Designers in mags and permaculture

One of our fav designers paid us a visit this past weekend. Julie deLeon and Bill worked together for years and they still collaborate on many projects. She is also a dear friend. Julie is portrayed in the recent edition of Chicago Home and Garden. Her new design firm Groundwork is up and running. She even mentioned Grow Modular as one of her fav's in the article.

She joined us on a day trip to Westby, WI for a day long presentation by Mark Shepherd, the guru of permaculture. We were awed by his knowledge of design, ecology, plants, water conservation, farming and environmentalism. Mark was helping the farmers of Ella Bella Farm craft a farm design in their ~15 acres of former CRP ground. He takes the typical farmer's ideal of flat, empty farmland and turns it into swales, trees, berries and alley cropping. It is a lot to get one's head around. We learned a lot and are not looking at our hilly farm in the same way!

We spent Monday (I took a vacation day from non-farm job) running drip tape in the garlic beds.

We aren't J.D. name brand folks but the drip tape is good stuff.

3 rows per bed = a whole lotta tape. We only got the fields half done!

Onions! Leeks!

Bill prepped the soil in field 3. This field has been in a manure mix (field peas, oats and hairy vetch) since last August. I have to say that hair vetch may well be my new favorite plant. It is so amazing. Spring brought it back to a vibrant green and it is growing well and smothering weed cover. It is a nitrogen fixer and adds organic matter to the soil.

About 10 days ago, Bill mowed and then cultivated and finally ran the rototiller over beds within the fields. He then shaped the beds by hand.

Today we planted onions, leeks, beets, radishes and spinach. A red, white and yellow storage onion. Leeks. Beets. (wow, 40' of beets!). Radishes. Spinach.

1 bed down. 8 to go.

Tomorrow we are off to a permaculture seminar with a friend in Westby, WI. Taught by Mark Shepherd. We are excited to meet him!

Red onions

Planning the Planting

Being a certified organic grower has forced us to sit down and put our plans to paper. We are significantly scaling up our operation this year; we are expanding from the 3 fields that currently certified to 11 fields. All told the fields total just under 3.5 acres. Included will be the orchard and our vegetables. Although this year we are growing our vegetables for mostly our own use, we decided that certifying them is good practice for us and in case of a glut of harvest we can sell them.

Under review is also our 3 Flat Acres branding, logo and website.

We celebrated Earth Day by organizing seed and putting the plan to paper. I finally went through my seed box and weeded out (yes, pun intended) all of the outdated seeds. I found seeds from 2004!

I will also plant some more greens in the church-house garden today - seems the thing to do on Earth Day.

orchard photos

(I found my camera cord.)

Garlic update

I have a lot of great photos of the garlic progress but alas, I can't find my camera cord to get them downloaded.  The weather has been tricky - the garlic is about a month ahead of where it typically is at this time of year.  We had some frost several nights last week (and forecasted again for tonight) and the garlic is definitely getting some frost damage on the tips. 

Last weekend we got the orchard planted.  24 heirloom varieties and 4 pear trees.  How I wish we had done this years ago and again I was down to the wire on making choices, but in the end we just placed the order and planted them.   We've got Liberty, Freedom, Duchess of Oldenburg, Northwestern Greening, Lodi, Wealthy, Northwestern Greening - several others that I can't remember off of the top of my head.  We planted the trees in a swale - permaculture-like. 

Bill plowed 4 more fields with the two-bottomed plow last week.  After several days he disc'd once and broke down some of the sod.  SW Wisc desperately needs some rain to help break down the plowed fields and allow him to disc again.  Then once thru with the cultivator and the tiller and we'll get it covered with a spring manure mix (vetch, oats and field peas).

Additionally, we are mapping our fields and progress on AgSquared.  It has a free trial for several months so we'll give it a try to see if it meets our needs for fieldwork, mapping, and tracking.

This is the first spring in years that I haven't started my own seeds.  We'll be buying what we can from our pal Penny who farms in Freeport.  Looking forward to seeing them and their progress on their farm!

Here we are!

We have officially moved - and the garlic is up!

Moving next week

We are doing a lot of packing.