Happy Thanksgiving 2013

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who decided to take a peek at this weekly blog. This week we have a very light episode because it's the holidays and honestly...the trytophan is honestly made the entire staff at LITFM comatose.

That said first we have the precipitation report, which is rather good as we had two rain events one leaving an average of 0.9" inches and the second left 0.71" all within three days, making a grand total of roughly 1.61 inches or rain. This is a good thing for the obvious reasons but it is also a good thing because our crops have plenty of water without our intervention for a short wile to fend off frost damage. The weather is doing this odd bi-polar thing where it's all over the place temperature wise and so we need all the help we can get. As it stands it looks like more of the same is on the way in the next five days so  we at LITFM recommend bringing in the hoses for the winter if you've not done so already. Remember to reel the hoses into coils so that any water trapped in the line is emptied out the other end. The purpose of this reeling is partly to make the hose store efficiently but also so no tapped water freezes and damages the interior linings of the garden hose.

With that in mind I must point out that one can continue some last few plantings as long as they are protected from any severe night time temperatures with high wind. It will take about three weeks to acclimate your transplants but if you employ night time protections such as draping old sheets over the plants or plastic tarps you can create a temporary miniature green house. If you've got the bricks and a spare pane of glass you can erect a temporary cold frame of sorts around your plants while they establish. The trick there is to build a set of walls around your selected plants using the bricks and lay the glass across the opening which creates a self-warming cold frame of sorts. As a final note, watering the morning after a major cold event can go a long way towards crop recovery, but make sure not to use warm water, as this may cause shock.

Lastly, as with every weekend, I will be down at the Fayetteville farmer's Market tomorrow between the hours of 9:00 am and 1:00 pm. The Farmer's market is located at 325 Franklin Street in the front parking lot of the Fayetteville Transportation Museum.  I'll have the following stuff at the booth tomorrow.

Plants:
4x Spineless Prickly Pear Cactus
2x Stonehead Cabbage
1x Charleston Wakefield Cabbage
2x Savoy Cabbage
3x Georgia Collards
6x Morris Heading Cabbage-Collards

Good Stuff:
10x Bundles of Organic fresh picked Rosemary(Full stems, 0.75 oz per bundle)
5x Bags of Organic fresh picked Rosemary (leaves and small sprigs only)
Rainforest peppers
Yellow Devils Tongue Peppers

That's right folks you read that clearly, fresh 100% organic rosemary bundles ready for your seasonal cooking either in stem form or picked form. This will be a first time offering to see if anyone out there would like some real rosemary for cooking at a price that beats the supermarket hands down.  Hopefully I'll see some of you braving the elements of the frozen tundra that is the Unterlands of frozen fayetteville but either way just remember to keep 'em growing!

P.S.
Clever move bLowes....selling quart poinsettias for 0.99 cents....and there goes a bit of the operating fund. You just knew I was a sucker for Euphorbias didn't you?!

Frost Snap? More like Frost Murder

Hey now! Welcome to another edition of lost in the farmer’s market, today’s topic is about winter preparations and I’ve got some good photos for you all that I think you’ll like of a certain awesome plant blooming. But first let’s talk about what a winter garden looks like.

The container crops as seen from the driveway side.

 As you can see here a considerable number of plants comprise the container portion of  the test garden. Each of those pots are 14" fluted pots because the wider top presents more surface to absorb the suns rays where the bulk of the crop plant's fibrous roots are in the soil thus a better overall growth rate. The soil mix is made of compost, topsoil and either black hen or black kow composted manure. You cant see it here but I often dust the soil surfaces with mulch to improve moisture retention.

The container gardens as seen from the firepit area.

Clearly not all pots are filled yet, In fact there are three large pots that need filling and a final fluted pot that needs filling but so far the gardens are off to a good start. What are the crops you ask? Well, in the pots on the ground it's a mix of Japanese Red Giant Mustard and Dinosaur Kale. If you noticed the hanging baskets in the picture before last you might have noted they had something in them. That is a bumper crop of Radicchio for salad greens. Now the empty pots once filled will be planted out with Napa Cabbage and the odd Morris Heading cabbage-collards that seemed to resemble Kale more then cabbage. Out front there are three planter bowls two are planted with cilantro and the other lettuce. The raised beds are getting a bit of a rest this winter so they are planted marginally with Red giant mustard, some cabbages and whatever else I can manage to stick in the ground. But enough with the delay heres some blooming plant shots!

Adenium obesum - Desert Rose

Perhaps one of my most prized plants, the desert rose as some of you may know is a plant I spent three years looking for at least. Finally bLowes had them for sale late last winter, and here it is blooming for the third time since I've had it. The flower is completely worth it though. As far as plants go they're sort of symbolic, here is a succulent that doesn't act like one. It has no thorns and takes patience Much like the traditional garden rose waiting for the bloom is always worth it. As a gift, it's the sentimental item you would give to someone who really matters.

Euphorbia milli 'Fireworks' - Crown Of Thorns

I thought this one was just plain cool. I got it months back and it's a euphorbia which means it's a succulent and is related to Pencil cactus, Devils backbone and Poinsetia. Normally crown of thorns main features are that their stems are covered in large thorns, and that when they bloom the flowers come out in ringed clusters which from a biblical perspective resembles a bloody crown of thorns. Draw whatever conclusions you want but this one has variegated leaves and this is a double interest! Time will tell what the blooms are like though.

Homo sapiens trasbaggians - The future Human

 Yes we spotted this one last weekend as it moved through the market grazing on treats offered by the locals. Apparently this pollution immune advanced breed of human prefers sweets in the from of carrot greens, turnip skins and anything you might generally compost. No one knows whats under that defensive coat of plastic-shopping bag-like body fur however as it shuffled through it did seem to avoid drains and flash photography. Just a note...don't say 'Yolo' around it, it seems to view that as a territorial challenge for mates and food sources. One poor market goer made the mistake of doing so and was promptly trampled to death.*

But moving on from the organic debate, this weekend I will be at the Fayetteville City/Farmers market on Saturday. The Fayetteville farmer’s market is located at 325 Franklin Street on the property of the Fayetteville transportation museum. The market runs between the hours 9:00 am and 1:00 pm and you can find my both over by the art studio side of the market. As always the plant list for this week is below:

Perennials:

6x Spineless Prickly Pear

Salad & Fixings:

3x Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce

1x Cilantro

Cole Crops:

3x Georgia Collards

7x Morris Heading Cabbage-Collards

2x Stonehead Cabbage

2x Charleston Wakefeild Cabbage

2x Savoy Cabbage

1x Napa Cabbage

Available Soon:

00x Swiss Chard

00x Cilantro

And this concludes another fine episode of LITFM, as a weather warning it has been forecast that we may have a night time low temperatures as noted below.

Saturday 11/23:  31 degrees

Sunday 11/24: 22 degrees

Monday 11/25: 33 degrees

And the rest of the thanksgiving holiday week goes about the same. Remember your basic protections for plants exposed during such weather. Water all new plantings and any plant you cannot move thoroughly. Refrain from applying fertilizer during the cold period as this may promote new soft growth. If you cannot move potted plants to safety consider covering them with a plastic tarp or old sheets propped up by sticks and weighted at the corners with stones or bricks. The fact is that it seems we are headed for another heavy cold snap and must be ready for it. There is no telling what winter has in store but losing crops is not part of the plan! With that said, Keep ‘em growing!

*PS this is all a joke the person wearing the outfit was encouraging keeping Fayetteville clean by recycling and not littering. I thought that was a awesome costume and wholly support the message :D

Mistress Winter, must you leave frost all over?!

Welcome to a frosted edition of Lost in the Farmer’s market. As all of you know there was supposed to be a double post over the weekend but the recently cold weather has had me scrambling to handle field work. As noted in the frost preparation post that meant deploying tarps and moving the most tender plants inside for their own survival. Today I’ll cover the particulars of the frost, this week’s plant list for the market and the assigned topic for the double post.

Now for those of you reading this who are regulars to this blog you know I’m utterly dedicated to the organic sustainable agriculture movement. There is no doubt in my mind that the time for this is right and it is precisely what the nation needs. My primary logic for such is simple enough; we are facing a severe food shortage. As Cumberland County Agriculture Extension Director Lisa Childers said to me during an interview regarding our greatest ecological threat;  “The loss of farmland, we have to double our food supply by the year 2050. When you look at all the challenges facing our farms, the average of the farmer is 57, so you have concerns about farm land transition and who’s going to take on that farm and keep it going. You have issues with loss of farmland to sale, development and such which makes it a big challenge. We’ve got to figure out how to double the food supply by 2050 so we’ve got to research, research research. We do grow more on less land but even that is not enough so we need to find a solution.”

Most people would never realize that we will have a food crisis in the next forty-seven years. Indeed I also never expected that statement during the interview, but it makes perfect sense. As farmers grow older and land is snapped up by development or sold off little or no new farmland is being dedicated and a handful of corporations seek to own it all. In short we’ve got a bit of a problem and call this the canary in the coal mine. The challenge is the changing of minds people want change but they don’t want to wait for it. Lowering the cost of real fresh organic and local food takes time and significant changes to the buyer’s market. But for now it seems all organic will cost more because it’s in theory harder to grow.

The reality is that this is not in any way true as has been proven in three successive years of test garden operations where it costs me per pound the same or slightly less than it costs at the supermarket per pound of food. This leads to a conversation from a few weeks back at the Market booth where I found myself verbally sparring with someone who was determined to talk smack about organic and what it meant. The conversation started with the usual greeting and polite conversation as the individual looked at the plants as arrayed on the booth. I told him they were non-GMO, organic with no chemicals used in any phase of production. He responded with a statement that such wasn’t possible. So I said “If it’s not possible what are you holding in your hand right now?” He of  put the collard plant down he was inspecting and said to me “There is no way you grew this organically, organic stuff is typical bull**** to raise prices.” Needless to say I’ll spare all of you the rest of the conversation as it spiraled about over the next half-hour or so with this visitor going on about how he didn’t like organic and so on.  In short it reminded me of a line from an old Supertramp song called Goodbye Stranger.

“Now some they do and some they don’t,

And some you just can’t tell.

Some they will and some they won’t,

And some it’s just as well.”

Some folks are hard set against change and understanding of things that are different that in theory appear to challenge what they consider traditional. This visitor at the booth was one of those sorts, so of course instead of trying to change his mind I switched to taking the legs out from under his arguments. But that aside let me show you all a picture of what a real organic grown tomato actually looks like. The below image is of my prize Paul Robeson Tomato measuring at 8 ounces even it was about as big as two apples side by side.

DEEEEEEEEEEEE-LICIOUS!

Oh yes it’s not perfectly round or evenly red or for that matter uniform in any measure of the word, but you can imagine that for nutrient value it blows the doors off those perfectly round red balls that pass for tomatoes at the supermarket and it required precisely zero pesticides or herbicides to produce. I imagine that if we were to produce more nutritious food per square mile without the need for chemicals the environment’s health as well as our own would improve. But, let us see what an organic tomato looks like on the inside as this earlier pair of Underground Railroad tomatoes sliced and prepared for addition to chili.

For note, I decided to take the picture after some of it was added to the pot.

Note the color of the flesh is very dark crimson and the lack of excessive gel, seed and some such, here we have tomatoes that could said to have a lot of ‘meat’. Since this came out of my back yard most if not all of the nutritional value is still present. But more so I have a tiny chemical footprint because in reality other than water runoff and organic fertilizer residue the land upon which the test garden sits only gets better every year. This alone is what organic really means, stewardship of the land, helping nature do what it does best and preserving a balance of coexistence between you and nature.  It’s going to become important in the coming years as the economy will likely continue to stagger and stumble and the population‘s food needs increase while something has to be done to counter the loss of our countries greatest resource. It’s clear we can’t keep importing basic food stables any more then we can keep growing non-productive food crops for ethanol and so on. The diet of the country must adapt, and we too must adapt or risk succumbing to the changes in our world. The choice is simple enough, risk becoming an anecdote for failure to future generations or become the first world nation that embraced critical changes and blazed a trail towards continental sustainability that other large nations could readily follow.

But moving on from the organic debate, this weekend I will be at the Fayetteville City/Farmers market on Saturday. The Fayetteville farmer’s market is located at 325 Franklin Street on the property of the Fayetteville transportation museum. The market runs between the hours 9:00 am and 1:00 pm and you can find my both over by the art studio side of the market. As always the plant list for this week is below:

Perennials:

6x Spineless Prickly Pear

Salad & Fixings:

3x Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce

2x Cilantro

Cole Crops:

3x Georgia Collards

7x Morris Heading Cabbage-Collards

2x Stonehead Cabbage

2x Charleston Wakefeild Cabbage

2x Savoy Cabbage

1x Mustard-Spinach ‘Senposai’

1x Napa Cabbage

Available Soon:

00x Swiss Chard

With exception to a final note about precipitation and weather this brings this episode of LITFM to a close. As you may have noticed we had one major frost on Wednesday evening where wind and cold conspired to kill all tender crops where they sat even when semi-protected by proximity to structures and stonework. This came on the heels of Tuesday’s sleet which signaled the end of the warm season crops. Unfortunately the sleet produced negligible precipitation to the point there was nothing worth measuring in the rain gauges. At the test gardens, the cosmos, basil, Meringa, tomatoes and eggplant were all stricken down. We are in a presumably brief warming trend with no freezing temperatures in the immediate future so that means you as gardeners can wring a few more weeks of planting with an careful eye on the weather forecast.

As always folks, Keep ‘em growing!

And so Autumn came...maybe?

Welcome back to Lost In the Farmer’s Market. This is a replacement episode, to cover the lack of a post last week. As some of you have heard I am enrolled at NC A&T and at times the requirement to write large papers eats up time or drains my ability to write much else due to deadlines. That said I had to write a few papers with due dates all falling in the same week so the post just never made it up here. Without further delay today’s topic is all about the basils that were included in the test gardens this year.

Now honestly I can’t say a single basil specimen failed this year as all of them did well and some from last year even returned from seed which is a double bonus. However a few species did outshine the rest and they deserve special note. So let’s start with the list of basil species and their relative performance.

Blue African Basil

‘BAB’ is probably one of my long-standing favorites as I grew it every year when the test garden was in New Jersey. As far as flavor, BAB has more of a anise-camphor flavor making it good for a finishing flavor-garnish. But more so BAB pesto is quite the flavor experience with reduced amounts of garlic and extra parmesan or romano grated cheese. But best thing about BAB is the blue-purple leaf variations and the sheer amount of nectar producing blooms which can help feed a large number of pollinators and humming birds. Lastly the plant is drought tough once established and should be deemed a tender perennial in some circumstances. In short blue African basil was the largest basil in the garden at the end of the growing season.

Genovese Sweet Basil

GSB is one of those sweet basil hybrids with such good all-around characteristics that it flatly replaces normal basil and typical large leaf sweet basil for pesto and seasoning use. The two specimens in the garden grew to about two feet tall not counting flower spikes in large quart nursery pots and produced ample amounts of leaves for culinary use. I would easily declare this selection the best sweet basil I’ve grown to date due to its tolerant habits and more so by the end of the season it had sown its seed itself in other pots so its seedlings were brought in last month and repotted for next year. You can get this species from Botanical Interests as GMO-free seed for about two dollars.

Pesto Purpetuo Basil

PPB was the test species this year. I picked it because it’s a species that does not flower and is apparently a cross between Ocimum basilicum and O. citriodorum. The plants are upright, and roughly column shaped and bear smaller leaves that have white variegation. They suffered no disease issues and grew to an overall height of about three feet when planted in the ground without regular irrigation. In terms of flavor it was more like a plain basil with just a touch of anise making it pleasant for general use. I would plant mor of this in a heartbeat next year but certainly not more than the actual flowering types.

Red Rubin Basil

Red Rubin is an heirloom classic, as one of the earliest ‘red-purple’ basil types it does not hold color in supper heat or full sun but does have all the sweet basil flavor with additional foliage color. The most interesting trait of this basil is it’s habit for randomly reverting to a normal green color in unpredictable ways. One branch might go straight green while another might have purple freckles on green or   some odd half & half mix. Sometimes the leaves are intense purple and other times they are this violet-red color but all in all it is still a nice basil and worth growing just for what it might do and for making some downright unruly pesto!

Thai Basil

Sometimes called Siam Thai Queen Basil under cultivation Thai basil has a strong anise-flavor that is non-bitter. The leaves are tinted where they meet stems with a deep red and the stems themselves also retain the color. Overall the plants are self-heading as they reach a height, flower and stop getting any taller. Fortunately Thai basil is drought immune once established and provides nectar to pollinators making it very worthwhile to grow. I first encountered this species in Canada back in the 90’s when it had just been introduced to garden centers and have grown it at every opportunity since. It’s a yearly regular much like blue African and will continue to be so. I might add Siam seedlings volunteered in the garden this year so, double bonus for the plant being self-sown.

But enough about basil, this week end as with every Saturday until I run out of plants or Sustainable neighbors stops maintaining a table at the market I will be at the Fayetteville City/Farmers market on Saturday. The Fayetteville farmer’s market is located at 325 Franklin Street on the property of the Fayetteville transportation museum. The market runs between the hours 9:00 am and 1:00 pm and you can find my both over by the art studio side of the market. As always the plant list for this week is below:

Perennials:

7x Spineless Prickly Pear

Salad & Fixings:

3x Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce

2x Cilantro

Cole Crops:

3x Georgia Collards

6x Morris Heading Cabbage-Collards

3x Stonehead Cabbage

3x Charleston Wakefeild Cabbage

3x Jersey Early Wakefeild Cabbage

2x Savoy Cabbage

3x Mustard-Spinach ‘Senposai’

3x Napa Cabbage

Available Soon:

00x Swiss Chard

This of course concludes this belated post that was due last week. The plant list above is current and the post intended for this week will be posted on Sunday. Remember folks, if the weather holds you can still get plants in the ground as late as the end of November with no ill effects. That aside we have a good three weeks of safe planting time roughly to fill those beds with winter crops so don’t delay get those plants in today!

Rain report

Last Week: Average Precipitation of 0.7 inches.

This Week: Average precipitation of 0.2 inches.

As always folks, Keep ‘em growing!