The Daily Grind

Ever since our first internship on the farm of the Sonnewald Natural Foods we have been familiar with the wonderful taste and nutritional qualities of freshly ground flour. We were quite pleased, then, on arriving up at Ecology Action in early '06 to find a flour mill in the food prep space. I slowly worked up to supplying all of our flour needs with it, and we started buying so much wheat that it only made sense to get it in 25 and 50 lb bags.

That was a Country Living Grain Mill (CLGM), and I recommended it to anyone who asked. It is important to note here that we were off the grid at EA, and this was a hand-powered mill. I was certainly just a little proud of that fact. When we moved down to the Golden Rule Garden we were blessed to have access to a Miracle Mill, which had stone burrs instead of steel, and an electric motor which was masked in a nice wooden cabinet. We had great flour with the convenience of pouring in grain and letting it do its thing. The downsides? I couldn't brag any more, the thing was LOUD, and it ground fast enough to heat up the flour considerably (which takes away from the flour's nutritional value). But I always told people that I would go back to a manual mill when I got my own. It keeps me one step closer to my food.

When we moved back here the decision to buy a mill was postponed, because Mom already had one. For anyone who gets Lehman's Catalog, she has the "Our Best Grain Mill". It is difficult for me to give it any kind of negative review, simply because it served us for over 10 years. At the same time, though, it is not designed to produce the quantity (or quality) of flour that other mills can. The burrs are a little smaller, its axle doesn't use bearings, and for many other reasons I can't list (for lack of engineering knowledge) it is harder to use. After using it very intensively this year, grinding 10 cups of wheat berries (~15 cups of flour) a week for bread, I managed to break the set of stone burrs and wear away a 1/2" of the brass spacer between two washers on the axle. So we decided it was time to upgrade.

I had always counted on acquiring a CLGM of our own, since I had such good experiences with it. They are of excellent quality, and the many reviews on the web attest to their popularity. There was no reason to pursue any other, knowing what I wanted.

Then I got an email through the EA vine from Cindy Conner, a Biointensive farmer and instructor, about the new grain mill she had recently gotten. No stranger to the grain grinding (or growing) scene, she had owned a CLGM for over 10 years. Recently, though, she had the chance to see a demonstration of the GrainMaker mill, made by a family in Montana. Her glowing report of it and pronouncement that it has now replaced the CLGM on her counter inspired me to ask a lot of questions and do some more looking around.

GrainMaker has a thorough website that explains the features and history of the mill, so I'll spare you those details (and myself the charges of plagiarism). Suffice it to say that, between the testimonials, my friend's comments, the lifetime warranty, and the obvious pride the company takes in the quality of their product, I was sold. So we took the leap and ordered one.

As soon as we received it I knew the company had style: the only packaging material inside the box was a 5 lb bag of hard white spring wheat. (At left, Alten admires the mill and wonders when I'm going to bolt on the handle.)

I took our Lehman's Best off the counter and replaced it with our new GrainMaker, and we were off and grinding. To say that I am happy with it is an understatement, and I don't even know where to start lauding its excellence. It is as smooth as any good grinder should be, exudes longevity, and shines from the corner of the counter (so much so that Alten is attracted to it from across the kitchen, and will not suffer himself to be far from it). Best of all, though, is that it will grind truly fine flour on its first grind, with the effort that I am used to expending on other mills - but with the other mills I had to use that effort twice, because I needed to put the wheat through two times to get it fine enough. In fact, the GM got flour finer than I have ever ground before, short of putting it through three times on the CLGM we had used. And with only one grind! You can tell I'm in love.

I look forward to working through corn, rice, quinoa, and the grains that are small enough to have stymied the other mills we've used: amaranth and teff.

Now for a few details on our installation. The photo at the top shows our grain processing facility, complete with the Lehman's Best mill and our oat roller (which I wrote about on the Golden Rule Garden blog). At right is the GrainMaker in place. The overhang on our countertop isn't sufficient to clamp either appliance to, and Mom preferred that I not drill holes in said countertop, so I got creative with boards and c-clamps. Close inspection of the image will show that I used a lap joint to make better use of the limited number of clamps. No applause, please. Somehow I think it's funny that Mom is fine with c-clamps more or less a permanent part of the kitchen, but isn't ok drilling very permanent (but oh-so-subtle) holes in the counter.

An unintended plus is that two of the clamps are bright red - just like the GrainMaker! Notice, too, that I used some cardboard under the clamps so as not to mar the finish of the new mill. Maybe at a later date I'll get some red cardboard, too.

The final affirmation of the mill's goodness was the bread I baked and shared with everyone this morning. Delicious, as usual, but much less dense thanks to the finer flour.
Yay!

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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!

The Newest and Hottest

Winter often brings with it a desire to be somewhere warm, dry, and cozy. We live in a farm house that was built sometime in the second half of the 1800's and, though its 18" thick brick walls make it far from drafty, one needs a good way to heat it.

The house was built with one big chimney through which passed the exhaust from three fireplaces, one in the basement, one on the first floor, and one on the second floor - all directly in line vertically. When Mom bought the house the second floor fireplace had been removed, leaving the lower two. And we were soon surprised by the reality that when we lit a fire in the living room the basement would get smoky. Upon professional inspection it was found that the flues had been designed to join into each other. The chimney sweep had never seen anything like it before, and subsequent professionals we've had out think we're pulling their legs when we tell them about it.

But that problem has long since been fixed, and a few years back we had a liner put up the chimney and a fireplace insert installed in the living room fireplace, which is the one that gets regular use. Those familiar with wood heat, thermodynamics, and/or general trivia know that fireplaces are pretty, but absolutely impossible to heat a house with. Almost all of the heat generated goes straight up and out the chimney via hot air, creating low pressure in the house, which in turn pulls air (that would be cold air) from the outdoors through any crack available. The result is a beautiful visual feature warming those directly beside it, paired with a constant draft in other parts of the house

A fireplace insert is a like a woodstove that only has a nice-looking front, since the rest is nestled into the fireplace cavity. The advantage over a free-standing woodstove is that it takes up less space. Both are designed as chambers that burn wood more efficiently (and distribute heat much more efficiently) than a fireplace. We got one called the Clydesdale, made by Hearthstone.

In terms of wood-burning efficiency it worked fine, but in the heating department it came up way short. Inserts depend on a fan (see the electric cord off to the right of the stove) which blows air through channels that go behind, around, and back out the front of the exterior of the stove - that's how the heat radiated by the insert gets moved from the fireplace cavity to the room you're trying to heat. The problem with the Clydesdale was that the fan didn't work very well, and was very noisy. Then the thermostat element in it broke, then the function that lets you moderate the fan's speed broke.

This year we decided that the insert just wasn't doing it for us. For all the heat it produced it could not heat the house, and for it to even work as well as possible it needed this fan on that often made listening to conversation or music difficult. We wanted something that could radiate its heat without use of any fan, and that meant a free-standing wood stove. An added bonus was a surface we could conceivably cook on, heat water on, warm socks on, etc.

We consulted a great fireplace shop in the Richmond area, actually The Fireplace Shop, and settled on a soapstone stove (for soapstone's many wonderful characteristics). While waiting for delivery, we thought maybe we'd prepare the way by getting the Clydesdale ready to depart. Inserts, it turns out, are stuck in the cavity and surrounded by insulation, then a collar is put over what remains of the gap between the fireplace front and the insert. That's so you can't see the ugly back. Once we took the collar off and the insulation out, we found that the heat truly poured forth. It was pretty amazing. To make the thing really effective the fan still needed to be on, but even without it there was A LOT of heat. If we had only known that we might not have gotten a new stove, but since it was on its way already, and because of the new stove's attributes, we stayed the course.
Because it sticks out further than the insert we needed more insulative material, so we got a piece of limestone (set on two pieces of Mycor) to match the existing hearth. So here is our beautiful new stove, the Hearthstone Heritage (my, aren't we refined?). It is a hit with the cat, the laundry, and the rest of us, and we all look forward to figuring out how to maximize its performance and charm.

The Clydesdale will find a place in the workshop, and possibly eventually in another home. I have fantasies about using it in a cob-masonry stove kind of application in the future.

To the credit of Hearthstone, this was one of the earliest versions of the Clydesdale, one with a few design flaws. When we went in to look for a new stove the folks at the Fireplace Shop asked us what we had.
"What? You have a Clydesdale? Why would you want to replace that? Oh, it's the old one. Never mind."

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Emancipating the Potatoes

While we were having Thanksgiving in northern Indiana our garden received the biggest rainfall since we began recording it in mid-April of this year. It won't be a surprise to folks in this area to know that the season's record breaking amount was only 1.85", and that fell over two days. (The next greatest two days were the 9th and 10th of July, adding up to 1.3".)

But it was enough. Anyone who asked how the garden was doing in the past three months heard "It looks like our sorghum did really well. The last thing we have to harvest is the potatoes, but they are locked in our brick-like soil. It's going to take a good rain to be able to get them out." People quit asking about the garden after awhile.

Now I have been volunteering, triumphantly, that the potatoes have been freed. We got back Sunday, and Monday's first order of business was to dig as much of the remaining potato area as possible because of the rain scheduled for Tuesday. (At left are the seed potatoes cut, ashed, and ready to plant, back in April.) We had planted 245 square feet of potatoes, and between July 20 and September 23 I dug out 143 sq ft of them. Mostly coinciding with one of our measly .1" rains. And the most area I managed in a day was 55 sq ft, because the ground was so hard.

Heading out Monday afternoon I dug the remaining 103 sq ft in an hour and a half, which is a testament to the qualities of perfectly moist clay soil. Not too mucky, not too dry, and the fork pulls them 'taties out like a dream. Well, almost.

We planted these potatoes in April and May, and I think the May plantings had just gotten their tops all established when it quit raining. Our yields reflect that we're working heavy soil that has had its fertility pillaged.

Just a hint of what I'm talking about: the May planting, our worst yielding, was 65 sq ft of Kennebec potatoes, and we got a total of 4 lb from that (Margo and Alten weigh them on our itsy-bitsy scale at right). It works out to 6.2 lb per 100 sq ft. For all of you commercial potato farmers out there (and I know you're reading my blog) that works out to 1.34 tons/acre. For the rest of you, it works out to .13 lb of harvested potato for every pound planted. Which is what we call deficit spending.

It is easy, at this stage, to look at our potatoes and declare failure, commencing to plant petunias next year instead. But I maintain that failure is important, and I routinely tell folks that in classes. When someone wants to know the most important thing to master in gardening I answer "observation." Paying attention to the processes in your garden means the difference between learning from your mistakes and suffering from them time after time. Also important (when discussing failure) is perspective. This is our first year here, and we hope to be producing all of our food within a few years. Is it better to have crop failure in one of our most important foods when we are getting on our feet, or to experience it when we are depending on that crop?

So what went wrong with our potatoes? There were two obvious culprits, which I have already mentioned. First, our soil is heavy clay, and little organic matter remains from its previous 20 or more years of being gardened. Root crops don't like that. They aren't allowed to expand, so they grow small and in funny shapes. The second was the lack of water, which we were counting on as rain (the healthiest form of irrigation for crops and soil). Additionally, we planted them about a month later than we wanted. Earlier planting would have given them quite a jump on growth before the hot (and dry) weather of summer hit. Quality of seed potatoes may have played a role, but most of ours looked very good. The first three variables are so overwhelming that smaller ones, like varieties planted, pest damage, and availability of micronutrients wouldn't add up to much.What will we do differently to address these troubles next year? Well, we'll start by getting a bigger scale, cause weighing even a small potato harvest 1 lb at a time gets tedious. Seriously though, we plan to post production of compost as a top priority, and though adding compost will probably take years to make an impact on this soil we're committing now. We saw that most of our crops needed at least twice as much water as they got which, though that wouldn't really be much water in the big picture, it is way more that we can store currently. So we'll add some rainwater storage and water more than just the newly planted stuff (and, of course, hope for a different weather pattern next year). We'll be as on-schedule as any farmer ever is next year, since we'll be starting out with more than practically nothing. And, finally, we'll watch and see what happens in the completely different conditions that next year will undoubtedly bring.
Until then we will be a little short on the homegrown mashed potatoes...

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3DW, 11/10

Ecology Action holds its Three-Day Workshop (aka 3DW, as opposed to WD-40) twice a year, usually the first weekend of March and November. It is intended as an opportunity for folks who have read about, practiced, or heard of Grow Biointensive to learn more through lecture, discussion, and hands-on practice. Not only is is it an educational experience for the participants, but for those of us who attend many times as presenters or support staff it is an inspirational event.

This time over 50 people (some of them Ecology Action interns) came from California, Utah, New York, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Missouri, Manitoba and Alberta, Canada, and Ecuador to attend. Most of them had great gardening-related projects in the works, and all of them had fascinating work beyond gardening.
When we arrived the workshop presenters were John Jeavons (above and below, leading the participants down to EA's garden) and Ecology Action Garden Manager Carol Cox. Margo and I began doing some of the hands-on instruction after our first summer as apprentices, and began presenting during the lecture time in our third year. When Carol retired from EA last year we picked up the most of the classes she taught and created a couple of others. No comparison to the instruction she could give after 20 years of experience, but she was very encouraging to us, as was John. (At left, me workin' the overhead while teaching garden planning).
We decided that Alten was too young yet to hit the cross-country Amtrak circuit for this workshop, so I went alone this time and taught for both Margo and myself. And while the opportunity was a great one and I had a wonderful experience, I will be glad to have Margo back when we teach in March 2011.
So come and see us!
(By the way, one of the participants was Matt Harnack, a documentary filmmaker and co-coordinator of the Common Ground Demo Garden in Palo Alto, CA. All of the photos in this post were taken by him. Thanks, Matt!)

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The Garden Is Dead

Long Live the Garden! (Our Fall garden is pictured above)

Our first frost happened on October 16, and didn't mess around. The low was 28° F, effectively ending our main season. Basil was the only hot-loving crop we still had in the ground, and had long passed its productive leaf stage. And that was good, because it is not made for 28°. We did manage to get some seed from it, and will test its viability after we clean it.

The only crop we have to harvest yet is our remaining ~140 sq ft of potatoes. Our lack of rain keeps us from that harvest. We know they grew fairly successfully, but the nature of our soil means they are locked in the ground until we get a couple of good rains in a row. The last time that happened was the 9th and 10th of July.

Potatoes excluded, we have now entered the stage of the garden that a lot of folks around here skip: the late-Fall and Winter plan. Our original idea was to plant the currently double-dug beds into cover crops, and prepare previously un-dug beds for our wheat, rye, and garlic plantings. Again, we needed some more rain to pull that one off, so we now have planted 600+ square feet of a wheat/rye/canadian field pea mix (on the left), 200 sq ft of cereal rye, 150 sq ft of winter wheat, and about 40 sq ft of garlic. And that's where we'll likely finish for this year.

Compromise number one was planting our wheat, rye and garlic in previously dug beds. Compromise number two was the nature of that planting. Garlic is garlic, and that simply involves separating cloves, and planting the choicest (the first sprout is pictured on the right). But the wheat and rye, which we want to bring to full maturity next summer, would normally have been transplanted on 5" centers. A combination of travel and lack of rain made that difficult, so we decided to just bite the bullet and broadcast. The only thing desirable in that choice, though, is the ease of planting. Weeding will be much more difficult, coverage will not be as thorough, and yields will suffer. Our final compromise was not so much a decision we made as a matter of indecision. Because we were so far behind, we gnashed our teeth about planting and digging options, and whether or not it would rain for us. As a result everything has been planted a month or more late.

But farming is about learning from mistakes, right? And by all accounts it has been a doozy of a season for all the farmers and gardeners around.

Since the 16th of October we have had frosts of 28, 32, 27, 24, and 23°, and when I left from watering the garden at 7:00 last night the temperature had already fallen to 39°F. I think it's time to hibernate.

This week brings a trip to California to teach at Ecology Action's 3-Day Workshop on the 5th, 6th, and 7th. It is always inspiring to get to meet so many motivated gardeners, share knowledge with them, and learn what they have to offer. Plus maybe I can bring some of the copious amounts of rain they're getting back home with me...

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Alten in October

We have this great calendar that was given to us at a baby shower for Alten. It is a thirteen-month calendar where you can write down firsts, cute things done, weights and sizes, and paste current pictures. We've done an ok job of recording everything except the photos. To date, we haven't actually printed any of the pictures we've taken of him (though grandparents have). All our copies are stranded on this laptop in front of me, which is already been resurrected once.With this in mind (together with the many friends and family too far away to visit regularly), I'll post as many pictures as I can on the blog :) Because one computer may die, but the web is forever, right?

The top picture shows Alten's first interaction with a cat, specifically Grandpa and Grammy Royer's Sphynx. Our cat here at home will have nothing to do with him.

At left, Alten believes it is time to start solid foods. In this case a ceramic bowl. The scrambled eggs inside weren't apparently all that interesting.

And at right we have Margo and Alten decked out in cool rainy-day garb.

Above is Alten's first soccer ball, with which he is enamored. It was sent as a gift from good friends up north. At left Alten holds Sophie the Giraffe, which is natural latex with food based paints, and has lots of great things to chew on.

On the right is our currently 14 lb 12 ounce boy, no doubt watching the window or the ceiling fan (both of which provide endless fascination).















And last but not least, an action photo. Alten dearly loves chewing on anything that gets close enough, including my chin.










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