Greenhouse Growing: Extend Your Season

Unintentionally I've fallen into something that I find incredibly interesting and innovative. A few years ago we went to a farm to ask a few questions and find out what food was and how it was grown. It was November and our impatience to wait until the spring growing season left us with an incredible opportunity to learn and work with season extension.

Normally when we think of farming we think of the summer, but with a few tweaks, there's an unbelievable amount of food that can be grown all year round.

One incredible advantage of greenhouse growing is the head start or end of season extension we get just by adding some greenhouse cover protection like polyethylene covers.

I've recently taken on a temporary project helping with the Eli Zabar's Vinegar Factory rooftop greenhouses on the upper east side of Manhattan. Here the tomato season starts in may when the typical outdoor season isn't until July or August. Tomatoes on May 14th, what a beautiful thing and they'll produce right through the fall.

Now when I say innovative I don't necessarily mean groundbreaking fr humanity, just those of us who have never thought about growing food I the "offseason" months or growing food at all for that matter. One of the big reasons I continued to farm after Matt left for Miami and when I recently left Stone Barns has everything to do with the fact the there are some many new and interesting topics and questions that keep popping up.

I unintentionally found an incredible greenhouse 2 1/2 years ago and I intentionally continue to keep finding them and hopefully building them and using them.

Summer Snacks: Spring Guacamole on Seaweed Sheets

CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE AND ENJOY

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

Jamming: Preserving our abundant summer fruit crop

CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE AND ENJOY

The summer is approaching yet somehow I'm in a jamming class preparing for the winter. There is no end to the creativity and ingenuity I continue to find on the farm. Stone barns has been such an incredible resource, not just for farming, but for the skill and craft of cooking and using these magnificent plants in so many different and mysterious ways. From tinctures to teas and scones to herb-infused jams these plants offer such a variety of uses. I find it fascinating how much there is to do, but even moreso how little...

Hoop Dreams: Hoop Houses for Summer Field Tomatoes

This season a portion of the field tomatoes will be placed under these easy to put together hoop houses. The hoops are made from aluminum channel, steel poles and polyethylene covers which should last around 5 years.

The idea is to compare tomato yield and health during the summer seasons for tomatoes in the hoops and those that aren't.

Growing Strawberries, fruits and organic fertilizing

CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE AND ENJOY

Outside of regular watering and weeding, we always add a little bit of kelp to our soils before planting anything.  Additionally, this time I got a chance to use another sea-based, natural, organic fertilizer called fish emulsion, which is made from fish oils and left over fish parts.  "There is no waste, only potential" and just as compost takes the leftover nutrients and energy in food waste and turns it into fuel for soil microbiology, fish emulsion is a byproduct of fish waste that becomes nutrients for the strawberry plant.  Although we only use a very small amount of this natural fertilizer and dilute it in water, the effects were great.  The key to our addition of fish emulsion was to add it in while the plant was young and in a vegetative state.  The fish emulsion we use is of the NPK ratio 5-1-1.

All fertilizers have an NPK ratio, which is the percentage of Nitrogen (N), Phosphorous (P) and Potassium (K), which are some of the major nutrients that effect plant development.

When a plant is young, it's first instinct is to produce vegetative growth, nodes, leaves, stems etc.  Once the plant matures, it will look to change course by removing energy from leaf production and start focusing on taking all that energy to flower and eventually reproduce.  Just like a child, we want to provide the right nutrients for the young plants to develop it's basic structures and as it gets older, it will begin to develop more strength and stability to stand on its own.  To stimulate this early vegetative growth we want to help the plant by adding Nitrogen (5% in the ratio stated above).  Plants use Nitrogen to fuel the photosynthetic process and increase green matter, i.e. more leaf and stem to eventually produce fruit.  When the plant matures and there is a trigger of enough light and heat during the day in the late spring and summer, we want to make sure we don't keep feeding the plant Nitrogen.  Instead of using Nitrogen to produce more leaves, if the plant is slightly stressed out and not be over coddled with fertilizers and nutrients it will begin to transform and choose to flower and fruit instead.  Although this may seem counterintuitive it is an important and often overlooked concept for fruit production.  A little stress and trust can go a long way with a plant.

Beginning to Understand Strawberries: Another Perfect Flower

CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE AND ENJOY

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...

Cross-pollinating Peas: F1

CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE AND ENJOY

There it is, our first crossed pea pod.  Sweet, green Oregon Giant snow pea crossed with the purple, Caruthers shell pea.  Now our first generation, or F1 as it is called, has been created from two separate parent pea plants.  This pea pod above has seeds with genes from the green pea and some genes from the purple pea parent.  Once this pod swells, we will remove the peas and seed them to see the next generation, F2.   By selecting for the pea characteristics we want from each generation by F4 or F5, we should have what we're looking for.

Follow the story of the Stone Barns Center purple pea project here:

Introduction to the purple pea project
Update 1
Update 2

Purple Pea Flowers: Cross Pollinating With Purple Peas

CLICK PICTURES TO ENLARGE AND ENJOY



It's getting dangerously close to the end of my second apprenticeship here at Stone Barns Center.  I have seen and worked on incredible projects from my first days with Matt as a green volunteer, still believing that carrots grew in the back of a supermarket, to the Captain handing me the keys to the greenhouse back in December.  Relationships with the space, the plants, myself and others. Exploring internally, emotionally pushing myself through false walls and expanding into a capacity I never realized I had both physically and mentally.  This journey has been one of unlearning and learning, hiding from demons and slaying them face to face.  I hold each one of these experiences close to my heart.  Experimenting with these beautiful pea varieties has definitely been one of the more all-encompassing learning experiences on the farm.  I propagated them, built the trellis, transplanted them and have watched them grow.  Over the last few weeks, they finally began to flower and that means it's time for us to cross pollinate the two purple varieties (Caruthers pea and Sugar Magnolia pea) with the green Oregon Giant snow pea. In this process, we select a host or female flower, which will remain attached to the plant we would like to produce a seed pod.  The male flower will be plucked off of another plant and used solely for its pollen.  Peas have what is known as a "perfect flower" which means it has...