Amarosia Organic Garden

There are basically two kinds of weeds; annuals and perennials. In both cases tillage is futile. It brings annual weed seeds to near the surface where they germinate and chops rhizomes (horizontal roots) into tiny pieces and spreads them all over your garden, from where they send up new shoots.

Annuals can be recognised by the fact that millions of the things will germinate from their seeds in any freshly tilled soil. These include hempnettle, lambs quarters and mustards. They can be controlled by using the colineal or stirrup hoes to slice just below the surface, cutting the roots, while hopefully not stimulating new seeds to germinate. It takes me about 7 minutes to weed a 60ft bed using the colineal hoe… however, this needs to be done repeatedly as new waves of annuals decide that it is their turn to choose life.

Perennials on the other hand reproduce from roots and rhizomes (horizontal roots) and must be dug out. Trying to cut them at the neck is like trying to slay a dragon; two heads replace the initial one and you are left with a bigger problem than you had before. I spent a merry morning digging through a bed using an E-Z digger, carefully removing all(!) of the tiny pieces of prickly lettuce rhizomes that I could find. This took me nearly two hours for a 60ft bed, but hopefully will deal with the worst of the problem. It is VERY time consuming and hard on the back, but it is easier to remove them from an empty bed than one full of spinach and carrots.

Now I’m going to write to Burt, of Burt’s Bees, to offer him a bucket of wild lettuce, which he uses in some of his soaps, at a very good price.

These are my most commonly used hand tools; (from left to right) The E-Z Digger reattached to a long handle for making and closing furrows and some weeding (Veseys), the Colineal Hoe for weeding annuals (Johnnys), the Stirrup Hoe for slicing out the roots of tough weeds  and the soil rake for preparing nice level beds (both Home Hardware).

These gloves are the most sturdy ladies gloves I’ve found so far. Most are designed for light work and the fingers rapidly wear through, or they are ‘one size fits all’ which means ‘one size fits no-body’.  I found these at Marks Work Warehouse after demanding ‘mens gloves that fit ladies’. They won’t last forever, but they have at least lasted more than the usual 4 weeks.

Today Rowena is modeling kneepads from Marks Work Warehouse (adjustable sizing with nice thick padding), Sturdy cord pants with LOTS of pockets bought second hand so that the raspberry and mudstains won’t cause too much upset and a pair of surprise boots presented to me by Lise Fournier who acquired them unintentionally and did not require boots 4 sizes too small for her!

It was 14C in the greenhouse when I started seeding a rainbow of salad turnips (Scarlett queen, Hakurei, purple topped globe and goldina) plus two different coloured Bok-Choi’s. It was pretty pleasant working in there. The arugula obviously thinks so too as it is germinating nicely.

I had been worried whether the seeder was working properly, which it clearly was!

Afterwards I worked on transplanting some claytonia which had overwintered, to a more practical location closer to the doors. I used the E-Z digger to dig the plants, make furrows and then dropped the transplants (with lots of roots and soil still attached) right into the furrows.

I use the same E-Z digger when making and closing furrows for direct seeding radishes, turnips and some salad greens.

After that was complete I worked in the big greenhouse doing battle with the weeds. By the time I finished it was 42C in there and I was sweating into my eyes (delightful, I know). Outside it was -2C so a quick roll in the snow seemed really appealing.

Apparently I placed a tray of seedlings in the wrong spot. Karima (our delightful cat) informed us of this mistake by tipping a tray onto the floor. The point has been taken and they are all now on a higher shelf.

These are our Sungold tomatoes, already beginning to grow their first true leaves. They will need to be moved to the greenhouse really soon as they are beginning to get leggy in the limited light available in the sunroom.

I have finished weeding, raking and seeding the second bed in the small greenhouse and am now standing back and waiting for something to happen. Note the footprints in the soil. You have to walk behind this seeder, unless you build an offset handle, so this means walking in the beds. The seeder has an easy emptying hopper system which is neat, however, it does require removing the handle each time, which gets pretty annoying after seeding 12 different salad greens!

The first bed has begun to germinate VERY densely, so we’ll see how that affects the final plants. The rows closest to the edge of the greenhouse are germinating most slowly simply because its freezing still outside so there is a temperature gradient from the wall to the inside of the greenhouse.

I was introduced to the concept of soil blocking by a organic farmer from near Fredericton, who learnt about them from Eliot Coleman, author of many books about small scale, local, organic agriculture.

The basic idea is that instead of putting loose potting soil into multiple plant pots made of flimsy plastic that quickly get destroyed and end up on the land fill, you compress wet potting mix into cubes which are free standing and don’t require a pot. We purchased our soil block makers from Johnnys Selected Seeds in Maine who are the closest suppliers to New Brunswick (they are made by a company in England).

This is the smallest of the set; each block is 3/4 inch in each direction. We start off tiny seeded crops such as tomatoes, peppers, herbs and most flowers in these tiny blocks and then a week after germination we slot them into the next size up blocks.

The blocks are set into trays or on sheets of sturdy plastic which are reusable many times. Each cube has a little depression in the top into which your seed can be dropped. One single plastic sheet (the size of a typical planting tray) can hold 320 mini cubes which saves a lot of space in our germination chamber!

Seeds are sometimes covered with a sprinkling of potting mix but often not, because the cubes hold so much moisture and the germination chamber is so warm that the seeds don’t need to be buried to experience ideal germination conditions.

The tomato plants (which looked like the photo above 5 days ago!) photographed yesterday have already changed colour, developing green leaves and pink tinged stems with hundreds of tiny hairs. It won’t be long before they are 8 ft tall vines in the greenhouse!

So far most of the tomatoes, the dahlias, winter savory, Genovese basil and hyssop have all germinated. After being moved to a sunny spot the leaves quickly grow and change from yellow to bright green.

We are still trying to figure out how deal deal with the problem of plants emerging with their heads (first leaves) stuck firmly inside the seed case. Some tomatoes don’t have this problem too much (Sungold) , some are easy to remove (Una Hartstock and Yellow Plum) and some damage the heads really badly when you pull them off (DeBarao and Principe Borghese). It takes delicate hands to pull the seed cases off without pulling the leaves off too!

… in snow, updating the website and seedlings.

I’m busy doing the final edits on the fresh produce section of the website. Lots of information soon to be added. Dave meanwhile is translating merrily.

The snow has drifted right across my access path to the greenhouses putting paid to my plans to seed some more carrots; I could have dragged myself through the drifts, but not with a 6 row seeder in tow!

In the meantime there is life in the germinating chamber. The Genovese basil, Dahlias and Hyssop are starting to germinate already and are soon to be moved to a sunny windowsill and from there to the greenhouse.

We would love to take on two apprentices during the 2008 growing season (from May to October). Krystle would of course be our number one choice for one of the apprenticeships, but sadly for us she is heading out west to Wwoof her way around a number of different farms and gain experiences from each of them.

Our ideal apprentice would not necessarily come with prior experience (though some background knowledge isn’t a bad thing) but would have a ‘can-do’ attitude, good time keeping, a willingness to learn and to try new things and an acceptance that sometimes it does rain but we have to dig carrots anyway!

If this sounds like something that you, or someone you know would be interested in, please get in touch with us or read more about the farm and our apprenticeship program here.

And that doesn’t include the ones we seeded in the greenhouse in the morning!

Krystle and I started off the day by, once again, weeding in the greenhouse, then seeding spring onions (in bunches), two types of chard (bright lights for the colour and lucullus for the flavour) plus early beets.

After lunch we went back in and seeded spinach in the gaps left by the earthway seeder, of which there were many. I often think it would be easier to just hand seed in the first place. I know its very quick to use the Earthway seeder, but the results are patchy and you can’t afford to waste space in the greenhouse.

Next Krystle learnt how to use our mini soil blocker which makes freestanding soil cubes (so we don’t need to use plastic pots). When I get going with it I can make 1 tray of 60 blocks a minute which works out as 3600 cubes per hour!

Then we started seeding herbs, flowers and a selection of greenhouse tomatoes chosen their growth habit (tall and climbing so we can tie them up and fit a lot into a small space) and flavour. 10 kinds in total from large slicers to tiny sweet cherries.

We tried a number of seeding methods from fingers, to a tiny tim seeder from Veseys to using the moistened tip of a needle for the really tiny seeds of flowers like Veronica. We averaged 4 minutes per tray of 60 cubes; some of which were faster (big seeds such as Echinacea) and some of which were MUCH slower. The Tiny Tim seeder proved to be a winner with Krystle who could seed basil faster using it than seeding by hand. I’m still getting used to it, but I’m sure it will come in handy when seeding large quantities of onions and other small (but not minuscule) seeds.

Wow, what a great evening! I just taught the first of my organic gardening classes at the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition and it was really fantastic seeing the enthusiasm and creativity in my students, who ranged from experienced gardeners to newbies taking their first steps towards starting a garden.

 We spent the evening focusing on permaculture and at the end of the evening they worked in groups to design a golf course based on permaculture principles with great results; geese in the water traps to keep the water moving, keep the grass down and add ‘fertility’(!), edible landscapes (fruit and nut trees), Wind and water mills,  wildflower traps and biodegradable golf balls! Of course there are practical limitations (what happens if a golfer upsets a goose?) but the crux of the exercise was to think as big and as creatively as possible because we so often set artificial limits that don’t need to exist.