OK, NOW it's Spring...Notes From the Field.

Yesterday, we reveled in the first harvest of Spring!  Each of our ten hard-working volunteers took home a hefty share of vegetables - radish, kale, mustard greens, chard, spinach, lettuce....and the carrots, beets, and dill are only days away!  

Harvests are dependable reminders that the demonstration garden represents a dynamic balance between production and education.  At times, I've perceived these goals as mutually exclusive, where attainment of one means sacrifice of the other.  Luckily, we've learned a lot in the past few years, and it seems that an inevitable outcome of focused, seasonal garden demonstrations is an abundance of healthy food.  As the garden plan aligns with timely classes, workshops, and tours - and likewise illustrates the gardening concepts and techniques that we attempt to articulate - the earth responds with unrestrained generosity.  In other words, the more we learn, the more we teach, and the more we maximize our potential, the more it feels like production and education are one in the same - that bringing people into the living, breathing, evolving process of growing food - really folding them into the moment, the season, the tools and tangibles - is both highly educational, and essentially productive.  We are excited to be part of another bountiful season, and grateful that the food finds a home with people who need it.  Last year, over 1000lbs of fresh produce was donated to Portland Housing Authority's Sellwood Center, just across the street from our office.

Please explore the mountain of pictures below, and feel free to drop us an email if you have garden-related questions.  As always, keep the tools sharp, your back straight, and the soil beneath those fingernails.  Thanks for visiting the blog! 

 -The Organic Education Center Team

Crimson Clover is one of our favorite fall-planted cover crops.  Come Spring, the garden is bursting with it's ruby red flowers.  And, the bumble bees seem grateful for the early nectar.  As a late-maturing cover-crop, crimson clover will occupy valuable space well into the spring season, so it's best to plant this specimen in an area that you don't mind prepping a little later.  When 1/3 of the flowers begin to bloom, Nitrogen fixation is at it's highest, and it's time to incorporate the vegetation - or cut it and use it in the compost pile!  In the garden, we like to leave patches of crimson here and there for the beneficial insects and a burst of color.

The Forest Garden is beginning to fill-out and fill-in with crimson clover, lupin, and a smattering of herbacious perennials.  This area provides a textured contrast to the more orderly annual garden beds, and is great habitat for many beneficial insects in the garden.  It's also a source of delicious fruit come summer time - plums, figs, cherries, apples, pears, and peaches are a welcome sweet treat for students, volunteers, and staff.

The Chicken Tractor  acts as a mobile weeding machine in the garden.  This year, four young hens are doing the dirty work of weakening a problem patch of morning glory.  Each week, the tractor is moved to a new block, where the chickens excel at eating cover crop, and keeping the morning glory down.  In the meantime, they add fertilizer, keep the pest population under control, and provide delicious eggs in exchange.  It's a win win, really.  Morning glory, like so many perennial weeds with fleshy rhizomes for roots, is difficult to eradicate completely.  But with consistent cultivating (weeding) it's energy stores can be depleted, and eventually it will become less of a problem.  In this case, the chickens are the first line of defense, and will be rotated on the problem patch all summer long to pick at any emerging shoots.  If the plant can't photosynthesize, it won't survive, but in the case of morning glory, this process could take months, even years. 

Another favorite cover crop is called Phacelia, which can be planted year 'round.  This close-to-bursting bud was found on a patch that was left to overwinter last fall.  Phacelia grows quickly, puts on a massive amount of succulent biomass, and develops a mass of otherworldly buds and flowers.  Also called Bees' Bread because of the intricate, deep blue flowers - a favorite for many species of bee in the garden -  patches of Phacelia will literally hum and dance with ecstatic insect energy.

The recent warm days, along with some handy row-cover, or Remay, have germinated our first stands of the summer cover crop Buckwheat.  This quick growing broad-leaf can go from seed to flower in as little as 30 days, providing rapid cover, and accumulation of organic matter between crop rotations.  These early buckwheat beds will be turned under and prepped for Summer crops within a matter of weeks, though we will continue sowing Buckwheat in our rotations throughout the garden all summer long.

Floating Row Cover, also called Remay, is a light, poly-spun fabric, and is an indispensable tool in the garden at the bookends of the growing season.  During the Spring, Remay placed over a direct seeded bed of greens will help protect against flying pests and flea beetles, raise the soil temps a degree or two, and shelter our delicate seedlings from pounding rain, hail, and winds.  In this picture, the radish and beets on the right were sown at the same time as those on the left.  The only difference was row cover, and you can see that those on the right are almost twice the size!

 Spinach is a crop that can be fairly difficult to germinate in the spring.  Developing plants are  also very sensitive to wide fluctuations in temperature and soil moisture.  We've found Row Cover a valuable tool for germinating spinach seed, as well as for mediating the unpredictable Spring  weather patterns.  The Spinach in this picture is happy, delicious, and ready to harvest.  For an easy Spinach Succession in early Spring, you might try transplanting a patch of spinach seedlings, and then direct sowing between the established plants a couple weeks later.  By the time the first batch is going to seed, and ready to be pulled out, the direct seeded succession should be filling in nicely, and will have been protected by the more developed plants.  We tried this this in the garden this year, and so far, so good.

Cold Frames are another great tool for season extension in the Spring.  We planted our first succession of lettuce into a cold-frame, back in March, and it's been growing rapidly despite the cold snaps.  Cold frames can be framed with wood, bricks, metal - anything really - and covered with a transparent material like plastic, glass, or polycarbonate.  On sunny days it's important to prop open the lid of a cold frame to prevent rapid temperature spikes (which can scorch your seedlings).  Generally though, a coldframe will help raise soil temps four to five degrees, which is plenty for an early jump on the season.

Inter-planting and Companion Planting is a technique we use to maximize productivity in the garden while benefiting from some helpful plant relationships.  For example, aromatic plants like dill, fennel, and scallions help to deter the pesky cabbage moth, which enjoys laying its eggs on all of our favorite spring greens.  When the larvae emerge, they often devour the developing leaves of kale, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli.  In this picture, you see a line of direct seeded dill planted alongside a row of kale.  In between the kale, is also a bed of quick growing arugula.  The tender leaves of arugula, while delicious in salads, act as a nice quick cover between the kale, and provide a more attractive food source for another pernicious pest: The Flea beetle.  This technique could be compared to a "trap crop" - planted with the intention of "trapping" pests, or at least redirecting their damage to less valuable crops.  One of our mantras of pest control in the garden is remembering that pests have to eat too.  Sometimes it's easier, less resource intensive, and more fruitful to work with them, rather than against them.  As for slugs...well, that's another story altogether, and one that involves a lot of tolerance, as well as vigilance.

This is the same bed, viewed from the other side, where we see scallions planted next to Kale.  By the time the Kale is well established with a full canopy, and is less susceptible to pest damage, the scallions (and dill) will have long been harvested.

This other perspective shows a bed of broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage with Dill planted down the middle, and mustard greens planted alongside.   The wire hoops you see were used to support row cover over the bed - not always necessary with lightweight floating row cover, but helpful in areas with high wind, where the fabric can damage young plants from excessive abrasion.

This bed represents another example of Spring intensive planting - in this case we opted to plant in blocks, rather than inter-planted rows.  The foreground shows a direct sown salad mix, with fennel starts planted in bare spots.  Next is a block of carrots, then scallions, both direct sown and requiring thinning as they develop.  Lastly is a block of onions and leeks, which will be harvested mid summer.  As the earlier greens and carrots are harvested, the empty blocks will be planted to a summer cover crop, or mulched, awaiting a winter cover crop or fall vegetable.

 Utilizing the space beneath our vertical crops is another method of intensive planting.  For example, we planted our peas (which are trellised with t-posts) to one side of the bed, and then a couple successions of early radish were planted in closely spaced rows perpendicular to the peas.  Between the radish rows, we sowed beets and carrots, and by the time the radish were ready to harvest, the beets and carrots were ready to be liberated from the shade of their radish companions.  In this way, carrots and beets will be developing alongside our peas throughout the season - and a radish harvest is already under the belt! 

SOAPBOX ALERT: As with any planting scheme, it's important to keep the health of our soil in mind.  These quick-fire, intensive, closely-planted successions of vegetables will rapidly deplete available nutrients, as well as pose challenges to good crop rotation planning in the future.  When planting many families of vegetables in the same bed (carrots, beets, radish, for example), it can be difficult to rotate families from year to year, especially in a small space.  While this is not always a problem, certain families (like solanums and brassicas), when planted in the same soil year after year, increase the likelihood of disease and pest outbreaks down the road.  Though diversity and production is important, it's equally important to respect the capacities of our garden ecosystem to sustain our extractive activities. Every year, our soils need time to rest, replenish, and rebuild.  Soil life and the organic matter that it feeds upon, are what maintain fertility and balance within our soil food web, and ultimately our larger food system. Too much of anything, especially too fast, is what gets us into trouble.  We always urge students to learn, at the very least, which vegetables belong to which families, and to keep in mind that something always needs to be given back, whether through cover-cropping, compost, organic amendments, or even a few years of rest and weeds. 

Check out our new plastic cloches!  Taken from Eliot Coleman's winter farming handbook, these metal hooped, plastic cloches are a great season extender for summer crops.  The metal hoops are made from 10' 1/2" EMT galvanized conduit ($2.50/ea) and bent with a pipe bender.  These hoops will easily span a 3-4' wide bed, but don't have to be used on rows.  The sandbags offer a handy way to hold down the edges along the cloche, and work effectively even in high winds.  

We took advantage of a sunny spring day to transplant tomatoes under the hoops.  The cloches had been set up the week before, so the soil was nice and warm, and the cover crop that we chopped in three weeks earlier was mostly decomposed.  Even though the tomatoes were fairly "leggy" we planted them deep by pinching off the lower leaves and burying them up to 12."  Since tomatoes will root from buried vegetation, this method creates stouter, more supportive stems, and massive root systems.  This year we're experimenting with some new varieties for the Tilth garden, from Japanese Trifel Black to Speckled Roman, to the colorful and delicious Marvel Stripe.

We couldn't avoid mentioning the vibrant stand of white winter wheat that has been developing since last fall.  Planted in September, the grain overwintered as a low-growing cover, and then commenced rapid vegetative action this Spring.  Two weeks ago, seed heads began to form on a roughly 3' tall stalk, and now I'm beginning to think that we'll actually have some grain to harvest.  Small-scale grain growing is a topic which has gained much attention in recent years.  We'll be researching the process, and tapping experienced homesteaders to enlighten our harvest, threshing, and cleaning experiment and demonstration.

 Garlic commands a certain reverence in the garden this time of year.  As a relatively easy, low-maintenance, and exceptional crop of culinary value, we are content to see a healthy stand developing.  Last fall, a diversity of hard and soft-neck varieties were planted during the Organic Gardening Certificate Program. And just this week, we've started to see the first of the garlic scapes emerging - scapes are the curly flowering stalks of hard-neck garlic, which are snapped off to encourage the plant to put energy into bulbing (below ground), rather than flowering (above-ground).  Scapes make a delicious substitute for scallions in any dish.

Spring also brings yellow tips to our garlic leaves, which is in large part due to cold soils, and therefore, a lack of available nitrogen.  If foliar fed or irrigated with a water-soluble nitrogen source (like fish-emulsion), garlic will frequently grow out of this deficiency.  However, in the Tilth Garden at Luscher Farm, we are plagued by a common fungal disease called rust, which does not greatly reduce overall yields, but will cause premature die-back of the leaves, and an overall weakening of the plant.  In other words, it's an attack on the immune system that reduces vigor to some extent.  The best way to minimize rust is to eliminate alliums (onion family) from the garden for a few years, or at the very least practice long, well-spaced rotations.   In this picture, we see the rust

expressed as small orange spots, haloed by yellow.  In the picture below, we see severe yellowing on the tips of the older garlic leaves.  Generally, as we approach summer, the yellowing is a normal precursor to the bulb development and die-back of leaves, so don't be alarmed if you garlic starts to yellow a bit this time of year.  We try to harvest our garlic heads when three to four green leaves remain on the plant, because these will cure to become the papery covering - important for maintaining the freshness and store-ability of our precious garlic heads.  For more information on garlic growing, harvesting, storing, and curing, check out this article.  Happy gardening, and enjoy the harvest!