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! 

2017 Sneak Peek

The countdown to spring is on! It's hard to believe in only a month I will be planting the first seeds in the urban farm's grow room. In our northern climate, most vegetables have to be started indoors so that their growing season will be long enough. At first glance this may seem like a pain, but it gives veggie growers a chance to baby their plants and allow them to get big and healthy during those first weeks of life. Having a grow room is also just fun, and the grow lights really make the dark days of winter feel warm and bright.

For now, here's a preview of some of the vegetables that I am especially looking forward to planting, growing, harvesting, selling, and eating this year. If there is a veggie you are excited about, let me know!

Meet the Black Krim heirloom tomato. I've never grown a black/green tomato before, so I am very excited to try out this variety!

The Hungarian Hot Wax pepper is a hot pepper (like a jalapeno) but with the texture of a regular wax pepper. I think they would be great pickled or chopped up as a pizza topping.

Tatsoi was the most beautiful vegetable I saw on my WOOFing trip this fall, and I knew I needed to grow it. It's much like spinach and is good stir fried or even eaten raw in a salad. Here are some recipes for this Asian green.

I first had pickled daikon radish at a local restaurant, Graze, and I fell in love with this little root veggie. Here's a link with some other ways to enjoy them.

For years I ate the sauteed greens of chard and enjoyed their surprisingly salty flavor, but tossed the beautiful stems in the compost. I didn't really appreciate this veggie until summer 2016 when I learned that you can cook and eat the stems in much the same way as asparagus! Fantastic! Here's a recipe to get you started.

WWOOFing with the best of them

I spent the past week working on an honest to goodness CSA (community supported agriculture) and market-selling organic vegetable farm. I volunteered through a program called WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). WWOOFing works like this: you volunteer on a farm for anything from a week or two up to a whole season in exchange for a bed and some simple food. For some the adventure is in the travel or being free to move around the world cheaply. For me, this program provided the easiest way for me to get onto a farm and see how things work (and perhaps other farms in the future!). It also allowed me to put into focus what I want out of Two Wheels Urban Farm.

My week looked like this: 8-9 hours of work every day, and this included planting hundreds of garlic bulbs, building temporary tunnels to protect the veggies from the first frost of the year, harvesting, and filling CSA boxes. The farm provided me a comfortable bed and dry bulk items (rice, beans, lentils, quinoa, etc.) and all the veggies I could eat from the farmer box (veggies that didn't make the cut for the CSA box or the market stand, but are still super delicious!). It was tiring work, but the farm crew was awesome and I had a ton of fun and learned a whole lot of valuable information that will make the urban farm even more productive.

All the veggies I could eat! And I ate well for sure!

I took notes all week on the technical stuff, including some terrific varieties I'm going to plant next year. But these are some of the additional take-aways:

1) Farming is a labor of love. You don't farm to get rich, and most families have at least one person who works off-farm. This is something that I had thought about in other ways, but hearing the farmers talk about it in these terms made total sense. Like teaching, growing food is something that you love not for the money, but for the hard work and the non-monetary rewards. It feels great to grow food and feed people.

Packing up the CSA boxes was a lot of fun. I thought of all the people involved in the CSA boxes I've received over the years and all the people who would be eating the food grown at this farm.

2) Starting small is ok. I feel like my ideas are creeping along, but that is a good way to grow-- slow and steady. The CSA farm I worked on last week started out 30 years ago with only 10 shares and an acre of gardens. Today they often have seasons where over 100 CSA shares are sold, they run a weekly stand at the farmers market, and they farm over 7 acres.

The veggie plots at this farm were very large and needed a crew to keep them up. If my urban farm grows slowly and I farm only what I am able to handle, my business and my sanity will survive to farm another year!

3) I learned this week that urban farming, especially going the route of farming small plots in city backyards, is really cool (perhaps I have underestimated myself?). And by living and working in town, I can live my values and use my bicycle as significant mode of transportation, something that I wouldn't be able to do if I lived out of town.

There are a lot additional advantages to urban farming: the very local community of both my neighbors and those with whom I farm and sell to, utilizing lawns to produce healthy, chemical-free food instead of input-heavy grass, and producing food without the land debt (often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) that many farmers face. Also, I will be able to have "high touch" with my high density plots, keeping them weed free and healthy to get the most produce out of small amount of land.

Unlike row crops, veggie farming is very hands on, and plants need babied throughout the season. I built these tunnels to protect sensitive lettuces from the first killing frost.

Have a great week everyone! Next week I hope to have some updates on the urban farm expansion project!

Pre-RAGBRAI wrap up

One thing that I hadn't thought about when kicking the urban farm up a notch was "how am I going to be able to go on vacation?" With multiple vegetable plots to water and harvest and chickens to tend to, someone needs to be here at least some amount of time every day. Next week I am going to ride RAGBRAI (the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) and I am very thankful that my family will be back here to take up my slack!

Another thing that I didn't know before this year was how successful the vegetable production would be. My lovely SO mentioned to me the other night, over a beer on the patio, as we were watching the chickens frolic in the yard, that the home veggie patch looked so much better than in years past. After getting over my initial shock-- didn't it look good last year, too?!-- I realized that she is right. It does look better this year.  Bigger. Greener. Healthier. And more veggies! I sat down today and thought of some reasons that might be the case.

Full time farmer

The most obvious reason is that I am working the urban farm full time. Other than family, my fruits, vegetables, and chickens come before everything else and I spend a good deal of time outside every day. But that's not to say that someone who works full time couldn't have success. My vegetable beds are large (and hopefully growing in the future) so for me it's a full-time gig. But for a smaller gardener, the goal would be to set aside a few hours a week where you can really get in there and work on your garden, especially early in the season. This commitment will make a huge difference.

As long as you spend some time each week on the care of your plants (and singing to them doesn't hurt!) you will almost always be successful.

Feed slowly

When fertilizing plants, it's best to feed them slowly. Think about how people eat-- small meals over the week instead of gorging for only one meal on Monday morning. I wish I could remember who taught me this, but the idea really sank in. Commercial fertilizers are powerful and tend to overfeed plants. The plants get big and green really fast, but maybe that's not what nature intended. A healthy plant living in the wild eats slowly as it absorbs nutrients from composted material. This is the system I have tried to put into place. I added compost to all the beds before planting, and for the most part that's the only fertilizer I have used. Corn is a heavy feeder, so I did use some fish emulsion fertilizer a couple of times this year. But that's it, and everything is producing very well.

The corn is flowering right on time. Sometime over the winter I'll be enjoying a bowl of this popcorn while watching a good movie on a cold night.

Weed early

The biggest change I made this year was to weed meticulously the first month after planting. This is when weeds are taking hold and it's make or break time. If you can get those weeds early, then the rest of the growing season is so much easier!

Eventually the tomatoes take over and shade out everything else, but while they are small in the spring I spend a lot of time weeding around them so that in July I can relax and watch them ripen.

Proper spacing

In the past I have either crowded my plants (not enough room so many plants get shaded) or I have given them too much room, and weeds grow and space is wasted. This year I used information from the Square Foot Gardening book to make sure I gave plants exactly the square feet they require and no more.

Tomatillos are monster plants and they require extra space. I'm growing basil and cilantro underneath them (partially shaded) and this keeps the herbs from bolting too fast.

Pest Management

I had two main pests this year that I had to deal with, cucumber beetles on my cukes and flea beetles on my broccolini and Brussels. For the cucumber beetles I used a net over the plants while they were small. I left it on until they started to flower and by then the beetle population was very low. For the flea beetles, I sprayed my cole crops with neem oil to deter the pests. Both organic, safe methods worked well and kept the insects in check.

The chickens love helping out by eating all the bugs they can find!

Happy urban farming and I will check back after RAGBRAI!

Expanding veggie production

Because of my small piece of land, I plant my annual vegetables very densely, giving each plant exactly the space it needs and no more. I was inspired by the book All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew, and after learning about his method I was really excited about minimizing footprint while maximizing harvest.

When building raised beds, any size works, though narrow boxes work better so you can reach into the middle without stepping into the bed. These beds are just boxes that can be created with anything: wood, cinder blocks, rocks, or bricks, with the main concern being to use something that will not leach toxins.

Boxes are simple and can be made of any safe material.

The potting soil mix in the square foot gardening book (1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 vermiculite) is high in nutrients, drains very well, and is light for easy weeding. My original boxes were built to these specifications and have done well in past years.

Plants growing happily in a box, summer 2014.

For my 2016 boxes, I have two types of new boxes: 4' x 4' boxes and 4' x 8' boxes. The 4' x 4' boxes are pre-owned, pre-fab kits that a very generous friend gave me, and they are made out of a composite material (something like this). Two of the new 4' x 8' boxes are made from new, non-treated cedar boards, and the last new 4' x 8' box is made from repurposed 4" x 4" cedar posts. I attached the boards together using self-tapping deck screws, so I didn't need to pre-drill.

For the soil mix I ordered two square yards of Purple Cow Organics compost from a local store, which turned out to be just right for the new boxes and left a small amount to mix into each of the old boxes--a big shout out to my father who spent a whole day helping me shovel and haul the pile off of the driveway! I also bought bags of peat moss at my local garden store and deviated from the original mix by not adding the vermiculite, which I will likely mix in to the new beds before planting.

Peat moss is a non-renewable resource. I am investigating alternatives for future raised beds.

In the new 4' x 4' boxes I used old coffee burlap bags as a weed barrier. For the 4' x 8' boxes I decided to do something different-- I put down a layer of wet newspaper.

This moist layer should attract worms to my box as well as discourage weeds for the first season. Eventually the newspaper will be incorporated into the soil and I will be able to use these boxes for deep-rooted veggies.

Annual vegetable bed expansion history:

• 2012: 64 sq  ft of raised beds
• 2015: 88 sq ft of raised beds + 200 sq ft community garden plot                                             
• 2016: 216 sq ft of raised beds + 200 sq ft community garden plot

Two of the new 4' x 8' boxes on the left. New 4' x 4' boxes at the bottom.