Learning to grow food

Spinach! (photo by Meaghin Kennedy of These Salty Oats)

Beets!

Basil!

As 2014 comes to a close, I’m already planning for how I can use my 2015 summer break for agricultural work.  I’m eager to keep learning and continue practicing the agricultural skills that I’ve gained in the past five years.  However, I also wanted to step back and take a moment to acknowledge what a year 2014 was for growing food!  I’m happy with small successes and I learned a lot in 2014 about how I want to grow food in the future.

So, here’s some reflections and photos to share with you about learning to grow food in 2014 in the life of Erika.  (FYI - There are lots of photos.  Remember that you can simply click on the photo to view it in a larger size.)

In the early spring, I co-taught a Seed to Supper class at the Oregon Food Bank.  Seed to Supper is a program of both the Oregon Food Bank and Oregon State University Extension, and is essentially a 5-week basic gardening course for adults who are on a limited budget.  Topics include picking a garden site, soil health, seeds, planting, pest management, watering, and harvesting.

I had a lot of fun teaching this class!  I was able to review basic agricultural concepts and apply them to a home garden setting.  It was also great to be with an enthusiastic group of people (OFB staff, fellow volunteers, and class participants) who had a variety of gardening experiences and expertise to share with the class.  On our last day of class, we took a field trip to one of the Oregon Food Bank’s Learning Gardens, which is the companion program to Seed to Supper.  The Learning Gardens allow for volunteers and students to help produce food near OFB’s two distribution centers in Portland.  The gardens serve as a demonstration site for gardening education and they produce lots of fresh produce that is donated to OFB.  It was cool to see how this program is able to do so much with a small amount of land.  

Garlic at OFB's Learning Garden

Lettuce at OFB's Learning Garden

 Also in the early spring, I was eagerly planning my own home garden as I knew I would be around for the majority of the growing season.  My family and I installed more raised beds in our backyard and built a chicken-proof fence.  For the first time I successfully grew some of my own plant starts and eventually planted them outdoors when it became warm enough. 

Tomato starts that I grew from seed

Spring plantings in backyard

When I began working for Mercy Corps NW Refuge Gardens (link to previous post), I transitioned some of my focus away from the home garden and more to the programs’ garden sites.  In the early spring in SE Portland, we spent time waiting for the ground to dry out and warm up due to some heavy rain spells.  When things started drying up and warming up, we built our 200-foot-long raised beds by hand, untangled a lot of drip tape, and transplanted or direct seeded a variety of crops.  Eventually, we had enough product to go to market and begin selling so that the families participating in the project could start making some money. 

Early season plantings & weeding at Sherrett garden

Early season braising mix

Market!

Early and mid-summer were a lot of fun at work.  While I some spent time helping families with field work and with the succession plantings (more raised beds!), I spent a lot of time focused on harvest and post-harvest handling, helping our produce look pretty and stay fresh for the farmers market.  At the start of every harvest day, I would walk the two garden sites and see what product was ready for picking that day, what would be ready soon, and what needed some attention (aka, weeding).  That got rather interesting when I was trying to evaluate a crop that I had never grown before, but with the help of phone calls to the program director (who worked at our larger growing site) and speaking with the families, we usually figured it out.  Also in mid-summer, I got to visit the Damascus farm site to take some photos, and it was amazing how much was growing out there compared to when I saw it in April.

Lok building raised beds

Jumuna and Guman harvesting spinach

Lok direct seeding summer plantings

Working in packing shed (photo by Meaghin Kennedy of These Salty Oats)

Packing CSA boxes

Transplanting at the Damascus farm site

At home, the biggest struggles I had mid-season were related to watering and rodents.  I was learning about home-scale drip irrigation, then got really lazy and didn’t finish installing irrigation to all of the beds, and was haphazardly watering some things by hand.  Eventually I got drip irrigation for all of the raised crops, but next time I’ll be smart at the start of the season and have the irrigation ready to go earlier.  And then there were the rats, which seem to enjoy eating garden vegetables.  I’d never dealt with a rat problem before, so I didn’t really know what to do.  We removed a large wood pile in the yard (where evidently they had shelter) and our cat went to work.  While the rodent problem was never entirely solved, it certainly seems better now than it did during the summer.

Montesino grape tomatoes (saved from the rats)

Spending time watering in the backyard

There always seems to be a tipping point during the season (I’d say mid-to-late summer) when things just grow like crazy.  After so many months of waiting and hoping and thinking that you as the farmer/gardener are doing things to make a difference, the plants just take off and you realize that you really only have so much control (and understanding) in the whole process of growing a plan.  At work, we had more product than we knew what to do with (especially cucumbers and sungold tomatoes), and I was eagerly buying up bumper crops of various items to preserve at home for the wintertime.  At home, despite my peak season neglect, most plants were vigorously growing.  (And, if it weren’t for our rodent problem, I would’ve been able to eat a lot of those things.  Instead I think I mostly just fed a lot of rats.) 

At home...

Richmond Green Apple cucumber, from Dancing Bear Farm seed

Front yard mania

Green zebra tomato

We planted a dozen new dahlia plants this year.

At work...

Sherrett garden in August

Cippolini onions

Sungold tomatoes

Italian sweet candy roaster peppers

Beans!

Dragon carrots

PSU market madness

Sungolds & shishito peppers

Onions, eggplant, peppers, black radishes, shallots, cauliflower

Chioggia, Touchstone Gold, and Detroit Red beets

September CSA box

At peak harvest time, I moved.  I spent my 23^rd birthday carrying furniture and boxes into an apartment in Eugene and started my graduate program two days later.  I was looking forward to spending more time with Andrew and to another adventure, but I really wasn’t ready to leave all of the food I had been trying so hard to grow.  Moreover, I had met so many wonderful people and families in the Portland-area food production community and was sad to leave them.  Nonetheless, I left my work and gardens feeling very optimistic about my future in sustainable agriculture.  Hopefully, my graduate program can give me some more tools for how to combine my agricultural skills with social justice and community organizing.

Lok harvesting pink radishes during my last week of work

Laxmann harvesting black radishes

Since moving to Eugene, I haven’t had the chance to do much gardening or farming.  I have a small community garden plot where I planted garlic and some windowsill herb plants that I propagated from home.  I attended the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Convivium in October.  I also visited a friend who lives at Berggren Demonstration Farm  (a Rogue Farm Corps host farm!) and helped with her animal chores a couple of times, and attended Food for Lane County’s GrassRoots Garden’s annual Carrot Harvest Day.  On campus, I work for the Student Sustainability Coalition and am working with some other students and campus initiatives to coordinate food justice activities for 2015.  So, while I’m not getting my boots or hands in the dirt much, at least I’m working on other useful skills.

Grove campus community garden

Turkeys at Berggren

Fall chard at Berggren

Spending all my money at the farmers market in late fall

I’m in Portland now for winter break, eating lots of onions, squash, cabbage, and stone fruit.  The home garden looks at lot different now that it did just a few months ago.  We have some herbs and hardy greens still hanging in there, although I did let the chickens eat a lot of what was in the backyard (or maybe that was the aphids).

The garden after the first frost

Lacinato kale in December

Chickens in action, despite the frosty weather

I’m sure by the end of the school year (or before then if I have a chance) I’ll be ready to spend a good chunk of time outdoors in the dirt!  Happy New Year!