A beautiful day

Could it be more perfect? I left work a bit early today to attend a meeting of the Durham Food Prosperity Council, which I help organize. We had a guest speaker, Durham City Council member Steve Schewel, who spoke to us about how to get involved in policy advocacy at the local level. I am very excited about the prospect of getting more involved in local food policy work, for I love me some wonky dorkiness.

Then I checked my email and found out that I have been accepted to the undergrad certificate program in horticulture at NC State!!! Yay! I am excited to be going back to college to study something that can help me be a better farmer.

And now I am blogging from my farm. It is 73 degrees, which might be unheard of for late May in North Carolina. It is just beautiful outside and I am so happy to have some quiet time out here to look and love without digging or weeding or planting or mulching or running drip irrigation lines. I plan to be out here some this weekend getting some of that done, and I will be happy doing it, but it is also wonderful to sun myself and just sit here and appreciate all of the hard work my friends came out and did last week whipping this farm into shape. Thank you, friends! Your work is much appreciated!

The seasons go round like a wheel

It's been nearly six months without blog contact. To catch us all up, Durham had a wildly mild winter. Them, last night, it snowed. But don't worry. It will be over 60 degrees out tomorrow and 70 by Wednesday. The floating row covers and the plastic tunnel experiments worked a bit, but not nearly so well as I was hoping. It was difficult to keep the plastic where it belonged, and the row covers are too much a pain in the tush to get under. But it is possible that these things extended the growing season. It is hard to tell because the winter was so warm that things grew even outside of the season extenders!
On to spring news:
The peas are in. I planted them on Saturday. Also seeded in is a very exciting experiment. My massage therapist and I share a love of gardening and she gave me Italian arugula seeds. I have decided I love European seed packets. This one is quite informative without being overwhelming.
More greens will go in this coming weekend.
Soil prep has been done with a fun new tool this year. I'm using a broad fork I received as a Christmas gift from my in laws. It is awesome to use and hopefully it will do good things for the garden.
Seed starting will begin in earnest in a couple of weeks indoors. I think I might have 10 different types of tomato seeds...thank you Baker Creek for throwing in one more as a free gift with my order! It is always fun to try something new.
The BIGGEST news ever is that we have expanded our urban landholdings, and........we will be putting in an urban orchard NEXT WEEK!!!! The orchard was designed and will be installed by Bountiful Backyards (Will and I will wield shovels as well in an effort to be helpful!). I cannot express in words how very excited I am about the orchard and the chance to work with BB.
I will wrap it up with the animals. My cat has yet to kill a vole. My 2012 bee attempt will begin (with two hives) in late April. I think I have learned enough at the wonderful Orange County Beekeepers Association's bee school to keep them around this year! I also have a house for mason bees (another thankful shout out to Anne and Tom) that I will hang on the front porch. The fowl are doing well and laying regularly and have been for about two weeks now. I am hoping to add two more ladies to the flock sometime this spring.

One more day of summer

It is supposed to get really cold on Saturday night. This is good for the garden, but bad for hot-loving farmers like myself. Luckily, I love my garden and am glad that the cold should do in the bugs that are munching on my brand new Red Russian Kale seedlings and my chard. All else seems to be going well. Seedlings of all types are pretty well established, and it's supposed to warm back up to lows on the 50s after our little cold snap. Perfect fall plant weather!

One more big plant project is coming up before winter's onslaught; high tunnels for some of the seedlings. I want to see if 1. I can have them without their collapsing at the first snow fall, and 2. They help the plants grow more vigorously in cold weather. I'll keep you posted!

Fall garden time

It has been ages, blog! Late summer tends to get me down a bit. The corn didn't quite work out, the tomatoes died of wilt, squash bugs abounded and still abound, and the second bee hive fled the premises. It is too depressing to write about in the moment and the bad stuff manages to obscure the good.

And there is a lot of good.We put up beets for the first time, not all the tomatoes died (we have put up a bunch of tomato sauce and the tomatoes keep coming!), the green beans did well, the crowders are insane, and the edamame rule.

All that being said, fall is here! And I feel like I've earned some cred as a southern gardener because I am nine kinds of excited! Beans and peas are growing well, as is a TON of dill (I helped a few flowers self seed), and cilantro is up! I finally cleaned out the front yard garden and planted mustard, rape, Wong bok, arugala, lentils (we will see how that goes...) and fava beans. YAY!!!!!

There is still so much more to be done...more weeding out back, and taking up the melon/cuke patch and some of the beans so that more fall plantings can go in.

I'll wrap it up with a shout out of thanks to a storm named Lee who got me the rain I have been dreaming of for months. Thanks Lee! Now let's go fall garden!

The diseases of summer

It's been hot and it has been humid! It was dry for several weeks, and then the weather pattern changed and Durham has been muggy and assaulted by thunder storm after thunder storm. To be honest, I worry less about my plants when it rains than when it is dry, but I suspect that this summer may reverse my thinking on that subject. The tomatoes have started to produce beautifully, but I'm about to lose a substantial portion of the plants to wilt. Some plants were looking a bit wilt ridden when it was dry. Then the muggy came, and things went from and to dead pretty quickly. I blame myself as I made some bad cultivar selections this year; I started tomato seedlings for my mother in law this spring. She lives a couple of hours east of us and they have different wilt than we have here. I planted the seedlings she didn't have room for, and our type of wilt took em right out. I also planted black krims that I got at a seed exchange. I have no idea if they are resistant to anything. The rest of my plants are volunteers from last year. This will teach me to buy appropriate varieties and seed save rather than messing with other stuff. Tough lesson though.
Word is out from Debbie Roos at the Chatham County cooperative extension that downy mildew has struck some NC counties. In a high panic, I have started spraying my curcubits with Serenade. Durham was last hit with this shite disease in 2009 and I lost everything practically overnight. I am on it this time. I hope. I am pulling in beautiful cukes for the first time ever (thank you bees!) and I will be damned if I lose the whole crop.
In happier news, the bean and corn look mostly happy as do the amazing, mobile, reappearing peanuts. I am very excited for the blue coco beans. They are beautiful plants, and the baby beans are going to be a lovely, mottled blue and green! The crowder peas out front are growing like gangbusters, though the rest of the beans are smaller and more bug eaten than I would like. I suspect the lack of water for several weeks may be the culprit (no irrigation out front), but it's possible that the soil is lacking nutrients. I suspect that it is time for a soil test. I HATE soil testing. I have to dig so many holes!
Potato harvest is due to take place tomorrow. I think we lost some plants to the blight, so I will post about the size of the harvest once I have that information.

Bugs bugs bugs. And disease.

Well, summer is off to a swimming start. The blackberries are delicious. The tomatoes are coming in (!) and I saw a bee pollinating no fewer than 5 cucumber flowers. Gold star to that bee!!!! On the negative side, one of my squash plants was infested with squash bugs. I grabbed them all with my fingers and put them in a pail of soapy water. Yum. I went back the next day to get the remaining ones and just squished them with my fingers. Double yum. Some of the tomatoes have some kind of wilt. I'm being a bad gardner because I haven been able to bring myself to uproot them. So I will probably lose the entire harvest. So far, I do not have any vine borers. Everyone else I know who gardens downtown has them, so I think it's only a matter of time. I check every day, so hopefully I will catch them before my plants die. One of my poor pawpaw trees appears to have been scalded by the sun. I built it a shelter using my floating row cover, so hopefully it will not die.

In other news, the city is almost certainly going to sell us the triangle behind the house! Darko Urban Farm will be expanding!!!!!! I think we have large scale compost and lots of fruit trees and bushes back there. I don't think we are going to fence it in. If it all goes well, there will be a beautiful, available food forest back there in five years or so!

On the sad side, it is not raining almost at all. It's getting really bad. Apparently the corn crop out east has already been declared a lost cause. With our catchement system, we've managed without using much water from the city at all, but I'm not sure how much longer we can avoid watering.

All in all, things are good so far. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. And freaking out that other people have squash out the ying yang while mine just flowered for the first time this morning. But it's all good.

And sometime soon, a little house that matches the people house will have feathered, egg laying residents... The house is cute cute cute! Yellow with white trim just like my house and with a blue front door just like my house! And I think we are going to stencil "Darko Urban Farm" on one side, not like my house, but awesome.

Permaculture!!!

Well, mark me down as a true believer. Meaning, I guess, that I no longer just think permaculture sounds good on paper. It IS good in the garden. I was visiting the garden briefly a couple of days ago after work. It looks jungle-y in a way that makes me forget how tidy and kind of barren it looked a few months ago. Now it is a mess of food and flowers and bugs. And I love it!!! I was taking a peek at the snap peas, which are kind of on their last legs; it is too hot for them and it is time for them to move over and make way for the beginnings of green bean season. All of the sudden, a VERY scary-looking bug was among the snap peas. It was beautiful, and it looked like the kind of bug that wouldn't think twice before taking you out. It was so clearly a death machine that I was afraid of, even though it was relatively small. I have never, ever EVER seen this type of bug before. It looked exotic. It looked like it would eat lots of pests!!! It looked like I had made this amazing, pest eating bug a home in my veggie /flower jungle!!!! I will take a look in my bug ID book, and if I identify this bug, I will share it here.

Now, if only it would rain. I've somehow managed to already run a 1700 gallon cistern dry....