High Tunnel Quick Hoops: More quick and inexpensive greenhouse solutions

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Fall is in full flush and I can honestly say that I have never see such beauty and color in my life. Maine has lived up to its reputation as the epicenter of fall foliage.  The abundance of reds greens, orange and yellows mixed with everything in between are visible from every vantage point, whether it be a simple drive to work the winter farmers' market or all the way up north to Acadia national park for a hike.  Discussing my plan for a late summer and fall apprenticeship, I was often told how bitter and cold Maine is.  I've learned that winter is only stubborn and harsh on the way out, yet majestic and slow going in.  The ocean, only a light jog away from the farm, takes time to cool down from the summer warmth and equally as long to warm up during the spring or elongated winter as so many Mainers dreadfully refer to it.  Nevertheless, there is always work to be done on the farm and at Four Season Farm, always something new and interesting.  With my intro to farming being in a massive greenhouse, I have grown to love greenhouse technology and the concept behind season extension.  Today we are going to take a...

Low Tunnel Quick Hoops: Minimum expense, maximum efficiency

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Before the farm became a part of our reality, before we learned that carrots didn't grow in the back of supermarkets, farming was always something we believed was done in the summer. Nevertheless, it was a cold, snow-filled November morning in 2009 that we decided to set out on a simple task...if we want to learn about food, why not ask some farmers?  Although we believed the growing season must have been nearing its end, we were surprised to learn that this was far from the case.  This curiosity shifted our perception, the earth came alive and so did food.  It became individualized and we began to understand that not all food was the same.  To our surprise and enjoyment, it turns out there is a huge amount of food that can be grown all year round and some that even surpasses its summer counterpart.  Looks can be deceiving and while winter carrots may look like summer carrots, when you taste them you might think they are completely different vegetables.  Today we are going to look at the simple innovation and advantage of...

Summer Snacks: Spring Guacamole on Seaweed Sheets

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My time at Stone Barns has come to a close and while I'm in this grace period between farm jobs, I figure if I can't farm at least I can eat.  It's amazing how having this week off has been so strange.  After a year of straight working it's an odd feeling not to have a project connected with my everyday.  It's been an interesting experience recreating an identity after such a long period of connection.  Nevertheless, I still can't get the good food off my mind and I remembered as I was leaving the greenhouse for the last time I noticed the deep leafy greens of our cilantro plants standing up straight and strong.  Whenever I see cilantro my first thought is guacamole, but with no tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, or onions in season it just didn't seem to fit.  This is when I decided to put together a spring guacamole a simple concept.  I needed something with flavor and something with crunch to supplement the ingredients not yet available.   Clearly this wasn't going to be a fully local meal considering we aren't growing avocados here in the Northeast, but if I could use the majority of my ingredients from the area and only a couple from out of region, I feel that's a step in a good direction.  So using some

Beginning to Understand Strawberries: Another Perfect Flower

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It was back in October when it all started.  Heading into the winter months, when all thoughts on the farm were shifting towards vegetation, a time of calm, internalizing for both plants and farmers.  The fruiting highs of the summer and early fall had come to a close and it was time to let the land rest, but in the greenhouse we were already planning for the next spring.  There is something incredible about this greenhouse's ability to control the environment just enough to allow us to observe plants that might otherwise be locked up by the winter cold.  In the Stone Barns greenhouse, we have no interest in drastically creating micro climates that encourage massive inputs of energy.  Fossil fuels are minimally used only to keep temperatures above freezing, which generally only happens in the coldest winter nights.  During the day, the sun's rays are enough to keep the house in the 50's, sometimes even higher.  We weren't trying to force fruiting summer plants to produce in the winter, rather transplanting strawberries allowed me to observe the incremental metamorphosis a strawberry plant experiences on its way to fruit production.  First the growth of the...

Winter Pickin': How sunlight affects flavor

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With the winter nearing its end, many changes have taken place on the farm.  The fields and terrace gardens have thawed and been plowed, the greenhouse reemay has finally been taken down and new life is starting to emerge all around us.  Spring is near or should I say, spring is here.  As we take our last cuts of this beautiful rainbow...

I Think We Need A Little Space

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As discussed earlier in the week, our goal was to use the slower growing turnip roots to our advantage by inter-seeding 6 rows of the quicker growing and stunning Ruby Streaks mustard green.  In slightly over a month, as expected, both mustard varieties began to display their true leaves and we were ready to harvest and provide space to the mini turnips that were just getting underway.  Our beautiful plan was executed to perfection and in a matter of minutes we had harvested out the rows of deep purple whole plants leaving only strips of green and brown behind.  Not only was this a great way to get more growth from a potentially empty space, but...

You Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Yours: Cultivation tools

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On the farm, as in life, sometimes it is the simplest solutions or most subtle changes that make all the difference, but in order to get to a level of understanding that allows for this type of creative thinking, we must first understand the basics of whatever it is we are trying to accomplish.  Air, sun and water are the most quintessential elements required for plants to survive.  Although there are many other factors that contribute to the life of a plant, without these three basic needs, there is no life.  One of the main functions of a greenhouse is to reduce the variables involved in growing.  While we can control much of the quantities and qualities of air, light and water, we are still left to contend with some of the inevitable issues that abound when attempting to create such a controlled growing environment, especially in the winter when the greenhouse creates a cool, moist environment.   One of the biggest challenges that we face by creating this cool, moist environment is the development of moss and fungal pathogens.  As we discussed last week, herbal tea remedies such as chamomile sprays can truly help reduce the spread of these issues, but this is only one piece to the equation.  In addition to the tea spray, we can offer more assistance in this fight by simply cultivating the top layer of soil both in the beds and pathways.  This scratching of the soil surface is a tiny adjustment, but can offer huge benefits such as

Now the Fun Begins: Practicality meet Creativity

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The decrease in sunlight and heat during the winter season creates some interesting relationships in the greenhouse.  Although all growth slows down, some plants are much more sensitive to these climatic changes than others.  By observing these growing patterns over time, we must adjust our seeding patterns to increase the ecological and economic efficiency of the greenhouse.  Each week The Captain and I get together and sort through a list of all the open soil beds that were prepped and rested for at least a week; these are beds that are ready to be seeded.  In order to keep a lively and healthy soil system we maintain a rigorous crop rotation that ensures we never seed the same plant family in the same soil bed twice in a row.  Once a plant family like a lettuce (Compositae) has its final harvest, we move on to a new plant family which may include a carrot (Umbelliferae) or a spinach (Chenopod) for example.   To be doubly sure that no pests or pathogens can multiply or develop colonies in the soil, we make sure to rotate in at least 3 other plant families before we go back to a lettuce.  One complete cycle may look like this:  1st a carrot, 2nd a spinach, 3rd arugula and once all three of those crops have been seeded and harvested respectively we can start thinking about planting another bed of lettuce.  With 7 different plant families and plenty of diversity, this rotation offers a lot of options.  In winter the amount of weekly open beds is somewhere in the 4 to 6 range, in summer it's generally up in the 12+ range, so a major difference here.  When deciding what to plant, we take many factors and people into consideration.  The amount of sunlight, the phase of the moon we are in and the phase of the moon we are approaching, the rate of the seed's germination and growth, the plant family, the restaurants that we want to sell to and the market we want to be prepared for.  Each of these factors help us determine what and when we should seed.  After many years of observing and experiencing, The Captain has a great understanding of how we can proseed (too easy) most efficiently.  So here in January and February we know that certain vegetables such as...

Pic of the Week

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"But I can only show you the door.  You're the one who has to walk through it"

Snow Peas, Sugar Peas, Greens and purples and so much more...

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Before I ever decided to leave Manhattan for the farm I wanted to learn "real life skills" as Matt and I called them.  Skills like growing food, building things, getting our hands dirty and having a more balanced understanding of how life worked, things that were always left for other skilled people to handle and things that we viewed as obviously important for any human being to be introduced.  Where does our food come from and how was our house built were never questions that crossed my mind growing up, there were more important things to me at the time.  There were basketball games to win and miles to run, girls to find and basically other experiences that never led me to slow down and ask these simple and seemingly innate questions, instead I had trust.  I started having countless conversations with people about how little we felt we actually knew outside of the city world, a world of dependency and an unwritten trust that someone was taking care of these answers.  It wasn't until I stepped outside of my reality that I realized that there was much more going on behind the scenes.  It's funny to look back and think how much I assumed the world had taken care of over the last few thousand years.  I grew up just assuming that people had already sorted through the tough questions about health, food, medicine and land and it was time to go into outer space, yet once I stepped off this island I realized that as a society we are only just beginning to see the results of our actions.  Time is so relative and with an 80 year average lifespan, there just isn't that much time to develop from the past.  I mean we spend the first third or more of our lives learning how to speak coherently and many of us never quite get there, then we're supposed to play catchup by sorting through the puzzle pieces the past generations left us and figure out solutions to problems we can't even understand why they were problems to begin with.  It's pretty amazing to think how far we come and yet how far we still have to go.  Nevertheless, I say le me take certain matters into my own hands on this journey and let me tell you nothing feels as good as seeing a project through from start to finish.  Whether it's seed to carrot or wood pile to trellis, the opportunity to build something is a validating and invigorating feeling.  This week I was given the task of building a trellis for a plant breeding experiment...