oh, and we moved.... again

We moved from Sebastopol... to Sebastopol.

We used to live about a 5 minute drive from the farm. Now we live about a 30 second walk down a hill from the farm. We can basically roll out of bed, down the stairs, grab some breakfast from the kitchen (still rolling) and then out the door were you have to hop, skip, and jump over some rocks and woods and stuff and then dash over the constant stream of water at our driveway and then keep rolling down the hill until you make it to our front gate of the farm. Hopefully by then we are awake.

We got really lucky. And we love our new homestead. Come and visit sometime.

And when we wake up in the morning and look outside our window it sometimes looks like this...

it makes it hard to roll out of bed.

Bean Harvesting

Now, I am a bit behind, but I figure you still want to know what we've been keeping busy with for the last two months anyways. So, bear with me as I try and catch up to the present.

In early October it was time to start harvesting the dry beans. We had created a lot of funky trellis systems for the pole beans and what we learned is that having pole beans around is a lot more work than having bush beans. It's extra work to put up a trellis that is both sensible, inexpensive, and actually holds up to the weight of the beans (and a row of beans is very very heavy!). We had varying degrees of success and failure.

Fail

Success sort of

So, by early October we were ready to start harvesting the beans. We started with the bush beans, cutting them down to the ground and leaving the roots behind to decompose, spreading the whole plant onto sheets to dry and cure in the sun for a week or so.

Once they had dried down enough and I finally found a moment, it was time to start the process of cleaning the beans from the pods. I put together what we had for cleaning seeds on a large scale. I grabbed a soil sifter from the shed at the farm, the seedling boxes I made for sowing seeds to use as another sifter size, more sheets, a couple of clean 5 gallon buckets, a wooden box, a cardboard box, some gloves, and the incomplete potting bench that is waiting for a table top. All these things were used in various moments in order to get those beans clean. Bean cleaning took me most of a day for three varieties of beans: calypso, painted pony, and hopi yellow bean.

It took me awhile to figure out a good rhythm for cleaning. First I would stomp on the entire batch of beans with my sandals, crunching out a rhythm as I went along. Then I would take smaller batches of the plants and start to wring and crunch the whole plant, pods and all over the soil sifter to try and break the beans out of the pods. When I thought I had all the beans out of the pods, the plant material would go on another sheet as the beans fell through the sifter to the sheet below. I did this over and over until I had all of the beans on the sheet below the sifter.

stomping on beans

close up of calypso

the bean cleaning set up

calypso beans and its sifted chaff

calypso beans in a box

hopi yellow beans

hopi yellow beans sifted over the soil sifter

painted pony beans and its chaff

After that step it was time to start to separate the chaff from the beans. I would use my seedling boxes that have a finer hardware cloth at the base as a way to sift out the smaller pieces of chaff leaving the beans and larger chaff behind. The small chaff I saved as it might be useful for a component of a seedling soil mix at a later date. I then put the beans and larger chaff into a 5 gallon bucket where I would swirl and shake at just the right tempo in order to bring the lighter chaff to the top and the heavier beans to the bottom (just like when you find the raisins at the bottom of a box of raisin bran or something. Heavy things sift down to the bottom while lighter things sift closer to the top - it's a physics thing). I then would carefully scoop off the chaff and leave behind the beans.

In the end I had one cardboard box partly full of calypso beans, a 5 gallon bucket half full of painted pony beans and a small cardboard box full of hopi yellow beans. I still have to clean the turkey craw beans and Grandma Nellie's yellow mushroom beans, but they weren't completely dried down in October. Now it will be a good rainy day project. The mayflower beans we also grew ended up not producing pods in time to ripen before it started to cool down and rain. We basically lost those beans to mold. The turkey craw beans had to be carefully pulled and cut from our trellis system and I pulled off as many of the mostly ripened pods I could. The rest of the plant ended up like mayflower with most of the plant molding and the most of the pods being under developed. So the lesson was that we probably planted the pole beans too late and that maybe we should try and stick with bush beans for ease of growing, managing, harvesting and cleaning.

Now we know about how much we get out of a bed of beans and how much work it is. We'll have to choose carefully what types of beans to grow for dry beans for next year. The pods that break apart very easily are best when having to clean lots and lots of beans. The hopi yellow was actually the easiest to clean, followed by the painted pony and last the calypso. Trial and error and time is what we need to figure out the best beans to grow for our purpose. Anyone out there know of the perfect bean to grow for dry beans? There's gotta be a good one out there!

Sharing the summer bounty and some close ups

The last month or so we have had lots to harvest. We've been sharing our bounty with as many people as we can and whoever will take it off our hands (which is never hard to do!): friends, neighbors, students and their families, volunteers at work, coworkers, and even the people we buy our bread from at Wild Flour Bread in Freestone.

What we've been eating and sharing:
carrots, beets, lettuce greens, tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, summer squash, leeks, onions, potatoes, basil, summer savory.
and also apples and pears from neighbors. I've even made sun dried apple and pear slices.
Yum!

Here are just some close ups a few of the recent things we've been harvesting.

honey rock on the left and noir des carmes on the right. September 7th

noir des carmes cantaloupe variety

noir des carmes on the left and honey rock on the right. noir des carmes is a bit more mild, but is super juicy and should be spooned out like custard and honey rock has a bit more sweetness and firmer flesh

honey rock finally ripening and noir des carmes mostly done. September 17th

pepper medley and leeks and summer savory for dinner. peperoncini, hungarian purple paprika, chilhuacle negro and corno di toro peppers

la ratte fingerling potatoes

mountain rose potatoes

some of our beans with more to harvest soon. we should have a good amount for our winter storage. calypso, painted pony and hopi red

calypso beans ready to harvest

hopi red beans ready to clean

cucumbers. japanese climbing and lemon. we've had tons of these!

hopi black sunflowers are ripening. the birds sure do love to steal our seeds though!

a golden beet heart

We've been enjoying sharing our vegetables and fruits with everyone. Wish we could send it to our family far afield... instead they will just have to come and visit!

Soon we will be harvesting the rest of our dry beans and potatoes and then our winter squashes.

Crop Circles

Our neighbor, Neil, uses his meadow for some excellent artistic expressions to attract aliens. He finds pleasure in riding his mower and making these fanciful shapes in the tall grasses. Along with the help of the folks at the Sonoma County Airport, he had some images of his crop circles taken by pilot and photographer Larry Wasem. Neil graciously sent them to us because some of them contain nice images of the garden!

The Crop Circles

Crop Circles + FFF

We give great and many thanks to Neil Davis, Melinda Gay, and Larry Wasem for letting us post these images.

Expansion

For the last month or two we have been hard at work with expanding into our lower quarter acre. This space has been left fallow for a few years and has been relegated to weedy grasses and uneven compacted soil. It also happens to be the low spot within the fenced in garden space, so in the winter it will be pretty wet. But, if we want to be able to provide food for more than just ourselves and share with the community and friends then we need to continue our step by step expansion into the lower quarter.

Here's what the lower quarter looked like July 6th. As you can see on the right there is a compost pile and then moving left we see some stakes that are end markers for some of our blocks and pathways. All the way down to the end we have the last of the scythed grasses before we ended up raking them into the huge pile.

 

On July 7th we had scraped the rest of a block and started some more raking

 

 By July 21st we had a second block already scraped and raked in the morning,

 

and by the afternoon we were continuing to hoe a third block

 And by this point in the afternoon we were so excited to be scraping the last little bit that we actually documented it with a photo! Yeah 3 blocks scraped!

On July 22nd we had some wonderful guests for a farm visit so we didn't get much work done, but we had music time and wine  and a taste test our first snacky veggies of summer squash and peppers!

Most of the summer squash was about this size. A few days later they had tripled, quadrupled in size!!

On July 23rd we got a new shipment of compost. 

This stuff is way more quality stuff compared to the "organic" compost I mentioned we got cheaply from the city. I mentioned before that we would spend lots of time sifting the compost to get rid of the plastic and other trash in there. Well, here's about a 5 gallon bucket half full of the junk:

 Nasty, huh?

 And here's the new compost which is way better (and goofy me showing it all 10 yards of it off)

The next step was to rake off all the rest of the scrapings into piles and start bringing 1 wheelbarrow of compost to each bed.

By July 25th we had 4 blocks looking like so

By July 28th we were ready to spread our powders and dig the beds

 

We figured out that if we actually kept things up we could dig a block in one day, but that never really happens as other tasks sometimes slow us down (or the heat). One thing that really slowed us down though was the compaction of the soil. In order to overcome this we had to water the areas we would be digging. We watered over multiple days and for long enough periods of time to soak in enough for our forks to penetrate this compaction. 

But, by August 4th we were ready to put in the lines of irrigation for these new beds. The plan is to cover crop them for the summer and then use that green material to start building our compost piles. It was difficult to find summer cover crops that were organic. We settled on a pound of organic soybeans. This got us through one block plus two beds in the next block, each with 3 rows per bed and about a 2 inch spacing between beans.

By August 12th we had our first soybeans germinating.

 

 We had some more guests for a nice family vacation during that week and you can just see how big that squash ends up getting if you don't pick it every couple of days. It's as big as the kids!

 They enjoyed playing in the hay bale fort

Touring the farm

 

and watering the new beds (and even trying out the forks for digging)!

In other news around the farm...

our produce is just starting to really come to fruition (pun intended) and we are starting to harvest lots of goodies to share with friends and neighbors. Be sure and stop by or ask us if we've got any sun ripened and sweet Chadwick cherry tomatoes, or the tasty Nyagous or maybe even some Moonglow tomatoes! Also ready are our American Flag leeks and Australian Brown onions and lovely cipollinis. Not to mention the still going strong Costata Romanesca summer squashes. We've also got some chioggia beets. Oh and herbs... and green beans....

We will continue to expand our lower quarter and look forward to sharing more with all of you!