LIFESTYLE: Farming (Updated November 2011)

• Making Plans
• Can We Really Call this Farming?
• Preparing for a Fruit Orchard (UPDATE: February 2012)
• Raised Beds for Vegetable Production
• Pruning

We've added a fenced area to the east of the "backyard". We'll use it for the dogs to do training, to put in a kennel building with dog runs, etc. But it could also be used for livestock.

We've taken a walking tour of the area north of the house so as to get measurements for the placement of planting beds, livestock buildings and fencing. Over the winter, we'll work out how to phase in these improvements. I'm also looking into raising rabbits for meat in addition to deciding what kind of chickens to keep and what other livestock to phase in to our self-sufficient, sustainable, organic farm.

As an environmentalist who likes being in the city... it was hard for me to move out into the country. Everything off the farm requires using a vehicle to get to town which is at least 10 miles away; which means using more fuel.

The hubby was already commuting and the distance didn't change for him... plus he drives the Honda Insight specifically because of his commute and the 70+ mpg he consistently gets pretty much offsets the distance he drives.

My graphic design business is based from my house, so that saves a lot of fuel as well.

Still, it was hard for me to justify moving to the country just for the sake of living on an acreage (which has always been the hubby's dream). The fact that the zoning where we bought the land makes it easy to do innovative construction did help. The other justification for me is to turn the acreage into a self-sustaining farm.

To that end, I've been taking classes through the Kansas 'Growing Growers' program, attended workshops and seminars by the Missouri Beginning Farmers program, gotten to know my local Extension Service pretty well and attend the 'Women in Agriculture' conferences... just to name a few things.

It's slow going right now, but in order to make this an organic, self-sustaining farm, I figure it's better to spend the time getting the preparation right than jumping in and messing things up that will cost more to fix later.

Can We Really Call this Farming? (October 2009)

Going through my photos from this year, I realized I never published this one from the spring. Here is Gary working on putting in the first of the 2 foot by 10 foot beds in the Northwest Field. You may wonder if we can really call this farming... probably not. But I always say: You have to start somewhere. We quickly discovered that the southern end of this field (closest to the red barn) stays very saturated with water; which will change the plans I had for that field. But we avoided that area and put in the few (12) that we could. A big deal for me this year was record-keeping. Not used to doing that with gardening... but think I made a good start of it and, hopefully, it will work for tracing seed from generation to generation. I kept a journal this year. Meant to keep really good track of rainfall and such, but that part wasn't so well documented. Personally, for vegetable gardening, I prefer raised beds. Mainly because its hard for me to kneel and lean over the flat ones (like this year) to manage them. Had a terraced garden at the old house (picture below) which was perfect for my needs... and I've been promised that raised beds will be in my future.

We had a pretty good year when it came to our harvest. There were only a few vegetables planted this year, but we ended up with:

• about 100 lbs of potatoes (among 4 organic varieties)
• enough organic roma tomatoes to make 4 big tubs of tomato and mozzarella salad
• about 25 lbs of onions (not organic... only because I didn't find any by the time I needed to plant them)
• 20 pie-size pumpkins (can't claim organic, but they come from seeds from an organic pumpkin 2 generations ago)
• about 2 lbs of edible pod peas (not a very good year for those)
• about 5 lbs of carrots

and I still need to dig up the sweet potatoes (organic)... hoping to get about 50 lbs (crossing fingers). UPDATE: We did get at least 50 lbs of sweet potatoes! I have plenty left to plant for the next crop.

The eggplants didn't do anything... hardly even got plants. And the radishes bolted ... but I see there are a few plants out there now, maybe they seeded themselves for a fall crop. The peas did SO poorly, I did get a few but had to save them for seed for next year.

Such is the life of working the soil. Farming is the hardest job ever! And we don't even have livestock yet. Ah well, we learn as we go.

Right now we are storing our harvest in the basement, but it isn't quite as cold down there as I'd like for storing vegetables... so we may be building a wall down there so we can create a "cool room" (like a cellar) that is not part of the conditioned space.

I keep forgetting to talk about the things I've been doing in the area of farming. So before I get into the fruit tree orchard prep, let me just mention what I've been doing...

Each year I buy seedlings through the Missouri Department of Conservation program. We don't mind getting them young and letting them grow. To date we have planted 25 Blackberry plants (20 survived), 25 Persimmon trees (15 survived), 25 Dogwood trees (8 survived), 25 Elderberry bushes (12 survived), 25 Wild Indigo bushes (22 survived so far - 1st year), 25 Witchhazel bushes (22 survived so far - 1st year), and 25 Cottonwood trees (only 6 survived so far - 1st year). As you can see, you take your chances getting bare root seedlings, but so far we are ahead of the game. We've had 2 years of blackberries (enough for my husband to eat his fill and freeze the rest). The rest of the plants are not mature enough to produce yet... but we are looking forward to watching them grow and eventual harvests.

I also purchased 3 PawPaw yearling trees and 6 Aroniaberry bushes from the local high school botany program. Lost 1 PawPaw, but the others are looking very healthy. I've harvested 2 years of Aroniaberries and (like the hubby) have had enough to eat my fill and freeze some as well. I'd like to get more PawPaw trees (they have a low transplant success rate) so I'll be ordering from the MO Dept. of Cons. as soon as the order form is available this year. They run out quickly.

OK, on to preparing for a fruit orchard...

This year we started preparing the soil in the location where we will plant the fruit orchard. It is a north facing slight slope with good drainage. It needed roto-tilling because the previous owner ran horses on the pasture and the ground is thoroughly compacted... really not good for growing crops. A normal garden roto-tiller would not make a dent... we ended up renting a walk behind version for one day and the hubby chopped at the areas I had marked. It resulted in about a 4 inch depth of loosened soil.

I purchased a batch of 1000 sweet potato slips (organic, Beauregard variety) through the Kansas State University program. I've done this before as the coordinator of a bunch of people going in on an order, but this year only a couple people were interested, so I ended up with about 500 slips for our farm. That was fine because we then planted the organic sweet potato slips in the cleared strips to help break up the soil even further (as they grow and are dug up at harvest time).

The location is quite a distance from our water supply, but we have several old garden hoses. So I hung them in 2 parts... one close to the source and one close to the plants. It took about 30 minutes each day to spread them out and attach them and then water the new plants. I watered them in for about a week (maybe two, I don't really recall), until it was clear that they had taken hold. Then, since sweet potatoes are very resilient, I left them to their own devices. I did keep an eye out for nibblers (deer and rabbits) but we were lucky and I didn't have to use the 'Liquid Fence' deterrent. (It's going into storage for next year.)

I didn't bother trying to keep the area weed free... after all it had been in pasture grass for a long time and nothing would stop the fescue from growing. I did use the flame weeder once to slow the grasses progress. We had a very hot and dry summer and I was afraid that we would get no potatoes off those plants... but the purpose was to break up the soil more than harvest a crop anyway.

After the first hard frost, we purchased a middle-buster (basically a single plow) for the tractor and the hubby learned how to turn a row. I watched as the soil was disturbed and LOW and BEHOLD... SWEET POTATOES!!! Granted they are small (about the size of a large carrot) and not very many (ended up with about 50 lbs), but I call that a success after the year we had.

The middle buster worked great and the disturbed soil depth is now about 10 inches (generally). Next year I'll put an annual rye in for the cool weather and then buckwheat for the hot weather to continue getting it ready for the trees. It will take another year before we will plant those. When it's time, the plan is to put in 2 apples, 2 pears, 2 peaches, and 2 cherries. (Varieties still to be determined.)

UPDATE (February 2012): In January I had the fortune to attend a full-day seminar on Soil Health and Cover Crops presented by the local NRCS office. I now know that it was not necessary for us to roto-till the land to prepare it for the orchard! Instead, we could have done a couple of different things...

We could have put a chicken tractor on the area and "uppened" the soil (as described in "Chicken Tractor" by Andy Lee and Patricia Foreman) by letting the chickens scratch and peck at the greens, bugs, seeds, etc. and turn their food into chicken manure.

Or, we could have scratched at the surface (which is really all we ended up doing with the roto-tiller since there was hardpan on the surface) and then planted a "cover crop cocktail" (as described by Ray Archuletta at the seminar) to add organic matter and let the sub-aquatic world of micro-organisms repair the soil.

So, this spring we will smooth out that chopped up dirt and plant the cover crop and let nature take its course!