The Call, Column 100 – Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Garden

(July 29, 2018)

The Urban Farmer

Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Garden

            Can I let you in on a little secret? I really dropped the ball with my garden this year.

I prepared (well, had the chickens prepare) and mulched the soil pretty early on in the season, for which I will give myself a cold, curt pat on the back. But that’s the last one I get.

Because, since I did that, I have had the busiest few months of my life. My friend and I joined an environmental group, Climate Action RI, and I took on a leadership position; I am part of a few other boards and organizations (DWC and Autumnfest being among the most prominent); I spent a bunch of time lobbying on a few bills in the state house, and as legislative session ended I have begun to help out on five-ish political campaigns; I have traveled a few times this spring, and I’ve actually maintained my social life better than ever before.

All of this, on top of work and other obligations, left me a little short on time, patience, and any shred of motivational energy. So as the spring went on, the weeds took over and the garden went unplanted. And this unfortunate reality wasn’t helped by the fact that the straw that I had used to mulch apparently wasn’t properly heat-treated…so thousands of tall, grassy plants quickly filled the beds where tomatoes and peppers were meant to be.

Needless to say, this left me more than a little overwhelmed. The end of May came much more quickly than I had anticipated (isn’t that the story of getting older, though?), and my garden was in no fit state to be planted. I had a decision to make: do I buy some plants and muster up some as-of-yet unforeseeable burst of energy to plant them (and then do that over and over to maintain the garden), or do I forego the vegetable garden altogether this year, instead focusing on my perennial fruits, chickens, and compost?

Instead of committing, I guess I kind of chose the worst combination of both options (story of my life). I bought a ton of vegetable plants in the first week of June, and did not get around to planting them until two weeks ago…in mid-July.

Ouch. I spent like six hours outside that one Sunday, weeding the entire garden – paths and all – and planting all but two beds with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and various types of squash, which had all seen better days (like, six weeks earlier when I actually bought them from the nursery). All of that said, though, they have actually grown quite a bit since I planted them, and I will probably start harvesting late in August or early in September. It won’t be a banner year in my vegetable garden, but it will do.

So why the title of this column? What did I learn?

One of the first lessons of this year is that being overwhelmed is a huge, driving de-motivator for me (and probably for a lot of you, too). You can ask my family or any of my close friends (and especially the friend who joined CARI with me): I’ve been a monster in the past couple of months. I have the tendency to spread myself way too thin, in no small part because I have no internal concept of the limitedness of my own free time. This is probably a defense mechanism that my brain developed, since the ticking away of time was the most pronounced stressor that I experienced while growing up (I’m not really sure why).

Whatever the reason though, I have the tendency to say “yes” to everything, and the only metric for whether I have time for something is whether that block of time is already booked in my calendar or not (meals, relaxation, and free time need not apply). This was taken to the extreme in the past few months, and it kind of got to the point where I would be stressed out and triggered by even the thought of quieter, less impactful, “on-my-own” type activities…especially those that required manual labor, like my garden. And so, overwhelm translated to complete lack of motivation.

But the second lesson seems to be that, if we don’t approach activities like gardening with a strive for perfection, it removes a lot of the baggage that can make them so overwhelming. I got to the point where I literally did not have the contiguous block of time I knew it would take to weed my entire garden. And the thought of being out in the summer sun for that long, and somehow moving around or canceling my other (honestly, much more exciting) obligations, all to plant a garden that I knew would ultimately perform pretty poorly given how neglectful I had already been…it all gave me the intense feeling that it wasn’t worth it.

But this year’s garden – like every year prior – could never be perfect. That’s not how nature works. That’s not how urban farming works. That’s not how human endeavors work. I was so sapped of the motivational energy (this is an actual thing, an actual, designated store of sugar in one’s cerebrum that is used to motivate intention, action, and strict adherence to plans) that the fact that my garden would never be perfect was enough reason to just keep neglecting it.

These are things I have to work on. But once I finally dedicated my time, effort, and motivation to actually weeding and planting my garden, it felt really good. Even if I don’t harvest as much as other years, this year’s garden represents a bit of deeper emotional growth. I chose to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good – nor the enemy of the garden – and with each tomato and pepper I eat, I will remember that lesson.

My column appears every other Sunday in The Woonsocket Call (also in areas where The Pawtucket Times is available). The above article is the property of The Woonsocket Call and The Pawtucket Times, and is reprinted here with permission from these publications. These are excellent newspapers, covering important local news topics with voices out of our own communities, and skillfully addressing statewide and national news. Click these links to subscribe to The Woonsocket Call or to The Pawtucket Times. To subscribe to the online editions, click here for The Call and here for The Times. They can also be found on Twitter, @WoonsocketCall and @Pawtuckettimes.

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The Call, Column 98 – An Early-Summer Gardening Checklist

(June 24, 2018)

The Urban Farmer

An Early-Summer Gardening Checklist

Happy Summer Solstice! This is a great time of year: the days are long, the weather is warm, the garden is growing, and the RI legislative session is over so we can start organizing for candidates…sorry, I just had to put that in here for the chuckles. But that’s not what today’s column is about.

It’s primetime on the urban farm, so today I want to talk about a few important tasks that we should all be taking care of in the next few weeks.

• If you haven’t already, plant your garden. I’ll admit to being very late to plant my garden this year, so maybe we are in good company. But it isn’t too late. We had an odd start to the warm season this year, with a lot of cool days in June and very little rain. Hopefully it will level off for the rest of the summer, so now is probably a good time to plant in anticipation of that. All threat of frost has passed, so all of your warm-season crops – tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, summer and winter squash, and cold-sensitive herbs are fair game.
• If you haven’t already, prune bramble fruits (raspberries and blackberries). As I wrote about a few years ago, raspberry and blackberry bushes are some of my favorite plants. They require basically no maintenance, and each year they produce a bumper crop of incredibly healthy fruits. They are the epitome of a “Paleolithic crop” (if such a thing even existed).
  The thing is, they also try to take over your yard. They spread via a network of underground roots, with dozens of “new” canes (stems) popping up five or 10 feet from the rest of the patch. Thankfully, you can prune existing canes and pull these new ones pretty much at any time during the growing season, without much of a negative impact on the health of the patch. Remove any canes that haven’t started growing leaves at this point (they are dead), and either pull or mow over newly-sprouted canes that are spread too far beyond the boundary of the patch.
• Keep your garden mulched and weeded! This is the time of year that you can get ahead of the mulch. The weeds are only just coming out in full force, so if you make sure to keep a nice, thick layer of straw, or grass clippings, or shredded leaves, or whatever you can get your hands on, on top of your garden soil, you can prevent the problem of excessive weeding later on. I mulched with straw this year, which worked great…other than the fact that one of the two bales I put down still had viable seeds in it! So while half of my garden beds are pretty much weed-free, the other half are full of some sort of grain plant.
• Make sure to water. Rain is sparse and kind of irregular during the New England summer, especially as of late with the effects of climate change. This whole weekend is supposed to be stormy, which made me happy to hear (other than that fact that it limited what activities I’ll be able to do outside).
  If you keep your garden mulched, it will prevent a lot of the evaporation that necessitates watering many times each week. But I still recommend that you water maybe twice a week, especially if it’s been dry. Use your judgment, and base watering frequency on how well the soil has retained moisture, and what the weather looks like it will be in the next few days.
  Also, consider drip irrigation. I have yet to fully install mine, but a drip irrigation system saves you lots of time by watering your garden for you…all while using a lot less water, and spreading it over a longer period so that plants can absorb more of it before it percolates too far downward into the soil.
• Clean out the chicken coop. If you have chickens, now is a great time to do a very thorough cleaning of the coop. You should be cleaning it out once every few weeks, but completely replacing all of the bedding/mulching on the ground of the coop is best to do before it gets too hot. They will thank you, and hopefully repay you with a bumper crop of eggs!

Clean out the accumulated junk. I’m sure that you, like I, still have seed trays and old plant ties and a whole slew of other materials from last year’s season, still lying around in your garden. It’s so easy to fall into that trap: you plant in May and June, and your garden – and life – get so hectic, and remain that way well into the fall, that you don’t get around to cleaning up the equipment and odds and ends…and then it all freezes over in the winter. And the next spring (or early summer), you’re preparing to plant again, and last year’s trays are still there!
Its ok, we all do it. I made a concerted effort, a few weeks ago, to clean up a bunch of that stuff (and isolated it in one corner, to eventually bring inside). It is definitely cathartic to do this; it makes you feel more organized in your gardening, and also makes it less likely that that stuff will get in your way while you’re planting and taking care of your garden.

My column appears every other Sunday in The Woonsocket Call (also in areas where The Pawtucket Times is available). The above article is the property of The Woonsocket Call and The Pawtucket Times, and is reprinted here with permission from these publications. These are excellent newspapers, covering important local news topics with voices out of our own communities, and skillfully addressing statewide and national news. Click these links to subscribe to The Woonsocket Call or to The Pawtucket Times. To subscribe to the online editions, click here for The Call and here for The Times. They can also be found on Twitter, @WoonsocketCall and @Pawtuckettimes.

The Call, Column 94 – A Gardener’s Worst Nightmare

(April 15, 2018)

The Urban Farmer

A Gardener’s Worst Nightmare

Gardening is going to get a whole lot more difficult in the years to come. Nope, not because there’ll necessarily be more woodchucks. I don’t foresee a shortage of seeds or plant starts, or any particularly nasty new plant virus. And if every garden supply center is planning to stop selling shovels and rakes, no one told me.

No, probably the biggest overall threat that we, urban farmers, will face to effective garden-growing is (drum-roll please) climate change.

It’s real, it’s our fault, it’s an overall threat to our well-being, and we need to do something about it…but we aren’t doing that fast enough.

And at this point, all action that we take on climate change will be to reverse the changes that have already taken place, and avoid more catastrophic atmospheric warming and related events in the coming decades and centuries. We are already seeing the effects of climate change around the globe – the ice caps are receding, ancient and new pathogens are spreading in territorial coverage, species are becoming threatened and extinct, and…the seasons are no longer dependable.

And that’s our kicking-off point for this column. There are many effects of climate change that are very relevant to urban farmers (not to mention full-scale farmers), and may threaten our ability to grow effectively. I want to discuss these impacts, and give some idea of how we might adapt to them while still in the process of transitioning away from climate-change-causing fossil fuels and towards the inevitable sustainable future.

The most prominent threat, of course, is the changing of weather patterns. I’m sure that you, like I, have noticed that the real beginning of winter – frozen mornings, consistently cold temperatures, regular snow – is creeping later and later in the year…as is the real beginning of spring. This has left us (in New England) with warm Novembers and cold Aprils, and wildly unpredictable Decembers and Mays.

Gone are the days when we could reliably assume that the first frost would happen within a week of October 15^th, and the last around May 20^th (in Southern New England). The agricultural zones are even shifting, as the frost line moves northward…who knows how long we will even be in Zone 6b?

This all makes it very hard to plan our gardens. When do we start our seeds indoors, if we don’t even know the appropriate month for their plant-out date? And when can we even be sure that we’ve had the last frost, since that May 20^th approximation is not nearly as accurate as it was 30 years ago?

And, though the first and last frost dates are changing, the amount of sunlight we receive isn’t. We already have a short-ish growing season in Southern New England, which means we rely heavily on that growing season coinciding with the longest days and highest amounts of sunlight in the year. Well, May is typically a lot sunnier than November…if we lose growing time at the beginning to gain it at the end, our gardens will suffer no matter what we do.

This is a huge problem. I’m not sure I can confidently recommend a solution to adapt your gardening strategies, other than being as attentive as possible and selecting varieties that are able to mature in a shorter time, or with less sunlight. Also (and this one doesn’t come naturally to me at all), we may have to be more risky in our initial plant-out and final harvest. We will have to have more plants than needed, plant them out in late May, and pray there isn’t another frost lest we have to replace whatever dies…and come October, leave some of the less-than-optimally-ripe stuff on the vine later than normal, in hopes that it can mature before we get a hard frost.

Unfortunately, this is not foolproof. Three or four years ago, basically every farm in the state of Rhode Island lost its peach crop for the year because of this seasonal shifting. A short period of warm weather in early February of that year “tricked” the peach trees into budding out early, and a subsequent deep freeze in late February killed it all. Many trees died, and those that didn’t bore little to no fruit that year.

One of the other effects of climate change, that I’m sure you have noticed, is an increasing incidence of precipitation in high-precipitation areas. This translates to more snow in our area during the winter, which (despite uneducated claims of this nature), absolutely doesn’t mean climate change isn’t happening.

As the atmospheric temperature warms, water is more easily evaporated from the oceans and other bodies of water, resulting in more frequent and substantial precipitation. The atmospheric temperature has increased by a couple of degrees, and is set to increase by a couple more in the coming decades, which means our winters still do, and always will dip into freezing temperatures…and presto-chang-o, we get lots more snow as a result! This has meant that it’s harder to plant early-season crops like spinach, since the snow covers the soil later, and threatens the health of tender seedlings. This weekend’s nice weather aside, this fact has delayed me from doing much early-season stuff in my garden this year…and I really don’t have a good solution to offer.

Despite having more snow, the progression of climate change has meant that the soil freezes a lot less – and for a much shorter time – during the winter. Our winters now consist of alternating days of frigid temperatures, with less-cold or even above-freezing temperatures, which means the soil doesn’t freeze for a few months, and to the same depth, that it used to. This has meant that topsoil-borne diseases are more able to survive the winter, resulting in a more pathogenic start to the growing season.

Your best bet to prevent this from being much of a problem is to mulch, mulch, and mulch again! If soil doesn’t get splashed up onto the leaves of your plants, it significantly reduces the risk of them catching many soil-borne diseases. This doesn’t prevent every effect of the above problem, but it’s a start. I spread a thick layer of straw on my garden last weekend, which I’m hoping will be enough.

Finally, the variability in the weather in early-to-mid spring results in less native plant growth, less early-season berries, and less worms and soil insects. That is a HUGE problem since, well, nature relies on biodiversity.

But for gardeners in specific, that means that birds, woodchucks, and other “pests” do not have a reliable food supply early in the season. Well, no reliable supply…except whatever you’ve taken care to grow in your garden. I don’t even have a solution to this for a world without climate change. It’s a problem we just have to live with, I guess.

I hope you may be able to use some of this information. But even more, I hope it has helped you to internalize the pressing issue of global, human-caused climate change. Our gardens are in trouble. Our world is in trouble. We are in trouble. We have to adapt to what’s already happened, but also take action to stop further change, and ultimately reverse what has happened altogether. And we have to do it now. Shoot me an email if you want to find out how.

My column appears every other Sunday in The Woonsocket Call (also in areas where The Pawtucket Times is available). The above article is the property of The Woonsocket Call and The Pawtucket Times, and is reprinted here with permission from these publications. These are excellent newspapers, covering important local news topics with voices out of our own communities, and skillfully addressing statewide and national news. Click these links to subscribe to The Woonsocket Call or to The Pawtucket Times. To subscribe to the online editions, click here for The Call and here for The Times. They can also be found on Twitter, @WoonsocketCall and @Pawtuckettimes.

The Call, Column 84 – Lessons Learned Amongst the Cold Tomatoes

(November 12, 2017)

The Urban Farmer

Lessons Learned Amongst the Cold Tomatoes

It was 6:30am, and my hands were absolutely freezing. I was bundled up, sure, but my hoodie and bare fingers were no match for the early-morning dew and near-freezing temperature. And the cold air around me was filled with a pungent, not-exactly-unpleasant smell as I worked tirelessly against the clock.

OK, I’ll admit that was all pretty dramatic. Those were some of the thoughts racing through my head last Tuesday morning, as I hurriedly picked the last of the produce from my garden before winter set in. But the 45 minutes I spent in my garden that day sparked some interesting internal dialogue, and taught me a few lessons about our gardens and our world that I think would be worth sharing.

First off, I’ve come to realize that any outdoor activity, urban farming most definitely included, is actually pretty tough in the context of an 8-5 work schedule once Daylight Savings Time has ended. Had the frost been predicted for late the week before, I would have had a well-lit hour after work to do the last-minute harvest, in the waning (relative) warmth of the afternoon. But now it’s dark by the time we leave work, which meant a rather rushed harvest in the cold, bitter, pre-coffee morning before work, since I wouldn’t be home with enough light to harvest by until after the frost had already happened. I am only a part-time, amateur gardener, so I can only imagine how much this effect compounds for professional farmers who have full-time jobs off the farm.

The very fact that Daylight Savings had already ended by the time of my last harvest gave me pause, too. Normally, it is the middle of October when the first real killing frost happens, and it is at that point that I normally make the last harvest of the year. This year was almost a full month later. Climate change is real, we are the cause, and it is already resulting in dangerous alterations to the seasons, making them less predictable and less conducive to normal growing.

A kind of inflammatory thought I kept having was how much I hate morning glories…at least, the vines. I like the flowers themselves, and had planted some a few years ago in my garden. But they dropped seeds, and now, each year, my garden gets overwhelmed by volunteer morning glory vines. They have strangled many of my plants in the past, and it happened this year with the tomato patch I was in last week. Three or four of my garden beds were basically decimated by morning glory vines this year, so I really have to find a way to prevent that from happening in the future.

Speaking of preventing morning glory overrun…I did take note of a couple of things that should have been done over the course of the season but weren’t. Every year, I start off by saying that I will mulch religiously, that I won’t step on the soil after it has been planted and mulched, that I will keep everything weeded and watered, and that I will tie up the plants regularly.

Harvesting those tomatoes was kind of eye-opening. Because I had to fight through weeds and an untied patch to get at the tomatoes, stepping on the soil in the process. I did a great job this year with keeping everything mulched, but between the morning glories taking over again, other weeds springing up over the months, and not typing the tomatoes to their stakes often enough, it make it kind of hard to harvest.

Speaking of difficulty in harvesting…the rush to harvest everything before work (and the frost) helped to point out to me some of the flaws in how I had organized the layout of my garden. I plant things too close together, especially tomatoes, which makes them grow as a think mass. I also made an error when originally designing my garden, by making the beds six feet on each side instead of the standard four. This makes it exceedingly difficult to access the stuff at the center of the bed while standing on the outside path, which makes it tempting to step in while harvesting.

Next year, I will still plant according to a loose version of permaculture principles, but I need to remember to leave more space for the plants to grow, and give myself access to the center of each bed (even if it’s just one area that I’m allowed to step into) to make harvesting and maintenance easier.

The last lesson that I thought was worth sharing was the notion of what is really worth harvesting. I had limited time in which to harvest that morning, so I had decisions to make. I decided not to harvest the last of a quasi-perennial green that has taken over one of my beds. It cooks up nicely, but I didn’t think I would have time to use it, which meant the more-easily-storable tomatoes took precedence. I also made note of all of the cold-tolerant crops – carrots, potatoes, turnips, brassicas – that I could wait until next week to harvest (which actually might even be improved by the frost) – allowing me more time to harvest tomatoes.

My column appears every other Sunday in The Woonsocket Call (also in areas where The Pawtucket Times is available). The above article is the property of The Woonsocket Call and The Pawtucket Times, and is reprinted here with permission from these publications. These are excellent newspapers, covering important local news topics with voices out of our own communities, and skillfully addressing statewide and national news. Click these links to subscribe to The Woonsocket Call or to The Pawtucket Times. To subscribe to the online editions, click here for The Call and here for The Times. They can also be found on Twitter, @WoonsocketCall and @Pawtuckettimes.

The Call, Column 70 – An Urban Farmer’s Springtime To Do List

(April 23, 2017)

The Urban Farmer

An Urban Farmer’s Springtime To Do List

Spring is in the air – and the soil, the sunshine, the budding perennials, and the mating calls of every animal in Southern New England. And for urban farmers, that can only mean one thing…It’s time to start preparing your homestead for the growing season!

Today’s column is a very practical one. I’ll share with you some of the basic tasks you’ll want to get done in the next couple of weeks, taken right from my own “Garden To Do List” (I promise, I’m working on my compulsive list-making problem).

Make a garden plan. This is one of the most important steps between today’s patch of dirt and a flourishing garden. A garden plan can mean different things for different people, but it basically encompasses the intended use for each bit of your land under cultivation – garden and otherwise – and a rough timeline for how that will be implemented. You should start with a list of all of the crops you intend to grow, including any perennials that are already planted and those you plan to plant this spring. Then, draw out a map of your whole yard or garden space, roughly to scale. Fill in all of the perennials (present and future) and permanent fixtures in your garden, crossing them off the list. This leaves you with an idea of your available space, and a list of the other (annual) crops you will fill it with. Now, keeping in mind light/shading and water requirements, and the principles of crop rotation, companion planting, and, if you’re adventurous, permaculture or biodynamics, plan the layout of the rest of your annual crops. Ask yourself how much you will want to produce of each, and allocate space accordingly.

Start your seeds indoors. There is still time to start long-season crops from seed indoors, and the time is soon approaching to start the shorter-term ones inside. You can read my full columns from two years ago on exactly how to start seeds indoors (https://tinyurl.com/TOFseeds and https://tinyurl.com/TOFseeds2). Basically, you’ll want to start them in good-quality seed-starting mix (like Fort Vee), in black plastic trays. They need a rack system to sit on, exposure to a South-facing window and daylight-spectrum bulbs, regular watering, and an organic source of nutrients. And if you’re particularly adventurous, a small fan blowing on them for a short time every day to make their stems strong.

It’s a little late in the spring, but you still may be able to start tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, and maybe even onions indoors. Now is the time to start some brassicas (cabbage, etc), most herbs, and leafy green crops (if you want to start those indoors). And squash/cucumbers/melons should be started inside in a couple of weeks.

Plant out early spring crops. It’s also finally the point in the spring when you can plant your first seeds outdoors. Greens, like lettuce and spinach, can be directly seeded in your garden at this point. As can most root crops, onions, peas, and even seed potatoes (but not sweet potatoes until late May). The seeds you start indoors should wait until after the last expected frost (around May 20^th), as should non-cold-tolerant crops like beans and sweet potatoes.

New perennials, both those in dormancy and those already leaving out, should also go in before the weather warms too much more – as long as they can survive the frosts we will likely get between now and late May.

Prune your fruiting plants and repair/install supports. Pruning should ideally be done in the fall, but I rarely do that. I tend to prune my grape vines down to a few feet off the ground – this is entirely a practical decision, based on where they first make contact with the support system I have for them. And by waiting for the spring, I can be sure of which raspberry and blackberry canes are dead (meaning they fruited for at least one of the last two years), so I don a pair of gloves and get cutting. My other fruiting perennials – blueberries, apples, elderberries, and other, more esoteric plants – aren’t really old enough to be pruned yet, so I can’t really advise on these.

This is also a good time to repair and install supports for your bramble fruits, fruiting bushes, and even small fruit trees. Something as simple as a wooden stake, driven into the ground, can help to support the weight of a fast-growing bush or tree. I am planning to use something non-biodegradable as a more permanent support for my raspberry and blackberry patch, though, because the old wooden ones seem to have rotted over the years.

Clean out your garden. I can never find enough time in the fall to clean all the spent plants and last-generation weeds out of my garden. It always ends up happening in the spring – better late than never, right? So of course, the remains of last year’s annual crops should be removed and composted. And so should the spent parts of perennials (we’ll get to that below). But you also want to tidy up the tools and equipment in your garden, to make it a productive place to work this spring. And fix any fences or pathways that might need mending.

Apply soil amendments. The most important of these is, of course, compost. This can be homemade compost, making sure chicken manure was aged for six months to a year, or purchased compost products (think local, organic, and sustainably-derived).

You’ll also want to apply other organic soil amendments, balancing nutrient levels in your soil to whatever level you’re concerned about them (I tend not to be, especially when I use enough compost).

It’s also the time to till cover crops back into the soil, to provide a nice source of “slow-release” fertility for your spring and summer planting. If you have chickens, they’ll be happy to do this for you in exchange for whatever bugs they may find in the process. (It sounds like I’m joking, but I’m actually very serious. They are little rototilling machines.)

Thoroughly clean the chicken coop. What better way to get a kick-start on next year’s compost than by thoroughly cleaning out the chicken coop? Remove the nesting material and the soil and bedding as deep as you can, replacing them with fresh materials (leaves and wood shavings, perhaps). The chickens will thank you, and in six months, you’ll have some powerful new compost…just in time for fall planting.

Install irrigation systems. Now is the perfect time to do this, with the weather still marginally wet and the ground free of weeds, but with deep freezes (ideally) done for the year. You can make and install rain barrels on downspouts very soon. And as you plant your garden and prune your perennials, you should install a simple drip irrigation system. That’s my plan for the next few weeks!

Repair and replace garden equipment. Hoses break. Nozzles crack. Black plastic trays warp. When not ultra-durable, manmade materials are continuously exposed to the elements, they don’t always last long. Thankfully, the equipment that is required for urban farming is pretty minimal, so it’s often worth having quality stuff! Might I suggest that you check out Cluck! Urban Farm Supply, in Providence, for urban farming equipment and supplies? You won’t be disappointed.

My column appears every other Sunday in The Woonsocket Call (also in areas where The Pawtucket Times is available). The above article is the property of The Woonsocket Call and The Pawtucket Times, and is reprinted here with permission from these publications. These are excellent newspapers, covering important local news topics with voices out of our own communities, and skillfully addressing statewide and national news. Click these links to subscribe to The Woonsocket Call or to The Pawtucket Times. To subscribe to the online editions, click here for The Call and here for The Times. They can also be found on Twitter, @WoonsocketCall and @Pawtuckettimes.

The Call, Column 58 – A Long Winter’s Nap: Putting the Urban Farm to Bed for the Year

(October 23, 2016)

The Urban Farmer

A Long Winter’s Nap: Putting the Urban Farm to Bed for the Year

 Despite the unseasonable heat we’ve enjoyed this week, the fall is chugging steadily along. Soon enough, New England will be plunged into winter. The Farmers’ Almanac said it’ll be an exceptionally cold, snowy one this year, which is good reason for we urban farmers to focus well on preparing our homesteads for the cold and snow. Today, we’ll talk about a couple of important tasks that need to get done before that fateful time when the ground freezes, based on my own experiences.

The Vegetable Garden

            I hope you’ve had a good year in the garden, and that the last of your summer crops, as well as the glut of your fall ones, are maturing and ready to harvest. You’ll want to keep close watch of the weather, or at least put a weather alert app on your phone. Most annual crops, especially the remnants of the summer garden, need to be harvested before we get hit with a killing-frost. This usually happens in mid-to-late October, but we’ve been lucky so far (or unlucky, as the delayed onset of cold weather is an indicator of accelerating climate change). I usually wait it out as long as I can, and when the freezing temperatures seem imminent, I’ll do a “big harvest”, collecting everything edible and on-its-way to being edible (i.e. green tomatoes) in the garden, to be eaten, processed, or allowed to ripen. After that, it’s best to pull up all of the spent annuals to prevent overwintering diseases and pests, and either plant for the fall/winter or protect the soil.

It’s too late to plant most fall crops (I wrote a great column last August, about how to do just that!), but there are a few things you’ll want to plant and otherwise do for the health of your soil.

First off, plant garlic! This should go in sometime in the coming couple of weeks. I think I’ll plant my large selection of organic garlic this weekend, to allow it a bit of mild weather to establish itself.

Now is also a great time to plant cover crops, which are various cold season grasses, legumes, and the like that serve as a living mulch over the winter, and can be tilled into the soil for a fertility boost in the spring. As you pull up your spent vegetable plants, you should do some combination of the following, or ideally all of them: plant cover crops; apply manure, so it has the winter to compost and sterilize (or, at minimum, get some at leave it in a pile to compost); apply compost; and mulch the soil with anything from straw to grass to the coming onslaught of leaves (shredded, for faster breakdown).

Perennial Fruits

            In New England, now is actually a pretty good time to plant perennial fruit trees, bushes, and groundcovers. If they’re dormant when they ship from the nursery, they will not really start growing until next spring; if they aren’t, or you get them from a local nursery, they will grow a little and then go dormant as the weather cools. I tend to prefer to plant new perennials in spring, but I know of plenty of people who have made successful fall plantings.

For perennial fruits that are already established, late-October/early-November is when they need to be pruned. Grape vines should be cut down to a few feet above the ground; bramble canes that fruited for the first time this year or last year (depending on the specific cultivar) can be cut to the ground; and other fruit trees and bushes should be pruned carefully, to allow airflow between branches and facilitate whatever harvesting/plant-training program you have in mind.

New plantings and old should be mulched again in the fall, to keep the soil relatively warm and foster biological activity. For more detail on any particular crop, consult a reliable online source, or a homesteading book like John Seymour’s The New Self-Sufficient Gardener.

Irrigation System

            Rain barrels are sort of a sticky subject at this point in the year. You don’t want to empty them prematurely and waste the water. However, you have to make sure they are completely empty before the temperatures dip below freezing for an extended time, to prevent them from freezing solid and getting damaged. They should be cleaned at this point in the year, and either put away or otherwise cut off from your downspout (so they don’t fill up again).

Drip irrigation is a little bit of a different story. This is my first year with the system, so I’m writing based on my research rather than personal experience. What I have read has said the system can be left installed during winter. But you definitely want to flush all of the water out, disconnect it from the spigot, and open as many valves and holes as possible (similar to the way normal hoses are winterized). Even if the plastic is capable of withstanding the cold temperatures, the last thing you want is for water to freeze within it and breaking the tube. Refer back to the literature included with your system.

Chickens

            Chickens don’t need to be winterized per se: they thrive happily down to -20°F. But their water is a different story. You need to find a way to prevent it from freezing. I’ve seen designs for passive water heaters, which use a combination of black materials (which absorb light and reemit it as heat) and the greenhouse effect (where a clear container traps sunlight as heat) to keep water above freezing and therefore potable.

I aspire to use something like that one day. But for right now, I use a run-of-the-mill heated waterer. It’s like any chicken watering fount, but has a plug and a heating element built into the base, which turns on when the temperature of the water drops close to freezing. It’s also possible to build one by resting a standard plastic waterer on a heating dog bowl.

Otherwise, just know that your chickens are in for a boring couple of months. There won’t be much garden waste, bugs, grass, and the like for them to enjoy, so you’ll have to give them something to do to prevent cabin fever – like hanging heads of cabbage for them to jump and peck, or just bringing them new and interesting treats (they seemed to really enjoy the acid whey from my homemade Greek yogurt, today). On a more practical note, you also want to make sure to have a good supply of your bedding(s) of choice, as well as their feed. Winter isn’t the best time to run out of these.

Other

            If you have a vermiculture system, it’s best to bring it inside (a basement or unused room), or at least the garage during the winter. The worms don’t do well in the freezing temperatures. If they must stay outside, find the warmest place you can – like within the henhouse, which is naturally kept a little warmer, by the birds.

Finally, you generally want to make sure that the urban farm is clean as we enter the winter months. This is one I have struggled with in recent years, mostly because this time of the fall was usually when school would really pick up.

Make sure all of your tools are clean, sorted, and put somewhere that will be easily accessible come spring. Collect all seed-starting trays, plastic cells/pots, plant markers, and anything else that can get lost or damaged in the snow, clean them off, and bring them inside! I can’t tell you how many black plastic trays I’ve lost because of this type of neglect.

Finally, make sure you’re on the mailing lists of your favorite seed companies. December will be here before you know it, and you know what that means: time to start it all again!

My column appears every other Sunday in The Woonsocket Call (also in areas where The Pawtucket Times is available). The above article is the property of The Woonsocket Call and The Pawtucket Times, and is reprinted here with permission from these publications. These are excellent newspapers, covering important local news topics with voices out of our own communities, and skillfully addressing statewide and national news. Click these links to subscribe to The Woonsocket Call or to The Pawtucket Times. To subscribe to the online editions, click here for The Call and here for The Times. They can also be found on Twitter, @WoonsocketCall and @Pawtuckettimes.