Radio Interview

Just a quick post before I go to the city, giving everyone a heads up to tune in to The Weekend Gardener this Sunday on 95.7 News FM in Halifax (I always find it easier to just go to www.news957.com and listen live). Dan Jason and I will be on Niki's show from 12:00 to 1:00 talking about seeds and about the workshops we're doing. We still need you to spread the word about the three workshops (people are the best advertising!) so please do spread it if you know anyone interested!

August Seed Saving Workshops with Dan Jason

Very exciting stuff in the works lately! Apart from the garden (which is overflowing with seeds right now... more on that later) the seed saving workshops with myself and Dan Jason are really coming together. Dan is coming out from Salt Spring Island at the end of the month and the two of us will be giving three workshops, one in Halifax, one in Middleton and one in Bridgewater. All the info is attached below, hope to see you at one of them and please do spread the word if you know anyone interested!

-Halifax Workshop: 3:00 to 6:00 at the Spryfield Urban Farm, August 22nd. Cost: $25 for the general public and $10 for Urban Farm members. An intro to seed saving at the urban farm! We'll have a garden walk and talk about as many crops as we can cover, as well as hands on demonstrations (bean threshing, tomato fermentation, etc..) and discussions on the deeper political and philosophical aspects of seeds and urban food production. Contact Su Donovaro to register: urbanfarmspryfield@gmail.com

-Middleton Workshop: 2:00 to 5:00 at Annapolis Seeds (8528 Hwy 201, Nictaux), August 25th. Cost: $25 Come visit the seed farm and learn the fun and increasingly crucial art of saving seeds. Some topics covered will include pollination, threshing, organic growing, the importance of maintaining biodiversity as well as a garden walk to discuss specific techniques for each crop. All knowledge levels welcome! Limit of 20 participants, contact owen@annapolisseeds.com or 825-4732 to register and reserve your spot!

-Bridgewater Workshop: 10:00 to 3:00 at Watershed Farm (768 Allen Frausel Road, Baker Settlement), August 29th Part of a very special weekend at Watershed Farm, the workshop is closely tied with the first annualWatershed Music Festival on the 28th (1:00 to dark). On the 28th we'll have lots of music and different workshops throughout the day, and on the 29th we'll have a slightly more advanced (and much quieter!) seed workshop. We'll go into great depth for this one covering each crop individually as well as covering broader topics like threshing and storage. Also exciting will be a lesson on hand pollination of squash from local squash guru Chris Sanford! Included is a delicious organic lunch along with snacks, you'll get to head home with seeds of both mine and Dan's as well as seed garlic from Watershed Farm. You can register online here. Spots are filling up fast!

Another Photo Update

-Lancashire Lad pea

-Leek flower

- My home glistening in the fading evening sun

-Arugula flowers (we're going to have a ton of arugula seed this year)

- These are pretty special: Crown Peas. They're the most unusual pea I've ever grown, formerly considered a separate sub-species of the common pea they have huge clusters of spectacular flowers, forming a "crown" at the top of each plant. The pods are short but tasty. It's almost like a cross between a sweet pea and an edible pea.

-Phacelia is a great nectar crop as well as a cool season cover crop. Bees are currently being drawn to it from seemingly miles around.

Haymaking

The garden is at its leafy, blossom-filled peak right now, and so are the weeds. The hot weather and regular rains that we've had since June have been a blessing for plants both domesticated and wild alike, it's all I can do to push the weeds back enough for the cultivated ones to take up a dominant place... this is not an immaculately tended garden by any means! The newly seeded hay meadows are a riotous, tumbling profusion of wild mustard, ragweed, goldenrod and bindweed, however after scything down these opportunistic meadow dwellers I've discovered a healthy carpet of my cultivated grasses, previously hidden from view - a good sign for next year.

Our own hay meadows are another year away from maturity (they were just seeded this spring after wresting the land from the forest a few years previous) but we have the good fortune of having a neighbour on one side who has more land in grass than the inclination to cut. We've been scything and making loose hay up in that field for the last couple of weeks, it's definitely a learning process for me. Following the very thorough instruction from the Vido Family (you can read one of the articles here) and from what they showed me last summer when I spent some time at their farm I built a couple of hay racks and then went at it. The rack construction is really simple, I made mine with scrap 1x3 lumber, although future models might be made from coppiced hardwood poles from the forest. They're basically two square frames leaning against each other (like an A-frame) and tied with twine at the top (they fold for easy storage and transport).

My current hay making process is to cut the grass and leave it in it's windrow for one full day. I initially planned to spread the windrows so the grass dries more evenly but I've found that mature timothy and orchardgrass (and other course, airy plant matter) dry just about as fast without spreading. After that time I rake the grass into heaps with a wooden hay rake (hand made from yurt-pole cutoffs and with wooden teeth which avoid digging into the ground - photos on the way) and stack it up on the racks, forming a hay cock. After it's stacked the grass continues to dry with air circulation underneath it, and the bulk of the grass on the inside won't fry to brown in the sun like it would if exposed. I take the hay into the barn as soon as I can, though if built with enough skill a cock (or any other version of hay stack) can stay in the field and for some time without getting damaged by rain. I haven't yet mastered the cap design (ideally it should shed water like a thatch roof) and the cock pictured here got soaked in that last thunder storm we had. It was wet and steaming away like a compost pile from microbial activity when I dealt with it a few days after, it made an excellent mulch for the tomato patch! So there's lots to learn yet... I'll keep at it between weeding and tomato staking and the myriad other jobs on the mid-summer farm.

New Photos

-An interesting experiment of mine: the potatoes on the left had fresh comfrey leaves buried in the trench with them at planting time, the ones on the right didn't. The comfrey provides a big boost of nitrogen in early spring at a time when not much is available to growing plants due to the cool soil and slow micro-organism activity.

-Green Oakleaf Lettuce

-Shungiku, an edible chrysanthemum.

-This is an exciting new plant: Chinese Salad Mallow. The young leaves like these are tender and great in salads like lettuce, older leaves even make edible bowls.

-A sea of lettuce

-Spinach going to seed

Of Deer, Greenhouses and Seed Workshops

Finally, some welcome rain and a much needed opportunity for some writing! The garden is growing better than ever this time of year, it seems like every time I look at a plant it's twice the size it was last time. Around here this is the season of weeding and staking, watching things grow and best of all of endless salads. Life in the yurt has been fantastic (I still promise that construction write-up soon!), although it seems to have had the unintended consequence of deterring the deer from the upper field only to drive them into the lower field and the main seed garden. The damage wasn't too severe, a few peas got nibbled and are now re-growing. Ever since I built my funky, improvised deer fence last week out of tomato stakes, twine, surveyors tape and pie plates the garden seems to be secure.

The greenhouse is finally coming together too. The frame is nearly finished now, it's just a matter of finishing the ends (we're having wooden ends with wide double doors) and waiting for a totally still day to throw the plastic over.

Also in the works is a very exciting series of seed saving workshops with both myself and my friend and mentor Dan Jason from Salt Spring

Seeds. Dan is coming out here in late August and we'll likely be giving three separate workshops around the province (details to follow!) the biggest one and the one that's all confirmed is the Watershed Farm Music Festival on August 28th. Organized by Pollination Project at Watershed Farm, we'll have music all day on Saturday the 28th along with organic growing and seed saving demos throughout the day. The following day Sunday will be a smaller, quieter and more in-depth course with the two of us, check out the details: pollinationproject.com/eventsview.php?eventID=85 . I'll keep everyone posted when we decide on the details for the other courses!

Also, here's a photo I've been meaning to share from my time as a guest on The Weekend Gardener the other week. Niki Jabbour hosts the show every Sunday from 11:00 to 1:00 on 95.7 FM in Nova Scotia. I ended up going in to the studio for the interview, which was a ton of fun with such a knowledgeable gardener as Niki. Check out her blog too.

Next up is a weeklong farm tour of sorts to New Brunswick, there's a lot to organize on this rainy day...

June Photos

This is probably the busiest time of year on the farm with the seeding almost finished and the weeds now coming on strong, so instead of writing a detailed update here are a few photos of what's new!

-One of the new seed gardens.

-The new yurt! I moved in for the summer a few weeks ago, I'll post a more detailed write-up when I get the time...

-A tarwi sprout. This is a very exciting new crop for me, tarwi is an edible annual lupin with huge white seeds as big as beans. It's an ancient crop from the Incans that is nearly lost in modern cultivation, if it does well I hope to have seeds in a year or two.

-Milk Thistle

-As I write this the lupins are at their absolute peak bloom, the meadows are just filled with their heady fragrance on warm, still mornings.

-Lots of different greens destined for seed in the 2011 catalogue. The greens where so popular last year I'm really expanding in that direction, I have 35 lettuces alone planned for next year.