Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                                 October 20, 2013      

My life is dominated by the weather (like you couldn’t tell).  Right now the temperature is 30º. It is breezy and cloudy, much warmer than I expected. Last night the NWS forecast ( Bob Weisman doesn’t work weekends) was a low of 26º. We are usually a couple degrees colder than that, so it is warm this morning.

We are at the point of the season where a few degrees more or less makes a huge difference. Temperatures below 28º are considered killing frosts. The summer annuals all die at that temperature. That was two weeks ago. Somewhere around 24º is a hard freeze, cold enough to damage crops in the mustard family. That would put an end to all the leafy greens except kale. We had a low of 26º very early Sunday morning. It takes temperatures of about 20º to damage the kales.  Cover crops like oats and peas keep growing until the temperature drops to 10º.

Once it gets above freezing we will see what there is to harvest.

Sunday morning had all the makings for a perfect day. Cold and rainy, too miserable to do much outside and a fire blazing in the stove.  Perfect.

I did have a few things that need doing outside.  I have to split some wood, but that’s in the woodshed. The water heater in the greenhouse needs some attention. The combination of heat and humidity in the greenhouse has rotted out the burner. It needs a new water heater but I would just as soon not buy one and have it sit out there all winter.

I salvaged a burner out of a heater that my neighbor was scrapping and tried to adapt to this heater. The pilot won’t hold a flame for some reason and the burner  is not putting out the heat that I would expect. It’s really time for a new one. Although, this set up may work to keep the winter squash warm. Setting the temperature as high as it will go keeps the burner running all the time, negating the need for the pilot and the lazy burner keeps the water warm enough to keep the floor warm.

Last week was another good one for orders and we just finished up our CSA.  All the tomato trellis strings have been cut and the stakes pulled out.  All the cabbage has been harvested and stashed in the root cellar along with some turnips, winter radishes, and potatoes.

There are still a lot of potatoes that need to be dug.  It hasn’t been cold enough long enough to freeze the ground yet. Today we will work on getting the rest of them out.

I finally got around to harvesting a bucket of grapes for jelly. They are a mixture of wild and old Swensen Minnesota varieties. The prospect of a hard freeze clarifies what needs to be done.

Tracy at the Birchwood is having an 18^th anniversary party on the 28^th and it will be the kickoff for the Kickstarter campaign to raise some money for the long planned expansion of the Birchwood. If you have seen their kitchen you know they need it. Tracy says it better than I can.  Here is a link to what she has to say: http://birchwoodcafe.com/posts/4.   It is a good cause.

 Greg

Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                     October 10, 2013

It has been another wild week and the weather has been perfect. We have been moving 3-4 times as much produce as we would in any typical year.  But all good things must come to an end. The tomatoes have thrown in the proverbial towel. Everything is either slightly under ripe or rotten. Green peppers are seldom seen, Eggplant are mostly either small or over ripe.  Summer is definitely coming to an end.  Mercifully the days are getting much shorter much faster. 

The weather forecast went from a low on Sunday of 42º this morning to a predicted low of 36º tonight. Usually they overshoot a little and the predicted low come up a bit. I’ll have to see where it bottoms out, but It seems like time to get summer season crops harvested and under cover.

Rieders are making good progress on shingling the barn. It is a tough job. The roof is very steep ( 12/12) and there were two layers of asphalt shingles and a layer of cedar. I’m guessing that the cedar shingles were the original shingles on the barn.  They started on the north side.  Shingles need to be 70º+ to seal down. It is October in Minnesota. We don’t have that many 70º days left.  They will have the backside finished up tomorrow while it  is still warm. The south side will heat up in the sun and the tabs will stick down even if the air temperature never gets above 50º.

Other than harvesting all the time the crew has been picking up all the irrigation equipment, cutting the trellis string and removing the posts and stakes. Seed related activities are taking place on all levels, seeding cover crops, selecting plants for seed saving, and cleaning seeds.

We select the most disease resistant plants for seed saving. This year we planted saved seed plants next to purchased seed (of the same variety) plants and the saved seed did much better. They resisted blight better and produced more harvestable fruit. 

I have had such good luck with the seeds that were saved from hybrids that this year that I am going to save seed from a lot of the productive hybrids in addition to the high performing  open pollinated varieties.

In most cases, only about a third of the seed saved from hybrids comes true to type.  It takes several years to stabilize the a open pollinated variety from a hybrid. However, in two cases there was a second apparently worthwhile variety that came out of the hybrids.  I’m sure they will take several years to stabilize too, but they could be good. This has been a good year for selecting seed that do well in adverse conditions.

We had a great party last Saturday. Good food, conversation, and people. The weather was chilly and damp, but not bad. It made the fire all the better. Very fun.

I have a couple of projects that I need help on. One is pretty mundane. I’m looking for a 6½ – 7 foot wide snow blower for my tractor. It does not have to be in great condition, but it has to be all there. I’m planning to put it on my H and run it with a separate engine. The H does not make enough power or have enough hydraulics to run a big snow blower at low engine speeds. The separate engine will let me run the blower at full speed while the tractor is just idling.  If you know some one who has a big snow blower sitting in the grove, I’m looking.

The second one is a little more esoteric. This is one for fabric arts people. I want to grow pole beans on a large scale. To do that I need a lot of trellis. The trellis has to be made of untreated sisal, jute, or cotton. I do not want to pick bean vines off plastic netting. With  the natural fibre netting I can throw the whole mess in the combine and compost everything that comes out the back end.

The required netting would have about 8”X8” squares. The netting would have to be crocheted or tied. I don’t think that woven would not stand up to the weight of the beans. The difficult part, in addition to using 1/8” diameter string, is that the netting would be 300 feet long and 4 feet tall. I would need about 15,000 feet of the netting.

Nobody that I can find makes this type of netting or is willing to make it. The question is ‘How to make this type of netting?’  A shuttle with 3000 feet of sisal would weigh about 10 pounds and be the size if a soccer ball. 

The alternative is to run a wire the length of the row and tie a string from the wire to the base of each bean plant. That does not sound like a lot of fun.  Ideas ? Techniques ?

Extra credit question: What sparked the Back to the Land Movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s ?

Greg

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Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                     September  29, 2013

 It was quite a day today. The crop mob was postponed due to rain on Saturday.  Today a dozen (or more) people showed up on short notice and harvested a field of winter squash. It was great. And what a beautiful day.  The good news is that  there were tons of squash. The bad news is that there were tons of squash. I’m sure everyone will feel muscles that they didn’t even know they had tomorrow morning.

 The Butternut squash that was from saved seed did at least as well as the purchased seed, but maybe a third of the saved seed planting was lost due to flooding in June. The saved Delicata  did much better than the purchased seed even with the higher losses due to flooding.  Next year I’m going to have Denny grow  some more pumpkin varieties.  And I’m going to plant them some place where they won’t get flooded out.

 We got a very welcome  quarter inch of rain on Saturday. The warm weather last week encouraged all the oat and pea cover crop to come up. The rye and vetch popped up after the rain. Rye emerges after a week at this time of year. Oats take about two weeks. The peas are a little slower and the vetch is slower still.  Overall, things are looking good for cover crops this fall.

 The fall cover crops do several things. They keep the soil from blowing oe washing away until there is snow cover and they keep the soil from washing away in the spring.  Cover crops also either hold or add nitrogen and organic matter to the soil for next year’s crops.  Rye is a particularly good nitrogen scavenger. It is trying to grow a big root system to help it survive the winter. It seeks out any loose N and uses it to grow a bigger plant.

 Tomato seed collection is in full swing. On Wednesday our crew harvested seeds from about 25 different tomato varieties.  On Friday they cleaned the seed and set it out to dry.  On Friday they also harvest the zucchini that were hand pollinated for seed production.  Cucurbit seed production is new ground for us. I say us because our crew did everything but clean the seeds out of the rotting zucchini. The most mature seed is produced when the insides of the zukes are rotten. Rubber gloves are required to remove the seed. The smell is not good. 

 Our crew is the best. When it is my delivery day I leave them a to do list and  usually only the worst or least understood task is left when I get back. This Friday they hand harvested five rows of pole beans that were being grown out for seed production.  With the rain coming in on Saturday, it was important to get the beans out of the field before they got wet  and had a chance of spoiling the seed.

 The full tilt harvest continues. The schools have backed off their tomato purchases to 12-1500 pounds per week. I am very grateful for the extra three weeks of harvest and the tomato sales that we have had this fall.

I’m sure there is more for this newsletter, but I have had a busy few days and am looking at a big day tomorrow.

 Reminder: We have having an open house this Saturday. 2 pm until whenever.  Potluck supper.  Farm tour. Hay ride.  Bonfire. Hope you can make it.

 Greg

Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                                 September 19, 2013

Whew, what a day. Looking at the radar this morning it was clear that we were going to get rained on.  The question was ‘would we be in front of the severe part of the storm’. We made our preparations and headed out to do our harvest day.

 Rain gear was the order of the day.  The Crew started bunching radishes and I got set up to dig potatoes. Digging potatoes in the rain is no fun. The soil ends up being looser, but the potatoes are still buried.  It rained hard and the wind blew but it was not bad enough to keep us from harvesting radishes We picked up 0.55 inch of rain.  The rest of the day was pretty decent.

 We have been as busy as we can possibly be. We had a record sales day today, about twice our typical volume in August.  Two major differences from August: 1) we are down two people, 2) the days are getting shorter much faster.

 One of the reasons that we are so busy is because the Hopkins Schools decides to make all of their tomato sauce for the entire year  from local tomatoes. That translates into about seven tons of tomatoes. Since the season got off to a slow start there is about a month to process all those tomatoes. Today they ordered about 1200 pounds of tomatoes.

 Of course, this is on top of our usually busy late summer volume. The co=ops and restaurants have been buying more than usual too. If it doesn’t kill us it will be great. We had a pretty mediocre season going into September. It is turning around pretty quickly. Thank you all very much.

 We had our  first brush with frost on Monday morning. It was 36º at the house at 6:30 am. The dew was frozen on top of the cars. Down in the cold spot in the field the tops of the tomato plants were blackened. The basil had been covered, but some of the leaves were damaged. The next chilly mornings will be Saturday and Sunday.  At this point it looks like Saturday will be the coldest.  We will see.

 We have been getting a little rain. Saturday we got 0.8”, more than we have had in the past six weeks. The fall rains are critical to germinating the cover crop seeds that I depend on for rebuilding the soil.  The oats and peas that were planted in August  came up today. This is good.

 Now is the time to fill up on summer veggies. Winter is just around the corner. One of these days we will have a freeze that kills all the summer season plants. Frost can occur at 38º or below. It will damage the leaves and some of the exposed fruit. A freeze is 32º or colder. The severity depends on how much below 32º it gets and for how long. Below 28º most summer veggies are toast.

 Cook. Eat. Can . Freeze. Pickle. Now is the time. Soon it will be cabbages, potatoes, and winter squash. Not that they are bad, it is just that so many flavors are unavailable  until next summer.

 The tasteless, picked green, ‘tomatoes’ that  get sent up here from California or Florida aren’t fit for compost, much less eating. The same with all the out of season produce that appears in the grocery stores. It is bred for production under high input systems. Taste is not a consideration. One jar of home canned tomatoes has more flavor than a case of  cardboard winter tomatoes. Savor now.

 We are having a farm open house on the first Saturday in October. You’re invited. We might take hay ride, pick some corn. Eat some good local food.  Sit around the campfire and tell  stories. Put it on your calendar and stop by. It will be a potluck so you can show off your picnic skills.

 Greg

Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                                             August 14, 2013

 The Garlic Festival is all over but the accounting.  Everyone survived. Garlic Festival is one of those things that is a lot more fun when it is over.  It was a huge success, and from what I have heard, an all round good time.  

 The garlic festival is our Sustainable Farming chapter’s big fund raiser.  About nine years ago we were sitting around kvetching about not having enough money to do any of the fun things that we thought that would support sustainable farming. The discussion was moving toward writing grants. My suggestion was that we put on an event that was interesting, fun, and have people give us their money. Jerry came up with the idea of a Garlic Festival, so it is all his fault. 

 The first year we had about 20 vendors. No food vendor was interested in coming to a new one day garlic themed festival. Since I was familiar with several restaurants, my job was to line up some food. I asked Mike Phillips if he would help out and foolishly (bless his heart), he said yes. Thus the Great ‘Scape Cafe was born. And has become the only part of the festival that I know anything about. 

 This year chefs from Alma, Birchwood, Common Roots,  Corner Table, Lucias, Red Table (Mike Phillips), Three Crows, Tilia, and Phillip Becht (currently unencumbered by a restaurant) put together Minnesota’s most successful one day cafe. We had help from a multitude of dedicated  volunteers  who made it work. 

 It rocked. The first 15 minutes of the cafe are always pandemonium. I love it. At 10  to 11 people start lining up. At 11 we are open. Not ready, but open. It is chaos. Then, as if by magic, something shifts and it is like these people have been working together their whole lives. It is the relaminarization of turbulent flow in a kitchen. Beautiful.

 Roughly, 3000 people came through the gates of the festival. I think that we fed about a third of them in 3 hours. Some of them more than once, so hard numbers are hard to come by. Not to mention that we don’t keep any sort of count of how many people come through of what sells the best. All the food was as good as you would expect from a crew like this.  

 At the end of the day, we took in just over $10,300 to support the promotion of sustainable farming ( and I’m not talking about Monsanto’s brand of sustainable agriculture).  In Minnesota.  I know that we cannot repay the favor, but Thanks Everybody.  You are the best.

 The Garlic Festival was last Saturday and I’m still trying to catch up. It does not help that Mary took the grandkids Up North this week. I have to get myself up, get dressed, feed myself, etc. It’s tough, these days are just a few hours too short.

 Mary says that the weather has been cloudy, but nice. The girls have tried out kayaks and are getting comfortable with them. Today they went up to Thunder Bay.  When the kids were little the loved to be told stories. Mary would make up tales about the places along the North Shore. Some of the best were centered around Castle Danger.

 The weather here has been nice, a little cool in the morning, and dry. We need to water. And the cucumbers are having a hard time pollinating. The zucchini have adapted to the cool mornings better than the cucumbers.

 Noelle has been out hand pollinating a few of the open pollinated zucchini so the seeds will come true to type next year. To hand pollinate them, the flowers have to be tied or taped shut to keep the bees and cucumber beetles out.  Female flowers are tied and males are taped the afternoon before they open. The next morning when the dew has dried and things have warmed up, the petals are stripped from the male flowers and stamens are used to pollinate the pistils in the female flowers. The female flowers are then tied shut again to exclude other pollinators. After a few days when we can tell which pollination took, the fruit are marked with a pink ribbon and a fence post to keep them from being harvested.

 Arugula has been one of our signature crops. The past couple years have been tough due to new disease infecting the arugula. This year covering the crop with spun bound row cover has helped immensely.  Bacterial spot is a seed borne disease that is spread by rain splash when temperatures are between 70 and 80 degrees. The stormy summers have been rough. 

 It is a little early to harvest this planting, but the scheduled planting was wiped out by bacterial spot. The seed from Johnny’s seems to be heavily infected and we didn’t cover that planting because it was so hot and dry. The row cover makes it even hotter and  cooks the crops. A lose lose situation. The latest plantings were covered because we were in line for a storm, the hail storm that just missed us. It worked.

 The weather is supposed to warm up in the next ten days. Like everyone else we have a ton of tomatoes that are green as the grass. I think (hope anyway) the warm weather with ripen a bunch of tomatoes. We might get summer yet.

 Greg

Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                     August 4^th, 2013       

 How’s that for a change in the weather ? This is my kind of weather, but warm season vegetables are not liking it. To make a living at this I  need stinking hot weather in the end of July in and into early August. We had several mornings with temps in the mid 40s. Chilly. Temperatures like these are typical for September.  I suppose that it is too late to get off the weather roller coaster.

 As you probably guessed it has been a busy couple of weeks.  Our crew has been hard at it cultivating, mowing, hoeing, and hand weeding, making a big push to keep weeds from going to seed.  Even if the weeds are not going to impact this years crop, we don’t need to add to the weed seed bank.

 The weather has been absolutely beautiful, so we have been busy watering.  Tiny seedlings  and any plant that is setting fruit  needs water. If we water all day long every day, we can keep up with the veggies when it does not rain. Everyone here is hoping it rains tonight.

 Last weekend we had a crop mob. They weeded and  trellised tomatoes and pole beans. We had several CSA members show up, a lot of crop mob regulars, and several new people. Tracy provided lunch as she usually does. I have no idea how to thank these people for the work they do and the support that they provide. I am very grateful that they do it.

 Next Saturday ( August 10^th) is the Minnesota Garlic Festival. It is a celebration of local food, crafts, and farms.  The festival is a fund raiser for our Sustainable Farming chapter. The money lets us promote (real) sustainable agriculture ,  F2S,  and to try new ways to get everyone involved in understanding why good food is important.

 Come to the festival.  Support our vendors. Eat in the Great ‘Scape Cafe. Sample local wine and beer. Build a kite. Buy some garlic. Play a game of bocce. Volunteer and get in for free. Subtle, right ? Actually, the woman who was doing our volunteer recruiting had a death in her family and has had to step back. If you can volunteer for a couple hours let me know.  Be forewarned: If you volunteer for the Cafe, we will work you mercilessly and no one only works a two hour shift. You do get free admission and your choice of meals at the Cafe.  Other shifts are not so intense and you still get in for free and a meal in the cafe.

 We had been hand pollinating the zucchini. A lot of the small zukes were dropping their flower and shriveling up. Usually that is caused by lack of pollination. Hand pollinating helps, but the bees are better at it than we are. Next time I’m going to try using pollen from two or three male flowers and see if the results are better.

 It turns out that the chilly mornings are also causing the zucchini to abort. When the temperature is below 55º at night the pollen tubes quit growing and the tiny zukes are not pollinated.

 I didn’t think much about the bees and colony collapse disorder until we had to hand pollinate the zucchini. Last year we would find a bee or two in every squash flower. This year we may find three in a whole row.  Loss of pollinators takes on a lot more significance when 1/3 of our food is pollinated by bees and there aren’t enough bees to pollinate our zucchini and cucumbers.

 There aren’t many squash bugs, cabbage moths, or cucumber beetles this year either.  A dearth of pests is not something that I would usually complain about, but a die-off of insects could be a real problem. Bugs are pretty tough. If they are not making it, what does that mean for us ?

 Stalled weather patterns  have been bringing us some of the extremes that  have been so troublesome this year.  The never ending winter, the rain every other day  in June,  sudden intense heat and humidity,  record breaking 40º lows in the end of July….  Did you hear about the lake that formed at the North Pole ?

 Last year the apple and garlic crops were ruined by bizarre weather.  We all know about this year.

 I used to be concerned about that our grandchildren would have a hard time coping with the glocal  climate changes that are happening. I’m starting to think that we may have a hard time dealing with the new weather patterns, such as they are.   

 Hopefully we will be able to adapt quickly enough to survive these changes.  Of course that means that you and I have to change the way that we do things. Really.

 Greg

Godspeed Allie

Allie was struck and killed in front of our house last night. She was never very good at looking both ways before running into the road and this time one of Doug’s workers was going too fast to avoid her. The impact broke her back.

Allie was such a nice dog. She was affectionate and always has a big doggie smile on her face. She was great with visitors, never barking or jumping up on them.  She loved ‘herding’ the chickens, wearing a path around the chicken yard.  We only had her for a short time, but she left a big hole in our hearts.

As we finished burying her, the full moon was just coming up over the trees.  There were a few clouds scudding across that face of it. Mary turned around, and said “ Oh, Look. There she goes running across the moon.”

Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                                 July 20, 2013            

Mary and I snuck off for a few days earlier this week. We went Up North and stayed at Micmac Lake.  A friend of ours, Mark, put us on to these hike in cabins at Tettegouche  State Park.  They are about a mile and a half from the road and seem absolutely secluded. The weather was much cooler than it was here and the location was absolutely spectacular. Cabin B is right on the lake.

We left our crew to run the asylum and they did a great job. All the buildings were still standing when we got back and there was an order to be delivered  Friday morning.  Needless to say, it has been a short week for me.  I see that everyone here was busy picking, packing, figuring out how to do deliveries, weeding, watering, trellising tomatoes and pole beans.  There is more I’m sure…

I was planting another round of greens and radishes and realized that we are only about a month away from quitting planting for the year. It seems like summer just got started.  That is also a sign to start planting spinach and beets for fall.

An exciting development is that there have been a few ripe tomatoes. There is a small yellow, Amber, that is ripening some small yellow tomatoes. Some of the Japanese eggplant are sizing up.  There are a bunch of smaller globes and variety types too. A few early peppers are starting to show up too.  I find that I am in a much better mood after finding them.

There has been a problem with the zucchini aborting the small fruit. The most likely cause of that is lack of pollination. Squash are mostly pollinated by bumble bees.  It is a little worrying. I have started hand pollinating some of the zukes to see if it makes any difference.  Pollinating squash is a very straight forward process since the male and female flowers are very different. The males have a straight stem, while the females have a tiny zucchini under the flower.  This morning we got a tenth of an inch of rain so it washed off a lot of the pollen  off the male flowers.  First thing tomorrow we will spend a little time pollinating summer squash.

Today I spent a little time threshing and cleaning kale and turnip seeds.  The process is pretty simple.

The plants are piled on a tarp.

I walk on them to break open the seed pods. 

Remove the big straw and chaff.

Winnow the seeds to remove the light trash. 

Sieve the seeds

and do a final winnow to clean out the last few bits. 

Quite a few people could not see the pictures last time,. So I’m just going to post them on our website www.rbfcsa.com.

On Saturday morning we hosted one of the sites of the Eat Local Farm Tour.  About 15 people found us without direction to the farm being listed in the tour booklet. Several of our CSA members came by. It was nice to put a face with the names of the people whom I had not met before.  There was a lot of interest in what we were doing and how things were going this year.  I even picked a few things to try.

There is a crop mob planned for next week. I reluctant to say what we will be doing since our crew takes a to do list as a challenge, but I think that we will be weeding tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, training the pole beans up onto the strings, and hunting potato bugs.

I’ll know more next week.

Greg

Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                                             July 8, 2013

 Recovery

 The weather continues its all or nothing pattern. The heat has been good for growing  things, but it is getting quite dry. We have been watering for a week or so.  Our neighbor’s corn is starting to turn gray and the leaves are rolling up, a clear sign of lack of moisture. Our other neighbor has had their corn drowned out twice and he is not going to replant a second time.  Some of our weeds are starting to wilt.

 Lettuce and cucumbers don’t like being under water for several days. The big rain and flooding wiped out most of the cucumbers and about half of the lettuce. The warm weather this week caused a lot of the remaining lettuce to bolt. Once the plants get stressed they take any opportunity to go to seed.  The good news is that the deer did not get to eat any of the lettuce this year.  I’m planning on using the enclosure to keep the deer away from the spinach and beets.

 We put in one last round of zucchini and cucumber transplants last week. At the same time we direct seeded some cucumbers.  There is a reasonable chance that they will make it, even if we don’t have a long fall.

 The tomatoes were dry enough to cultivate just before the crop mob on the 27^th.  There were some very bad washouts in those beds. Elissa, Jacob, and Noelle went out and rescued dozens of tomato plants that had washed out of the field and replanted them back in the rows. Not all of them will make it, but I bet that more than half of the will.

 The tomatoes that didn’t  get washed away look great. There are flowers and small tomatoes on several varieties, but I have not looked to see which ones are the earliest.  The biggest tomatoes are on the left over plants that were potted up for bedding plant sales. Rather than throw them out, they were hand transplanted into the rows.

 The peppers and eggplant need to be cultivated.  The weeds aren’t the problem. The big rain packed the soil and formed a crust that is keeping the air from getting into the ground.  The tricky bit is that they are in a relatively  moist part of the field so the soil takes longer to dry out. Here the moister soils generally have higher fertility, which is usually a good place to put peppers and eggplant.

 The potatoes are looking very good this year.  Potatoes need to be hilled, to have soil piled around the base of the plant to keep the developing tubers from being exposed to sunlight. The light turns them green and causes a slightly toxic compound to form.  Hilling the potatoes killed an amazing number of weeds in the row and the loose soil forms a ‘dust mulch’ that conserves the soil moisture.  Everyone has been walking the field looking for potato bugs. I would like to get through one more year without spraying for Colorado Potato Beetles to avoid any issues with resistance.

 The greens and radishes took a beating with all the water. The smallest ones just got buried.  Some got washed out,  between a third and a half of a couple plantings wound up under water  for several days. 

 Greens and radishes are something that I plant every week.  After the rain there wasn’t anyplace that I could get in to. There was a bit of the oat and pea green manure that was about done, the peas were flowering,  That was high and fairly dry.  Jordan plowed that up and I planted in there. It was not exactly like eating your seed corn since I’ll go back with oats and peas when the greens and radishes are done.  Next year it will be planted to sorghum sudan grass. Those plantings look great. 

 The creek finally went down between us and Cathy’s so Andrew could get across with a cultivating tractor. The winter squash needed to be cultivated. Cathy has a new pond that is three times the size that it used to be so the edge of the squash field was very wet. Andrew had to turn over a few of the plants to cultivate. I’m sue that we lost much less than we would have to the weeds. 

 SFA Festival of Farms

Coop Eat Local Farm Tour 

Riverbend Farm Newsletter                                                             June 30, 2013

 Locally Adapted Seed Saving Project

 Some of the seed projects are coming to an end. The red russian kale is done flowering and the seed pods are turning brown.  The seed pods on the rainbow lacinato are still green and some of the plants continue to flower. They were all blown over in last Friday’s storm. I decided against standing them up because that could rip out the roots that are still intact. Some of the plants have a kink in the stem so they wouldn’t stand up anyway.

 Both varieties of kale were dug up last fall and spent the winter in the root cellar. The lacinato  plants were much larger, having been planted last spring. The RRK were seeded in late summer and were much smaller. The RRK overwintered better and look like they will produce just as much seed.

 Jean Peterson is growing out brussel sprouts for seed and she notes: “ Seed pods are formed and green. (only one plant has pods that look a little brownish.) Also the little green seed balls inside the pod taste tender and yummy” . If you know Jean, you can see her smiling as she says that.

 Brussel sprouts, cabbage, kohlrabi, and most kale are all in the same family. The red russian and the rainbow lacinato are both kales, but they can be grown next to each other because they are two different species. The RRK is related to rutabagas and the lacinato is closer to the cabbages.

 Some of the turnip seeds have started to shatter. They need to be harvested right away.  A few of the plants still have green seed pods so I’ll let them go a while longer.  The misato rose radishes are done flowering but  the seed pods are still green.  The beets are flowering, but have not  started to set seed.

 Cabbage family seed on the same plant ripens at different times. The first flowers set seed and ripen first. The best seed comes from the early set seed. The seeds are larger and tend to have a better germination rate.  Since we are not growing 10 acres of any type of seed we will harvest the seed as it ripens and store it in the corn crib where there is plenty of air flow, it is not too hot, and the mice can’t get it.

 The first planting of arugula is all flowering now. We didn’t harvest much of it, but it will make a nice seed crop.  There is so much of that  that I will let all the pods turn brown before we harvest it. My guess is that there will be several pounds of seed produced in that patch.

 The oats and peas are flowering. It looks like a great week for  them.  If it is too warm at night they spend all their energy respiring and the seed does not form.  Emmer is an old variety of wheat. It looks like an over grown lawn at this point. It has not started to tiller. The rye and vetch are also flowering. They are not so sensitive to temperatures since they are closer to weeds than food.  They are very resilient plants.

 The F2 hybrid tomatoes over at Cathy’s are looking good. There are a lot of them. The original hybrid is known as F1 seed, the seed saved from an F1 would be F2.  In theory only about 25% of the plants in each variety will come true to type.  There are about 200 plants of each F2 variety. If 25% of them are good I will still have 50 plants to save seed from.  With tomatoes, 20-25 is considered a safe number of plants to maintain genetic diversity.  Most modern hybrids are entirely self pollinating, so the plant next to the one that is true to type won’t cross pollinate it. It usually takes several years to stabilize a hybrid.

 On our side of the fence there are several side by side comparisons of saved seed ( from open pollinated varieties) and purchased seed of the same variety of tomato. It will be interesting to see if there is a noticeable difference in the plants or the productivity.

 Some of the saved seeds in the comparison are from heirloom tomatoes, which are not entirely self pollinating. There are usually a few off types that show up.  They tend to be completely different than the rest of the plants in the row and are easy to spot. It is possible to save the seed from the crosses and start a new varietal line, but there has to be some limit somewhere.

 The only seed that is obviously an off type that was noticed early and saved was some potato leafed plants that came out of Early Girl seed. Early Girl is an old hybrid, a 1962 All America Selections winner. It is early and it tastes great. It has the perfect balance between sweet and acidic flavors that make a tomato so good. 

 A few years ago Monsanto bought up the company that produces Early Girl seed. I can see them dropping this old variety in favor of something newer and more profitable.  Potato leafed tomato plants are almost always an heirloom, typically Brandywine or one of the myriad of selections from it.  It will be interesting to see what they are.

 A new venture will be hand pollinating zucchinis. There are some great open pollinated varieties and why shouldn’t they be adapted to our conditions too ?  There are two  problems 1) bumble bees visit every flower in the field and cross pollinate everything. 2) a lot of the zucchini varieties are hybrids.

 Problem number 1  means that the squash blossoms need to be taped shut the evening before they open.  As you can imagine, that need to be done everyday.  And since the bumble bees aren’t visiting every plant, pollen has to be hand collected from many plants to pollinate each female flower.  The hand pollinated flowers are then marked with a ribbon and left to go to maturity.  The latest planting of zucchini was laid out so the open pollinated varieties are all in the same area. We will just flag that area off and won’t harvest anything from the hand pollinated plants.  It will be next year before we can see how that goes.

 Greg