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. 

No leaf left behind

Fall has not typically been my favorite time of year. I'm not a huge football fan, I really miss the warm and bright days of summer, and fresh tomatoes are missing from my salads. But autumn does bring one gift-- leaves! I do love the beautiful trees, especially the maples that turn brilliant red, orange, or yellow.

Our red maple provides cool shade all summer and then its naked branches let light into our south-facing windows all winter long.

When the leaves have just fallen, they are like a colorful carpet!

But what to do with all those leaves? Our neighbors, for the most part, rake them up and the city hauls them away to a compost facility. In the past I have done this as well, but I realized I could put them to good use (and save money, too).

I could also go on and on about how much fuel the giant trucks use to drive around and suck up leaves or how many leaves end up in the lakes because they get raked into the street and go down the drain. And those things are indeed true, But really, when it comes down to it, I like to pinch pennies until they scream for mercy, so I just can't see throwing free mulch/compost away and then turn around and buy it at the store.

And using leaves is really easy, especially if you have a bagging lawn mower. Just set the lawn mower on the highest setting and run over dry leaves. Then use the bag to move the chopped leaves where you want them. Alternatively, you can wait until the leaves are brittle and put them into a bin and crush them (or stomp them like grapes!).

A few ideas on how to use your leaves:

• Mulching around perennial plants
• Spreading over garlic
• Raking into existing vegetable or flower beds
• Using as a "browns" layer when sheet composting/lasagna gardening or in a traditional compost pile or bin

Because my lawn mower is broken, I've been picking them up in buckets, crushing them by hand, and moving them around. When the lawn mower is back from the shop, hopefully the ground will not be snow covered and I can mow them up into smaller pieces. If not, no worries. Nature is amazing at breaking things down.

These leaves were spread over the garlic about a month ago and are already composting nicely.

In other news...

A big shout out to my friend for letting me babysit her Red Wigglers and learn all about worm composting. Hopefully I'll learn a few things and blog about it later this winter!

So enjoy fall everyone! Watch football, get your favorite sweater out of storage, or do what I do and go for a nice crisp bike ride. 😊 And think about putting at least some of your leaves to good use. You may be pleasantly surprised!

Expand-o-matic

As the summer winds down, I have been thinking about the future of the urban farm. My goal for next year is to produce enough vegetables to both feed my family and sell some at a local farmer's market.

I need more space!

I have a couple of options, in addition to the new raised beds I'm going to add next year...

1) Use land in other people's backyards. This would be the ideal way for me to keep my urban farm truly urban, while also putting someone's abandoned garden to good use or transforming lawn into something productive. Additionally, people who may want a vegetable garden-- but don't want to take care of one-- can enjoy the look of a garden along with eating fresh veggies grown right at home.

It might look something like this: I plant four plots in your back yard. You provide the chemical-free land and water and I do all the planting and maintenance. Two plots I harvest for me and two plots I harvest for you. (If you're interested in this option, please let me know!)

2) Rent or buy land. Buying an acreage is something we have been thinking about as a back-up plan. For now we could use the land for planting veggies and fruits and eventually build a house. I like living in the city, however, so this is an issue to overcome. Another option is renting land (an acre or less) and using it as my urban farm extension.


This week at the urban farm:

As I remove plants from the beds, some of them go to the chickens. In this photo they are enjoying a green bean plant. Most of the late pods I kept for next year's seed, but they got to enjoy eating these extra plants.

For the beds that are finished for the year I am using winter rye as a cover crop. This keeps the soil in place during the fall rains and adds organic material. It also suppresses weeds and just looks nice and lush!

Fall carrots are coming along.

Spinach and lettuce should grow well into the fall. I am planning to get some into the cold frame and see how far into the winter we can have salads.

Garden hacks to extend the growing season

The growing season around Madison is a mere 140 days (our grad school town, Raleigh, NC, gets 220 days). I have proposed moving to a warmer climate and have gotten the evil eye from my family. We do really love it here--even the snowy winters are a big draw for us. But I do need more time!

One problem I am currently dealing with is that it's time to plant tomatoes indoors and I am running out of room under my grow lights. I have a whole flat of lettuce that needs to move out to make room for my valuable tomato seedlings. After much reading this winter, I found some options for extending my season, and with these farm additions I can move some plants out and even start seeds outdoors now and could be harvesting cold-loving crops earlier in the spring and then again until Thanksgiving or later. Of course a heated greenhouse is ideal for growing year-round, but these are some easy, inexpensive options I'm trying out this year.


Cold Frame

A cold frame can be used for hardening off plants early in the year and growing veggies late into the fall. This project took a few hours, but other than buying the hinges, I was able to repurpose wood and other leftover supplies from my garage.

My new cold frame is built out of scrap wood and a used greenhouse panel (another option for the top would be an old window). To finish this frame, I'm going to paint the inside white to help reflect sunlight.

The plan for the cold frame was found in this book.

A thermometer helps monitor the environment inside the cold frame, since temperatures can really heat up on even a very cool but sunny day.

I placed the cold frame in a sunny spot facing south. When nights get really chilly this spring, my plan is to cover the cold frame with an old blanket and place a jug of hot water in the frame with the plants to slow the temperature drop overnight.


Hoop House

After building the cold frame, I decided to try additional cold weather growing options and see which ones worked best. According to the UW Extension, a hoop house can extend the growing season by 6-8 weeks, and I've noticed that most of the CSA farms around use them. My goal for the hoop house is to grow cool season veggies early in the spring (and then later in the fall), specifically the fresh spinach and salad greens I've been craving.

After I worried for several days about how to do it (I winged it since I didn't have written instructions for my specific plan) it turned out to be one of the easiest garden modifications I've made. The new hoop house sits over one of my 4' x 8' beds, and when the spring heats up it can be easily removed and stored away until fall.

The simple frame consists of 4 PVC pipes. The ground is soft right now, so I was able to drive them into the ground inside of the raised bed for stability. I made three hoops and used one across the top, and all of these were zip tied together. I also used wood stakes (two on each end) to add stability and keep the hoop house upright.

Hoops over the raised bed.

I found the plastic at my local farmer's co-op.

This is a temporary structure, so rocks hold down the plastic sheeting.

When the day heats up, the cover is easily rolled up and clipped.

Row Cover

Another trick I'm trying is row cover, which should provide protection down to 28F. I'm going to plant early in the community garden, and the row cover should hopefully provide some protection not only from cold weather, but also from hungry bunnies and birds. For early season crops like salad greens, the cover can be left on the plants 24/7 through harvest, which is a big bonus since I don't make it out the community garden every day. For especially cold nights, the row cover can also be used inside of the hoop house to add a second layer of protection.

Be sure to shop around. Prices vary widely depending on where you shop.