Baby food!

Our first batch of homegrown baby food made especially for our young friend on 12-14-13.  Shown here: Autumn Harvest carrots in the 3oz. jars and Purple Haze carrots in the larger jar.  Same-day harvested, steamed, pureed, and packaged.

Mystery Eggs.

Yesterday we had one of our youngest hens lay an egg; but who?  Today, we found another mystery egg. The first one we attributed to one of our two Cuckoo Marans. Todays egg could have been laid by the same hen as the first, or by the second Maran. (If these two eggs come from the same hen, it would represent more variation from a single layer than we are used to seeing.) These Marans arrived at Habitat Farm as chicks, just several days old, back on June 10th (right alongside Buffy). We think they are the layers in question because Marans are known for a darker colored egg. Check these out:

 

 Laid 12-8-13.

 

Laid 12-9-13.

Cordial.

Remember all those plums we harvested back in August?  Well, we ate a bunch, gave big handfuls away to the neighbors, made plenty more into plum butter... and used eight pounds of them for plum cordial!  After three months, it's ready for sipping.  It was worth the wait.  We had some with Thanksgiving dinner, we'll give some away as gifts, and we're taking a bottle of it to game night tonight.  (We created the labels by hand, using calligraphy pen and ink, marker, and gold pen.)  But one of our 4-quart jars will sit on the shelf for a while longer.  Maybe this time 2014 we'll open it up and see what kind of magic happened while we waited!  In the meantime, here are some photos to savor.

 

In print!

Remember the short essay we posted here back in September?  It is now in print!  You'll find it in the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of Oregon Humanities Magazine.

Snow day!

It snowed today!  But this was a rare snow for Portland: dry, very cold, and very windy.  The chickens handled it admirably, huddling around their water trough and drinking gladly as we filled it again and again with steaming tea kettle-fulls of hot water.  Some of the girls just refused to come outside at all, it was so cold and windy.  As for us, we did go outside-- just long enough to get some photos to share.

 Snow-covered cress.  

Rememeber what it looked like the other day?

 A strawberry plant in the snow.

Snow on the bench.

Frosts.

This week the temperatures dropped and the hard frosts arrived in earnest.  Temperatures have remained at or below freezing during the day, and the ground underfoot feels like concrete.  Most of the crops on the farm are protected from these conditions, thanks to our efforts.  But those with leaves above ground don't so much mind it: strawberry plants, kale, cress, leeks.  Here are some photos of frosty leaves snapped this week.

 

Upland cress.

 

Red Bor kale.

 

Giant Musselburg leeks.

Covered.

Earlier this week we finished covering all of the beds with straw before the major frosts hit.  We do have crops growing in the garden right now; some for spring, and some for winter harvest: garlic, fava bean, spinach, carrots, turnips, peas, onions, and chard are all holding in the ground waiting to spring forth in warmer weather this spring.  Meanwhile, arugula, spinach, carrots, kale, chard (under cover), tatsoi, and leeks are holding their own in this winter weather, still offering the occasional harvest during the dark months.   We also have a couple of rows of beets that we started late; in the spring we will thin them down, allow them to flower, and harvest the seed.  Here are a couple photos of the farm under cover.

 

Looking south.

 Looking northwest.

Medlars.

We've updated the header on our website for fall, and the new image features a closeup of our medlar tree.  Check out the full image:

Habitat Farm's 2013 Autumn Market Day: this Sunday!

Drop by this Sunday!
See the garden
Check out where the bees live
Say hello to our lucky 13 chickens
Sip some warm tea
Nibble on samples of our fresh veggies for sale
or on kale and chard right where they're growing!

And pick up some Habitat Farm produce,
for dinner that evening or for the week!
Harvested Saturday and Sunday, it may well be fresher than
what you'd find at the farmers market. And as always, it's
coaxed from the ground tenderly and grown entirely by hand!

Click this link for a list of what we'll have available--
while supplies last!

Some of the veggies that will be on offer:
 

 

Red Round Turnips

 

Rainbow Carrots

Autumn Harvest Carrots

And be sure to give us a like at our Facebook page,
or comment on the 2013 Autumn Market Day event page!

Getting More Harvest From Less Space.

One of the tricks we learned during our year-long CSA experiment was to seed direct-sown vegetables like beets, turnips, and spinach pretty densely.  When It comes time to thin them, the thinnings make a fine harvest all their own that could be ready only a month after sowing!  We think of it as getting two crops out of one bed-- first the baby greens which are ready in almost no time, followed later by the roots (or in the case of spinach, the larger and more mature leaves).  Here are some photos we took to illustrate how it works.

First, here's a portion of one of our beet beds, sown August 25th.  That's not quite three weeks ago, and these greens are already in need of thinning (and weeding).  Baby greens can be a bit labor-intensive to harvest, but they are the way to go if you want a crop that could be ready to eat in under a month.

Here's what one of our beet beds looks like after the thinning.  We thinned this bed, sown August 17th, over the course of about two weeks, reducing the plants to 3"-4" spacing.  That's a lot of baby beet greens.  And now that these plants have the space they need, we hope to get a good harvest out of them starting around the first weekend in October.  Whatever we don't want to eat right away should hold in the ground as the weather turns cold.  In other words, you're looking at our winter beets!

Here's today's harvest from that August 17th sowing, from only about as much space as is shown in the first photo.  They're piled high in a colander 11" across and 5" deep!

This crop isn't just good for salad, though they're tender enough to be eaten raw.  We like to cook them in a frittata, or to make them the star of a greens gratin or vegetable tart.  The flavor is like a cross between beets and spinach, and at this stage, is pretty mild.  Good stuff!

Bean Harvest.

 

Today we plucked the first harvest from bean plants sown back on July 19th.  We sowed the bush habit plants in two rows down a bed roughly 15' long--one row of "Provider," the green bean in the photo, and another of "Golden Rocky Wax," the yellow bean shown here.  We've already been eating fresh beans from plants sown on May 5th, but production from that first sowing has begun to taper off.  Now this second sowing should pick up that slack and bear fruit into the fall, which means this ended up being a well-timed succession!

Dig.

Dig
By Nathan Hoover

This September morning I finally got around to digging up the potatoes we sowed back in March, a job I'd been meaning to finish before the fall rains come down in earnest.  As I started carefully scraping away layers of dirt, I suddenly imagined myself as an archeologist, and my focus shifted to the history hidden under all that soil.

We’ve made our backyard into an urban farm, but it wasn't always thus.  Turning up the occasional artifact--a glass shard or shiny wrapper--evidences prior residents who used the dirt as a personal landfill. Then there was a time not long ago when this neighborhood was just fields and orchards.  Of course, the soil itself was carried here tens of thousands of years ago on catastrophic floodwaters; the rocks I dug up were boulders once, winnowed down by the giant rock tumbler of the Missoula floods and settling out of the torrent right here in the now potato bed.

As I went deeper, one foot, then two feet, I imagined myself a jail-breaker.  Digging my way not out of a prison, but out of the city itself.  Out of a broken food system, out of the urban heat sink, out of the pavement and pesticides that have been built up around us.  Walls behind which we will all waste away if we don't get out soon.

Moments later I was a coyote, digging by my nose, unearthing a body.  It was the buried body of my former coyote-god self as it was before the mythic transformer arrived and made the mountains hold still, took the everyday language from the salmon, made humankind.  I had my head to the ground and my hands in the dirt not as an animal, but as a worshiper.

Then I was the old pioneer sea captain who, guided by the north star, shaped his corner of Portland to keep that star always in sight.  Or better yet, I was a pirate, driven by my own moral code and my own understanding of freedom, digging up real treasure and holding the chunks of gold up to a grey Portland sky, grinning.

And then suddenly all those faces came together in me with a flash of realization.   As an urban farmer, I am each of those things.  And that, I decided while dusting myself off from all the digging, was the real root of the matter.

 

Green Bee Habitable.

This morning we sighted two green bees flying in close proximity, along the edge of a recently cleared bed about to be sown with late turnips.  Thankfully, they hung around in that spot just long enough for us to snap these photos!  The bees are probably members of the family Halictidae, commonly known as "sweat bees."  These bees are an example of a native, beneficial pollinator, and we're so glad to have them!

Good to be back...

on Facebook, that is.  Our Facebook page is the place where we'll post local news stories that pertain to our mission, notes about what we're reading, or employment opportunities in local urban agriculture.  The content there is not redundant to what we're doing here on our website.  Check it out:

Habitat Farm on Facebook

Plum Harvest!

 

We have plums!  Remember when friends helped clear the blackberry from the back of the farm in December 2011? [See the photos in A Brief Tour of Habitat Farm, Spring 2012.]  Well, it turns out all that blackberry had been choking out plum trees that have been there for generations.  After we gave them room to breathe, they returned the favor by giving us fruit!  

Heaping half-pint containers like the one you see in the photo are going for just $2 each right now.  We're selling them by volume (as many as will fit in one of these little containers for two bucks), but just to give you an idea, the half-pint container in the photo is holding 10.75oz of plums--2/3 of a pound-- so at $3 per pound you could fill up on plums for canning, jamming, and dehydrating.  (Which is what we plan to do with whatever's left over.)  Just send us an email to let us know when it would be convenient for you to come get some!  

There's plenty more than what we harvested today, as you can see from the photo below:

Potato Harvest.

 

We harvested these potatoes on August 25th, 2013.  This is a variety called Red Lasoda that we found at Naomi's Organic Farm Supply.  We harvested the entire row (roughly 15'), 12 plants, because the plants were diseased, or had succumbed to a pest.  The leaves were riddled with little holes, and the plants were stunted--barely 6" tall in most cases.  They also had not matured like potatoes normally would: flowering, then dropping their flowers and drying out.  Still, they formed a good amount of beautiful tubers, with pristine, bright, rosy-red skins and creamy white flesh.  (They're still covered with dirt in the above photo.)  And they taste great!  The skins are very thin, so we are treating them as new potatoes.  But for around $7 investment in the Red Lasoda potato seed this past spring, while we didn't get the crop we had hoped for, we at least feel we got our money's worth. 

[Note: the $7 is a rough estimate.  We spent $20.93 in March on 3.22 lbs of potato seed of various types, including German Butterball (sown under cover on March 27th), Red Lasoda (sown April 28th), and French Fingerling (sown June 2nd).]

Here are a couple of our Red Lasodas all washed up and ready for cooking:

Eggplant Harvest.

We harvested these eggplants on August 16th, 2013, from about 24 plants.  Our eggplants are spaced at 1.5 foot spacing over two rows totaling 32 feet.  Half of the plants were started indoors on March 23rd; the other half were started a bit later, on April 6th.  By now, the plants are about 2' tall, and producing decently-sized fruit.  This variety is one we found through Kitazawa Seeds, called Ping Tung Long.

At Rest for the Winter.

Hey, thanks for staying in touch!  It's winter here on the farm, but we're still harvesting a few things for ourselves (leeks, rutabagas, carrots, spinach, tatsoi, kale, celery, and herbs) through the frost and snow. This time of year, plant growth can't really keep up with the amount of harvest we'd need to continue our CSA through the winter.

We've been using the down time to plan out next year's seed order and crop successions, and to plan out the coming season's CSA.  Want to get in on some Habitat Farm produce in 2013?  We'd love to keep you in the loop; simply send us an email to let us know you're interested.

We've also been using this time to digest our personal experience with Habitat Farm--now just one season in (Fall 2011-Fall 2012).  We're already inspired by this experience and coming up with new ideas for the farm in 2013!