Winter on the urban farm and my new favorite chicken accessory

I am back after spending a couple of months working a short-term lab job in an attempt to give my mind something to think about during the long, dark days of winter, and to make a few bucks for my early spring hiking trip with my dad-- spiritual pilgrimage, bonding experience, real world Spanish practice, and the chance to use teeny, tiny backpacking accessories. I'm hoping to get some good photos and experiences worth sharing here.

For now, here's a quick update on the urban farm!

The days are getting longer and brighter!

With spring not too far off, even the snowy days seem more livable! The chickens don't like free-ranging in snow, though, so I'm looking forward to some grass for them to walk around on.

Did I mention that you can freeze whole tomatoes if you want to put off processing them?

I core them, squeeze out the seeds, and store them in zip lock bags. When frozen they are like billiard balls.

I froze these in August or early September and just turned them into spaghetti sauce in January. Because I had the freezer space (and it's easier) I decided the freeze the sauce in baggies instead of canning. I'll be sure to use this batch before my canned sauce.

The product that is going to change my view of winter chickens: 

If you keep chickens where it freezes at night, you need this heated bucket!

In the summer I use a similar watering bucket with nipples (to keep the water fresh and reduce the number of water changes). But in the winter, even with a bucket heater, the nipples freeze, so I'm back to using a dish and heater, and I have to change the dirty water at least daily. This is my new favorite water bucket (the best $40 I've spent all year). It provides clean, liquid water all winter, and I can unplug it and use it all summer, too. Fantastic! Buy it here or at your local farm supply store.

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.

The ugly side of winter and Parrot Flower Power

Typically winters in the upper Midwest are snowy, with many bright days and surprisingly bright nights, when the snow reflects all of the light and makes midnight look like daytime. This is especially pleasant to view if you have an outdoor hot tub available.

But this winter we have had some oddly warm days followed by normally cold temperatures, resulting in melted snow turning to ice.

The low spot in my yard collected all of the melting snow and then froze into a solid mass of dirty ice (unfortunately, I have to cross this twice a day to check on the hens-- Yaktrax really do help).

It's hard to believe it with the mini glacier in my yard, but planting starts next month (indoors) so I've started working on my planting plan. (A sneak peak at the 2017 season will be in the blog next week!)

For now, my new toy!


Parrot Flower Power

The Flower Power is a small, waterproof, indoor/outdoor sensor that gives real time (as well as historical) information on a plant's growing environment. I decided to try one out because we needed temperature information under the indoor lighting system. There is a slick app to run this Bluetooth enabled device, so I can sit in the living room and watch tv while checking on the plants. Not only does it track temperature, it also monitors light intensity, fertility, and moisture. The only thing it's missing is the ability to monitor humidity.

The Flower Power is set up to monitor the conditions for a specific type of plant. In the app, the user designates the plant type and the advice given is species-specific.

The app's display is easy to understand and the reminders to water and fertilize are handy.

The Flower Power has been fun to play with, especially with my tomato plant. The light I'm using isn't really bright enough for tomatoes (they need very intense light), but it's good enough that I do have some baby tomatoes-- fingers crossed some of them mature! Luckily, the lights work great for growing baby salad greens!

Baby tomato and a flat of salad mix.

Baby greens with some lovely organic tomatoes from the co-op. A 10" x 20" flat of densely seeded salad mix gave us 10 side salads. And the baby greens are so cute! I've never seen anything like them for sale.

So for now, I'm thinking ahead to spring weather, but keeping my fingers crossed for some nice, new snow for fat biking before the winter is over. I'm also enjoying my last 45 flexible winter days, because once I start growing transplants, the fun doesn't stop until fall!

So, what do you do?

At a party last week, a good friend introduced me to a woman, and in doing so told the woman a few things about me, including that I am an urban farmer. The woman was very kind and interested and asked many questions about the urban farm, including where my plots are, what I grow, and where I'm planning to sell produce this summer. We talked about bed building, keeping chickens, vegetable selection, and how I'm looking forward to a busy spring season. After all of this discussion, she posed the question, "so, what do you do?" I looked at her, probably with one of my scrunchy, screwed up faces that people say I make when confused or irritated, and she added, "I mean, what is your job?"

*Sigh*

I get this sometimes, and I am am reminded that "urban farmer" isn't a typical job description (it's never an option in a form's occupation pull-down box). It's also a society norm to ask people what their paying jobs are. So instead of feeling resentful that she thinks my vocation isn't a "real job," I've decided to be thankful that I am in a position to be able to farm without having to support my family financially-- though I do take feeding my family seriously, and with good business practices I'm hoping that my market business will be solvent!

With that, some things I will be working on in 2017:

Be thankful every day. I will find 2 or 3 things every day to be thankful for, big or small. Concentrating on these will keep life in perspective.

This cartoon my mom had made really sums up what I have to be thankful for!

Today I'm thankful for indoor grow lights. I originally set them up to grow transplants for summer, but they have filled the dark winter with light and leafy veggies. And if these flowers work out, tomatoes, too!

Make my own bread. This is something I really enjoy doing, so I want to prioritize it. Also, it gives me satisfaction to know I can pronounce all of the ingredients in my recipes, and I love the way baking bread makes the house smell like a home.

This is a King Arthur Flour recipe that I have been making recently. It toasts up great, too!

Homemade stollen-- a new holiday tradition. And another King Arthur recipe.

Organize the garage. Since the garage serves many purposes for us (barn, tool shed, bike storage, carport) it needs an organization upgrade. I'm happy to say that we can fit our car and my parents' car in the garage as well as all of our bikes. That said, starting this spring our two-car garage is also going to be our urban farm pack shed, and I have big hopes of putting a vegetable refrigerator (probably an old beer cooler) out there.

The organizational system needs a 2017 reboot!

Keep a list of books read. A list will help me go back if I need to review some piece of important information. I will also keep a list of books I want to read. Most importantly, I plan to not always give in to the easiest thing when I'm tired, and instead turn off the television or the internet and read!

Winter is a great time to cozy up with a good book.

Winter on the urban farm

Spring will be here in just a few days, so I have been contemplating winter. When I was working a desk job and dreaming of my future life on the urban farm, a couple of thoughts nagged at me: what would I do with myself all winter and would I go crazy? Sitting around my living room day after day is not my idea of a good time. I like to be busy and physically active. Now that I have a month of winter farming under my belt, I have a better picture of what next winter will look like.

So what do urban farmers do in the winter?

Winter in Wisconsin.

Planning: winter is a good time to go to your office (in my case that would be riding my fat bike through the snow to the local coffee shop) to plan for next year.

My winter office.

During the growing season and at harvest I make notes of what crops did well. This will help me decide what varieties to keep and which to replace. I also have planting maps from each year, so I can work on the next season's rotation and companion plantings. Since Two Wheels Urban Farm is in the growth stage, winter can be spent mapping out where new raised beds and other new farm additions will go and estimating supplies and budget needs.

One map iteration from my big farm notebook.

Education: there is always so much to learn! Which soil amendments are best, how can I make compost faster, and how difficult is it to raise my own chickens?  The winter provides cold weather and short days, just right for camping out at the library and reading. There are also many options for conferences and classes. This year I attended the 2016 Gardens Summit in Madison and learned about veggies, pollinators and composting while networking with local growers. There is a free online conference called the Home Grown Food Summit, and next year I'm planning to attend the 2017 MOSES (Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service) farming conference. I'm also currently finishing up a women's bicycle maintenance class called We Are All Mechanics-- I'm thinking Park Tool School might have my next bike repair class.

I keep re-checking out this book and should probably buy a copy for myself.

Volunteering: another important way I spend my free time is to volunteer. The winter is the perfect time of year for me to slow down and give back to the community. This year I've volunteered for three organizations that mean a lot to me: Fair Share CSA Coalition, Wisconsin Bike Federation, and the Madison Area Master Gardeners Association.

A cool sign from the Fair Share CSA open house.

I'm going to enjoy these last days of winter and start making my spring to-do list... continue indoor seed starts, fence building, prepping the beds at the community garden plot, and harvesting asparagus!

Microgreens all winter long

When my outdoor harvest was completed late last fall and my last collard plant was composted, I felt a sense of loss--the cold winter was really on its way--and I immediately started missing all the fresh greens from my garden. Luckily I had discovered a fantastic resource called The Urban Farm Podcast. I love this podcast and have listened weekly all winter, storing ideas in my brain for how to improve and expand my urban farm.

One of the guests on the podcast around the darkest time of the winter was Peter Burke, who wrote a book called Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening on how to grow microgreens easily indoors all year long. I had seen local microgreens in the grocery store for around $5 for a pint. If I could grow my own, it would not only give us healthy winter food, it would be a way to keep my garden going, so it was worth a try. All I needed was a window sill, seeds, seed starting soil mix, newspaper, and some aluminum bread pans.



I found the seeds at my local garden store, and the brand I purchased has instructions inside the seed packets. They have a great selection of different varieties at this store, so I was able to try a lot of different options. My favorite turned out to be sunflower for general salad use, though the Savory Mix (a mix of radish, chard, mustard, cabbage, etc.) is very good on my Microgreen Caprese Salad:



The directions I follow are very simple. Mr. Burke's book and the seed packets gives additional information.

1) Soak seeds in a small cup of water for a few hours (I usually do this for just 2-4 hours). Start with two tablespoons of the smaller seeds or three tablespoons of sunflower seeds. Adjust for your next planting based on how dense your greens were.

2) Fill bread pan 2-3 inches deep with seed starting mix and water until it feels like a damp sponge.

3) After soaking, spread seeds over moist soil in a single layer. The seeds should be very crowded.

4) Cut a few sheets of newspaper to fit your pan. Get these wet and lay on top of the seeds. (I tried using a layer of dry soil over the seeds, and it creates very dirty microgreens, so this step is very important!).

5) You can then put the bread pan in the dark or in the window (though it will dry out faster in the window). Either way, keep the newspaper moist until the sprouts start to push the newspaper up.

6) Once the cotyledons have emerged, discard the newspaper, make sure the pan is in your sunniest location, and keep it moist.

7) To harvest, use scissors and cut the greens close to the soil. I let mine get 2-4 inches tall (6-10 days after planting), but I harvest them before they get their first true leaves. Bonus: you can then compost the soil and roots.

8) Microgreens can be stored in the fridge for a couple of days (don't wash them before storing, however).

Some money saving tips:

• I found the aluminum bread pans at the dollar store (3 for $1).
• Because my family eats so many sunflower microgreens (I start a new tray almost daily so we can have a salad for dinner) I bought organic sunflower birdseed instead of the more expensive packets of human seeds. I save a ton of money and then I can spend more on the non-sunflower microgreen seed mixes. Just don't tell your friends you're feeding them bird seed.
• Some of the instructions I've seen on the web mention using fertilizer. I don't use fertilizer.
• Also, many of the web instructions talk about "bright light" in your sunny window. In Wisconsin we don't have very sunny winters, and the sun is low in the sky even on the brightest days, and my microgreens do just fine.

I ran right out after the podcast and started microgreen farming that day, so don't be afraid to experiment first and learn the intricacies later!

My birdseed salad right before harvest: