Well, there is good news and bad news. All seven of the overwintering favas I trialled have survived the winter and are perky and ready to grow up up up with the lengthening days. The bad news is that how will I know which ones are the most cold tolerant when they all survived? The best kind of trial is when 90% of the varieties do poorly, and 10% thrive. Then you know you are on to something. We simply didn't have a harsh winter this year. The super cold northeaster we had in January followed a snowfall, which seems to have protected the plants well. Even my winter garden made it through far better than it did the past few winters. It was a gradual hardening off this year, which is fabulous...but as I said, I didn't get good info about the favas. 

Our 1200 garlic plants look beautiful, happily popping up through the mulch. We did a side by side comparison of mulched vs unmulched this year. The unmulched version was already full of weeds, but seems to be growing more vigorously, since the bare soil can warm up more quickly. 

So I enjoyed a couple of very beautiful february afternoons weeding the garlic, favas, and overwintering wheat and barley trials. I am ecstatic about having overwintered crops that I can enjoy working with without having to wait until the soil is dry enough to till up with the tractor and warm enough to germinate new seed. It felt wonderful to be back out to the field at Broadleaf Farm, a very special place, with the most beautiful soil that is so lovely to weed. The field at home, on the other hand, is a soggy, heavy, mucky mess and I don't even want to think about planting anything there until at least May. 

Georgia and I will have the details out on our CSA very soon. We are shooting for March 1. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I am busy filling seed and book orders and looking forward to having a small booth at the Bellingham Farmer's Market this year. I hope to see you there!

It's February, the time of the year when the abundant fall harvest has either been eaten or lost to rot. For a local food eater, the months of late winter and early spring are the most challenging. But here at my household at Riverhaven Farm, the residents are fat and happy. Our pantry is stuffed with amazing homegrown, foraged, and locally-raised ingredients. From the organic pastured pork and wild-caught salmon in the freezer to the overloaded shelves of canned foods, to the sauerkraut and root-cellared apples, potatoes, and squash, to the winter greens that survived the January blast of cold, we are smiling. The many jars of beans and grains are certainly a welcome contribution to our winter food supply as well.

I'm busy preparing for the many workshops and presentations I have scheduled for the winter and spring. I am speaking six times on the subject of growing beans and grains. I am also co-teaching a homesteading series that will cover a broad range of topics. The schedule of talks are as follows: 
GROW YOUR OWN DRY BEANS AND GRAINS
COMMUNITY EDUCATION WORKSHOPS

*February 7– Bellingham Gluten Intolerance Group support mtg - 7pm
*February 13 – Everson Garden Club meeting (WECU Everson) – 7pm
March 7 – Community Food Co-op Class (Cordata Store) – 6:30pm ($10)March 17 – Deming Library (Local Food Works series) – 10am
*April 9 – Lummi Island Gardener’s Network (Lummi Island)– 6:30pm
April 21 – Cloud Mountain Farm (Everson) – 1:30-3pm
   *Non-members please call firstSPRING HOMESTEADING SERIES Location: Riverhaven Farm (Lynden)Sundays from 2-4pm; April 15, 29; May 6, 20; June 3
$85 for the series + $15 registration feeRegister through Whatcom Folk School

Threshing soup peas and garbanzos with friends

Somehow I've completely neglected to blog for over 6 weeks, while meanwhile, the entire harvest season has come and gone. It's been a busy time! Right now I am relaxing in Missoula, Montana, with friends who also appreciate the art of growing quinoa, dry beans, and garbanzos.

The 2011 harvest season was the best so far for BBGP. The late summer sunshine and beautiful dry september was perfect for drying down all of the crops that matured. The cool summer meant that the soybeans and amaranth struggled and didn't mature well, but everything else was primo. The dry beans yielded about twice as well as last year, wildly exceeding my expectations. All of the beans are threshed and the grains and peas are all threshed but needing to be winnowed.

We had a number of successful work parties this year, so I want to give a shout out to all those who came and learned and helped and had fun. It's truly more enjoyable with company! We had a couple of great articles published this summer as well: in the June issue of GROW NW magazine and the October issue of the Community Food Co-op's newsletter. Thank you to the writers/editors for helping to get the word out about what we are doing. Lastly, I was invited by Tom Thornton, of Cloud Mountain Nursery, to have my dry beans and grains on display at the annual Fruit Festival. It was a very exciting weekend and I enjoyed chatting with hundreds of folks over the two days.

My cohorts and I are now busily planning for next season. A collaborative storage foods CSA is in the works for next year, I am putting the finishing touches on an instruction manual for growing dry beans & grains in the Pacific NW, we are planning workshops for winter and spring, and I am gearing up for seed sales, hoping to have everything ready by December. Thanks to everyone who provided motivation, encouragement, and enthusiasm this year. I feel especially confident that this project deserves my attention and passion and I look forward to diving in even deeper.

Happy Autumn!!

It seems like it is going to be awhile before my earliest crops are mature and dried down. The weeding pressure has relented but there is no harvesting to be done yet, so a few weeks of breathing time (camping, hiking, and planning for next year) have arrived. I am anxiously awaiting when the grains, soup peas, and garbanzos are ready so I can have a harvesting and threshing workshop. I think that will be loads of fun.Meanwhile, I have been too busy lately to make more tortillas and I crave them immensely. I had purchased a new Estrella masa grinder a few weeks back at the Mexican grocery store down the street and have been looking forward to trying it out. So I finally spent a few hours this morning making tortillas. I made about 70 tortillas from 8 cups of my Mandan Bride dent corn. Here are some masa-making instructions for those of you who are interested in making your own tortillas:

HOMEMADE MASA
Dissolve 4 Tablespoons of "Cal"/Slaked Lime (can be purchased at a Mexican grocery) in 12 cups of water.

Add 4 cups of dent corn kernels and slowly bring to a boil over a half hour. Let it boil for a few minutes, then turn off the heat.

Let sit overnight.

Rinse the corn until the water runs clear. Use your hands to briskly rub the kernels to assist in removing the cal. Drain in a strainer

Grind in a masa grinder as fine as you can get it (it won't be fine like flour and you will get a wet, coarse dough).

Make the dough into a ball. Add a bit of water if needed for it to stick together. It should be just wet enough to be able to make a golfball sized ball hold together.

Use a plastic bag to line either side of your tortilla press. Put a bit of oil on each side. Press tortillas and carefully peel them off the plastic.

They should be fried in a cured but dry cast iron pan on high enough heat so that they turn slightly brown on each side in about 30 seconds, but the pan does not smoke.

Note: if you do not have a tortilla press, you can make little patties with your hands, or you can press the dough between oiled plastic sheets with a heavy pan or other flat-bottomed object that you can press down on. But believe me, a good tortilla press is invaluable if you are going to do a lot of this!

Good Luck and happy masa-making.

So far I'm enjoying the summer immensely. Working hard, no doubt, but every day brings new treasures and introspections and simple beauties of nature. The field blows me away every time I walk out there. Most of the crops so lush and vital, the peas and garbanzos are thinking about starting to dry down, the beans still vivaciously filling in the paths so that there will be nowhere to walk come harvest time.

I decided to irrigate this year. Normally I've practiced experimenting with dry farming, but a few dousings is what I will apply this year. Last week I helped Dusty move the 40 foot long aluminum pipes to my upper section of field and we ran the sprinklers for 3 or 4 hours. Celt and I hooked up several hoses and ran them from the nearest spigot to the lower field and hand watered our squash, half the wilting buckwheat, and her beans. Everything has responded so well, and the lushness was beautiful to see afterward. The potatoes still struggle, the soybeans have barely recovered from all the bunny pressure, and the corn is tasselling so short. But I'll have my hands full in another couple weeks with harvest. I better go camping now while I still have the chance!

A few friends joined in today for some light weeding and we got a lot accomplished. It feels so good to be able to have fun, gossip, laugh, and be productive at the same time. I love the idea of having gardening partners in my life regularly, growing food is a joyous thing to share, and a key component to my own happiness.

As if we woke up in an entirely new and foreign (and lovely) land, the summer solstice has brought us warm weather and sunshine today, to last all week (we hope). The field is looking amazing these days, with all of the early crops full in their beds and lush. The field feels vital and enthusiastic as if all the crops are feeling content and productive.

Ok, enough of the poetry. We have had some setbacks this year, such as the birds ripping out a whole lot of corn and bean seedlings, rabbits mowing down the soybeans and storage onion tops, and germination issues with some of the seed purchased from seed companies. Heck, this may be a small operation, but my self-saved seed pops up thoroughly and enthusiastically whereas much of the stuff I've gotten from seed companies has been less than reliable.

Despite the setbacks, most of the crops are flourishing. An update to this point includes the following: the soup pea and garbanzo trials are growing fabulously, with most of the peas in flower (the bush peas have white flowers and so far all of the pole peas have two-toned pinkish, reddish, or purplish flowers! The barley and wheat are headed out, I forgot to look at the oats but I don't think it's headed yet (planted late). The lentils are flowering. The potatoes are weedy and could use another hilling up soon, but are holding their own. Sunflowers (oilseed and edible seed) look strong. Transplanted corn is big and robust. Millet is small but germinated well and is filling in the beds thickly.  Amaranth is doing well, still less than a foot tall. Same with quinoa but for the second year in a row, we planted too late and don't expect it to get big enough to harvest. All of the bush beans are starting to take off, pole beans are climbing their trellis.  Soybeans and cowpeas are growing slower but will love the sun and heat this week.
We've been working hard to keep the weeds down, hoping to stick with hand-tools during the growing. I'm out with the wheel hoe at least once a week keeping the paths manageable. The evenings have been idyllic out in the field and it is fabulous to be living at the farm this year so I can take advantage of short morning and evening tasks, when it is so peaceful out.

Our first work party is this saturday, June 25 from 3-6. Get ahold of us if you'd like to come. We will be sharing a home-cooked meal of beans and cornbread (what else?) at the end. Cheers!

Well, aren’t we lucky! An entire day without rain. Actually, two. But today was the day the soil was dry enough to till. And with 100% rain forecast for tomorrow, it appears it may be the only day in the first half of May that tilling has the opportunity to occur. I feel eternally grateful that Dusty was able to squeeze in my needs this morning, in and around the zillion other tilling and dry day tasks that he was rushing around doing. The second he began tilling my late-season planting area, I dove in, with transplants, seeds, trench-digging hoe, clipboard, stakes, sharpies, and measuring devices flying in all directions. I had no time to lose. With only two hours between the soil prep and the time I needed to leave for doctor’s appointments in town, I was determined to do as much as possible in the fluffy new soil. I have had enough of planting after the pounding rains have compacted the ground.

I was in paradise. Today was one of those days when you realize that the depth of joy and contentment welling up inside is unsurpassable, and a pure sign that you are doing exactly what you ought to be. I finally feel like a farmer. I want to do this more now than ever. And right in tune with how a farmer ought to be prioritizing life, I called up and cancelled my doctor’s appointment. It seemed like the stupidest thing in the world to leave the field when this may be the one and only day I get to feel the warm, cool, softness that is newly tilled, moist soil in the sunshine. So my two hours turned into five (I didn’t cancel the massage appointment I had later in the day, as I knew I’d need it!). And I planted 14 varieties of dry bush beans (20’ each), a 100’ row of pole beans (10 varieties), transplanted garbanzos, corn, and storage onions, and marked beds for millet, quinoa, and soybeans. Everything is immaculately staked, labeled, and measured for ease of comparing yields. Rows are evenly spaced. Pole beans are marked for pole installation.

It’s been a challenging spring. The early stuff has lots of grass coming up already, because it wasn’t properly tilled (didn’t get the right weather). I gave it a good hoeing last night, though, so it’s fairly well under control. I wish you all the best despite the challenges. May your gardens also thrive in the face of cool temps and rain rain rain.