Adobe house farm in winter

Adobe House Farm experiences harsh winters where nights are 20 below. But with the abundant sunshine almost every day of the year, cold weather crops still grow in the solar greenhouse and hoop houses. Kale, arugula, lettuce, spinach, and collards all grow at Adobe House Farm year-round!

Cover-Cropping with Favas

Cover cropping is a good way to help build soul quality and protect the beds from the abundant rainfall over the winter months. Here at the North Mississippi and Failing Garden, you can see fava bean cover crop poking its way though the soil.

We planted favas very dense, which will fix nitrogen for the soil, send its roots down to break up the soil, and contribute to the soil food web. As you can see, cover crops can be planted around cold-weather crops. We planted the cover crop as soon as bedspace was available in late october - early november. In the spring, turn under fava beans once they start flowering. This is when the plants have the most amount of nitrogen in them. If you turn the plant into the soil when it's flowering, it will have the biggest benefit to the soil.

I like to plant fava beans as a cover crop in gardens where soil quality is relatively good. There is no need for tougher cover crops, like some grasses, which specialize in breaking apart clay-rich soils. Favas are much more delicate and do not intrude in the garden as much. Some can also be saved for a fava harvest!

September: A Month of Change in the Garden

Whiskerton garden has undergone dramatic changes through September - from an overgrown green garden wonderland to a dying, withering, browning garden. Even though the garden is dying back, food production is still high. We are still harvesting cucumbers, summer squash, winter squash, leeks, onion, garlic, figs, chard, arugula, beans, parsley and rhubarb.

Good view of the busy garden in September. Lots of growth, lots of food, and lots of change.

The sunflowers were enormous this year! The birds let us know they were ready because they started eating the seeds. The seeds also had black on them and had started to dry. The seeds can be easily collected for making tasty treats or saving for next year's sunflower crop.

Sunflower stalks can also be dried and used for building grow structures in the garden next year. they also make great compost, full of fleshy woody matter.

Sunchoke artichoke harvest! These artichoke are related to sunflower, but make potato-like tubers that grow beneath the soil. We pulled out the whole plant, collected tubers and threw some small ones back in the ground for next year. Sunchokes can be prepared like potatoes, but taste like artichoke!

Sunchoke up close.

Pumpkins are ready! The plants have almost entirely died back, pushing all their energy into the juicy sugar pumpkins. I'm excited to make pies, breads and pumpkin stir fry!!

Strawberries Everywhere!

Whiskerton Garden's strawberry patch, which was put in three years ago, has not been thinned out significantly. With a not-so-great strawberry year in the garden, it seemed that the plants had become too crowded. Each plant was competing for light and nutrients so they were smaller and produced not-as-tasty fruit.
So this year we are making a big effort to thin out the strawberry bed significantly. With all the extra strawberry plants - we have been extracting about 500 per week for several weeks now - I am giving them to other Urban Farm Collective garden managers to spread in their gardens. Hopefully in a couple years there will be strawberry patches all over the UFC that are producing and we will have a significant amount of strawberries at market - not just two pints like this year!

Collected strawberries and sawdust. We put strawberry plants in plastic bags with sawdust and water.

The wet sawdust keeps strawberry roots moist for the week they will be out of the ground.

The great thing about thinning the strawberry patch is some of the extracted plants are already 2 or three years old so new beds will produce fruit next year. Gardens won't have to wait for two years before getting a harvest. These established root crowns will also have a much higher transplant survival rate than first-year strawberry runners.

Summer's Bounty: What to do with all that Food

With so much food coming out of the garden in August and September, it becomes necessary to find other uses for some veggies that arrive in excess.
Canning veggies, salsas, and

So much food during the Summer!

Keep chard, kale, rhubarb, green onion and other veggies  crisp and fresh by making them the table centerpiece. Now this is an edible bouquet!

Using garden tomatoes, onions, cilantro and garlic with store-bought limes and mangoes, we made tons of Pico de Gallo. So good!! This is a great way to use lots of tomatoes that explode all over the garden in the dry, late Summer.

Pesto is a yummy way to use all the basil

So much pico de gallo!

Zucchini bread muffins. I made a vegan recipe, replacing eggs and butter with asian pear from the garden and ground flax seed. They tasted so amazing, who knew that they were vegan (and only have 1 cup of brown sugar for the whole loaf!)?

Pico de gallo, pico de gallo, pico de gallo, pico de gallo and pico de gallo

Whiskertom garden August summer bounty

Overgrown garden!!

The garden is out of control, as predicted. Calculated perfectly! I knew that having so many cucurbits, specifically pumpkins, in such a small garden was going to be challenging. Luckily, we built a sturdy structure which is completely overgrown with pumpkins. It's worked very well. We should have built another for the rest of the pumpkins, which have taken over one part of the garden.

The garden is such a joy in the height of summer! so much food, everything grows so quickly, and there are no slugs! It's too dry for slugs, letting leafy greens finally grow without holes in them!

Rhubarb is such an easy perennial. We simply divided the root and had 5 times more rhubarb this year as last year.

Now is also a good time for colder-weather crops to be seeded for fall harvest. They grow quickly when the sun is out in the summer and then are big enough to withstand the cool weather later in the year. I have planted Kale, Kohlrabi, and Arugula. Hopefully they will get big enough before the fall... depends on how long the sun decides to stay out this year.

cucumbers growing wildly all over each other. Ideally I would have built a structure that would have allowed cucumbers to grow up instead in a big heap.

Pumpkins hanging off of the trellis structure

Chard, the best veggie to grow! Provides abundant food all year!

The onions are finally ready. From seed to beautiful onion in 5 months!

Cucumber, lemon cucumber, winter and summer squash varieties, among the beautiful harvest at Whiskerton this year!

Mason st. Update. July 2012

Not all bad news from my home garden. After the slug infested failures of the spring passed, my chard is growing, I just harvested the first broccoli, and my cucumber-sunflower-pole bean guild working well. See below for details!

Side-bed. Beets, Sunflower, Cucumber, Beans, Garlic, Artichoke, Chard, Broccoli, Rhubarb, Raspberries and Arugula currently growing.

Pole Beans growing up sunflower. Cucumber growing behind the beans

Artichoke in nutrient-debrived front bed. This bed previously had a conifer in it that depleted it. I have slowly been recovering it for a couple years. Clearly, it still needs some mending!

Artichoke in not-as-nutrient-deprived side-bed. Notice how much bigger it is compared to the artichoke in the front bed.

Beets in the side bed are surprising big and healthy! I am excited to have some beet and chard salad!

My perennial front bed is coming along nicely. I have decided to transition the front bed to a perennial bed because the soil is not good enough for vegetable growth. I am not going to live here forever, so might as well work on turning it into a beautiful, productive, low-maintenence garden for the next residents as well! I already have Lavender, blueberries, pine-apple mint, thyme, nasturtium, fennel, lamb's ear, strawberries, rosemary, and garden chives growing in this small area.

Whiskerton Garden in July

The garden is on the brink of complete chaos! This is a good thing, of course, because it means something is actually growing. I always worry every spring that nothing will grow. With delayed summers in the NW, there is always a week or two where I completely panic that nothing will ever grow. Then finally the sun comes out, warms up the earth, and everything grows like crazy. Fueled by months of rain, plants are just waiting to explode. And my cucurbits sure have!

The trellis I built for the pumpkins is working well. It's getting taken over quickly. I should have built a couple more structures, but I don't really mind the chaos either. It's amazing what a month of warm weather will do to a garden.

We planted sunflower with our cucurbits this year - so they would have something to climb up, provide us with an additional harvest (sunflower seeds), attract insects, and look beautiful in the garden. I just have to make sure that the sunflowers aren't so thick that they shade out the cucurbits below them! The pole beans are climbing up the sunflower and winding around the cucurbits as well. The guild is working well - just a bit out of control! We are starting to get the first signs of summer squash forming!

The melons are unhappy - need more care to be grown in the cooler NW conditions than I gave them. Definitely need some sort of protection from the cold and a suntrap.

The leeks, onions and other alliums look great! We are starting to harvest scallions and will hopefully be providing onions and leeks in increasing amounts over the next couple of weeks and into August.

Marrionberries, raspberries and strawberries, while delicious, provide many challenges for market. They don't travel well - usually ending up as liquid by the time they get to market. So we have been trying to eat as many as possible right off of the vine. I recommend work parties at Whiskerton garden because you get yummy berry snacks throughout the day! Blueberries are the only ones that make it to market looking tasty - and they sure are. I can't get enough of them!

My plan for the next month is 1) to continue to try and contain the wild beds and 2) get a more comprehensive irrigation system in place. The one now only covers half of the garden and is therefore pretty useless. We have a plan set and will move forward in the weeks to come - work parties pending!

I am thrilled to see Whiskerton garden flourishing as well as the UFC market growing every Monday. It just gets better and better. It's great to see everyone each week showing off the latest goodies from their little patches of earth. What a wonderful city we live in!

May at Whiskerton

With a fairly warm spring, Whiskerton garden is looking great. We already got an enormous initial arugula harvest, strawberries are turning red, and cucurbits are growing quickly (at least the ones the slugs isn't eat).

We are slowly expanding up onto the hill that was left open after Koto cut down the Maple tree. I have planted sunflower and artichoke and Koto has planted another fruit tree.

5,000 Strawberries at Adobe House Farm

In Adobe House Farm's first year, my sister learned which crops grow well and are worth the investment in time and money to grow. One of those crops is strawberries. The main reason for my visit to AHF this year was to assist planting 5,000 strawberry plants.

In order to reduce weeds, help retain soil moisture, and keep strawberries clean, we layed down a weed barrier over all of the beds. We poked holed and planted the strawberries. It's best to plant strawberry roots so that they go straight down, which meant digging 6 - 12 inches into the dirt. This proved very challenging in many locations because of the tough clay soil in the high desert.  As with everything on the farm, it was much tougher and took much longer to get the strawberries in the ground.

Hopefully the black tarp will save time with watering and weeding throughout the year and make it worthwhile to put in. It's important to keep trying to figure out ways to reduce workload so as to leave time for other farm projects - because there is always more to do!