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! 

Attack of the killer tomatoes! The Urban Farm in July.

July has arrived! With the summer solstice behind us and Independence Day ahead, the heat-loving veggies are really starting to show off and grow at amazing rates, the plants putting on both size and fruit. All that hard work in the spring is really starting to pay off.

I didn't realize how much things had changed here at the urban farm until I took a look at some photos from earlier this year. Wow, what a difference a few months makes!

The plants are getting huge and they aren't even full size yet! It's very exciting!

I like to think of myself as neat and tidy-- my family may disagree-- but as the tomatoes grow and grow and grow they are killing my orderly system.

Tomato plants are known for going a little crazy this time of year.

I purchased 10 new tomato cages in 2016 (between $3 and $5 each) to add to the 5 I already owned, but I have approximately 35 tomato plants to support and don't feel like spending the additional money, so I took a stroll around the community garden to see what my more frugal options are. This will be especially important in the future as the urban farm continues to expand.

Homemade cages made from fencing. This was my first choice after buying cages, but the fencing costs almost as much as the pre-made cages. Also, after careful inspection my plants are probably now too big to squeeze into a cage. If I ever feel like shelling out the cash, this is what I will make.

This free option uses limbs from trees and gives a country, old time feel to any garden. It looks like it could work well with this squash plant, but I'm not sure it would work for the giant tomatoes.

This gardener is using a system of poles and strings to hold up his tomatoes. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

On a bike ride this week I ran across this garden using a single stake for each plant. In the end this is the method I chose. Cheap and easy. I'm curious to see if the wood stakes are strong enough to hold up the plant once it is loaded with fruit. If it does work, I'll go to a metal pole (so they don't rot) or just make a few cages each year in order to spread out the costs.

In other news I've started harvesting pounds and pounds of carrots (both red and orange), beets, green beans, peas, and more kohlrabi. I even scored some pie cherries from the community garden's fruit orchard.

Dragon carrots (a free seed sample I received with my order from Jung's).

And freezing raspberries is my new daily chore!

I can't wait to make raspberry ice cream for the 4th of July celebration!

Early summer eating at the urban farm

After cultivating, planting, and then spending a few busy weeks weeding, now is the fun time of summer before the tomato plants become large and unruly and the flurry of canning has started. This is the sweet time when you can really begin eating something besides salad.

Due to my locavore tendencies, I've also been thinking more about reducing food miles where I can and eating what is in season and available in my region. Many of the veggies and fruits we now eat are grown in our own plot of land, and if not here, then purchased from local growers. And food miles aside, this food is ripe and tastes better than much of the produce trucked in from some other time zone.

Things we've been enjoying this week: green onions, broccoli, broccolini, basil, cilantro, parsley, and Swiss chard from the urban farm, and homemade bread made from local wheat and homemade sourdough culture (a real treat toasted and smeared with last week's strawberry jam). I also made my raspberry millet muffins (recipe from February 24) and subbed in local sour cherries. (I may now need to plant a cherry tree!)

Some other foods in photos...

Local bread cheese (Juustoleipa), warmed up on a hot griddle.

This is my second week of enjoying local strawberries. These were frozen on a cookie sheet and then stored in baggies for wintertime smoothies and shortcakes.

On a bike ride with my daughter today we found a patch of wild blackberries. They are tiny but perfect (maybe even more perfect because they were a gift from nature with no work involved).

Our cultivated raspberries are starting to ripen. There were only enough red ones today to pick and eat immediately, still warm from the sunshine, but I'm hoping to be freezing and making jam out of an abundant berry harvest soon.

Until our chickens start laying eggs, we're very lucky that a neighbor is selling eggs for a local farmer this summer.

Our first harvested kohlrabi (German for "cabbage turnip"). Very easy to grow and tastes a little like broccoli.

The community garden plots are producing some very nice beets, which I like roasted or pickled.

Sunshine in a jar

This week at the urban farm I had my first taste of canning. I have always frozen some fruits and veggies (raspberries are my favorite freezable) because freezing is fairly straightforward, even for a novice like me.

We are looking forward to a good raspberry harvest this year. Netting will keep the birds from taking too many!

Reusable netting is good for all kinds of fruit crops.

The world of Ball jars and canning lids has been a big mystery to me. When I was a kid my mom and dad would buy boxes of Concord grapes from the local grape growers and make jelly. The popping of the lids as the jars cooled made my mouth water for a slice of toast with homemade jelly. But that was many years ago, and we now all live far away from the Concord grapes of Tontitown, Arkansas (with its fun and delicious grape festival that feeds festival goers some of the best Italian food around).

In my mind I had originally thought that food preservation would all take place at one time in the fall, but now that I think about it more, canning and freezing and drying will happen at many points throughout the year when we will put away food from whatever plant is producing in abundance. As a food and farming meditation, I have been slowly re-reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and really thinking about each chapter. This week I'm contemplating her ideas of local eating.

What is local in the upper Midwest?

Here in Wisconsin, if you don't can/freeze/dry some of the harvest, over the winter a local meal will consist mostly of meat and milk products with root veggies. By early spring even the root veggies will likely be gone. Preserved foods are like packets of sunshine in a jar, ready to take out when the days are cold, reminding us that we do produce beautiful food here in the summertime, and giving us faith that the long, warm days of summer will indeed return.

Strawberry season

In the future I hope to have a strawberry patch of my own, but until them I am enjoying the fruits harvested by my local farmer's market growers. I bought two quarts of perfectly ripe, local, organic, berries at the downtown Middleton farmers market (conveniently located at Capital Brewery) and brought them home to make jam while they were at the peak of ripeness. My mom and I canned them using water bath canning, and I'm excited about pressure canning the less acidic foods later this summer!

Starting the process of filling up my pantry for winter.

And just because I like to know the monetary value of things, a half pint of local, hand-made jam goes for 8 bucks at the farmer's market (this seems expensive to me, though I have been known to pay this on occasion because it is so much more delicious than the grocery store variety). For $10 worth of berries, $2 for pectin, and $2 for new lids (I already owned the jars) I produced $72 worth of strawberry jam.

Chickens and compost

Just for fun, here are a couple of pictures of the pullets enjoying the strawberry tops!

It took a while for them to warm up to the berries.

But they figured out that they are delicious and begged for more scraps.

Showing the raspberries who's boss

Raspberries were the first crop I grew successfully. When we first moved to Wisconsin, our city house in Madison had a very tiny yard. I tried that first summer to grow a garden, but it didn't produce anything but a nest of wild bunnies. (Looking back on it, my garden patch was much too shady to grow tomatoes in a cool Wisconsin summer.)

The next year I decided to try my luck at fruits and took a trip to the local garden center to buy bareroot blueberry plants. My mind was set on baking blueberry muffins. The helpful garden pro convinced me that it would be a huge mistake to plant blueberries in my part of the state. Although I hadn't had a soil test, she assured me that all of the soil around the county is very alkaline, and I would spend too much time and money modifying my soil to make it acidic. She pointed me to my future friend, the raspberry.

At the time, however, I associated raspberries with chocolate (usually raspberry syrup on some overly sweet chocolate cake). I didn't much like these fruits and was sad to lose my dream of blueberries. But I took home 6 bareroot plants anyway, assuming they would die like my first year's garden, and I planted them in the sunniest spot in the yard along the fence line and mostly ignored them.

By the second summer they were 3 feet wide and growing into the neighbors yard across the fence. By the third summer they were out of control, and I used the lawn mower to keep down the new sprouts. The plants produced a good crop of berries those third and fourth years-- enough for lots of fresh handfuls eaten right from the garden, many breakfast fruit salads, and several gallons to store. I learned how to freeze and use them in many wonderful recipes.



Fast forward a few years to our current house with a nice sized plot of land, and my raspberries were haphazardly planted in the middle of the yard. Truth be told, I planted them in a circle around an old satelite dish in an attempt to hide it. (We have since come to our senses dug out the offending dish.)

But once again the berries were a disaster. They were in a circle and hard to pick. I wanted them to spread (more berries!) but this messy circle patch was not going to work!



I consulted several online university extension sites and found a cheap and easy trellis plan from the University of Colorado.

I cut back the raspberries into two distinct rows, which was not as difficult to do with a circle of plants as I thought. As new shoots come up, I will keep the ones that are in the correct row location and cut back any that are out of place.

Brief safety message: before I did any digging I had the utility lines marked. My lot has underground wires running all over the place.



Two stakes and two wires per row make up my simple trellis system. I used bread ties to attach the canes to the wires. 



Once they were all tied up, I applied some organic, time-released fertilizer and spread on a thick layer of mulch. This fall I will add a healthy layer of compost and add mulch one more time.



Now I sit and wait for the buds to open and my plants to come back to life. I'm looking forward to a good harvest this summer and a freezer full of berries for next winter!