Veni, Vidi, Seedy: I Came, I Saw, I Seed

 

Seed saving is something that has gone the way of processing your own chickens and milking the family cow... it's something nobody does anymore. Most folks probably wouldn't even know where to begin. Before I got here, I certainly didn't.

Most seed saving that happens at the home gardener scale is for heirloom plants. Heirloom vegetables are usually older varieties, although there are some exceptions, and are open pollinated,* which also means that the second generation will be the same as the first generation.** Heirloom varieties are usually known for their flavor, and often look a little funky, especially to those used to buying mono-vegetables at the supermarket that are all bred to look flawless and exactly the same.

These are some big differences from hybrid plants you usually buy from stores - if you save seed from a hybrid, the third generation will be quite different from the second generation, which is what you planted. If you remember your high school genetics lessons, you'll see why - the third generation will have recessive characteristics from the first generation that don't show up immediately. As a result, seed companies have a monopoly over that seed. Anyone who wants Sun Gold Tomatoes has to buy their seed year after year if they want the same product.

How you save seed depends on the vegetable. Tomatoes, watermelons, eggplant, cucumbers and squash are wet processed; beans, corn, lettuce, brassicas, spinach and peppers are dry processed (although peppers can be wet processed, as you will see). Last week, Autumn and I visited Twin Oaks Intentional Community and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange as part of the CRAFT program, where they did demonstrations of various types of seed saving.

Wet processing involves cutting or smashing up the vegetable in question and letting it ferment for several days. This, by the way, is definitely the best-smelling part of the process.

Then you add water and pour off the pulp and floating seeds, and keep adding water and pouring until the water runs clear. Then the seeds are put on a screen, where they dry out, which should take about a week. Once they're dry, they're ready to be stored.

With dry processing, the process depends on the plant, but often involves crushing everything together (most memorably by sandwiching the plants between tarps and dancing on them) and then winnowing the seeds using a fan.

 

We're actually saving seed for Southern Exposure this year at the farm, so the demonstrations helped us answer a lot of questions.

One of the vegetables we're growing for seed is Lipstick Pepper, a red pepper that is incredibly sweet and delicious.

 

We decided to wet process our peppers, since it seems to be a slightly easier process than scraping all the seeds off by hand. First, you cut out the crown of the pepper, with the seeds still attached.

 

You put all the pepper crowns in a container...

...and cover them with water. Let them sit for a day. The seeds are then much easier to remove by hand. After removing the seeds, you add more water and pour off the excess water and the floating seeds. You keep adding water and repeating until the water runs clear - with peppers, that takes maybe one or two more tries. (Tomatoes take forever.)

The seeds go on a screen in a well-ventilated area (preferably with a fan running). They need to dry for five to seven days. And voila! Home-processed pepper seeds.





*Open pollinated plants are pollinated naturally by insects, wind, etc. They are not self pollinating.
**Assuming you didn't accidentally cross pollinate your plant with another type, that is. For open pollinated plants, this is a real possibility. Isolation distances to prevent crossing differs from plant to plant, from 40 feet for string beans and lettuce to 600 feet for corn and squash.

The Passing of a Friend: My Trusty Canon

It is with great sadness that I mourn the passing of my faithful Canon Powershot. My sidekick and friend for five and a half years - which is a long time for a digital camera - he went with me on many adventures, including all over Europe and for two action-packed years of AmeriCorps NCCC. He was a chunk, but quite a trooper.

This, of course, explains my lack of posts over the last week. I've been taking pictures with my phone, but the connection on the farm is poor enough that I'm having trouble uploading them. So stay tuned, faithful readers! Hopefully salvation will come soon.

My last pictures, taken at a CRAFT tour in late May at Twin Springs Farm. (Check the link for my write-up on the CRAFT blog about the tour.)

The Curious Paradox of Diversified Farming

Last Tuesday, we had our second CRAFT* tour - this time to Radical Roots, a farm in the Shenandoah Valley that focuses on organic vegetable production. They also do a lot of permacultural design on the farm, from water catchment to companion planting.

If you'd like to read about our farm visit, check out the Piedmont CRAFT blog. It's updated by yours truly - I volunteered for the job after our first CRAFT visit back in March.** So I'm not going to re-hash it here. Instead, I want to talk about a few thoughts I've been having since seeing how Radical Roots operates.

I'm coming to realize just how unique Brightwood Farm is. Being a small organic farm makes one pretty unique by definition. When someone is talking about "conventional farming," they sure as heck aren't talking about organic, sustainable agriculture. But even for organic farming, Brightwood is outside the norm.

One of the main reasons I was so interested in this farm from the beginning was due to its diversity. In order to succeed, every small family farm needs to be somewhat diversified. A farm can't survive if it only grows one crop. Just one bad year, and that farm is completely screwed... not to mention the terrible effects that type of farming has on soil health.

And yet, most small farms that I've seen aren't nearly as diverse as Brightwood. Radical Roots, for example, focuses almost exclusively on vegetable production. Within the world of produce, they are all over the board. And they do keep chickens in a mobile chicken unit, as well as bees, but that's it for livestock.

Compare them to Brightwood: this farm has donkeys, goats, sheep, chickens, ducks and guinea fowl. They grow and sell organic vegetables and berries. They have a vineyard. They make wine, jams and jellies. They operate a small B&B. Is there anything they don't do?

Diversity is a good and a necessary quality, but I'm realizing that it can be a double-edged sword. Dean and Susan have their fingers in so many pies that I can barely keep count. They're like a pair of Energizer bunnies that drink espresso. And while it somehow works for them, I don't think I could manage their lifestyle.

So how can a small family farm make a living without running themselves into the ground?

I think the secret is finding your niche, whether that is wine or chicken eggs or heirloom veggies. No farm has just one niche, though... and Susan and Dean have, like, fifteen. The trick is matching your interests and what you can manage with your time and resources to fill gaps in your local food community.

For example: Virginia has hundreds of wineries all over. Good ones. So instead of trying to compete with them, Dean makes traditional farm wines. They're good quality, and they offer the value of novelty. If a small farm can do that with just a few of their endeavors, their battle is half-won.



*CRAFT, or the Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training. It's a group of local farms that bring their apprentices together once a month to tour farms and expose them to different methods of small-scale organic farming.
**Before I did my first update for the CRAFT blog, they're last (and only) blog update had been on March 16, 2009.

The Magical Mushroom Tour

How many of you have ever thought about where those attractive shiitake mushrooms in the grocery store come from? Yeah... me either. I knew mushrooms grew in forests, of course, and in Indiana there are dozens of little Mushroom Festivals that dot the rural countryside during the appropriate seasons, often in quaint little towns that also house adorable Covered Bridge Festivals and Fourth of July Festivals with people dressed in pioneer clothing and a real blacksmith and a guy dressed as Abe Lincoln.

The term "mushroom farm", however, was alien to me. Yet logically, there has to be a way to farm mushrooms, because there is just no way that mushroom hunters could find enough wild shiitakes to populate every grocery store in the lower forty-eight.

On Tuesday, I visited Sharondale Farm, a mushroom growing operation, in Keswick, VA - about an hour south of Brightwood. It was part of the CRAFT program, or "Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training". Basically, a bunch of farms in the region get all their interns/apprentices together and visit one another in order to better educate said interns. There were maybe 15 of us there to learn about the joys of mushroom farming, including myself, Susan, Caitlin, and Robin.*

When we walked into the "Mushroom Forest," it took me a few minutes to realize I was even looking at the mushroom farm part of the business. The paths were lined with logs that were propped up in an A-frame sort of construction. In some areas, groups of logs were lying on the ground in a row. After wandering around somewhat stupidly for a moment, I took a closer look at some large growths coming out of the logs.

Well, what do you know. Mushrooms.

Mark Jones, the guy who runs Sharondale Farm, gave us a bit of a guided tour and explained the process of cultivating mushrooms. He starts by capturing wild mushroom strains that he finds in forests, and grows them in his house in petri dishes, which he uses to inoculate sawdust with the mushroom spawn. He then takes logs - white oak for shiitake - and drills holes in the wood in a diamond pattern. He packs the holes with the shroomy sawdust, seals it shut, and waits for the log to begin fruiting. (You can see the drill holes in the picture above.)

Mark seems like a pretty cool dude. He has a full beard and wore a ratty LSU sweatshirt, left over from his grad school days, as he showed us around his property. He designed his gardens using permaculture, an approach that tries to mimic natural patterns and relationships, and as with many small farms, nothing goes to waste.

What comes to mind specifically are his mushroom spawn inoculated sawdust blocks. After Mark is done with them, he uses the blocks to line his garden beds. As a result, feral mushrooms spring up from the blocks that weren't quite finished fruiting, giving the entire garden a rather surreal, Alice-In-Wonderland type of feel. When the logs start declining, he pulls them and uses them to line the trails in the so-called "Magical Forest"** beyond his gardens, where feral mushrooms also are known to spring up from logs with a little more oomph left in them.

Interesting sign in the greenhouse

To put a finishing touch on the visit, Mark gave us paper bags and let us pick as many feral mushrooms as we wanted. Susan got quite a harvest for the house, and that very evening I used them to make a lovely Wild Mushroom Soup. Alas - I forgot to take a picture of it. We still have enough for another batch, however, and Susan and Dean have requested another concoction. Hopefully my wits won't leave me next time. In any case, the recipe is below, adapted from the Simply-In-Season cookbook. And while I did not have any psychedelic experiences after eating them, I will end with the caveat to be careful what mushrooms you pick, in case you do.


*Robin is another part-time worker at the farm. She and her fiance are starting their own mushroom farm this year. I had no idea mushroom farming was so popular.
**One area we didn't get to visit was Mark's indoor operation, where he grows the mushroom spawn and inoculates the sawdust. While there might be a legitimate reason for not going in there, like contamination, I lean towards the explanation that he's growing other "special" harvests. The "Magical Forest" might not be the only "magical" thing around Sharondale...


Read on for the Wild Mushroom Soup recipe.

The one where I get hired

Blog, meet Brightwood Vineyard and Farm. Brightwood Vineyard and Farm, meet blog. You two are going to be spending a lot of time together.

That is because I've been hired at Brightwood Farm as an intern for the 2011 growing season! *does a dance* I'll be starting in mid-March.

As you may recall, I've been fairly busy for the last week, with the road trip and everything. And not only did I visit Brightwood Vineyard and Farm in Virginia last Friday, but I've had phone interviews with four further farms: Kettle Run Farm in Berkley, Massachusetts; Pacific Crest Farm on Vashon Island, Washington; Well School Farm near Peterborough, New Hampshire; and Rocklands Farm in Poolesville, Maryland.

These five interviews were the distillation of the dozen-plus applications I sent out, in addition to probably another dozen emails expressing my interest in various farms and internships and asking for more information. Just like any job search, securing a farming internship took hours of legwork, from researching farms to emailing questions to updating my resume. But worth it!

When I first arrived at Brightwood Farm, I was given a brief tour and introduced to all the animals by Keriann, a neighbor who works on the farm a few days a week. And there are certainly animals - chickens, both for laying eggs and eating, ducks, sheep, goats (who like to slip through the fence and scare the bejeezus out of people driving by, as I can attest), three donkeys, and several dogs.

I then met Susan, the woman who runs the farm, and she took me on a more far-ranging tour to see the cabin that they rent out in a bed-and-breakfast sort of deal, the yurt and platform tent where interns sleep (I get to sleep in a yurt!), and the greenhouses. We also went for a small hike - the farm has 100 acres of land, full of rolling hills and woods and streams, not to mention a big river - it is absolutely beautiful, being in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Later in the afternoon, we went to the farm where Keriann and her husband live - Susan has another greenhouse there, and it's where she grows the vegetables.

Other than the greens, which are being grown in the greenhouses, Brightwood Farm grows a wide variety of vegetables that they sell at a farmer's market and sell to local restaurants. Susan mentioned that last year, the farm grew a lot of heirloom okra, which I thought was pretty cool, since I like okra and I don't think there's enough of it in the world. They also grow American grapes for local wineries, and berries. Additionally, they produce their own compost on site.

Susan invited me to stay for lunch with her and Carrie-Anne, which ended up being a very tasty vegetable soup and a mixed greens salad. All in all, I think the visit was really useful for allowing us to feel each other out and see if the farm and I are a good match - which I think we are. Having done four phone interviews since, I feel confident saying visits are far preferable - rather than just shooting questions at me, Susan and I learned a lot about one another through simple conversation.

Tricky, tricky goats.

Since I've already written a bit about what I want in a farm, I'll just go through them one by one and talk about how Brightwood Farm measures up.

"Learning Experience" - Internships as Education. One reason I was drawn to internships instead of WWOOF-ing this year was that education is built into farming internships, and Brightwood Farm certainly takes this seriously. The farm is a member of the Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training, or C.R.A.F.T. - a coalition where farmers work together to educate future farmers. I'm not exactly sure what this will mean, but at this point I believe it will involve visiting other organic farms in the region to see how they work and to learn about different aspects of farm life.

In addition, Susan takes her interns on monthly field trips - to other farms, as mentioned above, but also other areas. She mentioned going to Monticello last year to see the formal garden. After she said that, I was ready to sign up on the spot.

And of course, let's not forget the practical aspect of the internship. There will be no shortage of hands-on work for me to do, between the organic produce production and animal husbandry. In general, I think Brightwood Farm has a nice balance of organized, planned educational activities, and "learning by doing". (See "Learning new skills and trying new things" below for more details.)

Money and stuff. Brightwood Farm provides room and board for the interns (did I mention the yurt?), and everyone eats meals together, which is made with produce and eggs from the farm. Although the yurt doesn't have indoor plumbing, we can use a bathroom in the house, and have internet access there as well. And yes, there is a stipend - less than I made as a Team Leader, but I'm used to living on very little. There will be an ample amount for me to cover my student loan payments, and since I doubt I'll be out carousing every weekend, there will be enough for me to set some aside after getting shampoo and toothpaste and whatnot.

Travel and Adventure. Virginia sounds pretty adventurous to me.

Learning different skills and trying new things. According to the internship description, I'll get to do the following:

On farm training in planning, planting, care, harvest, market prep. Farmers market. Post-season clean up, and preparation for winter greens growing. Animal Husbandry: Routine care and feeding of meat goats, laying hens, ducks and donkeys. Working with livestock guardian dogs and a herding dog. As much as possible, we tailor the experience to the interests of our interns.

I'm pretty satisfied with how diversified the farm is - I'll have the chance to learn about the business of running a farm through farmers markets and the farm-to-table connection with local restaurants, in addition to working with animals and produce production.

And although I didn't talk about this before, I like that there will be one or two other interns to work with. Brightwood Farm also takes WWOOF-ers during their busy seasons. I always like meeting and working with new people, so the more, the merrier!


That's that - I'm really looking forward to starting at Brightwood Farm, but there is plenty to do at home in the meantime. I'm going to visit my grandparents this week, and I'll probably be driving to visit my brother in Minnesota (and perhaps another grad school) at the end of the month. Another road trip - huzzah!