Hallows' Eve: Scythe Time

This past Sunday's Hallows' Eve workshop was a blast from the past, and into the future! Guest presenter Harvey Ussery demonstrated proper use of the scythe, a mowing tool of old (commonly associated with the grim reaper & Halloween) which has come back to life recently as backyard food producers and small farmers alike focus on minimizing their use of fossil fuels. The high-quality & properly used scythe is not only efficient, as Harvey demonstrated, but meaningful and enjoyable!

The rest of the workshop examined the use of the broadfork and other hand tools in the Local Food Project garden system, and the consideration of season extension strategies and protection of crops in the late fall garden.

Cider and good times all around, we can see the Hallows’ Eve workshop becoming a pre-Halloween tradition here at Airlie Center.

Harvest Update

The days are getting cooler and fall has truly come to the Local Food Project garden. Tomato production has slowed down, but we’re still harvesting lots of sweet and hot peppers. We’re picking overflowing baskets full of tender green beans. And the LFP crew is harvesting new plantings of fall greens—Encore lettuce mix, Minutina (a succulent micro-green), Arugula, and Tatsoi. Even after first frost, these greens will keep growing—as long as we keep them protected with row cover.

Local Food Project at DC Green Festival

The Local Food Project met a lot of new friends at the Washington, DC Green Festival October 10 and 11. At our booth in the enormous exhibit hall we shared information about LFP and Airlie Center, handed out over 1700 lettuce starts for folks to plant at home, and talked about the role local food can play in an institutional setting. The festival provided a great opportunity to expand our outreach to an extended community and talk about LFP’s work to promote the benefits of local food. See more photos.

If you picked up a lettuce seedling and want to identify your variety, check out the October 8 post below to view photos.

What Kind of Lettuce Will You Plant?

Did you stop by the Local Food Project booth at the Green Festival October 10 and 11 and pick up a free lettuce seedling? Then check out the pictures below to figure out what variety you have! Keep visiting Sixteen Foot Ladder in the coming weeks to see how the same lettuce varieties are faring in our hoophouse.

Yugoslavian Red Butterhead

Deer Tongue

Forellenschluss

Capitan

Rouge D'Hiver

Mystery Plant Solved!

A mystery plant has been growing in the Local Food Project hoophouse. When it first sprouted in early June, we thought it was a cucumber. When its leaves grew huge and broad and it put out little green fruits, we decided it must be an Eight Ball summer squash. But when they kept growing and got as big as basketballs, we had to take another guess. Then, in the past month, the squashes began to brighten from deep green to rich orange—mystery solved! How that pumpkin seed took root in the hoophouse we’ll never know, but we love the three beautiful pumpkins it produced—just in time for fall!

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…

December’s Colorful Harvest

The first day of December dawned cold and gray, but these brilliantly-colored beets made the garden feel as festive as the tropics! Surviving the frosts under swaths of row cover, our “Chioggia” (red) and “Golden” (orange) beets are a favorite of Airlie Center chefs and are among the last of our 2008 field crops.

Another heartening find was this perfect head of “Red Cross” lettuce, still prettily ruffled, crisp, and unharmed by frost, deer, or groundhog.

The simple joy of cleaning tools

Cleaning tools to store for winter
Originally uploaded by Local Food Project at Airlie

With garden production slowing down, the Local Food Project crew decided it was time to clean out our shed and get our favorite handtools ready for winter hibernation. Since we perform most of our garden work by hand, we’re devoted users of well-made tools like the broadfork, the English spade, and the digging fork. To keep these and other tools in good condition, we scrubbed any last clumps of soil from the tines and blades with metal-bristled brushes. Then we worked boiled linseed oil into the wooden handles, ensuring the wood stays smooth and supple. After the busy-ness of the summer, taking an hour or so to care for the tools that aid us so well in the garden felt like a very worthwhile task for a crisp November afternoon.

Winter salad bar

Jericho Lettuce
Originally uploaded by Local Food Project at Airlie

This fall marks the Local Food Project’s first season growing veggies in our new passive solar hoophouse. The structure was built with assistance from members of the community during a workshop led by biodynamic farming guru Steve Moore. We laid out the beds and aisles to allow easy access for visitors, setting aside a gathering space in the middle for wine tastings or warming up with hot cocoa. We’re still putting the finishing touches on the hoophouse—installing solar-powered vents, constructing doors from sustainably logged wood—but the cool-season crops we’ve planted are already making great progress.

Here’s what we’re growing:

Green Lettuce—Jericho
Red lettuce—Red Cross, Yugoslavian, and Sweet Valentine
Kale—Laci Nato, Vates
Bok Choy—Mei Ping
Swiss Chard—Rainbow
Basil—Lettuce Leaf, Lemon, Red Rubin, Italian Large Leaf
Dill
Fennel

Once we get the hoophouse completely sealed up, I’m thinking it’s going to be our favorite place to escape the winter cold. And I can’t wait for next spring when it will help launch our spring and summer garden.

Cover crops for new growing space

Spreading straw over cover crop seeds
Originally uploaded by Local Food Project at Airlie

We’re expanding the current layout of the Local Food Project garden to include at least two new sections on the west side. This area is currently outside the fence, but we’ll be replacing the fence line this winter to include our new sections (along with extra room for future growth).

To begin preparing the soil for next spring, we made one pass with the tiller about four weeks ago. Last week, we tilled again, then direct sowed field peas and oats by scooping them out in handfuls and letting them scatter over the freshly turned soil. These cover crops, also known as "green manures," do great things for the soil. According to Eliot Coleman's The New Organic Grower, "Green manure crops help protect against erosion, retain nutrients that might otherwise be leached from the soil, suppress the germination and growth of weeds, cycle nutrients from the lower to the upper layers of the soil, and--in the case of legumes--leave to the following crop a considerable quantity of nitrogen."

The little seeds that ran through our fingers will bring enormous benefits to our garden! To keep them protected, we fought high winds and covered each section with a light layer of straw. When we’re ready to put seedlings in the ground next season, we’ll plant directly through the cover crops, then watch as the plants thrive in the enriched soil.