Author: Deep Harvest Farm

Posted on by

Saving Seed on Squash

Squash your Ignorance!

We’ve been saving seed on Oregon Homestead winter squash (aka Sweet Meat)  for over 10 years, growing it out in isolation every 2-3 years to collect the seed (using a hatchet and Shopvac!) and bestow the sweet flesh to our CSA. We adore this variety for its rich flavor, abundant yields and early maturity in our climate. It was improved by the great PNW plant breeder Carol Deppe who selected it for small cavity size ( = more food), vigorous growth and good germination in cool soils. It’s great in soups or just baked and eaten with salt and butter. It won’t store since it’s been cut into…so eat promptly!

Squash are a tricky crop to grow for seed due to their out-crossing nature (bees move pollen between plants) and the fact that they flower before they produce food (a fancy way of saying they’re fruits).  Since they readily outcross with other squash of the same species, it’s imperative that we grow them in isolation from other squash if the goal is to save seed. Luckily, we have some amazing CSA members down the road that have leased us a small plot of land to grow seed in isolation from the Deep Harvest/Foxtail Farm veggie HQ. I can even drive the tractor there to prepare fields in the spring!

Squash come in 3 common species, so it’s crucial that we know what species each variety belongs to so no crossing occurs. Sweet Meat squash, along with buttercups, kabocha, hubbards, kuris and other big, dense soup squashes are all in the species Cucurbita maxima. Delicata, acorn, pumpkins,  zucchini, summer squash are all C. pepo. Don’t save seed from a pumpkin grown next to an acorn, unless you want some funky offspring! Lastly, butternut squash and their kin are all C. moschata, a particularly difficult species to save seed on in the PNW due to their long days to maturity.

The fact that squash are actually fruits means that they flower before they make squash. Broccoli, beets, fennel, mustards, etc in contrast all flower after they form their vegetables. This means we can grow a broccoli or mustards seed crop next to another broccoli or mustards of a different variety for food, as long as we don’t let that food crop flower. Not so with squash. A squash intended for seed saving will happily cross with a squash meant for eating. This applies to all other fruiting crops in the Cucurbitacea family such as melons and cucumbers. You must grow them in isolation for seed.

Posted on by

Choosing Crops to Grow

What Crops and Why?

The last 15 years of farming are full of trials and errors, errors and trials, learning and growing and learning and… not growing. That’s a wordy way of saying, crops have come on and crops have gone off the farm plan for all kinds of reasons. The following are factors we consider when deciding if we’re going to grow a crop and if so how much we’ll plant of it.

One, do people like it? We use our trade zone of CSA pick-up each week as a mini member survey to see what you’re all leaving behind. A big pile of anything means it’s not likely to make the cut for next season, thus, the absence of mustard greens, celeriac, salsify and winter turnips in the shares this year. Can’t say we’re shedding any tears!

Two, is it profitable? This isn’t a huge factor when we plan our CSA harvests as we predominantly prioritize crops that are pleasing to your personal palettes and that contribute to a well-rounded and diversified farm share box. However, when choosing crops for the grocery stores, restaurants and food hub, this is THE consideration. We intentionally plant carrots, beets, chard, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, cabbage and brussels sprouts for these causes as they are ever popular and fetch good rates on a per bed basis, making them worth the lower wholesale prices.

Three, how much space does it take up? We don’t grow tons of potatoes or melons on our farm as they don’t yield well, are prone to pest damage, take up a lot of room, and don’t come anywhere close to penciling out.

Four, do we personally like growing and managing them? Nathaniel has a deep passion (to which I cannot relate) for growing corn and quinoa for seed, but I support it! And I have a newfound love for growing giant pumpkins and have serious plan to host a giant pumpkin regatta next year- stay tuned! These crops don’t make sense financially, but we grow them to keep ourselves enthused. Claire, Kevin and I must’ve checked on our big quirky pumpkin friends a couple times a week throughout the summer. We miss them!

It’s a delicate dance to weigh all these factors when working on the season’s plan, but it makes for lively conversations over coffee in the off season.

Posted on by

Seed Terminology and Labels: Open-Pollinated, Non-GMO, Hybrids, and Such

Annual Seed Spiel…Okay, we’re revisiting an oldie but goodie this week: Seed terminology and the common misconceptions around labels. As a small seed company we pride ourselves on strictly selling only open-pollinated, non-GMO and certified-organic seeds. What the heck to these terms actually mean and are they related? Let’s start with “open-pollinated,” a term referring to the way the plant reproduces.

Open-Pollinated

As opposed to “hybrid” or “F-1” varieties, open-pollinated varieties (OPs) are genetically diverse populations that are free to cross-pollinate within themselves. No plant is a poster child for the variety. Every individual’s genetic make-up is slightly different due to the free-flow of pollen (similar most wild species). You can save seeds on open-pollinated plants and get something that resembles the variety. You just need to save from enough plants to get a good representation of the variety’s diversity.

Hybrids

Hybrids come from two in-bred parent lines crossed by breeders to create a particular set of plant traits in the offspring. Seed saved from these hybrid plants will revert back to a hodgepodge of their parent traits. They often don’t resemble the desired plant at all. This benefits the breeder and seed company by removing the farmer from the seed work. This forces farmers to purchase the hybrid seed every year.  Think of open-pollinated varieties as the free-love plants, and hybrids as highly arranged marriages. We mostly grow OPs on the farm (maybe 90%). Still, it’s hard to find good OP varieties for crops like cauliflower due to a century long neglect of classical plant breeding in favor of hybrid development. Open a Johnny’s seed catalog and almost every vegetable is a hybrid.

While some hybrid breeding techniques border on “soft-GMO” by some definitions, hybrid varieties can be produced and sold as Certified Organic. Hybrids aren’t bad, per se, but the industry focuses on these varieties to the detriment of our collective ability to grow, save, and adapt our own OP seeds.

GMO

Okay, what about GMO and Organic? GMO (genetically modified organism) refers to a plant that’s inserted with one or more genes to create new traits, often to confer herbicide resistance, viral resistance or insect tolerance. They are almost exclusively used in commodity crops produced on a huge scale (think soy, canola, cotton, corn, sugar beets). GMO seed can’t be certified-organic. If I buy a packet of GMO corn seed and grow it with the most ecological, practices possible, it still couldn’t sell that corn as Organic. Organic Seed must be GMO-free and produced under strict practices defined by the National Organic Program of the USDA.

Now here’s where it gets a bit tricky. Many varieties, both OPs and hybrids, are grown for years using conventional practices, (ie. plenty of synthetic fertilizers and herb/pesticides.) That seed could be grown out for a single generation in a certified-organic environment and be sold as Certified-Organic. As long as it’s not GMO, Certified Organic tells you nothing addition about that variety’s underlying genetics or past environment. Many Certified-Organic varieties actually don’t do that well in organic conditions because they were not bred for those conditions. Conversely, plenty of non-organic heirloom varieties will do great in organic conditions since they were bred over 100 years ago, in the absence of modern chemicals. Now that’s interesting, aint it?

Posted on by

Wireworms are at it again!

Arghhhh!

Our seasoned farm share members know their way around an ugly potato and we’re hoping the rest of you are up for the challenge as well. A few of this year’s potato beds have been discovered by… wireworms. Boooo. Hissss. But whatever! We’re cool, we’re cool. Dealing with pests is part of this organic farming game and we accept it. Life can’t be flowers and strawberries all the time!

So, a refresher on the orange, crispy, little larvae that share our love of potatoes. Wireworms are the babies of click beetles which are small, copper-colored beetles that thrive in pastures with high organic matter. Unfortunately, high organic matter soil is what we organic farmers also love.

When we first started farming our current property, they were a new pest to us and existed in our soil in truly catastrophic quantities. We planted around 10,000 lettuce transplants that first summer here (we were used to growing lettuce for the grocery stores) in hopes that maybe a new bed or later timing date might help our lettuce growing cause. Nope! We grew absolutely zero lettuce. Or corn. Or potatoes. Oh and we had to pick about five gross worms out of each of our brassica transplants’ roots a few weeks after planting them in order to pull off any broccoli, cabbage, kale, brussels or cauliflower. Talk about crazy making! We persevered and found things that worked better than others, CSA members were understanding, and we’re still standing!

The more we’ve worked our soil, the fewer wireworms we’ve had to deal with, but they’re around lurking in the fields edges, which leads us to this week’s potatoes. Potatoes MUST be their favorite food, (next to pasture grass roots) and are recommended as a wireworm trap crop. A trap crop is something grows with the purpose of attracting a pest away from something more precious. Too bad the ideal trap crop is the food crop we’re going for in this situation. Thankfully, the damage is fairly superficial, albeit hideous. If you can’t stand the looks of these ugly roots, trade em away, or just get out your peeler and enjoy the goodness just below the potato skins.

Posted on by

Succession Planting

Folks often ask how we keep spinach and cilantro from bolting in the middle of summer or how we pull off lettuce all season long. Is it shade cloth? Constant irrigating? Secret farming sauce? The answer… succession planting (see how the word success is even in the name?!).

Whereas many backyard gardeners plant their whole garden in spring and call it good, farms and super productive gardens require more planning and planting. Some vegetables like winter squash or tomatoes should be planted just once as the growing season only has enough warm days for a single crop. Here at Deep Harvest, we plant most veggies multiple times throughout the season. This ensures they’re always in their fresh, vegetative state of growth when we need them. Take arugula, which we plant not once, not twice, but a whopping 16 times, March through September. Arugula bolts quickly, so this schedule is needed to ensure there’s always a bed of tender leaves for orders.

What about biennial crops like carrots and beets that don’t bolt their first year, you ask? Why not just plant all the carrots we need in March and harvest them throughout the entire season? Well, even root veggies don’t hold in the ground forever. After about a month, a mature carrot becomes a woody, hairy, split open, rust fly larvae-infested, or otherwise unsavory experience. Thus, we plant them every three weeks March through July to ensure they’re always prime. Another secret to effective succession planting is variety choice. Whereas our sweet, tender Hilmar makes a great spring/summer carrot, we favor Danvers for our final fall planting. It holds up much better in wet, cool soils. All the seeds in our Deep Harvest Seeds catalog perform well in our climate, but some need to be planted in the correct season to ensure a good crop.

If succession planting sounds like far too much effort, but you still dream of a bountiful gardening season, try planting crops that you can harvest for long harvest windows. Kale, chard, cucumbers, basil, zucchini, and tomatoes are the all-stars of Team Productivity. Go team!

Posted on by

Bush Beans, Pole Beans and Dry Beans

Allow us a moment to wax (wax bean?) poetic about one of our favorite tastes of summer.

Garden fresh beans. What’s not to love? Stir-fried, sauted, fresh, roasted, pickled– there’s no way to do them wrong. Then why does the English language cast these tasty morsels in such a bad light?  Being “full of beans“ or never amounting to “a hill of beans” aren’t exactly compliments. Getting “beaned” in baseball is nobody’s definition of a good time. And calling someone a “bean counter” can be downright rude. Why the bad vibes, people? Maybe our language-creating ancestors only ate beans from aluminum cans. Literal food for thought… But I digress. Back to regular programming—- Garden fresh beans!

Did you know that there are different beans for different uses? To the culinistas (did we just invent a word??) out there, you may want to take some notes. Our catalog has a bean for every occasion:

Snap Bush Beans  – These produce concentrated harvests of juicy beans for fresh-eating, sautéing, freezing or canning. An early May sowing will give you 3-4 weeks of picking starting in July. If you want continued harvests through August and September, consider sowing second and even third successions in June and July. Provider and Buerre de Roquencourt are our earliest-to-mature varieties while the fancy French filet bean, Velour, needs 1-2 more weeks to set fruit. For those of you who are all about flavor, Lewis bush bean won our on-farm bush bean taste test- TWICE!

Snap Pole Beans – Pole beans are the quintessential garden crop. While they lack the speediness of bush beans they make up for it in prolonged yields all summer long.  Be sure to give them something to grab onto and climb up before they send out their vines. A back fence, bamboo stakes or twine draped from a trellis all work just fine. Kew Blue produces stunning semi-flat deep purple crunchy delights and Cobra’s green beans are the tastiest and earliest maturing pole beans we’ve found! Use ’em in any which way.

Dry Beans (Bush or Pole, but all our varieties are Bush) – These morsels are intended for a late summer harvest, after the plants have dried down and the beans are brown and crispy.  Our Rockwells are a Slow Food “Ark of Taste” variety, renowned for its delectability as a baked bean.  Dragon Langerie is juicy and tender for eating fresh and can also be dried or shelled.

Posted on by

To mechanize or not to mechanize, that is the question

There are a couple distinct ways of approaching one’s small farm business. One approach is to buy all the snazzy equipment right away and assume it will eventually pay for itself in saved labor. Of course this doesn’t always pan out. Some examples of such luxurious small farm tools include new tractors and tillers, snazzy flail mowers and finger weeder implements, paperpot seeders for the fields (look it up, they’re trending on small farms), the vacuum seeder for the propagation house (also fun to google), and the greens harvester to cut salad without bending over (yet again, mr. internet will answer your questions), etc. to infinity and beyond. I don’t know if you know this about us, but we are not those kind of farmers. We are proudly scrappy, making sure a new tool is beyond well-earned before making an investment. After digging over 5,000 feet of potatoes in our first seven years, we decided we’d earned a potato digger. (Could’ve made that minor purchase a couple of years sooner to save the ol backaroo!) After 9 years on a tractor from the 60s and saving up our parsnip pennies, we figured we were due for a tractor with 4WD and some legit horse power. Mighty helpful when driving around in soggy springs! Twelve years in, we deemed ourselves worthy of a grown-up propagation house for our plant babies rather than two hilariously cramped, gardener sized start houses. Until we know for sure a farm addition is really, definitely going to improve efficiency and financially payoff, we hold off. So out we go to the fields to transplant by hand, knowing it’s the right move, at least for us.

Posted on by

Reduced Tillage Musings

The quest to reduce tillage, reduce inputs and ultimately, reduce work, continues….

Patty ponders ways to reduce tillage.

Our soil management regime currently centers around planting annual cover crops in the fall. Usually this is a mix of a legumes and grasses which grow a bit in late Sept/Oct., rest through the cold, dark of winter and surge into growth in spring. They often reach 6 feet tall by May when they flower and become fibrous/carbonaceous.

Working material back into the soil so we can run a seeder through the dirt again is a big process. This entails grazing sheep, flail mowing, tilling, chisel plowing, perhaps tarping, tilling again, maybe raking or some combination. At minimum it’s a 6 week process that requires no less that 4 passes with the tractor per bed. It’s a ton of labor, fuel, and tractor wear and tear, but the worst is the amount of soil damage incurred in the process.

It’s a constant dance of building and destroying soil health, just to maintain status quo. I’m always scheming about how to streamline this process, or otherwise change it up without sacrificing the benefits gained from the cover crops (which are vast). One option is buying compost to maintain organic matter instead of growing cover crops, which doesn’t require mowing and tilling to incorporate. Unfortunately, compost is incredibly expensive to buy and labor intensive to spread. It also doesn’t capture carbon, prevent erosion, maintain soil biology (the rhizosphere of cover crops keeps the soil ecosystem happy through the winter) or suppress weed growth like cover crops do.

One interesting soil management strategy we’ll test next season is the use of live pathways.  First we’ll seed a field of, say, red clover in the fall and let it grow until the following spring. Then, we’ll mow the field and strip-till 4-ft wide beds every 7 feet, leaving permanent 3 ft-wide clover pathways between the beds. This field layout could theoretically last for years and hopefully won’t require planting and tilling of cover crop every season. The 4 ft beds will be fertilized, planted, and weeded like normal and then mowed after the crop is harvested. We’ll manage pathways with a 3 ft riding lawnmower which will shoot clover clippings out the side into the bed as a nitrogen-rich mulch. The following spring the bed will hopefully be re-established with a single pass with the rototiller.

Granted, I can foresee a millions ways things could go awry, but hey, it sounds cool on paper. We’ll try to keep you posted on results!

 

Posted on by

Farm Diseases and Critter Pests

Here’s part 2 of our Farm Foes series. This week it’s diseases and critters!DISEASES:

  1. Downy Mildew – Wondering why the onions are so small this year? Blame the mildew, which killed their leaves before the onions had a change to swell up. Luckily small is still yummy. It also our afflicts our Russian kales in the late summer and fall.
  1. Sclerotinia – A fungus that affects the roots and stems of lettuce-family seed crops, including sunflowers. We lost a couple lettuce crops to the fungus this year.
  1. Late Blight – We haven’t seen any this year, thank goodness, but when it does rear its head you can say goodbye to all the tomatoes. We’ve only had a couple years when it’s been a major problem. Growing under tunnels and greenhouses generally keep the tomatoes dry and fungus-free.
  2. Powdery Mildew – Not a serious disease, but a life-shortener of chard, zucchini and cucumbers. Good riddance. Who wants to pick those plants for months on end anyway.
  1. I can’t think of any more economically significant diseases, which is pretty great!

OTHER CRITTERS:

This heron isn’t a pest, but it’s finch friends are!
  1. Birds! – We love em, but they’d completely annihilate many of our seed crops without bird netting. Finches are the worst for small seeded things (brassicas, cosmos, spinach), and blackbirds for larger seeds (sunflowers, corn).
  1. Slugs – We all know what slugs do. I think 20% of our farm budget went to Sluggo during that endless wet spring of 2022. Unfortunately, our ecological management practices like cover cropping and maintaining undisturbed perennial zones also create ample slug habitat.
  1. Voles – Come fall, these critters get audacious and develop a particular taste for carrots, beets and radishes.
  1. Deer – They can’t do too much damage on the vegetables, but can wreak havoc overnight on our little fruit trees if we leave the gate open.
  1. Coyotes – We’ve lost a chicken or two or thirteen to these wily beasts.
Posted on by

Farm Weeds

It’s breathtaking: the naturally occurring biodiversity that magically appears to stake its claim on one’s organic field. Dozens of weed species, insect pests, and countess bacterial, viral and fungal diseases. Not to mention the vertebrates, which can’t be underestimated. These species put the ‘work’ in farming and keep us permanently on our toes. Here’s the first in a two-part series on the top tier nemeses that make their way into our daily farm lives. This week: Weeds! Next week: Diseases and Beyond!!! It’s a whimsical balance between letting all these scrappy cohabitants have their lunch and allowing us to make some cash.

WEEDS:
1. Hairy nightshade – Our most prolific and aggressive summer weed. Fast growing with a
strong root system, forming hundreds of small green berries packed with seeds.

2. Lambs quarter – A nutrient rich relative of spinach and quinoa, it’s our fastest growing weed and a producer of thousands of minuscule seeds per plant.

3. Canada Thistle – Our most existentially threatening weed. Thistle forms aggressive horizontal roots systems that are aggravated and spread from digging and tillage. In a pasture it may be managed by repeatedly mowing, but in annually worked vegetable fields there are no real organically-certified suppression methods. We tried tarping, digging, burning and an organic herbicide, which it all laughed off. Thus, we had to take one of our fields out of organic certification (and production) for the three years to spray a patch. It blows in every year from neighbors’ fields, and without a well-funded, county-wide management the problem with continue to worsen.

4. Field Bindweed – While this isn’t widespread on the farm, it has cropped up in a few locations and is spreading like wildfire. Like, thistle it forms spreading roots systems that we can’t figure out how to kill with organic methods. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to pull out two new beds of strawberries, because it has spread aggressively under the black plastic. We’ll put this area into pasture for a few years and mow it like crazy in an effort to wear this plant out.

5. Chickweed – Our most serious cool-season weed, but not a huge nuisance. Once the fall crops mature, we let chickweed run rampant. It doesn’t compete with the crops at that point and acts as a makeshift cover crop. It can be a pain though during our super long, wet springs.