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