Kicking off the Spring growing season with a big truck, a mountain of compost, and a lot of muscle

We recently got 30 yards of compost delivered to our farm thanks to a huge dump truck from Cannon Excavation. We know that the key to growing great produce is having great soil, so we continue to do our best to improve the mostly clay-based soil on our farm. Compost is a soil conditioner, mulch and fertilizer all wrapped into one. It feeds the soil microorganisms that help plants stay healthy, adds nutrients to the soil, and helps clay soil drain better and sandy soil retain water.

Here is a great drawing about compost I recently saw online

We have a small worm bin and create vermicompost in our apartment, but it only creates about 4 cups of compost every six months. We need a lot more than that for a quarter-acre farm plot! Last season, we also started a big compost bin at the farm and used all of our decaying vegetable leaves, stems, and some turkey manure. Well, let's just say that it is not a glamorous process to create compost, but it is a great way to decrease the amount of garden waste going to the land fill and create a nutrient rich additive for our soil. Unfortunately, we didn't realize how much waste one needs to create a huge amount of compost. Our 4'x4'x5' cube of compost broke down to mere inches of compost over the winter. Wow! We definitely want to become better at learning how to compost and get larger amounts of compost to use in our farm, but for know we are thankful for St. Peters Earth Center for creating enough to share with us.



Boba guarding our farm from her compost pile lookout!



Once we got our huge mountain of compost delivered, it was time to start using our muscles to shovel and wheel barrel it into our rows. We mounded up compost on each row and then till it into the soil. This year, we are trying an experiment of using different amounts of compost in each row to see if it makes a difference in plant growth. So far, we have 7 rows finished and plan to finish 8 more today. We plan to start planting on Tuesday after the 90°F temperatures are gone. We hope this excessively hot Spring will be good to our baby plants!

This year we are building vertical trellises for our climbing beans and are planning to protect them with additional chicken wire fencing so that the deer can't get to them. Last year, we learned that deer really love beans and this year they can go somewhere else to find some food!

Yep, it is just dirt, but it takes a lot of muscle to make dirt look this good! :)

Ready, Chef, Go!

I read about a cooking competition to win a tropical vacation to the Dominican Republic sponsored by our local television station, KMOV, called "Ready, Chef, Go!" In order to enter the competition, I had to make a 5-minute cooking video of a signature dish and show off my creativity and personality. I decided to creatively highlight some of the vegetables that we are currently growing on our farm - lettuce, brussel sprouts, and carrots - by making recipe I called Asian Lettuce Wrap Sushi. It was Damian's directing debut and my first cooking video. It was fun to make and even more enjoyable to watch because I never realized how much I wink when I talk to a video camera.

I submitted the video and KMOV producers chose my video as one of their 10 favorite videos!! Next, the contest opened up to the public for online voting to pick the top four contestants to compete to win a tropical vacation on a prime time television show on KMOV called "Ready, Chef, Go!" Unfortunately, I am sad to say that I didn't make it into the top 4 for the televised "Ready, Chef, Go!" cooking competition. However, I am determined to go on tv and win something one day!  Losing this one just further reinforces my desire to get onto the Price is Right and win an RV or be a crazy contestant on Wipeout!! Also, making this video has inspired me to want to make more "farm fresh" cooking videos in the future! Stay tuned.

Garlic Sprouts, Baby Carrots, and Brussel Sprout leftovers

 

Finally, we have garlic sprouts!! Yay! We had planted over 180 garlic bulbs in late October and hadn't seen any sign of growth until now. We were a little worried after we visited another nearby farm in December and noticed that their garlic had sprouted already. After doing a little more research, we were reminded of the importance of the timing of fall planting so that the roots of the garlic have a chance to develop, but so that the tops do not break the surface of the soil. Many of the hardneck varieties of garlic actually need the ground to freeze in order for proper bulb development. It is a good thing that our garlic has waited until now to sprout. The hard part for us is waiting until July to harvest all of this delcious garlic, because it takes 9 MONTHS for it grow!

We also have carrots that we planted in late September still growing at the farm. Carrots can be left in the ground all winter long, but you will want to harvest all of them before early spring. Once spring arrives, the carrots will start to grow again and if they flower they will become inedible. Also note that when you are overwintering carrots in the ground, the carrot tops will eventually die off in the cold. The carrot root below will be just fine and will taste fine after the tops die, but you may have trouble finding the carrots after this.

We pulled out a Danver carrot to check on its growth. It still looked a little small, but tasted great! We are unsure if the weeds or the clay based soil are suppressing their growth, but we hope the warmer weather might kick start these little carrots to be bigger.

Lastly, It had been over 3 weeks since we visited the farm and we were unsure if our brussel sprouts would make it without being watered and during the cold nighttime temperatures.  Well, it wasn't the cold temperatures that got to them; it was the deer! We thought that the deer would leave them alone if we put double row cover over them, but that wasn't the case. They ate through the row cover and ate 99% of what we still had growing. They were nice enough to spare one of the plants for us and we got about 20+ brussel sprouts out of that plant. :) I added a picture of a mostly eaten brussel sprout plant because it is strangely beautiful and looks like a type of cactus or desert plant.

Artwork inspired by Leafy Vegetables

Sometimes I have to get my paints out and get creative! Tonight, my inspiration was our leafy vegetables that we had grown last year. I decided to use six different small canvases and highlight a different leafy vegetable on each canvas. I looked through my 2011 photos and picked six of our most beautiful veggies as the subjects for my paintings- romaine lettuce, pac choi, arugula, red chard, red leaf lettuce, and dinosaur kale. 

I wasn't trying to paint in a photo realistic style, but more of a colorful impressionistic style.  Being a perfectionist at times, I can get stuck working on my paintings for several weeks and even months just fixing an adjusting small details. I tried to approach these paintings with more of a "farming attitude" - which I consider to be an attitude of enthusiastic hard work but willingness to let go of small details and things that are out of our control. With that mindset, I was able to finish these paintings in just 4 hours! I think this is the first of many farm-inspired artwork I will be creating this year.

Now, these paintings proudly hang in our kitchen!  If anyone else out there is interested in commissioning me to do paintings for you, shoot me an email!

New Growth - 2012 Style

It has been a month since we planted our lettuce seeds in our indoor hydroponic Aerogarden and now it is exploding with tasty leaves! We have been able to make several salads as well as invent a creative new recipe - Asian lettuce wrap sushi - from the lettuce that is growing in our tiny home office. The best parts of growing this winter lettuce inside is the lack of bugs and that feels so clean due to not growing it in the dirt. Even though I love this small hydroponic setup, it still doesn't change the fact that we would love a greenhouse/hoop house one day so we can grow in the dirt and on a bigger scale during the winter season! There is something I love about putting my hands in the dirt and getting messy that can't be replaced by a tidy system.

This craving for getting dirty led us to by a bag of organic seed starter mix and add to our indoor garden and growth. We got out the sugar snap pea, kale, rainbow chard, and brussel sprout seeds. We put together the seedling heating mats, seed trays, and clear plastic lidded containers.  Then, we went to work MAKING A DIRTY MESS! :) Thankfully, our vacuum fixed the mess part later! Now we have about 100 seedlings growing in our office in addition to the lettuce garden. Since we are using every square inch of our two-bedroom apartment already, we had to get creative to fit all of garden-starting endeavors in our space. One thing is for sure... we have the most well lit area for typing up this blog!!

Our desk and bookshelf are radiating light!

In addition to our "apartment gardening," we have also commissioned our friends, Kathy and Irv of ESP of MO, to help us grow some of our Spring crop seedlings in their greenhouse. We are excited about getting the farm started again soon and about making new connections with those interested in buying our organic produce.

It's official now...We have hats!

Today was Damian's birthday and it was the last day of the Missouri Organic Association conference in St. Louis. We decided to have a different kind of "farm fun" and go mingle and talk with other farmers. Of course, we had to go to the MOA conference representing our own farm project with our new "Leafy Greens Farm" hats.

We talked up the vendors, sampled some local Missouri farm products, and attended a few sessions while at the conference. We learned how we can use Blue Hubbard Squash as a trap crop for our pests/nemeses - cucumber beetles and squash bugs. I learned about how to write a business proposal to help us secure grants in the future. Lastly, we learned about a farm in Nashville, TN called Delvin Farms.  They are running a 800 member CSA as well as selling produce to restaurants and wholesale. They are running an unbelievably cool and profitable operation on their 96-acre farm that started in 1972. They were way ahead of the curve in organic produce and became certified organic in 1998. Too often, we hear about farmers struggling to make enough money to pay their bills and how profits are not to be expected in the first 5-10 years. During their presentation, Damian asked a million questions and we stayed after their presentation to ask more about how they were about to make their farm so profitable. They were informative,  professional, and even invited us down to Nashville to tour their farm. True southern hospitality & true inspiration!

Another vendor of note that we came across in the conference was Slow Foods. According to their website, Slow Foods is "an international, educational organization devoted to promoting fresh, local, and sustainably-produced food, biodiversity, and the preservation of food traditions, as well as celebrating the pleasures of the table." They host farm/health related movie screenings and fun events such as the Drop.Swap.Grow., which is a Seed Swap in St. Louis on Saturday, February 25 from 12-3pm. Check it out if you are interested.

With Damian's job traveling all over Illinois, he has had the opportunity to tour a couple other small farms this week that we want to give recognition to: Golden Oldies Farm in Decatur, IL and Biver Farm in Edwardsville, IL. Both were gracious enough to let him have a tour without an appointment and talk about small farm practices. Other "good people growing great produce." :)

Brussel sprouts - think of them as cute little baby cabbages

Brussel sprouts are one of the most despised vegetables of young people, but really they are just misunderstood vegetables. If we could teach young people to view them as cute little baby cabbages, perhaps more young people would learn to love them. Another approach would be to cook them in more delicious ways. I was taught as a child that brussel sprouts were filled with MAXIMUM YUCKINESS and to avoid them at all costs. As an adult, I have decided to open my heart again and give those little baby cabbages a chance.

We have been wintering over our row of brussel sprouts because they did not seem to get a chance to grow to their maximum potential before the cold evenings started. We threw a double layer of row cover over them and waited to see what would happen. When we uncovered the brussel sprout row today at the farm, we saw some sprouts had grown larger, but most of the growth had stagnated. Unfortunately, the plants did not grow 3'+ tall like the seed catalog had described and we are wondering if our row cover had limited their upward growth. After a brief taste test, we decided to harvest about 7 plants (about 50+ actual sprouts) today and leave the rest in the ground to continue our wintering over experiment.

I am excited to try a few new recipes for brussel sprouts. I found the basic onion, balsamic vinaigrette, and brussel sprout recipe. However, I am open to any other interesting brussel sprout recipes from those of you who read the blog!