Strawberries!

We harvested eight pints of strawberries over two days, from about a hundred feet of strawberry plants spaced roughly a foot apart each. We thought we'd picked the plants clean on June 7th with a four-pint yield, but when we went back the next day we found another four pints ready to go. A few of our plants are several years old and well established, but most are just in their second year of fruit production. They're doing great this spring, with moderate watering (around two times per week) and warm weather.

Garden markers.

We were given these garden markers for carrots, lettuce, and zucchini by Heather and Derek Rubright. Here's what they look like now, adding character and beauty to our vegetable beds!

 

A brief tour of Habitat Farm, spring 2014.

Here's a view of the farm standing near the Northeast corner and looking toward the chicken coop. Note the tall stand of yellow flowers at about two o'clock: that's the cress that was covered in frost and snow a few months back. The small yellow flowers of broccoli-family crops like this one are a favorite of bees and other insects beneficial to the garden. Behind the cress, toward the center of the frame, is a tall stand of dark green: the crimson clover we sowed back on August 25th, that will be flowering in the next few weeks. Between the clover and the cress is a narrow strip of soil where our "cocozelle" zucchini seedlings, sown April 7th under cover, are coming up and showing their first set of true leaves. The bright green dots beside the cress flowers: "black-seeded simpson" lettuce, started indoors on February 2nd and planted out on March 24th. At three o'clock are three rows of "white egg" turnip, sown March 23rd, now ready for thinning. What looks like bare dirt at about eight o'clock is a bed of "atomic red" and "yaya" carrots, sown April 7th under cover. We just removed the cover a few days back, when the seedlings first began to show.

Here's a closeup of our "cocozelle" zucchini seedlings. We're planning another row of zucchini that we'll sow as a succession to this one, in about a month.

 

 

Here's one part of our chicken run. We've kept the chickens off the green grassy area in the background for a few months, so that it could grow thick and lush, better able to survive the chickens' routine grazing and scratching. We opened the space back up to them on April 20th, just for a couple of days. In the coming weeks we'll let them return for longer--a stretch of a few months-- while we give another section of their run some much-needed rest.

10-egg day!

With our eleven chickens, the average eggs laid per day is just over five. Ten eggs is the maximum possible harvest for a given day, and such a yield was mere conjecture until April 16th, 2014. Here's what it looked like that day, when every one of our hens chipped in.

Spring leeks and carrots.

We harvested these leeks and carrots last Saturday. 
The leeks were sown March 10th of last year, transplanted a bit late (June 9th). They grew a bit in the fall, held in the ground through the hard, snowy winter this year, and make for very good eating these days.

The carrots were direct sown a bit late (July 19th) and held in the ground just fine through the winter with very limited top growth. One of the varieties shown is Purple Haze, which we've overwintered before and had great results.

We'll probably still overwinter Purple Haze this season (that would be winter 2014-15), but we're planning on trying a new variety as well, called Merida. It can presumably be sown in late September/early October, and harvested the following May through June. Has anyone out there grown Merida on that schedule? Please let us know how it turned out!

Winter Storm!

Check out this link where we've just added a handful of photos taken over the last 48 hours, and see our kale, onion, and garlic plants growing right up through the snow! 

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