My Summer Experience at Airlie

My name is Madeline and I’m a summer intern at the Airlie Local Food Project Garden. What an experience this has been! I was so excited to have this opportunity and yet very nervous that I didn’t know enough and wouldn’t be able to do this job well.

My first day I put on my farming clothes (old shorts and shirt) and got to the garden at a bright and early 8:00 AM. The garden is so beautiful and Pablo and Brynn introduced me to the other intern, Lauren. Everyone has been so nice and patient with me as I learn. I’ve learned that gardening is hot, sweaty, buggy, dirty, and a muddy mess sometimes, but extremely rewarding! It’s been so great to see the plants that I’ve planted thrive and it feels great knowing that they produce healthy food for others.

Now that my time as a garden intern is ending, I’ve seen that gardening is full of surprises. One of the biggest for me was an odd-looking “cucumber” plant in the bed of cucumbers! It seemed to grow bigger and bigger every day, far out-growing its fellow cucumber plants. We had no idea what would become of this weed/cucumber plant. After observing for a few weeks, we realized it was no cucumber plant, but an unusual (and still unidentified) pumpkin/squash plant! So like in life, amazing surprises can come from unexpected places.

I’ve learned more about gardening and seen how much impact one garden can have on so many people, and I’m honored to have had the opportunity to work here.

Fistful of Baby Carrots

Growing carrots in our Virginia clay soil is always a challenge, but the Local Food Project crew has been carefully tending a test bed of four different varieties this season. We’ve weeded and thinned and loosened the soil and weeded again. Now we’re harvesting our first sweet and crunchy baby carrots! We have creamy-colored White Satin, shockingly vibrant Purple Haze, bright orange Nelson, and small round Parmex. Picked straight from the soil, this fistful of carrots smelled fresh and delicious—the hard work was worth it!

Back-to-School Buckwheat

Back to school, in the garden! Three weeks ago, we decided to sow a cover crop of buckwheat in an area of the garden where we had grown potatoes. Cover crops can have several positive impacts on the organic garden system. First, cover crops add biomass and build organic matter in the soils, breaking up clay soils and making more nutrients available to crops that follow. Some cover crops, like legumes and clovers, fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, working cooperatively with soil bacteria to do so. Cover crops can outgrow and smoother weeds (especially buckwheat, which has to be the fasting growing non-weed we’ve ever seen!), and can also facilitate the disruption of pest and disease cycles in the garden. Cover crops tend to have a ‘mellowing’ effect on the soil, and also protect soil from erosion & the elements.

Point is, cover crops are cool. Problem is, many of us organic gardeners know that cover crops are a good thing, yet can never seem to get around to actually sowing them in our garden. The two main barriers to a lack of cover crops in the organic garden are space & seed. Unless you live in the outerburbs, many garden centers do not carry cover crop seed. And unless you have a large garden, it may seem like a waste of space to put a section of the garden in cover crop.

The key to using cover crops begins with having a stockpile of cover crop seed on hand. Most garden catalogues carry cover crop seed in small enough increments to use over the course of a couple years in the backyard. Four good cover crops to have in your closet are: buckwheat, oats, winter-rye, and white clover. If you have an area that is ‘spent’, like an early planting of squash, and are not about to do a second planting, just get out there and broadcast some of your cover crop seed. It’s fun, and makes you feel like a wise gardener. Buckwheat is a fast-growing summer cover crop, but does not do well in the cold. When the frost kills your tomatoes, you still might be able to sow a cold-hardy cover like winter-rye. Each cover crop has its purpose and place in the organic garden system.

Now that you have the seed, you might find yourself with a space problem, particularly in the urban garden. The space problem can be solved through the technique of undersowing, or getting cover crops started a few weeks before a particular vegetable crop is done, right underneath the vegetables, in the same bed. For instance, now’s a great time to ‘undersow’ your tomatoes with oats. The oats germinate, grow up a few inches, then the tomatoes die back, and the oats can carry on into the fall before eventually dying after several hard frosts. Eliot Coleman, the Maine organic farmer and author, writes extensively about undersowing cover crops in his book, The New Organic Grower.

Once you get started with cover crops, you won’t want to stop. Buckwheat is a great one to start with, and you can probably still sow it this week, giving you a few weeks of growth before the first killing frost…

Harvest Update

Fall is right around the corner and the Local Food Project crew is preparing for new crops of cool weather greens while continuing to harvest record yields of tomatoes. From meaty Brandywine to juicy Pineapple, prolific Virginia Select Roma to smoky Nyagous, the LFP crew has a lot of picking to do! Peppers are taking off and ripening up in the hoophouse—Corno di Toro, Lipstick, Joe’s Long Cayenne, Chocolate, and more. Other staples of the harvest include lots of Bright Lights Swiss chard, sweet storage onions, and a wide variety of summer squash. There’s also the first fringes of fall lettuce mix—perfect for pairing with summer’s last tomatoes! See more photos in our online album.

View from a Ladder: The Evolving Garden

It’s been a busy year for the Local Food Project and there’s no better way to get perspective on all the changes than to climb up on the sixteen foot ladder and get a bird’s eye view of the evolving garden. We can take in the entire boundary of the expanded fenceline and see how the sections we newly tilled this year fit in with the overall layout of our growing space. We can look down on the passive solar hoophouse and realize how big a role it’s playing in our summer vegetable production. We can gaze at two new herb garden areas (the heart and the baseball diamond) and check out the progress of our sprouting buckwheat cover crop. And we can look forward to a productive fall and winter season, with our eyes already on plans for next spring. The view from up here is amazing!

Small Space Gardening: Feed a Family Garden

New this year, the Local Food Project crew laid out and planted a small scale garden designed to feed a family of four. The 700 square foot Feed a Family Garden—with a mix of short and long beds, a variety of popular crops, and a fun zig-zag pathway—demonstrates how a family might create a small veggie-growing plot in their own backyard. We used a broadfork to loosen the soil—an easy and inexpensive (not to mention quiet!) alternative to using a tiller that family members of all ages could help with. We’re also monitoring the effects of our nearby oak tree on the Feed a Family Garden (shade, water, roots, etc.). View photos.

The bounty of this new little garden has produced a lot of food! We’ve harvested more than 7 pounds of Swiss Chard, 12 pounds of zucchini, 3 pounds of cucumbers, 30 pounds of tomatoes, and a 7-pound watermelon. Visit Sixteen Foot Ladder again to see updates on the yields!