Cold Frames (and this growing season)

Steve told me the other day that he realized that he maybe has 30 years of farming to do, and that’s assuming we can start our farm by next year. I hope we have more than 30 years left… maybe science will advance to the point that we can have 100; if we are being realistic though, he is right. That means that he will only be able to grow things 30 more times. That’s not really that many times and how many of those times are we going to be successful? We (and by we, I mean, Steve) have been planting things since 2013. I only remember one of those seasons being truly successful. That’s like a 16% success rate only 1 out of 6 years. This has been a source of frustration for Steve… especially when it comes to his tomatoes. He loves tomatoes, but so do chickens and puppies. I read that chickens don’t like tomatoes, so they leave them alone. Well I guess my chickens were the exception to the rule because they absolutely devastated Steve’s tomatoes. Either that or whatever I read was a bold-faced lie.

This year, Steve made cold frames on the side of the house. He used some of my old wood-framed windows that I had been saving for craft projects and some left over materials from the chicken coop to make them. They turned out really well. We had some very good spinach, romaine, and radishes. He used it as a mini greenhouse to germinate the tomato plants, peppers, squash, zucchini and eggplants. The carrots and onions grew, but didn’t turn out very well. They were very small. I was still able to use them in a fritta.

We grew some Yukon Gold potatoes in a hay bale. Steve let that get away from him a little bit and didn’t cover them up as much as he could have while they were growing so they didn’t get very big, but I didn’t have to buy potatoes from the store all summer so that was nice. If we end up growing them on a larger scale we are going to have to figure out how to store them for longer periods of time. Maybe next spring we will grow enough to last us through the winter as well.

I was able to preserve a lot of the tomatoes. We did tomato sauce and spaghetti sauce. A personal favorite of mine is Zucchini Salsa!! I blanched and froze some zucchini and squash and spinach to use in recipes or sauted veggie dishes. We even grew enough jalepenos for me to make two batches of cowboy candy. It was a great growing season and an even better learning experience.

All in all the growing we did this year was both rewarding from the gain of knowledge, since we decided to start farming the way that we intend to when we are on actual on the farm. After a lot of research we decided that we are going to grow using a no till method, meaning that we are going to disturb the soil as little as possible. We have even researched several different ways to clear land using live stock rather than heavy machinery. We are rather enthusiastic about the plans that we have.