Editors' Blog

Here's what the Rocky Mountain Gardening editors have to say.

On Good Gardens, Fresh Food, and Living Large in the West

Mon, 01/12/2015 - 11:17

WINTER

 

Two thousand fifteen is newly born. It’s January and cold outside. Here in Bozeman we’ve had several days of what I can only call “ice fog.” There is a temperature inversion in the valley keeping the cloud layer low. The branches of the trees are coated with crystals. From my vantage walking on the shelf up against the Bridger Mountains each morning with our border collies I can see the airport below in the distance, and tell by my timepiece that flights are delayed due to de-icing procedures. This week there must have been some tight connections in Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Minneapolis.

 

Returning from my 2-mile walk there’s just enough light to make out the stalks of tomato plants I didn’t have time to pull last fall. The hoops are still on them and there’s snow halfway up. I’ll get to it in April during the thaw.

 

Even in the dead of winter there are plant problems. Last month the needles of three Austrian pines I planted 10 years ago suddenly turned very brown. Like dead brown. Cheryl Moore-Gough, our technical editor for horticulture, suspects a sudden and extreme drop in temperatures. She says we’ll have to wait until spring to see if they survive. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Life isn’t predictable.

 

The leaves of a small fig plant in the sunroom look diseased. I sprayed them with Sevin to no effect. I’ve been keeping a close eye on its health for several months and then realized I don’t even like the large, healthy fig plant also in the sunroom, that droops and drops its leaves all over the floor and window ledges if it isn’t well watered at least twice a week. When I try to sweep the leaves with a broom they break into a thousand fine flakes. One fig plant is enough. So I threw the small diseased plant out into the snow and felt good about it. All day it looked like a tropical plant, its bright green leaves strangely beautiful planted in the white snow. I feel a little guilty, but it’s still snowing, and tomorrow it’ll be gone under. But the killing nagged at me. I watered the big fig. You can almost see the leaves lift as the life-giving water enters its veins.

danspurr

HOW TO HELP YOUR TOMATOES RIPEN

Fri, 08/30/2013 - 15:30

Cutting back on watering tomatoes is just one trick to get the plants to ripen their fruit. There is no set amount to cut back, since everyone uses different quantities. Simply reduce the amount and/or frequency of your watering routine. Watch the plants carefully and don't let them wilt too much. The idea is to slightly stress the plants. Also, don't fertilize this time of year. Since it takes six weeks for tomato flowers to form fruits, pull off any flowers that have not already set fruit, and keep doing it the rest of the season (this should have been done mid- to late July, so you might want to pull off any tiny fruits at this point in time). You may also trim excess foliage, but be sure to leave enough on the plant to shade developing fruits to avoid sunscald. And if the weather starts to get really dicey, you can also root prune the plants by slicing the soil with a spade, about 10 inches to a foot away from the stem, in an incomplete circle around the plant i.e. maybe three slices. Do not remove the soil, just slice it. This will often result in ripening fruit within days.

The above is Technical Editor—Horticulture Cheryl Moore-Gough's response to a question from subscriber Lynn Bacon of Belgrade, Montana.

danspurr

INTERVIEW WITH JOEL SALATIN

Wed, 06/26/2013 - 12:56

Speaking with Joel Salatin

 

This interview was conducted at LocalFest in Pinedale, Wyoming, in May, 2012.

 

 

 

Zone 4 (Z4): How do you get time off the farm?

 

Joel Salatin (JS): We say my son Daniel runs the farm so I can run around. He’s 31 next week. Very capable. Has three kids, 8, 6 and 4. All out of diapers now. That’s when they become human.

 

Z4: You’ve written eight books. Where do you find the time for that?

 

JS: I write in the winter when we’re done with the season. I spend a lot of time thinking about things to write. I’m a fast typist. That helps. I can crank out a rough draft in a couple three weeks. Editing and refining. My wife Theresa answers the phone and I go dawn to night cranking out the copy. As a newspaper reporter you don’t tell your copy editor 15 minutes before deadline that you’ve got writer’s block. That was good discipline. I worked 18 months at the newspaper in Stanton, Virginia, and in college doing obituaries and police reports. You can say it’s humdrum but it still teaches you to sit down and do it.

 

It’s a small daily newspaper. Sport staff of four, newsroom staff of eight. Lots of turnover. You had proofreaders back then. Now if spell check doesn’t catch it you have big glaring errors. I expected to be there 5-10 years but it ended up 18 months. The farm came up. I’m second generation. I didn’t have to pay for the farm. That was a big step up. But inheriting the farm doesn’t make it profitable.

 

I learned my basic philosophy and technique from Dad, but he never made a living as a farmer. He was an accountant.

 

We have a quarter-acre of tall tunnels we put chickens and pigs and rabbits in the winter, but as soon as they go out to pasture we plant vegetables. Five of them: three 30’ x 120’ and two 20’ x 120’. Sweet corn in there right now 4 feet high. Way sooner than anyone else. We’ve been eating kale and lettuces for weeks in there.

 

Z4: Do you sell produce commercially?

 

JS: Our vegetables are mostly for home consumption. A former intern is doing that as her own self-contained business. I’m not a big salary guy. I like performance-based commission. Profit share because she’s tapping into our customer base.

 

We have eight or nine interns. They apply. There’s a vetting process August 1 to August 14. Calls, emails, get your name in the pot. We send you a questionnaire. From that we pick about 30 who we invite for a 2-day checkout. They come live with us, usually done over the course of two weeks. That’s in early December; that way if you’re in college you can get out. Work with us, live with us, eat with us. Then from that we pick our final team. Last year we had not quite 100 applicants. Our joke is it’s harder to get into Yale and Harvard than Polyface Farm. They live at the farm. Eat at the farm. We provide room and board and a very small stipend. It’s a four-month learning experience worth as much as a college education and they don’t have to pay for it.

 

This year we have two guys in their 30s. One is a welder. One guy is a professional video editor. The appeal of doing something farm oriented comes in all shapes and sizes. We have a healthy contingent of home schoolers. We like them. Of our eight at least three will be home schoolers. Most between 18 and 24. Three gals and six guys.

 

Can you cite numbers to support increase in local food.

 

Organic has been so co-opted by corporate business. The government has taken it over, and it’s become pretty adulterated. An organic melon from Peru in January is not what we’re after. If we discount that and go to local consumption it’s pretty low. 1.9’% of food  is pretty small. IT has grown dramatically. It took 20 years to get to 0.5%, and then in just five years it jumped to 1.9%. That’s the innovation curve.

 

Zone 4 (Z4): Can you cite numbers to support the supposition that there’s been an increase in local food consumption?

 

Joel Salatin (JS): I don’t count organic food as part of this, because it has been so co-opted by corporate business. The government has taken it over, and it’s become pretty adulterated. An organic melon from Peru in January is not what we’re after. If we discount that and go to local consumption it’s pretty low, though it has grown dramatically. It took 20 years to get to a half a percent, and then in just five years it jumped to 1.9%. That’s the innovation curve.

 

Z4: This is all down from 100 years ago when it was 90%.

 

JS: In 1946 half of all produce was grown in backyard gardens. That’s a pretty big slide.

 

One of the things that excites me are the virtual farmers’ markets. E-marketing on the Internet is going to be the new ticket in for local, because it allows you to aggregate without bricks and mortar.

 

Z4: So customers can place an order on line?

 

JS: Yeah. Weekly delivery. The shopping cart is electronic. Neither producer nor consumer has to rendezvous at a given place and time, which creates a tremendous efficiency. In the local system we have got to figure out how to make an end run around the industrial economies of the global system. One of those ways to circumvent the industrial system is to not be dependent on bricks and mortars cashiers and warehouses.

 

How do we do that? We do that weigh e-aggregation. That allows our customers to a purchase from many suppliers. Like going to a supermarket. A supermarket is an aggregator of numerous food purveyors. We can duplicate that on a local scale but can’t afford the bricks and mortar because that’s too expensive.

 

Z4: Are you doing that? Supplying so-called buying clubs that deliver food to customers via designated drop sites?

 

JS: Yes, it’s 45% of our business. We service them eight times a year, roughly every 6 weeks. We participate with virtual aggregators where we’re one of 100 farms, another one of 30 farms. These are all bio-regionally sensitive aggregators. They are able to undersell whole foods and bricks and mortars boutiques if you will. In many cases they undersell the farmers’ markets inasmuch as the farmer has to leave the farm for the day and drive somewhere.

 

I’m not opposed to farmers markets. We just don’t have to be in one because we see them as fairly cumbersome. I’ll guard that closely. But I have ideas how to disencumber farmers markets as well. Too often the committees are populated by nostalgia. And nostalgia is great until it becomes obsolete. And obsolete nostalgia doesn’t do you any good.

 

It’s a social-driven meeting place instead of where real food transactions occur. When’s the last time you saw someone come to the farmers market and say we’re going to can green beans next week can you bring me 3 bushels? That never happens. They buy special little pickled green beans in a little jar with a bow on it. We call them nibblers and guilt persuaders. They’re participating in the system. Send a check to the conservancy and take the kids out for Happy Meals.

 

There are a lot of crafts and other things. You don’t go in and buy a side of beef.

 

Z4: On another subject, can rotation grazing be applied to a smaller scale, say, with folks on small acreages?

 

JS: The beauty of electrified fencing or netting is it drops the capitalization cost down to where the fencing overhead doesn’t drive the economies of scale of the operation. The profitability becomes more size neutral because the equity is in the skill of management rather than the capitalization of the fencing overhead. That being said, on very small acreage it becomes problematic to have just one cow. I always like at least two animals. With our bulls you can give them what they need for two days by dividing a 2-acre area into 100 little 50th of an acre spots—roughly 100 square yards. 10 yards x 10 yards is a 50th of an acre. You move them around. The fence to do that costs literally pennies. They’re portable. You don’t need to fence up the whole grid. Take this one down, leap frog it.

 

We’re running a flock of a 1,000 layers on a 6-acre pasture using six pieces of premier polyethylene electrified netting that keeps out foxes, coyotes, bears, and keeps the chickens in. One hundred fifty feet only weighs 12 pounds and one person can take it up and put it down in 10 minutes. Get a ¼ acre every three days. It’s a $10,000 profit on 6 acres with a total infrastructure cost of under $2,000. Which is a one-time capital expenditure. Some of our netting is 15 years old.

 

Then you move into your portable structures. We had sheep for a while. What do you do with a couple of rams and you want to keep them separate? We built “the rambler” a 12’ x 12’ wooden pen on coaster wheels like on a yard cart. You put some shade cloth on one side and we’d shove it around the yard; it was basically a biological weed eater. You can do that with a milk cow, sheep or goats in a small setting. Chickens from Andy Lee’s tractor chicken books. Raising thousands of broilers we still use the little box shelters 2’ x 12’ x 10’ wide. We use the cattle to prepare the table for them because chickens like short grass. We use the egg mobile; my first was  6’ x 8’ on bicycle wheels and I’d push it around the back yard. I made gates 10’ long and 4’ high, hinged two together so they could collapse on themselves. I’d push this house around and I could open up these two sets of triplicate gates and put them together like a hexagon. I’d move this hexagon around the house every couple of days. It’d take a week to make a four-leaf clover around the 6’x 8’ shelter with 50 chickens in it.

 

All of this is extremely scalable because the infrastructure doesn’t drive it. The main driving value is in your management.

 

Lets talk rabbits. We have shelters that are 3’ x 6’ and 2’ high with a slatted wooden floor on 2” centers with 1” x 2” lath so the rabbits can’t dig out. You can have these lined up, half a dozen of them, which only weighs 20 pounds. One acre of grass is worth $45,000. You say, “Who eats rabbit?” A lot of people don’t eat rabbit, but some people do, and the fact is, nobody is raising them. In Virginia maybe the total rabbit market is, say, $5 million, which is not very much, but if you’re the only game in town, you’ve got a business. I can assure you that we can sell 500 rabbits a week. We’re so short of rabbits. Restaurants want 50 a week. It’s crazy. We get $24 a piece for a 12-week fryer. Five hundred a week at $24 is not a bad business and that can be done in a backyard. They don’t smell and don’t make noise. The manure has such a perfect C:N ratio you can use it as side dressing in your garden. It, along with horse manure, is the only manure cold enough to apply directly on vegetables. We feed them forage…hay and stuff, and a non-medicated commercial pellet. We service about 50 restaurants (30% of sales) but mostly to individuals.

 

We’ve got a new sales lady on commission who is doing the District of Columbia restaurant business. She is storming, and we’re pretty excited.

 

The beauty of rabbits, unlike chickens, is that they’re nocturnal. So they’re not nearly as susceptible to predation as poultry. Because they see something coming they go to the other end of the pen, whereas a raccoon comes in a chicken just sits there while the raccoon rips off a leg.

 

Do you breed rabbits?

 

No. There’s no free lunch. They can have diseases.

 

Our son Daniel started with the rabbits when he was 8, as a 4H project. He’s breeded up a genetic base that’s medication free and forage based. They’re just remarkable. They look like clones. The first 5 years they averaged 50% mortality. Most commercial rabbits you feed them anything green they get diarrhea. They’re real susceptible to ear mites and respiratory problems.

 

We have the rabbits racked above the chickens. Carbon goes to the floor and absorbs the manure and the urine. The reason rabbit manure is so cold is because all the ammonia is in the urine. The reason chicken manure is so hot is because it doesn’t urinate; the ammonia is in the manure.

 

Rabbits will pick a spot to urinate. Some commercial rabbitries put a 5-gallon bucket underneath them to catch it, which is like living over a bleach bottle.

 

The chickens underneath are mixing the carbon. We use sawdust and woodchips, but you can use leaves and straw, whatever. Churn it and keep that bedding composted.

 

The rabbit chicken compost is the best on the farm. Real slow and long. It’s just black humus. Clean it out once a year. It’s a real symbiotic thing. Most of it we spread on the fields.

 

Z4: You’re widely viewed as a champion of the local food movement. What foods are the most realistic candidates for local production?

 

JS: If there’s one thing that needs to be localized it’s produce, because it’s 96% water. You can’t afford logistically to transport water. You can’t haul water. But that’s what we’re doing. Historically, things transported were dry and dense, or exotics like oranges. Exotic enough to be transported. When Daniel Boone headed off to Kentucky for a month he wasn’t carrying cucumbers and watermelons. He was carrying jerky, dried apple rings, things like that.

 

If we took all the diesel fuel that is used to bring unseasonable, water-based produce to northern climes, if we turned that diesel fuel into plastics for season extension in northern areas we could wean ourselves from the watery produce transportation. Then you don’t have to run the trucks, don’t have to build the roads. Use this blessing of petroleum, this wonderful gift we’ve been given, then use it to invest in the future, rather than just using it up in a one-time deal to bring strawberries from Peru to Wyoming in January.

 

Save petroleum for critical needs like pharmaceuticals and chainsaws.

 

Polyface Farm is 550 acres and we rent another eight parcels that total about 1,200 acres. So we’re managing about 1,800 acre , which is quite a lot in Virginia. We don’t have ranches like Wyoming. 1,000 head of cattle. Raise 800 hogs. Getting couple hundred dozen eggs a day. 25,000 broilers, 1,000 rabbits, 3,000 turkeys. Not a backyard operation. We employ 20 people…primarily independent contractors. We take former interns, place them on the farm as independent contractors, and then manage them.

 

Z4: One of your themes is to unshackle the farmer and let him know what he knows how to do, and interface with his customers. USDA was formed to protect the public, but in the farmers’ market and CSA (community supported agriculture) system how do I know their food is safe?

 

JS: First, look at the number of people who get sick and die every year from food that’s passed through the entire gauntlet of supposed government protection. Like the listeria outbreak in Colorado. Not to mention the epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

 

I attack that at its basic premise, that according to a Pew survey 85% of Americans say that government is responsible for food safety. That is a misplaced allegiance in my opinion. So how does a person make those decisions? Several things. Visit the farm. It’s an acquired skill. If you visit several farms you’re going to get a sense real fast which guy has it together and which guy doesn’t. Here’s the deal: How do you know which church to go to, which Kiwanis club to join, which magazine to subscribe to? We don’t have government sanctions on these things. You have to educate yourself. The model is the feedback and self-responsibility loop on eBay. That has certainly become the free-market model to facilitate direct, quick feedback interaction, so that somebody who gets taken for a ride can very quickly disseminate that information to the greater public.

 

My point is that there are different ways beyond bureaucracy to create protective measures. Not the least of which is the fact the local grower is inherently more transparent because he has to live with his constituents. There’s no board of directors with a law firm on retainer to give a veil of protection between the corporate office and the faceless customer. The local food system inherently has a short chain of custody between field and fork that creates its own integrity and accountability simply because it’s a short chain of custody.

 

Now there are charlatans out there. I’ve been to places I don’t want to eat their cheese or drink their milk. But if you take it in toto, there’s no difference between relational marketing and giving your protection by proxy to some bureaucrat. I think it’s quite profound that we live in a culture where it’s been determined that giving your kids Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs and Mountain Dew is perfectly safe, but raw milk, compost tomatoes, and pasture poultry is dangerous. Intuitively when you look at that juxtaposition, you realize this is crazy.

 

I’m not advocating uninspected Happy Meals at MacDonalds, okay, but there’s no relationship. You don’t know where it comes from. It could come from China, from anywhere. But if in the name of food safety we smother neighbor-to-neighbor transactions with a heavy-handed bureaucracy we stifle not only commerce but the creativity that provides the antidote to the problems that the industrial food system has created.

 

Z4: What do you do about the big urban areas? How do you feed New York and Los Angeles? You can grow on rooftops and vacant lots, but… I asked Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) that and he said when he flies back to DC every week he looks out the window and wonders the same thing.

 

JS: Cornell did a study, a 2-year study of all metropolitan areas in New York, Syracuse, Buffalo, and what they found was that every single urban area could be completely fed by meat and produce within a 30-mile radius from city limits, except New York City, and it’d feed New York City if you went over to New Jersey.

 

Here’s the ugly reality: 50% of all edible human food never gets eaten by a human because it spoils or is thrown out. I talked to a guy who just came back from Zimbabwe where he was visiting a green bean exporter to Europe. At this facility they were taking in 9 tons of green beans a day and they were landfilling 7 tons, only packaging 2 tons. All the rest were thrown out because they were crooked, too short, too long, had some quirky thing.

 

In Idaho I visited a cow diary and I asked why are they eating potatoes. They said, well they got kicked out of a MacDonald’s French fry grading station so they fed them to the cows.

 

The point is that right now, take all the food being eaten by humans on the planet, we are producing twice that much. An amazing statistic.

 

One hundred fifty years ago that blemished, didn’t-fit-the-box food, all that stuff was all fed to embedded omnivores, pigs and chickens, embedded in domestic kitchens, industrial kitchens. There were no landfills. Today the lion’s share is not being fed to animals who are then in turn being fed subsidized grain in a huge carbon transfer. All this decomposable biomass accounts for more than 30%, and then if you add on the rest of the carbon—leaves, wood waste—70% of what goes into landfill is decomposable or edible materials. Our industrial food system is segregated. This isn’t normal.

 

Because of cheap energy, and railroads, for the first time in human history we are able to break apart the very close carbon cycle. Historically you couldn’t ship carbon very far. Because when you had sailing ships and oxen and draft power you couldn’t ship carbon very far. It inherently had to be cycled near by. Today we have been able to break those integrated carbon cycles and segregate then, and create a scale to keep animals alive. Plants, with herbicides and pesticides and…

 

We were able to divorce these complex interrelationships that created actual solar energy synergies within the system, so what appears to be efficient is actually floating on a great big barrel of oil.

 

That’s what I’d tell Sen. Tester. You go to an integrated system and all of these incredible masks of inefficiencies begin to crumble. Go to Italy, which is way more populous than the U.S. You don’t see lawns. On those 3’ strips between the street and the front of the house they’ve got tomatoes trellised. Cucumbers growing up on latticework against the house. They’ve got squash. In their road clover leafs [at road intersections] people have little weekend shacks with gardens; they drive out there on the weekend and tend it and bring it back and eat it or share with neighbors. Here we worry what if someone drives a truck into the shack and kills someone! We are so wimped out for any kind of integrated risk taking. It’s just crazy.

 

That’s why they can have a national health system that doesn’t bankrupt them. We lead the world in non-infectious chronic disease. They are spectacularly debilitating. Diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, cancer.

 

The 30 years that have been added to life expectancy since 1900 is almost strictly hygiene. None of it is medical. Well, maybe a year or two. It’s miniscule. It’s all from eliminating infectious disease like smallpox, having clean water.

danspurr

WHO'S STARTING SEEDS?

Mon, 03/11/2013 - 08:18

In early spring, it's still dark outside when I walk our two border collies, setting out around 6 a.m. I can tell who among our neighbors are starting seeds indoors by the white glow of their flourescent lights suspended in sunrooms or other parts of the house. Though cold outside, it's a sure sign that spring is coming.

Last year, our son got so anxious to get started he jumped the gun, planting hundreds of vegetables in our sunroom, on a four-tiered 2x4 and plywood structure with big banks of lights suspended by chains. Some of the plants outgrew their small plugs and there were simply too many of them to step up to lar ger 4x4 containers. They needed to go in the ground, but it was too early. He knew this might happen, but he just couldn't help himself. Fortunately, most of the plants were timed better and made it into the ground for a bumper crop of tomatoes, peppers, squash, and others.

This year, I started culinary herbs—oregano, parlsey, and sage—right after Thanksgiving, thinking I'd be cooking with them all winter long. Well, here it is March and most aren't large enough to begin plucking. Last week I did step them up to 4x4 containers and they have taken off. Which is a good thing because soon we'll need the space for vegetables.

So the lights in the sunrooms will glow for another few weeks, until the sun rises so early that the lights are no longer marking their telltale message: seeds growing! Even though there's still snow on the ground.

danspurr

WITHERING CORN

Mon, 08/20/2012 - 15:45

Corn my daughter planted on our property back in June seemed to suddenly stop growing a few weeks ago. This was disconcerting for several reasons: a) no harvest, and b) I've been the one responsible for their watering and care. For help, I sent Cheryl Moore-Gough, Zone 4 Technical Editor—Horticulture, a photo and asked for her thoughts. Here's what she had to say:

"I can only guess but it looks like a combination of lack of water and nitrogen during the entire growing season. N should be added right when they come up and then again in several weeks. We flood irrigate our corn when it gets going, digging a trench between the rows and mounding the soil over the base of the plants, and run the hose into the trench. If you give too much N and not enough water the N cannot be taken up.

"You didn’t mention variety but here’s our harvest log for last year:

First ‘Quickie’ August 20

First ‘Fleet’, ‘Early Sunglow’, ‘Northern Extra Sweet’ August 24

First ‘Revelation’ August 29

"I also see very few ears formed which could mean lack of water during pollination.

"Because of this year’s extreme weather the pros are watering corn 24/7 in much of the corn producing part of the country."

Well, I believe lack of water is no doubt true. We have a lot of other vegetables in production and because of the drought have been distributing water conservatively amongst all the crops, which include lots of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, onions, and potatoes. Perhaps the lesson here is not to plant more than you can safely water. All our water comes from a single well, and we don't know how much is in it at any given time of the year. We don't want to learn by discovering that the toilet won't flush!

danspurr