Category: Gardening Tips

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.

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.

If you’re having trouble deciding what to grow this season, here’s a gratifying option to living up your landscape: plant things both people and pollinators adore! You can share!!

Get this, many veggies and herbs will go on to flower and attract a myriad of beneficial insects if you leave ‘em the ground long enough to do so. You’ve probably discovered this phenomenon all on your own, forgetting about that old arugula or salad mix until after it’s bolted and flowered and then – boom- it’s suddenly abuzz with life!

We often leave entire beds of broccoli and cilantro to continue growing waaayy past their harvest window (on purpose- no really!!), inviting in a diversity of bees, flies and beetles that in turn pollinate our other food crops and prey on pesky pests like aphids, mites and caterpillars.  Over-mature crops can even help to bolster native pollinator populations, many of which are in decline due to habitat loss and a lack of floral resources. If you have the space and a tolerance for a slightly messier garden appearance, consider leaving the following crops in the ground beyond the point of edibility:

Cilantro, Dill and Parsley: These three herbs are in the family Apiacea, known for its “umbel”-shaped flower heads which can attract a wide diversity of beneficial bees, syrphid flies and parasitoid wasps, which prey on aphids!! After cutting these plants back a few times for food they’ll start to bolt and flower. Just sit back and enjoy the magic!

Annual brassicas – arugula, mizuna, mustards, salad mix, tatsoi, choi sum and gai lan: These quick-to-mature leafy greens of the family Brassicacea are often the first to bolt in the garden, leading to a proliferation of white and yellow flowers. Bees or all shapes and sizes including honey bees, bumble bees, sweat bees and mason bees will find their way to these flowers.

Basil, Holy Basil and Catmint – These herbs are in the Mint family, producing spikes of gorgeous, purple flowers that bloom a good long while. Pinch the first few flowers off your basil plants to encourage branching, which will yield more pesto for you and flower production for the pollinators.

Edible Flowers – The blooms of Calendula, Borage, Bachelor Buttons and Nasturtiums are all edible, adding bright colors and subtle flavor to your summer salads, drinks, and party cakes. They also happen to be some of the best pollinator crops out there! The butterflies and their friends will thank you (in their own subtle way).

One final word to the wise. While leaves and stems lead to flowers, flowers happen to lead to (drum roll, please)…seeds! Keep an eye on those plants as they’re blooming and consider yanking them before the first seed pods start drying down to prevent seed dispersal in your garden. That is, unless you want to try saving your own seeds or don’t mind volunteers next spring!

Seeding: Come May 1st, here on Whidbey Island we start cucumbers and summer squash seeds in 2” pots in our greenhouse on heat mats set at 75 degrees.  Sowing indoors allows us to get plants growing when the outdoor soil is still too cold, while also giving these crops a head start on the pests and weeds. If you don’t have a heat mat or greenhouse, a bright, warm window ledge should suffice. If you’d like to direct-sow cucumbers and squash, wait until the soil is at least 60 degrees, ideally a bit warmer.

Placing and Spacing: When cucurbits have filled out their 2” pot, we plant cucumbers outside spaced one foot apart and the squash between 18” and two feet apart, depending on type. Intuitively, summer squash require less room than giant vining winter squash. Both crops love full sun. We prefer growing long Asian and English cucumbers on trellising in the greenhouse to keep them straight and easy to pick, but you don’t have to.

Harvesting: To my serious chagrin, we need to harvest these crops every other day to get ‘em in their prime eating state. If you don’t mind a giant zucchini boat or slightly suboptimal cucumbers, you can get away with picking less frequently. CSA members, grocery store customers and chefs prefer these speedy growers small and firm, so at least two months of our summer our lower backs are feeling the burn as we fill bin after bin of these tasty fruits.

Did you hear the birdies start chirping last week? Here at Deep Harvest, the robins are back to singing sweet songs of cereal (their AM chirps sounds like “cherrio, cherrio”) and the sun is showing its face. We know this means that you likely want to get your hands popping seeds into that cold muckiness. Ok, ok- at this point, we’ll allow it.

Lucky for you eager growers, some flowers actually like the cold soil. Who are these brave blooms? They go by the names Poppy, Larkspur, Rudbeckia, Catmint, Chamomile, Eryngium, Sweet Pea and Nasturtium. They’re the open-ocean swimmers of the flower world, not only tolerating frigidness, but even basking in it. (I’m an open water swimmer of the human world, so I understand!). We direct sow all these seeds in early to mid-March. However, if you’ve had trouble getting any of the aforementioned flowers to germinate, you might want to take tending to them to the next level. This crew appreciates being stratified or scarified! Eeee. Sounds scary, but it’s merely scar-y. Here’s the skinny on how to grow the frigid-est of flowers.

Stratification is a process of seed stimulation to promote germination. Most seeds experience dormancy as embryos, which must be broken somehow. In nature, seeds spend significant time in the ground during winter rains and frost which softens their seed coats. In your home, you can mimic this process by dampening a paper towel,  sprinkling the seeds on it and folding the towel around the seeds. Place this bundle in a labeled plastic bag, seal it, then mark your calendar so you remember to take them out of the fridge after a month! At that point, you can start your flowers as you normally would. Larkspur, Rudbeckia, Catmint, Chamomile, Eryngium all may benefit from this process.

Scarification: Some seeds have extremely hard, protective coats, which can make it difficult for them to germinate. The whole point of a seed having a tough coat is to prevent it from germinating at the wrong time. To overcome this protective mechanism, you can nick the seed with sandpaper or an emery board. You can also just soak them in water overnight before planting. That causes seeds to swell, which in turn breaks the outer seed coat. Sweet Peas and nasturtium may benefit from this process. At Deep Harvest, we always pre-soak our sweet peas, whose coats are particularly hardcore.

You may also have heard of Vernalization which is process that initiates flowering in plants (rather than germination of seeds) by exposing them to prolonged cold temps. Vernalization doesn’t apply to seed starting, but if you’re interested in growing root crops for seed, explore this concept further here: https://www.growveg.com/guides/vernalization-of-winter-vegetables-for-seed-saving/

Plants want to grow! Once those little green machines sprout in the ground, there seems to be no stopping them. But what about getting them to germinate in the first place? This might be trickier, as each seed type has different environmental preferences. The seed starting basics:

Water – Once in soil, seeds want to stay moist. Too wet they will rot, too dry and the water can’t penetrate their hard seed coat. If bone dry is 0% soil moisture and drenched is 100%, it’s ideal to keep you soil between 50-75% moisture. That usually means watering once a day in the cloudy spring, and twice a day later in the season. Make sure you’re soaking the soil least 1” deep so that the little seedling roots can easily grow downward.

Temperature – Each species has a different optimal temperature for germination at which the seed will sprout in the fewest days. Go above or below this temp and the number of days for germination will increase. Too hot or cold, the seeds won’t sprout at all and may rot in the soil or go dormant. A good average temperature for most veggie seeds is 70F. We use heat mats set at this temp in our greenhouse to start our seeds, and stop using them altogether by the end of May or when the ambient temps are about 70F. While we recommend mats for heat-loving solanaceous crops, most cool season crops, like kale and lettuce, will germinate just fine at 55F. Keep in mind that the heat mats are only for germination. After germinating, remove plant from heat to continue growing at ambient greenhouse temp.

Light – We start our seeds in a greenhouse. Here they are exposed to natural light fluctuation. A bright south-facing window can also be a good option. Some sites don’ have a much sun exposure, especially in late-winter/early spring, so you may opt to start seeds indoors under grow lights. It is important to use full-spectrum lights with a high lumen output, and to also have a timer that runs 12-16 hours a day. If your seedlings are getting leggy it’s likely that they are not receiving enough light!

Remember its always an option to start seeds directly in the ground once soil temperatures are sufficiently high and the ground is easily worked! Around here, early March is the absolutely earliest to direct sow those cool-season crops.

You got this!