It’s been awhile since we sent some news, so we thought we’d start reconnecting by sharing some photos.
From the Winter Archives. Above left: Noah and Mary inspect the building of some farm cabinetry in shop. That was the winter of 2018, and those are the cabinet frames that were destined for our yurt. Right: 2017 was a cold winter, and Noah installs the (still working) farm-built germination chamber in the farmstore. Our farmstore opened in 2016.
Winter is a time for farm improvements. The shop got a facelift with a large workbench that doubles as tool storage. There’s a new rolling cart that holds fasteners and wrenches. Being a farm that still fabricates a lot of our own tools, cleaning up the workshop was a necessity. We found some things to donate to other farmers and took the rest to local reclaimed building stores. That’s not a puppet theater display on the tabletop; it’s just a freshly assembled nest box for our laying hens.
At the height of winter — just over a month ago — our tunnels were bursting with greens. These greens, all harvested now, were harvested as long as the temperatures were above freezing in our unheated tunnels. Since we receive so little sunlight in the winter, we are uncovering in this image to promote growth and airflow. To make the daily covering and uncovering easier, most of our unheated tunnels have thirty foot wide row cover.
This is the first year that we’ve grown microgreens at scale. A good portion of the reason is Sabrina. With some help setting up the system from us, she’s been seeding and harvesting weekly. We grow these using sunlight in our nursery and a small amount of supplemental light. Our favorite (and most reliable) varieties are radish and pea shoot greens.
From the winter warm, we’ve also had a decent amount of spinach, radishes, carrots, garlic, occasionally other fresh greens and eggs. The carrots and radishes were harvested in the fall and are kept in our walk in cooler at 35 degrees.
In the winter, we spend a lot of time on soil fertility. Large organic alfalfa bales are purchased from a farmer-colleague and the alfalfa is spread and then flail mowed on beds that we haven't tapped for the season. And we compost! With the help from chicken bedding, we make about 40 yards of compost a year. It's turned regularly in the winter, to take advantage of moisture. You can't see it in the photo, but it's steaming hot.
“And it’s also hauling season. We scavenge the countryside, literally Oregon on the left and New Mexico on the right for good deals on quality, used materials. It cuts down our footprint a lot. That load in New Mexico included dozens of walkin cooler panels and a cooler-compressor unit. It’s part of building a sustainable farm.”
All the materials need somewhere to go. The footprint for the new farm center is large, but it includes a new farmstore, several walk-incoolers, adequate indoor wash and pack space, some better climate control, a nursery, and a space for growing mushrooms. There is also a space for events as well, those workshops we’ve always wanted to have, or a winter film series.
The whole north lean-to will be storage, mushroom growing space, a loading dock for our growers cooperative and help a few neighbor farmers use this as a shared space. On sunny days you may see us out here eating lunch, but on cold rainy days there’s a space for the whole crew to hang out inside!
There are a lot of drains in this project. We hired out the cement, but we did all the drains, rebar, and design work ourselves. Most of all the other work you’ll see us doing this spring.
The cement pouring this winter was dicey. It involved using a lot of cement blankets and added a huge amount of chores to uncovering and covering the weeks it took to do the excavation and drains. On the morning where we poured the last of the cement, some of the soil was frozen about a 1/4”. We fired up the farm flame weeder and that took care of the problem.
And there it is. Or at least the base of it. It’s our biggest project yet. We are daunted by it, but also excited. It’s something we’ve needed for a long long time. But it’s the biggest project we’ve ever taken on and when we aren’t in the farm office working on our crop plan, interviewing perspective crew, or working on another project, we are likely making working on this. It’s been more than a year of planning and we are excited to see this project take shape.
All the while we’ve converted a small part of our nursery, heated by a pellet stove, into some wash and pack space. This is last weeks’ spinach harvest.
But the pipes in our little sauna/bathhouse where we wash eggs (yes, there’s also an egg washing station in the new farm center), froze. So we had to wash eggs at home until we thawed pipes. Next fall we’ll insulate those pipes a bit better.
The winter laying hens have really been thriving. We finished a new chicken barn, the 4th to the fleet, just in time for really cold weather and the new flock (pictured here a few weeks ago) lives together, albeit in two different mobile hen barns. Their winter range is part of our orchard.
Malaya, ever a tomato scavenger, is in high form, sleeping in the snow on sunny days, waiting for farm visitors, and somehow, got one of the last farm tomatoes of the year.
Christmas Day 2020, with the whole farm crew, including both Sabrina and Willa, in the farm van off for an excursion.