern field, where we have beds and beds of mature or almost mature hardy vegetables growing for winter eating: kales, collards, cabbages, over-wintering cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, carrots, mustard greens, swiss chard, radicchios, and more.
Above: Up close in the southern field — one beautiful semi-savoyed cabbage for our winter season.
… and while we’re on a virtual tour of the fields, I thought I’d share photos of some other random farm-related things:
Above: The current CSA pick-up site inside the YCAP Food Bank warehouse. This has been a great place for the CSA this fall — we’re grateful to the food bank for sharing their warm, dry, well-lit facility with us.
Above: I realized recently that we hadn’t taken or posted photos of our house from this angle so you could see the workshop/storage space we built on the first floor. It’s a little messy here right now, because we’re at the end of the season, but we use this inside/outside area for washing, prepping, and storing veggies before taking them to town. The downstairs is well insulated, wired, and plumbed, so it’s a great multi-purpose non-residential space where we can work out of the rain, store small tractors and keep onions and garlic at a steady temperature even with outside’s extreme highs and lows. One of our projects for this winter is to clean up the outside area and put up a cover so we can keep rain and leaves off our heads while we wash.
Above: Another winter project has been to slowly collect more of the implements we need for field work. This year we limped along with a rotary mower and a tiller — while we were technically able to get our work done, we were limited by our lack of tillage choices. The tiller requires a very dry field to perform, which delayed our getting on the ground. Plus, we’re not excited about the plow pan we’ve seen forming already in just one season. So, we’re moving to what we hope is a more gentle flexible series of tillage routines. Pictured above is the first phase of the new program: a chisel plow. It’s a big one, so we’ll probably have to take two of the shanks off when we want to use it deep, but we hope to use this for primary tillage in the spring (after mowing our cover crop). We also hope to use it at a quicker speed for cultivation in our dry summer fallow — but more on that topic later.
In terms of other implements, we also recently purchased a Lely Roterra, a ‘power harrow.’ Our hope is to use this in place of the tiller for final bed prep. We’ll post more photos of the Roterra in action in the spring, but the key feature we love is that it doesn’t turn the soil. Instead the blades sort of ‘mix’ the soil in place. The benefits to us? We’ll avoid the plow pan that forms at the base of the tiller blades; we won’t be bringing old weed seeds to the surface as readily; and we can move through a bed at a slightly quicker pace than with the tiller.
We also have on order a used cultipacker (for use in our summer fallow program) and an 8-foot grain drill (for sowing cover crops). None of these implements is costing us an arm and a leg, but it still feels like a big increase in the amount of random steel objects we now have to take care of. Which is why a small new pole building is also on our winter list. But we also feel like purchasing the appropriate equipment for our farm is a commitment to our practices.
Anyhow, just a few photos of what we’ve been up to out here on the farm. Life has been quietly busy lately. I don’t think we’re ever going to have a true stop on all activities this winter — or any winter really. In the end, I don’t think we’re wired for long rests. We are taking lots of good brief rests though. Our mornings are slow to get started and the days end early. But, we’ve made another BIG list for 2007/08 winter. We’ll see how we do …
