Garden Report 2011

Every winter we crunch our numbers and do a write-up that summarizes the garden's experience and progress in the past year. (Our 2010 report was posted January 13, 2011.)

Circle of the Sun’s 2011 growing season was a welcome contrast to 2010. We got sufficient rainfall for most crops, welcomed two interns from Kenya for three months (see the November 2011 issue), brought almost the entire 4,200 square feet into cultivation, built enough compost piles to meet our bed amendment and flat soil needs, and started expanding into the corner of the neighboring field.

We noticed a big difference in soil structure this year, in terms of ease of digging, between beds that were dug last year and those dug for the first time this year. We expect the 2012 addition of compost (at the rate of one 5-gallon-bucket per 100 sq ft) will also be a big help to the soil, both in terms of drainage and ease of working. We also found that, despite the heavy rains we had early in the season, our garden drained much better than the surrounding area. Our conclusion, then, is that double-digging alone is quite helpful to a heavy clay garden simply through the creation of pore space, which benefited the root systems of our crops in addition to the advantages already listed. And now, thanks to the “jar test” method, we can give an objective description of our heavy clay soil. During the internship each of us chose a spot in the garden, took a sample, and ran the jar test. The outcome ranged between 73% and 84% clay, 15% and 26% sand, and no silt registering whatsoever. That’s what they call “heavy clay”.

Weather was much more pleasant than last year regarding rainfall, erring slightly on the side of too much. We received 58.35” of rain in 2011. Readers may remember that we put our rain gauge out in 2010 mid-April, so we can’t compare last year’s reading directly with this year’s. But taking that into account, between April 15 and December 31 of 2010 we received 22”, compared with 45.75” for the same span in 2011. Wow! The National Weather Service states our average annual rainfall as 39.58”, so our reading this year registers as nearly 20” above average. Most of that rain came at convenient times, filling our rain barrels just as they became empty. And our crops were grateful for the regular water, giving us generally much better yields than in 2010.

Our temperatures were not notable, with the exception of two-and-a-half weeks in July when the highs stuck in the upper 90’s (a nasty shock to our interns Peris and Mary, who had just arrived from a more moderate climate). It was hot enough that beans had trouble pollinating, and the price of green beans doubled. We were glad, when we asked around, that we weren’t the only ones suffering from that problem! Our highest temperature of 2011 was 102° F in August, our lowest was -16° F in January. Last frost was 30° F on May 5, and our first frost was a hard one, 25° F on October 22.

Our season got off to a great start with timely flatting, thanks to an early spring project. With scavenged lumber and used windows from other people’s renovations, we framed out the south-facing garage door in an out-building and covered it in glazing. As a result, we had a place to put our seedlings that got good sun and never fell below freezing.

Our tally of crops this year looks much better than last year. I’ll start with our two big successes: kale (at left), and sorghum, which also did well last year. Our kale yield astounded us - our 20 ft² area gave us a total of 34.78 lb in its six-month life. That works out to 173.9 lb/100 ft², which is well over the Grow Biointensive high yield! With sorghum we exceeded the intermediate yield again for air-dry biomass, with 52.03 lb/100 ft², and raised the seed yield from last year’s 7.43 lb/100 ft² up to 12.8 lb/100 ft², halfway in between beginning and intermediate yields. Sweet potatoes also performed much better for us this year, the best section of which produced at the rate of 101.9 lb/100 ft². That puts it slightly higher than beginning yield, but more notable yet is that it marks the first time we have successfully grown sweet potatoes bigger around than our thumbs (some this year exceeded 1lb in weight). Also worth mentioning is that the most successful of our varieties came from a friend whose family has been cultivating it locally for over 100 years. That’s acclimatization.

Our other root crops - potatoes, carrots, onions and parsnips among them - continue to have difficulty thriving in our heavy soils, though we expect they will perform better as we add compost.

Cereal grains were a mixed bag in 2011. We grew out seeds from Bountiful Gardens’ rare-seed collection of barley and spring wheat, planting 4 ft² sections of each variety. While some sections only amounted to 7 or 8 plants, we managed to bring all of them to maturity and end up with 3 or 4 times the number of seed we started with. Our winter wheat and rye were a disappointment, maturing to give us well under beginning yields for both seed and biomass, and we attribute that to last year’s drought. We were not able to dig or transplant due to the hard dry soil in October and ended up broadcasting the seed, doing our best to chop it in with a rake.

Many experiments in the garden are devised as a matter of circumstance, and so it was that we decided to do a test comparing transplanted vs. broadcast flax and parsnips. Transplanting the entire sections of each would have required more flats than we had built, so we transplanted half of each crop and broadcast the other half. The results were noteworthy - poor germination and difficulty weeding their random spacing meant total failure of both broadcast sections, while the transplanted sections flourished. It may be worth doing the same comparison each year, simply for the dramatic visual during garden tours.

As part of the Grow Biointensive method we grow open-pollinated varieties of our crops, and put some energy into saving seed from year to year. With beans and wheat that is a simple matter, since the same thing we are saving to eat is what we will plant. Other crops are a little more complicated, but worth the effort for the satisfaction. This year, in addition to the crops whose seeds we eat, we saved from our lettuce, tomatoes, basil and squash plants, and from last year’s parsnips and parsley (at right) which, as biennials, had to survive winter to produce seed. Additionally, we went to great lengths to save seed from two varieties of flour corn. Corn crosses very easily, and our garden had GM corn planted within 20 feet of it this year, so we practiced our hand-pollinating skills and taught Mary and Peris how as well.

I’ll wrap up with one of the highlights of the growing season, which was our first garden tour. We intend to make it an annual event, open to the public, but tested the waters this year by inviting all of our friends and family. Over 50 people came to share food, get guided tours of the garden, hear our vision for the farm, and play in the sun. We look forward to an annual event that showcases the potential for small-scale sustainable agriculture to feed households and neighborhoods in our community.

Many thanks to all who helped to make this season a success for Circle of the Sun through organizing and funding the internship, hosting and supporting interns, coming over to work with us, and giving us advice and encouragement.

Time to set our sights on 2012!

9610

Garden Report 2010

This piece was originally written for and printed in Ecology Action's February 2011 newsletter.

This being our introductory Annual Garden Report, we have general details to share which will give an impression of Circle of the Sun’s situation. And before we do that, we must announce that the biggest event this year was unrelated to gardening: we welcomed our first child, Alten Lee, into the world at then end of June! Needless to say, he is a joyously complete distraction.

Our garden space has been cultivated in various ways for close to 40 years. The previous owner was a commercial farmer but kept this plot as his garden. We imagine he gardened it with chemicals, but he is no longer around to ask. Last year a church group used it for a good season of sweet corn, green beans, tomatoes and squash. The only thing of which we are certain is that it was rototilled with regularity.


The soil is mainly clay, with small pockets of sandiness here and there. While we have not yet taken a soil test, there seems to be little evidence that previous gardeners added organic matter. As a result, together with its clay composition and rototilled treatment, the top 10 inches are compact and very hard to work. This kind of thing happens with the use of a rototiller, where the clay soil is broken down into particles which feel loose initially but settle into a brick with time and rainfall.

Our best hope for creating a permanently loose and workable soil is non-mechanical cultivation and years of compost application. With an eye toward the long-term, then, we are forging ahead patiently. As this report continues, keep this discussion of our soil in mind, since it plays a role in so much of this year’s progress.

Because we moved here in March our entire season started late. While we should have started immediately by flatting a host of crops, we had no flats. Once flats were built and things were flatted we could focus on bed preparation and then planting, but the result of our late start meant that most of our crops went in the ground at least a month later than would have been ideal.

One of the steps we took was preparing for data collection. We installed our rain gauge and min/max thermometer halfway through April, so we have data for a little less than 3/4 of the year. For the purposes of projecting averages this is useless, but the information is more than sufficient for discussing this season.

First to the precipitation, which was (besides Alten) the most dramatic element of our year. Between April 16 and June 30 we recorded 12” of rain, 6.3” of which fell in June. The following six months, July to December, we recorded a total of 10”. The longest stretch we went without any rain was August 6 to September 12. But perhaps a better indication of how things went when all those crops were trying set seed and mature is that from the 13th of July to the 26th of October (8 days past our first hard frost) we recorded only 1.9 inches. The farmers we talked to in the area, commercial and market, all said this was well the driest year they can remember. And that we picked a heck of a year to start.

Secondly comes temperature, whose drama was more of the erratic nature. Between our last light frost (May 10, 32°F) and our first frost (October 16, 28°F) came weeks that alternated between highs in the mid-70’s and upper-90’s, playing havoc with both heat-loving and cool-loving crops. At Ecology Action the commodity is nights-over-60°, since below that temperature plants don’t grow as quickly. This year we recorded 87 nights where the temperature stayed above that mark, and in fact 13 nights were over 70°, which lends some validation to the observation that tomato plants seem to grow a foot overnight in the midwest. Our highest recorded temperature this year was 100°F, and our lowest was -8°F.

Our entire garden is 4200 square feet, or 42 beds. We marked our growing area out at the beginning of the season in 4’ wide, 75’ long beds of 300 square feet each, and had a garden plan drawn up to fill it. We planned to double-dig all of the area to plant, a task that fell to Dan since Margo was in the last months of pregnancy. A soil with excellent structure will drain excess moisture well, and hold moisture weeks after a rain. Ours, being unimproved clay, needed to dry out a few days after a rain but became too solid to dig if more than six days passed. So early on we were left with small windows between rains, and then later the .1” we would get at a time was not enough to sufficiently moisten the soil to dig. By the end of the season Dan had dug and we had planted 1,792 square feet, 43% of our total growing area, which is remarkable given the difficult conditions we faced.

On the score of crops, there were three categories: those that died before maturity, those that produced something, and those which could be said to have flourished in any meaning of the word. Out of the 31 distinct crops we planted, 21 achieved maturity and produced a measurable quantity. Looking from another perspective, 61% of the area planted (1,092 sq ft) produced.

The 10 crop failures, which accounted for 700 sq ft, were amaranth, carrots, chia, corn, leeks, parsnips, quinoa, squash, triticale, and wheat.

Twenty crops fell solidly in the middle category, and were remarkable mainly in that they reproduced despite the harsh conditions imposed on them: for lack of any irrigation system only the newly planted crops got watered from a can, and the rest had to make do with practically nothing. The most disappointing yields were probably our potatoes. In the most abysmal section, 65 sq ft of Kennebec, we dug 3.97 lb, equivalent to 6.13 lb/100 sq ft. This was the result of planting 30 lb of seed potatoes!

Among those 20 crops there were a few which gave us mediocre but delicious produce. Snow Peas, for instance, gave us .8 lb from the 8.5 sq ft section (9.4 lb/100) of sweetness, and our Red Russian Kale yielded 2.7 lb in its 18 sq ft section (15 lb/100). The total of our two 50 sq ft sections of Black Turtle dry beans was 3.7 lb, which is close to the GROW BIOINTENSIVE beginner yield of 4lb/100, and satisfying when we cook them up. Even our two lettuce sections of Sunset and Red Winter, though they gave us a total of 8 edible heads, will live on next season through the seeds we saved from the last plants to bolt.

We are, then, left with one crop that gave us good numbers. Our Dale Sorghum, grown with original John Coffer strain seed acquired from Ecology Action, exceeded our hopes and expectations. The seed yield of 7.43 lb/100 was fine, coming close to the GB beginner yield of 8 lb/100, but our dry-biomass yield of 52.56 lb/100, which exceeds GB intermediate yields, pleased us beyond words . We know of sorghum as a traditionally drought-resistant crop, but the fact that it thrived in the kind of season that choked the life out of most of our other crops gives us reason to hope for our soil and our future sorghum yields.

Speaking of our soil once more, we succeeded in building two compost piles this year, one of which was sifted to give us the most beautiful compost we have ever laid eyes on. As we mentioned in the November newsletter article, next year we will put a priority on building compost whether or not the materials are grown in our own garden.

Our biggest projects for the coming year are construction of a small greenhouse, completion of a fence that will keep out pests large and small, and an aim to bring the entire 4,200 sq ft of growing area into successful cultivation. Happy Growing in 2011!