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By Luci Beachdell
| Saturday, March 20, 2010, 08:00 AM
The other day I mentioned that you still have time to start your seeds. But if that didn’t scratch your gardening itch, it’s time to get outside and plant cool weather crops! Oh, you lucky ones of the raised beds who do not have to wait for soil dry enough to till - and don’t have to worry about soil so wet that your seeds will rot! Go, go to your gardens with all seed packets containing the phrase “plant outside early spring, as soon as soil can be worked”, and plant those seeds/starts! (Of course you should design your garden first, so you know what goes where and when you expect to harvest, and if you’ll be replacing it with something else later, and so you’re rotating your crops, etc.)
Those things you can plant NOW (if your soil’s ready & dry enough!) include:
Onion bulbs & sets
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By Luci Beachdell
| Thursday, March 18, 2010, 08:00 AM
Open this handout to find out what’s available to you in the Miami Valley gardening world this year; use it to save special dates. (For example, Cox MetroPark will host its annual Perennial Exchange on September 10, 2010! Information I, for one, am delighted to put on my calendar in advance!) Please share widely, and send to anyone who may be able to add entries to the 2011 calendar & ask them to contact me! Although most of the dates are confirmed, please check back with the sponsoring organization for more details!
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By Luci Beachdell
| Wednesday, March 17, 2010, 12:09 PM
With this recent advent of spring & crocuses and daffodils and tulips popping up, some of the winter stir-craziness has subsided. However, if you haven’t already started seeds (for things that want a head start when you plant them in the garden), you still have time. Most tomatoes and peppers and many flowers recommend planting the seed 6-8 weeks before transplanting outside - if you start now, you’ll be right on time - if you’d started much earlier, and didn’t have the best of setups, you might be growing skinny, leggy seedlings, rather than thick, hearty ones!
The basic steps to planting seeds are pretty simple - I’ll give you a very brief outline here, but see the attached handout for more detail.
- Choose which plants to start indoors. Use seed packets or the internet to figure out “days to maturity” - how long before you can start harvesting fruit! Most warm weather crops get planted around May 15 in our area of Ohio.
- Choose & clean a container, add (sterile), moist potting soil
- Place seeds on top of soil & sprinkle a light covering of soil over them
- Label seeds with variety name & planting date
- Place containers in a warm spot to germinate/sprout (sun is not important yet)
- Keep soil moist but not wet
- Seeds sprout above the soil level (1-3 weeks)
- Move them to a sunny (south/west facing non-drafty window) or under a fluorescent light
- Provide 12-16 (ideal) hours sunlight per day, and darkness the rest of the time! It’s possible to grow seedlings without fluorescents, but easier to get tall leggy seedlings
- Keep seedlings moist but not wet
- Transplant up to individual pots, if desired, repeat steps 7-9
- Fertilize only after seedlings have first true leaves. Use a flowering houseplant fertilizer as often as once every 2 weeks, at half to one-fourth the recommended strength. If you don’t have ideal light, go easy!
- For about a week before planting in the garden, get seedlings used to a harder life - water less, keep cooler, fertilize less, then move to a semi-sheltered area outside, then work them up to full sun & wind. Then plant!
Park Seed has a really nice set of “Know Before You Grow” information, tips about various types of vegetable and flowers.
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By Luci Beachdell
| Friday, March 12, 2010, 09:10 AM
Community gardens in the Montgomery County area have started (or are close) to opening registration. Here are dates for the Possum Creek MetroPark, Wegerzyn MetroPark and Trotwood Community Gardens. For locations of other community gardens in the area, see the map on the MetroParks’ Grow With Your Neighbors page. For information about registering for a plot at any garden other than the three listed above, please call or email Luci Beachdell at Five Rivers MetroParks at 276-7053. Also, for a fun little note on why community gardens are so cool, look at this blog post, “Making [social] Change: Let Your Garden Grow”.
Wegerzyn MetroPark Community Garden
Returning gardeners have until March 25 to register for last year’s site. New gardeners start registering on Saturday, March 27. Cost is $20 for a 28 X 28 foot plot. The season is April 17 through October 3. Contact Wegerzyn MetroPark at 277-6545 for more information or in person at 1301 E. Siebenthaler Ave.
Possum Creek MetroPark Community Garden
Returning gardeners have until April 1 to register for last year’s site. New gardeners start registering on Monday, April 5. Cost is free for a 18 x 36 foot plot. The season begins as soon as site is plowed (April/May) and ends 1 October. Stop in at Possum Creek Farm, 4790 Frytown Road, for more details or to register. Please call 276-7062 prior to stopping in to make sure someone is at the farm!
Trotwood Community Garden
Returning gardeners have until April 2 to register for last year’s site. New gardeners start registering on Monday, April 5. Cost is $30 for a 25 X 25 foot plot. The season is April through November. Contact Karen Bailey at 854-7227 for information or the Recreation Division Office, 3035 Olive Road, Trotwood. We refer to the garden site as the Old Boys Baseball Field on South Broadway - located between 114 and 132 South Broadway in Trotwood.
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By Luci Beachdell
| Wednesday, March 10, 2010, 07:57 AM
For those of you who didn’t get a chance to go - or even didn’t get to go to all the sessions at the mid-February Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association Conference, here are the last of the overviews of what was happening there - or at least some fun and informative tidbits from each. Thanks especially to Megan Croswell, Kat Christen, Mary Sue Gmeiner, and Carli Dixon, who shared their experiences with me! See the attached documents for the full overview of sessions from these folks - and handouts! Also, see the webpage where OEFFA has posted any handouts/presentations from the conference.
Chickens
Here’s a link to a 34-page document about Changing your City’s Chicken Laws! Lots of answers to questions like, “isn’t this a health risk? dirty? smelly?” and far, far more.
Eat Locally Grown All Year, led by Mary Lou & Tom Shaw
Pick cucumbers daily and toss them into a vat of pickle brine (whatever your favorite recipe). When you get enough over a couple weeks or so, can them in a hot bath canner. You can fish them out in the mean time for fresh pickles.
Store cabbage in your garden through the winter by harvesting the head, inverting and burying it in the same spot with the root sticking up out of the soil. When ready to eat, go to garden and pull up the head by the stem! She said her cabbage keeps until at least January!
Carrots can also be stored in the ground for the winter. She finds covering the carrot bed to keep moisture off, keeps them from freezing. Then just dig up a little of the bed each time you are ready for a bunch of carrots!
Urban Gardening, led by urban homesteader Rachel Tayse (all I’ve got from this session is a handout on preserving; here are a few points
Freezing too ripe produce: toss whole tomatoes in the freezer & use them for soup or sauce later. Wrap an entire head of cabbage in plastic wrap, then in foil, then freeze. The texture will be pliable, and no need to boil before adding to casseroles or making cabbage rolls.
Make your own fruit leather. First, puree the fruit (stew quickly and run through a food mill or else use a blender & blend to the consistency of applesauce). Next, line a cookie sheet with silpat or parchment (or use your dehydrator). Spread the puree in a thin layer on the prepared surface. Put in oven at 200 degrees (lower, if you can) or dehydrator. After the puree starts to dehydrate & becomes sticky (about 1 hour), add another layer. Repeat until the leather is the right thickness. Allow to dehydrate until you can break off a piece without seeing any juice/liquid. This may take up to 12 hours depending on humidity. Remove from oven. Cool. Cut into strips, toss with a little cornstarch so they don’t stick together, and store in an airtight container. Keeps a few days at room temperature, a week in the fridge, for a long time in the freezer.
Grassroots Food Campaigns, led by Sarah Alexander of Food & Water Watch
It was clear from the keynote speakers, Joel Salatin and Ann Cooper, that food and politics are hopelessly intertwined. So this workshop was very pertinent to conference attendees. Sarah engaged the audience in discussion on goals, strategies and tactics, with practical examples. Points to remember: define measurable goals, identify the decision maker who can give you what you want, pull together all resources, and understand the opposition.
Developing Community Kitchens, by Leslie Schaller of ACEnet
The Appalachian Center for Economic Networks is a shared-use facility providing growers with a place to create a value-added commodity, as well as business expertise for product development, marketing and distribution. Leslie Schaller of ACENet drew a map for the would-be developer of this kind of facility, with a list of considerations and potential failure points.
Transition Initiave, led by Mary Cunnyngham and Cindy Parker
If you believe that life as we know it is changing, due to peak oil and/or economic crises and/or climate change, then you may be ready to learn about Transition Towns. An essential part of a transition town seems to be an energy descent action plan. The town will be characterized by sustainability, resilience, permaculture ethics, and a renewal of essential skills.
finally, interesting miscellany:
Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education. SARE translates cutting-edge research results into practical, how-to books, bulletins and online resources for farmers, educators and researchers. Also offers grants and outreach to advance sustainable innovations to the whole of American agriculture.
Rain Brothers, LLC, in Columbus, design water harvesting systems
Insurance providers for small farms: Hastings Mutual. Starkey Insurance Agency. (others, too, I just didn’t pick up that literature. See attachments.)
Kenyon College’s Rural Life Center Promotes education, scholarship and public projects about rural life in Knox Co, Ohio.
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By Luci Beachdell
| Wednesday, March 3, 2010, 08:45 AM
(Brought to us by the Five Rivers MetroParks Conservation Department. Featured here because of the overlap of conservation and productive farmland.)
Late last fall
Five Rivers MetroParks closed on 2 new conservation easements totaling 253 acres. MetroParks now protects 5,940 acres in the Twin Valley, mostly in Montgomery County. The Twin Valley is the wildest corner of Montgomery County with mature woodlands along Twin Creek surrounded by scenic and productive farmland. The conservation goal is to protect the stream corridor and adjacent woodlands by purchase if possible, and to protect the surrounding working farms with conservation easements. These easements protect the watershed of Twin Creek, one of the finest streams in Ohio.
Reasons to do conservation easements instead of outright purchase include:
Less than one third of the cost to MetroParks and taxpayers.
Easements ensure that the protected public land will always be surrounded by undeveloped farmland, a much better situation for wildlife and park users.
Easements create a partnership with landowners, local communities, and other conservation organizations. These partnerships can accomplish far more together than separately.
Both of the new easements are partnerships with the Three Valley Conservation Trust and the United States Department of Agriculture. Three Valley applied for and received the necessary grant funding that covered three quarters of the acquisition costs. Click here for more information on the Three Valley Conservation Trust.
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By Luci Beachdell
| Tuesday, March 2, 2010, 05:42 PM
Are you a local food grower, or do you know one? “Retail Ready” is a new program designed to teach best commercial business practices between growers and various retail markets. The Miami County and Greene County OSU Extension offices, along with the Ohio Dept. of Agriculture are teaming up to offer this training:
Tuesday, March 23 from 1-4 pm in the Buckeye room of the Greene County Extension office at 100 Fairground Road in Xenia.
Growth in demand for local foods, together with the growth in direct marketing by smaller-scale producers amplifies the need for grower training on what buyers need to more readily fit into their buying procedures. Most buyers are anxious to work with local growers to market their local products, but have also expressed frustration at the lack of grower awareness of their preferred buying practices. This training should help growers and retailers build more successful market relationships.
Retail Ready training was developed with generous assistance from the National MarketMaker program and the University of Arkansas Applied Sustainability Center.
For more information contact Brian Raison at raison.1@osu.edu or Beth Bridgeman at bridgeman.7@osu.edu or call 372-9971.
Producers will evaluate their readiness by reviewing resources and a checklist of various topics related to how to package, label, price, invoice, deliver, meet quality and insurance standards, and much more. Please let others know about this workshop. Cost is $30. Call the Miami or Greene County OSU Extension office, or mail your check, payable to: OSU Extension, 201 West Main St., Troy, OH 45373. Registration deadline is 3/19.
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By Luci Beachdell
| Friday, February 26, 2010, 08:00 AM
Okay, semi-final installation of the OEFFA conference before February is over! All you folks who gave me information about the sessions you attended - thanks!
High Quality Organic Small Scale Grain Production
Presenter: Deb Stinner, OSU Organic Food & Farming Education & Research Program (OFFER)
One of the other presenters couldn’t make it to the conference, & Deb has a slightly less hands-on approach to the wheat trials, but she shared these things, and more research is available online. This was really a farmer’s workshop, with a target at commercial type farmers doing a corn/soybean rotation. But Deb and several farmers present talked about the capacity to raise grain and make money on it in fairly small areas - 20 to 50 acres or fewer - which is really what I was hoping to learn more about. I think that grains could be a wonderful, marketable product that might make good use of some of the vacant spaces across our county.
Small grains (wheat, oats, spelt, field corn, etc.) are disappearing from farms across the Midwest
small grains don’t fix nitrogen, but they do build soil and offer opportunities for low-no tillage
grains should be part of crop rotation - don’t grow grain year after year in the same place!
A nice rotation: Corn; Soybeans; Oats (high-oil hulless); Wheat or Spelt; Red Clover or Alfalfa
Weed Trees in your Forest Garden: What to Do?
Presenter:
Janell Baran, USDA
SARE Farmer/Rancher grant
Controlling ailanthus altissima - Tree of Heaven - organically, then using dead trees to cultivate mushrooms
Go here for the handout on killing Ailanthus - or other weed trees (not shrubs!)
Janell also then proceeded to inoculate the treated trees with mushroom plug spawn. We should know this year if they took & if she’s now harvesting mushrooms off her dying Trees of Heaven.
Janell is a big fan of Mushroom Harvest, a company in Athens, Ohio which specializes in native OH mushroom strains and also offers mushroom supplies.
The final OEFFA conference installation will be soon, and will include resources for chicken-raising, some simple ways to preserve food, and miscellaneous information I picked up while walking around the exhibition hall.
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By Luci Beachdell
| Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 01:38 PM
A colleague sent me a link to this “Tiny Life” blog.
Look at the really clever use of old gutters as “window-boxes”!
The Tiny House movement - as you might guess - is about minimizing the space you live in and using fewer resources, etc. I’m not quite ready to give up my lovely brick home, but the site is quite nifty - and the garden page (see link above) has several cool ways to add garden in little space.
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By Luci Beachdell
| Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 08:12 AM
A few online resources have recently come to my attention - or rather, they send me emails with updates and new and exciting (or old and really useful) information.
Mother Earth News is a great online resource for organic gardening (and more), as well as being a periodical. They’ve been sending out all kinds of good stuff - from “what’s an heirloom seed” to “Grow $700 of Food in 100 square feet”.
Park Seed is sending out fairly regular emails, called “Know Before You Grow…”, and posting that information online here in their garden library. The Library includes the Know Before You Grow series, as well as useful information here on growing a variety of vegetables.
These are only two of acres of online resources - but again, they’ve been prolifically emailing me lately, and I thought you might like to see them.
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