Around the Farm and What We Have Been Up To

  Already late in May, and it is unbelievable. We have been extremely busy with getting the farm in shape and prepared for our very first CSA season. We are excited that we have acquired our very first inaugural CSA members and we can't wait to share with them all of the wonderful fruits and veggies we have planned for this year. If you are one of our CSA members reading this, thank you again for joining us on this wild journey through the world of farming and we can't wait to enjoy the fresh garden delights with you this season from Furlong Forest Farm.

I'll try to set up a recap of what we have been doing since the New Year around the farm. This is going to be heavy on the photos and light on words so that you can visually see how the farm is rapidly changing month to month, week to week, and day to day.

In January:

making more seeding flats. our carpentry skills sure need work.

various versions of seeding flats

that kittons sure is helpful when I am trying to sow our first seeds

our first seeds in our homemade seeding mix and protected in a makeshift greenhouse while we set up the hoop house

hoop house framed up

In February:

wrapped in plastic 

hoop house complete with half door and rolled up "window treatments". moved the seeding flats onto our benches and we are ready to grow!

brassicas the first to germinate in the hoop house

scything down the cover crop to prepare the strawberry beds

planting strawberry plants

strawberry plant

In March:

peppers germinated

a bed of cosmic purple carrot. the first seeds to get direct sown into beds: carrots, beets, lettuce, radicchio, radishes

brassicas transplanted 

garlic planted in november are growing very well

brassicas ready for outdoor protected area to toughen up for planting

re-staking the lower blocks of beds 

cosmic purple carrot: the first direct sown seeds have germinated

first tomato and pepper plants transplanted

lettuce plants transplanted

In April:

broccoli and cabbage beds ready

one compost pile can take all day to gather green and brown materials

and can be over 4 feet tall

many of the first direct sown seeds are beginning to grow well: greens and lettuces, beets are seen in the picture

view of the farm from the southern end looking northerly

planted the first onions: newburg

and had the help of family to plant lettuce transplants that would go in the first CSA boxes

transplanted the last of the tomatoes

first reddish strawberry ripens: seascape 

and planted cabbages

prepared bean beds and melon beds and cucumber beds

sorted and selected the best seeds of our dry bean varieties for planting: hopi red 

calypso

hopi yellow

And then there was May:

prepared beds for tomatoes and squashes and more dry beans

and everything seeded and transplanted has really started to grow

on the farm looking northerly in May

friends visit and help prepare and plant more cosmic purple carrot seed as well as more bean selecting and sowing and summer squash seed planting

planted all our tomato plants

and then planted our pepper plants

germination of all the recently planted seeds begins: beans as well as melons, cucumbers,  more lettuces,  more carrots

And now we are caught up to the weekend of May 17th and 18th when we harvested our first goodies and brought our members their first Furlong Forest Farm CSA box!

You can see more photos of the preparation of the first boxes (as well as earlier farm photos not on the blog) on Instagram with some sort of smart phone or on the web using the site webstagram and typing in @furlongforestfarm or #furlongforestfarm.

We got most everything in the ground that we had wanted to by this time of year. Just a few late season beds to plant with seed and later transplants from the hoop house and we will have met our full capacity for this season's plantings! 

Is it time to take a breather yet? Not a chance.... still lots to do and not just sit around and watch the plants grow and wait to eat them!

'till next time.

A New Year and New Projects and Renewal of the Farm

Over the winter months we have been busy working on a few projects which has kept us from sharing on this blog.

Project One:
Begin planning for our first CSA growing season

Project Two:
 Buy seeds for the whole year and spend lots of money

Project Three:
Build a hoop house for starting our seeds which includes: Measuring out the footprint, putting in rebar, putting up the PVC hoops, screwing in the spine of the house, duct taping the PVC to prevent it from degrading the plastic, building the door frames, building a door, putting up a very large 45 foot long piece of greenhouse plastic over the PVC hoops, cutting out the doorway and window and then securing the plastic to the PVC and wood, making air vent flaps at the door and window.

Project Four:
Build seed sowing boxes

Project Five:
Build benches that will double as potting benches and for keeping seed sowing boxes above ground

Project Six:
Finalize the design for our farm logo

Project Seven:
Continue working on our brochure for potential CSA members

Project Eight:
Finalize our offer letter to our first season potential CSA members

Project Nine:
Create a website specifically for our farm and CSA

(are you getting tired yet?)

Project Ten:
Make a soil mix specifically for germinating seeds

Project Eleven:
Sow the first seeds including the following vegetables, fruits and herbs: peppers, tomatoes, onions, leeks, cabbage, broccoli, kale, echinacea, bergamot, roselle, borage, lettuce, sage, eggplant, celery

Project Twelve:
still need to buy our website domain, launch the website, get ourselves official farm related website email addresses, set up a new Instagram account for farm related photos

Project Thirteen:
I just set up a new blog called Feasting with Furlong Forest Farm so I can post recipes, veggie and fruit storage and consuming tips, food related bits and whatever else is related to eating.
You can find it at feastingwithfurlongforestfarm.blogspot.com and it will be linked to this original blog as well.

all this and we still found time to work our "other jobs" and complete our taxes. Stay tuned for a post about our new website!

(and I figure you can wait to see some of our best recent photos of the projects we have been working on once our website and Instagram account is launched!)

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.