I hate buying eggs

Fall vacation is over, so it's time to come back to reality and tidy up the urban farm for winter. My compost bins are full, so a lot of the plant material has been worked back into the garden beds (burying it under soil, where it can break down over time). The tomato plants, however, always go to the municipal yard waste composting facility. My home compost piles just aren't hot enough to kill all of the disease-causing microorganisms that hang out on tomatoes. And those nasties can survive over the winter in soil, only to infect next year's crop.

Interesting how our city's compost facility is now owned by Purple Cow. (In the past I spent a lot of money buying compost from them.) So it does pay-- except for tomatoes and any diseased material-- to compost as much as possible at home.

All that's left outside are these few kale plants and some leeks that need to be harvested soon. Leek soup anyone?

The hens are also going through their first molt and they have many missing feathers and are very grumpy (and likely a little concerned with so much skin showing and next week's temperatures going down into the 20s). But once their molt is finished, they will look better than before and should have their best year of production ahead of them, which is good, because I haven't gotten an egg from them in well over two weeks.

Looks like I'll be supporting the local egg produces for a few more weeks.

This high protein food should help the hens grow feathers faster. Without added protein, chickens have been knows to eat feathers to add protein to their diet (and losing more feathers is not at all what we're going for!). 

And with the cooler, short days, baking is on my mind...

In Sweden my favorite fika treat were the kardemummabullar, which are cinnamon rolls with an almond and cardamom filling. They are the best things I've had in a long time! With all the cool weather, this is the perfect time of year to practice my indoor homesteading skills and bake my own breads and treats.

Have a great weekend!

I heart my chest freezer

Until the last few days, the warm weather has been hanging on, and we've all been outside wearing shorts and riding bikes. But all that nice weather keeps the tomatoes ripening, and without intervention all the ones my family cannot eat (and that would be most of them) would go bad.

I know people love their iPhones, giant televisions, and salted caramel lattes, but to love a chest freezer is a special kind of love. This humble, quiet, out-of-the-way appliance allows me to enjoy the end of summer.

In the past, canning was done on a hot day in a hot kitchen. (If you haven't canned before, the house can heat up to a sweltering temperature if it's still warm outside.) Canning would be an ideal cold weather activity, like baking bread or making a hearty soup. A friend let me in on a secret a few years ago that changed my canning forever. She told me that you can freeze tomatoes whole in plastic bags and then take them out whenever you're ready to can. And if you let them warm up at room temperature, the skins come off without having to boil them, which is amazing when you are making a chunky tomato sauce or salsa!

My newest spaghetti sauce method is to core each tomato, squeeze out some of the seeds, and then freeze them all in gallon sized bags. When I'm ready to can, I make the sauce with the skins on (which adds additional nutrients) and then zip the sauce in the high speed blender to pulverize the skins and any remaining seeds before canning.

Many fruits and veggies are easy to freeze and use right from the freezer: sliced peppers and any kind of berry are two of my favorites.

This week at the urban farm

Now that soup weather is upon us, I've started harvesting the leeks. A lot of soup recipes call for leeks, but they are also good in many recipes in place of onions or roasted in the oven with other fall vegetables.

The chickens are just starting their first molt, and because of this egg production is almost nil. Hopefully I will have more to report on this soon! They have had a good summer of romping around the yard and have appreciated the vegetable scraps this season.

The tomatoes and flowers are the last summer plants I will pull out of the garden. The tomatoes will go when they stop ripening on the vine (I'll put the pink ones in the window and ripen them indoors). The flowers will go once they die or we get a hard freeze and the butterflies are gone for the year, whichever comes first.

A note on fall eating and cooking: it's almost time to celebrate the harvest with fall meals: butternut squash soup, spaghetti and lasagna feasts, vegetables caramelized over time in warm ovens, stuffed and roasted acorn squash! Enjoy eating these warm and cozy foods; I hope you are all having a fantastic end of season!

Payoffs of the urban farm

The harvest continues but is winding down quickly. My last boxes of veggies have been delivered to my land partners and I'm starting to take down fences and compost plants as they start to die back. With fall comes amazing food, though, and I wanted to take a few minutes today to realize some of the tangible values of urban farming other than beauty, enjoyment, the great outdoors, butterflies, and a feeling of living closer to the land. Fall is a time of thanksgiving, of reflection of the growing season, of preparing for winter... and it's lovely weather, too!

I know it's fall when the popcorn is ready to harvest. (Must also be time to store the summer clothes and dig out the mittens and wool socks!) Popcorn is so cheap to buy that people sometimes wonder why I bother. I grow it because I love to harvest it and it saves well all winter. Nothing beats a big bowl of fresh, hot, homegrown, heirloom popcorn in the middle of a snowstorm!

Carmen peppers are my absolute favorite variety! They are super sweet and a beautiful red! We've harvested a lot of them this year, so at $4.99 a pound we've come out ahead. They also freeze well, so we'll be eating them for months to come.

Tomatoes are ripening more slowly now, but we're still enjoying them daily (a money saver, but more importantly, nothing beats a ripe, garden tomato--and as you can see in this grocery store photo, home-grown, vine-ripened, heirloom tomatoes have superior quality--transportation issues are the main reason why modern, commercial varieties are pretty but tasteless!). Since we have so many, I'm canning again this year (see below).

This was almost a perfect year for tomatoes in the southern half of Wisconsin. I only irrigated one time and disease pressure at the urban farm was minimal. 

There were so many tomatoes this year, even the yellow, heirloom slicers got to go into the spaghetti sauce!

I'm still a novice canner and always looking to perfect my technique and recipes, but my sauce is pretty tasty!

Until our maple tree decides to turn red, I'm enjoying the leaves on my walks. Happy fall, y'all!

**Side note about composting from my walk last evening:

Greens and browns, people, greens and browns...not sticks. Just sayin'.

It's ok to make mistakes

I have to admit that fall snuck/sneaked* up on me this year. It's been a long summer, full of new things: trying out the farmer's market, growing in 3 locations, and succession planting on a scale I've never done before. But with the beautiful growing season (the tomatoes are still going crazy!) I totally forgot that autumn was right around the corner. Is this a big deal? Thankfully no, but I did miss planting fall radish, a few fall root crops, and most of the fall lettuce.

So this leads me to my point: as an urban farmer, it is ok to make mistakes. Although there is nothing as sweet as home-grown food, we are in the fortunate position of being able to buy food from local farmers' markets and around the world. So I am going to cut myself some slack and move on.

Don't let fear of screwing up keep you from starting a garden or growing a few patio plants. If you need  encouragement, here are a few common urban farm errors that I have made just this year:

• Go on vacation and don't set up irrigation (this is especially an issue with potted tomato plants).

• Go inside for lunch and forget that your chickens are still running around the yard. Find them later that evening (close to fox dinner time) wandering around the neighbor's yard.

• Forget to harvest zucchini until it's the size of a 6 month old Labrador puppy (this mistake can be forgiven by making zucchini bread out of the giant squash).

• Plant 30 (or some other large, unreasonable number) of eggplants, having forgotten that you are the only member of your family that remotely enjoys eggplant (this error leads to giving away vegetables to neighbors and friends, so things can turn out well in the end).

This week at the urban farm:

The lower home plots last week. I have really enjoyed the sunflowers, but they are so large this is probably their one cameo appearance at the urban farm.

Next year-- more plum tomatoes! I forgot over the winter how much I love to can. 

I've been really pleased with these "Glow" sweet peppers. They are thick-walled and very prolific in our Wisconsin cool summers, and they will turn a beautiful orange if I leave them alone long enough. 

A nice shot of one of our flower beds.

Have a great week and enjoy the fall weather!

*I prefer "snuck" as the past tense of "sneak," but I'm sure my English teacher and writer friends will appreciate that I acknowledge the more correct "sneaked." English teacher and writer friends, please comment on this and any other grammar issues I have if you have the time. 

Lazy time of year

Ah, early August. The days are warm and sunny. The plants are so large they are shading out most of the weeds. This year's rains have been just right, so not much irrigation is needed. I can just sit back and watch my tomatoes ripen! Speaking of tomatoes ripening, during this downtime I am mentally preparing my checklist for canning. Jars, lids, making sure the pressure canner is working properly. In a week or two I will be spending some hot days in the kitchen with quarts and quarts of marinara sauce. But for now, I can enjoy the cut flowers I bring in from the garden, let the chickens romp around the yard catching bugs, and steal a few cherry tomatoes and pop them into my mouth still warm from the sun.

This week at the urban farm

My new favorite cherry variety, the hybrid "Cherry Bomb," started ripening this week. I love the look and it is late blight resistant, too!

Cherry Bomb, Sun Gold, and Yellow Pear cherry tomatoes. Sun Gold are still the sweetest cherry tomatoes I've ever had. Have you found something better?

The 5 hens are laying about 3 eggs per day. No signs of molting yet, but that will be coming up sometime in late summer or early fall.

I planted these blackberries a couple of years ago for my dad, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. They have large, delicious fruits, but they are thorny and birds get most of the berries! Our raspberries are definitely my favorite fruit crop.

I can't say enough about cut flowers. If I have the space, I will always grow them. They bring so much beauty (and so many pollinators!) to our urban farm.

After only one week away...

As the days of summer get shorter but warmer, after only a week away from the urban farm I came home to a jungle of tomato plants, huge and heavy with long-awaited ripening fruits. The sunflowers had shot up well over my head, and even with daily inspections from my family, a couple of zucchini squash got away and became sizable clubs, perfect for shredding up and baking into chocolate chip zucchini muffins. It's also time to start canning. This year, Italian peppers are the first to go into the boiling water. I look forward to mixing them with olive oil and scooping it all up with a local baguette this winter.

There should be a walkway in the middle!

The mess is worth it for the great veggies this time of year.

Peppers and carrots + garlic and spices + vinegar and olive oil = love!

Knowing I will eat food in the winter that I put away myself helps me look forward to the cold months ahead.

Growing for pleasure

I've written a lot about urban farming for food and self-sustainability and using organic and sustainable practices for the environment and health. One thing I don't write about much is the pure joy of growing plants and eating the produce. This weekend I had the opportunity to host a church group for a tour of our plots, and it gave me great pleasure to walk with friends among the green plants, to have samples of vegetables to eat, and to see small children pulling carrots and beets right out of the ground, washing those beautiful carrots with the hose and and eating them still warm from the sun. It made my heart happy to share stories, both bragging about our successes and commiserating about droughts, June bugs, and hungry bunnies. So if you decide to grow your own food, I'd put pleasure at the top of the list of reasons why.

The first cherry tomatoes are ripe this week, the earliest being the orange hybrid variety 'Sun Gold'.

Green beans are in season. This variety is called 'Provider'.

Raspberries grow very well in our local soil that is not acidic enough for blueberries. We always have plenty to eat fresh and freeze for the rest of the year.

Cut flowers are in bloom!

We have squash now, tomatoes, peppers, and garlic very soon, and eggplant after that. Almost ratatouille time!

Thinking ahead to next year

It's hard to admit, but I've been in a blog funk. While not writing, I have been mulling over my thoughts about urban farming and trying to articulate the reasons I've been going through some changes. 

For me, the number one reason to grow food is to feed my family and share with friends. This year I ventured into farmers' market sales and found that with the three yards I farm, I didn't have enough produce left over to share and enjoy (there's nothing worse as a vegetable grower than having to buy lettuce because you sold all of your crop!).

Freshly dug carrots are like candy!

This left me with two options-- buy/rent additional land for next year or continue to grow only in town and say goodbye to the marketing side of the urban farm.

Although the idea of moving to the country or leasing land is temping and there would definitely be benefits, I have decided to stay in town and grow for the pleasure of feeding the ones I love. I'm thankful that our family is in a position for me to be able to make this choice.

Small, city-yard sized garden plots can grow a lot of food-- enough for summer family meals, freezing, canning, and sharing!

So I am going to get back on the blog horse so that I can put my thoughts and photos out into the world and hopefully get some new ideas from those who enjoy urban farming as much as I do!

Urban Farm Update

The year has been somewhat chilly and very wet. We really need some hot, dry weather to push our summer crops along. That said, we've been enjoying the cool weather garlic scapes, carrots, kale, lettuce, kohlrabi, and we just finished the peas!

And raspberry season has only just begun! 

Spring 2017

Most of the days this spring have looked like this...

But even though it's been a wet and cool start to the growing season and we are a bit behind, things are coming along nicely!

The garlic over-wintered successfully under a warm layer of straw. It's looking healthy and green!

Salad greens are still in full force and we're starting to harvest radish. Last week at the farmers' market I threw in a couple of radishes with each bag of salad mix. We should have more of both this week!

The tomatillos are flowering (which seems crazy early) but if the flowers can survive a few more cool nights they should have fruit set soon. I can't wait for fresh green salsa!

The next farmers' market is this Thursday at Greenway Station, 8am to 1pm. Hope to see you there!

Kids' day at the market this week!

Countdown to the first farmers' market

It's a busy time here at Two Wheels Urban Farm, and next Thursday morning is our first farmers' market day at Greenway Station in Middleton. I plan to give a better update next week as to what we'll have for sale, including what garden plants will be available.

Until then, here's a brief update in photos!

The early planted veggies are starting to look like they could be harvested soon.

Because of cool temperatures, most of the plants still have floating row cover.

We set up the orange market tent and sign this week to make sure we had all the supplies we need and could figure out how to open up the tent!

Have a great weekend everyone, and look for information early next week about opening market day!

Spring tour of the urban farm

Spring is in high gear and there are chores all around! I love this time of year because there is always something going on. Below are some pictures I took yesterday to show how the plants and projects are coming along. If the weather stays nice and all goes well, we should be good to go for the first spring farmers' market on May 11!

Plants to sell at the first markets. The peppers are getting really big!

Taking a peek under the row cover, the green (front) and red (back) lettuce varieties are growing well now that the weather has warmed up.

The kale is looking good, too.

My dad and I built the last of the new beds yesterday. This one will be for some of our market cut flowers. (Now to build the fence to keep the animals out!)

The chickens love the spring sunshine! Me too!