Winter Greenhouse Systems Part I: Reemay Revisted

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How can you grow vegetables in the winter?  Don't you need to burn a ton of fuel to keep the greenhouse hot?  These are some of the questions I often hear when I tell people I work on a farm in the middle of January.   I think one of the most interesting and common misconceptions about winter greenhouse farming is that the greenhouse needs to use a lot of heat to grow food.   The truth is plants are incredibly resilient and creative organisms that find ways to not only survive in cold temperatures, but thrive in changing environments.  Spinach and carrots for example go through a process of converting starches to sugars to adapt to the fewer hours of sunlight during peak winter months.  This produces a healthy plant and creates an even sweeter taste that is more attractive to people.  What I find most incredible about the greenhouse I work in at Stone Barns is that even though the soil is directly in the ground and not in soil pots or benches, the deeper soil levels naturally maintain a temperature roughly in the 45 degree level where as the ambient temperatures can reach below freezing if not heated.  Understanding these basic soil facts allow us to work with earth's natural heat to create an ideal growing environment while maintaining a very low energy input usage.  We are attempting to produce produce that is best suited for the natural environment we are growing in and by keeping the surface levels of the soil just above freezing, we can grow fresh food all winter long.  So how do we keep the soil levels above freezing if the ambient temperature can drop below freezing?  Last year we discussed the benefits of...

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

What's Your Favorite Vegetable?: Winter days with spinach

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One of the most enjoyable parts of winter farming is the pace, although only a fleeting moment, the December/January growth slowdown has offered me an incredible opportunity to not only observe, but to truly dwell in my relationship with the greenhouse.  Upon further reflection, it's amazing to think about how much I overlooked during the summer, between getting acclimated to this new lifestyle and simply trying to keep up with the summer burst of life, there were many times when I forgot to really look.  Obviously I saw and experienced an incredible amount, but as Fred Kirschenmann, President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture references in his book of essays, "Cultivating an Ecological Conscience," "it is not by looking at things, but by dwelling in them, that we understand their joint meaning."  The summer was a blur, although I was working with many different plants and plant families, it was difficult to create a solid relationship with any one plant since every bed required so much attention.  Now, here in the dead of winter, I have started to dwell and build these relationships.  After 7 months as an apprentice on top of a year and half of volunteering/Beet Reporting, it can be easy to take for granted the incredible information that opened my eyes to the extraordinary world of plants in the first place such as our method of harvesting spinach.  During this year's winter months, the greenhouse is covered in spinach.    Every week I spend a few hours cutting spinach leaves for local restaurants Blue Hill restaurant, Sweetgrass, Tomatillo and the occasional winter green market.  As illustrated in the picture above, we can clearly see that the spinach leaves get smaller as you get closer to the center of the plant.  What does this tell us?...

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Fire in the sky

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...

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Stand out from the crowd...

Winter Hearty Transitions and Crops

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It's December, which means it's officially been six months since I've traded in my tie and the bustling concourse of Rockefeller Plaza for a rake and the rolling hills of the former Rockefeller Estate.  It's been six months since Matt and I spent our weekdays foraging for delicious street food meals and fought with tourists over awful punchcard lunch salads I am ashamed to call salads and even more ashamed to have paid for to get a 10th one free.  And after six months, I've decided to stay onboard at Stone Barns for another unique 6 month adventure.  Now the fun really begins, the pressure is on, my faithful teammates have taken their talents out into the world and all the learning, prepping, making harvest lists, watering and developing we did together is going to show.  It's just me, the Captain and the greenhouse left for the next few months before the new batch of apprentices come on.  With this added pressure, comes the beauty of...

Who Knew Garlic Came With Instructions?

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It's IN the garlic clove...it's so simple.  The winter is coming and it's already time to plant for the spring, it's kind of like working in the fashion industry,  we're already preparing for next season's new flavors.  Although I haven't had much time to write while being out of the country and off the grid for a few weeks, last time we discussed different techniques for saving heirloom tomato seeds. Similar to tomato seeds, Garlic also has a protective outer coating, but it can be removed by hand, something most of us have done if you've ever eaten garlic.  As I walked into The Captain's office holding a garlic bulb, I heard him discussing the winter's garlic plantings.  I had never planted garlic before and had no idea that the fall was a good time to do it.  Being the novice farmer I am,  I asked him to tell me where the garlic seeds came from, but to my surprise, he told me...