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'.

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!