Hey Folks:Fennel take so long to grow. This one is about a month old, still two inches or so in diameter.
It should be ready in about another forty days.
Fennel is a great pairing with fish, and thick wedges of it are a fine addition to a kabob.
Eaten raw, it makes a tasty salad with apple, almonds or sunflower seeds, and a small quantity of sweet onion (I recommend Cipollini). Dress with lemon and a spot of olive oil and serve slightly chilled.
And one more surprise.
The farm gate store is now "open' for non- customers.
I have a surplus of scapes.
See the "farm gate store" page for details, forward the info to friends and family.
I'm still tweaking the harvest routine to make packing the delivery quicker. Each year gets a little more complex, and changes need to be made to keep the process efficient.
I mentioned in the previous post that there was a curious absence of cucumber beetles and cabbage moths. They started to arrive this week, I assume that they were knocked back by the frost in May.
These insects are only a problem when the plants are young and vulnerable. After the crops are established, they tend to outgrow any damage.
I identified the red frog (pictured in the previous post). It is a wood frog, probably travelling from one hedgerow to another and eating terrestrial insects along the way. This is a new species for the farm (and me - I've never seen one before in the many hours of hiking and camping I have accomplished). Hopefully, I'll find a salamander at Whitsend next - we came across these regularly at Elmtree Farm.
The only other nature note are the fledgling birds being guided into the field by their parents. The sparrows like to sit up on the tomato stakes and watch for insects on the ground or in the foliage. Every time I seed another bed, the crows come to check it out (hoping for corn or forage oats I suspect).
I had observed in past years that the summer solstice brings a change in the weeds and grasses - leaf growth slows down and roots and seed heads start forming very quickly.
During the last week or so before the solstice, I mow the paths as much as possible to gather up the leafy material for the compost. This material is known as 'green manure'.
Mowing the paths is half the task. To make room for the new compost, the older compost windrows have to be turned to make way. It is a dance, one activity cannot resume until the other is finished.
After rolling the older compost windrows, I took a temperature reading, one windrow had reached an internal temperature of 94 degrees (34 degrees C). Too hot for any weed seeds or pathogens to survive.
Some of this compost will be applied in the fall to beds where next years root and fruit crops will be planted, the rest is for next spring.
As for this year's application, all of the bean, pea, and leaf crops are getting a double application of compost. It's taken a couple of years to build up a decent supply of this amendment, and not soon enough.
I wrote in previous years about a suspected imbalance of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus in the field - root crops did very well, and fruit crops did poorly. I seem to have corrected that with added application of rock phosphate in the past two years (last year's peppers did very well, and when I get them right, the roots are doing as good as ever).
However, the three macro nutrients are only a small part of soil fertility building.
Signs of high soil fertility:
Crumbly soil surface. When the soil is wet here at Whitsend, the soil surface takes on a crumbly look, but when it dries it becomes flat and hard.
Earthworms. A farm with very high fertility can have up to 100 earthworms in a cubic foot of soil. * Whitsend has much fewer (I've not done a formal count yet, the number varies in different parts of my field. It is certainly less than 100 worms per cubic foot).
Soil structure. A block of soil can have numerous cavities and tunnels built by worms, other insects, decayed roots of dandelions and such, and the action of broadforking. Again, there are variations from one part of my field to another.
Water retention. A fertile soil retains water much longer. Within 48 hours of a heavy rainfall, my soil surface is dry, and within 96 hours, even the soil just below the surface is drying out.
These observations tell me that I have the macronutrients in balance, and now I have to bring out the the fertility of the soil.
During my internship at Elmtree, I learned that Stinging Nettle was a plant that grew where there was a 'latent fertility'. This plant grows vigorously at Whitsend. The potential is in the ground, but needs to be worked out.
The answer for the time being is to begin adding more compost. Now that my compost material is at a sufficient quantity, I can start doubling the applications.
It makes sense in hindsight. When I first began to work this acreage, I removed a lot of quackgrass roots, which are very difficult to compost properly (I lost one of my compost windrows in my second year because of this).
This quackgrass was fertility locked away in a form that was not usable by me, and by tossing it into the hedgerow, I essentially removed it from the field without replenishing it.
Kind of like a physics equation about energy.
If
Whitsend Fertility (WF) = QGrass + Other growth (crops, other weeds, insects, fungi, etc...)
Where value of
Whitsend Fertility = 10
QGrass = 5
Other growth = 5
Then
WF (10) - QGrass (5) = Other Growth (5).
Yes, I know I'm no PhD, I understood math but didn't care for it and my science teachers were either nerds or bores and even the good one wasn't inspiring. So I never learned the language.
But I like the concept of the equation. It explains what I need to do...add as much compost (or more) as it takes to replace the amount of quackgrass that I removed.
Responsible farming is all about maintaining a balance. And learning.Talk to you next week, perhaps with some pictures.
Bob
* "Grasp the Nettle", Peter Proctor, Random House New Zealand, 1997, page 27.