Merry Christmas from Steed Farms to You and Yours

Well, the fall is behind us now and winter starts. Our weather has vacillated between hot and cold as the usual for Florida weather. It is really hard to grow things with such uneven temperatures. Our butterhead lettuce (Sylvestra) is doing fine but some are already bolting due to the hot temperatures we have experienced. The one that are not bolting look great. There is a lot of variation in the plots and very little uniformity. I guess this is good for now when we pick small quantities to sell and eat. We are still harvesting arugula, collards, mustards, mint, oregano, bok choy, napa cabbages, parsley, and lettuce. I also let Anna pick the first two carrots from the plots. We had a terrible germination on the first plot of carrots. The second and third plantings did much better. I factored in the uneven drip line watering, the dry bark, and the warm temperatures and did much better. We will be picking our first cilantro next week as well.

One butterhead lettuce plant! Pretty nice!

Butterhead lettuce rows

I also started some peppers, eggplants, tomatoes and our saved cucumber seeds in the green house in organic mix sown in trays. They have started to put on their first true leaves and I plan to plant them in the greenhouses in pots since I am not using the space at the moment.

I planted some avocados from seeds and they germinated well in the soil. I just transplanted them yesterday to make nice trees for sale. I am planning to spice up our wholesale landscape plants to include a retail type farm stand and I would like some variety of tropical, color, and edible plants. That will be my main goal for this year as well as making sure that I can grow the right mix and variety of vegetables.

As the holidays approach, I would like to wish all who read this glad tidings and may the blessings of the spirit of Christmas be upon you, your loved ones.

Robeez Shoes Donations

I don't normally do this, but here is a link to send e-greeting cards and Robeez shoes will donate $5 to K.I.D.S. (Kids in disetressed situtuations) for each card that is sent. If you post it on your blog they will donate $25 to the same charity. Here is the link. http://seasonofgiving.robeez.com/send_ecards.asp

Fall Season Underway

The strawberries around the county are growing, the citrus is turning sweeter by the day, and the vegetables are being harvested. I enjoy this time of the year. Holidays, baseball finals, (Go Rays!), college football (Go Gators), pro football (Go Bucs), and eating events.

Two pictures of our harvested crops!

We are still planting lettuces, cilantro, carrots, and onions. I started the red onion (Mars) in a tray and will be transplanting them out. I used organic soil and when they started to germinate out of the soil I top-dressed with an organic fertilizer (Sustane). I didn't have much luck with the horse poop this year. There was way too much wood shavings and it is having a very bad effect on the the germination of the seeds. I guess that they are drying out too fast. We are harvesting bok choy, oregano, mint, mustard, and collards. New this week to harvest are the citrus (Hamlins), dandelion, and parsley. The cucumbers are finished. I top dressed the entire field with an organic fertilizer (Bradfield) and weeded half of the plot. I will weed the next half this week and plant a few more things. The pest pressure is pretty light and there are ladybugs all over the place.

Pumpkin Recipe

One of our blog readers who also ordered some pumpkin seeds sent us a recipe for pumpkin soup. He says it's like Texas Chili, you can tweak to your own taste. Use one large pot (3-4 qt) filled with peeled, cubed pumpkin. Add 5 cups water and 5 cubes of chicken bullion. 1 large onion, quartered. Boil for 30-40 minutes. Puree adding add 1 stick margarine or butter, about 1 tsp fresh ground pepper and 1/2 cup half and half or whole milk. You can add garlic, parsley or other spices to change.
We still have seeds if you would like them. Refer to our previous post on how to get them.

Our new plot is doing alright. We have been harvesting cucumbers, mustards, mint (first harvest this week), oregano, and bok choy. I planted more mustards, collards, kale, lettuce again, carrots again, and cilantro. The older collards are starting to get bigger and will be harvesting soon. The cucumbers got hurt by an early frost last week. I'm not sure how much longer they will produce. I also planted a cover crop of a fall mix from Johnny's seeds and a crimson clover crop. I want to try the two to see which works best. That really was good for our summer crop. It helped me identify a real winner.

Harvest Starts Again!

We have started harvesting some plants. Nothing too big, but we have picked some arugula, cucumbers, mustards, mint and a bok choi. I have never eaten a bok choi before but it was really good. I put it in a stir fry with some leftover steak and it was really nice. It had a unique flavor but not too strong to offend.

Our seeds did not germinate like we had hoped and we had a lot of empty plot so I had to reseed were the water was reaching from the drip tubes. The tubes have worked well aside from that one point. The water travels pretty much straight down and not laterally to wet the row middles. If we were using transplants it would have worked fine. We have had some problems with grasshoppers and some caterpillars on some of the plants but we are taking care of them with pyrethren and bt sprays. In the next few weeks since the temperatures have fallen I will be planting the lettuces again. It was too hot for the a month ago.

We are also adding a composting toilet to the farm so I can rent out the mobile home that we used to live in. I am nearly finished with it and just need to add a door, a flap in the back for the waste removal, a hole where the waste enters, and some paint. I also would like to put some screen for the top for air flow.

Next Planting

We have planted about half of our next plot so far. Fourteen rows by about 26 feet. We had a picnic breakfast and the whole family (Jenn, Anna (2 yrs), Nate (5 mo.)) all came out to help. Nathan slept through all the work. We will need to fix that poor work ethic. And Anna was a big help with the snow peas. We had a fun time despite the 90 F. degree temperatures. For the first time on our vegetables, we are using the drip tape from Queen Gil. I hope it goes well. I would like to conserve the water and minimize weed competition where I am not growing plants between the rows. I am a little worried that the drip pattern will not reach the middle of the rows where I planted some seeds. We will find out quickly. We planted what worked well last time, some new things, and some seeds we saved from our last year. I also planted some left over herb transplants just to use them up. We will see what happens. I am disappointed with our cucumbers. I started them early so I could get them in before the frost sets in December. They were growing beautifully and were over growing the plug trays. They were the nicest cucumber transplants I have ever seen. Unfortunately I missed a watering for 24 hours because I thought that it was going to rain at night and it didn’t. They burnt up and I have been trying to nurse them back to health. Some of them are going to die. But I guess you can look at it that they have been screened for extreme drought tolerance. Maybe I can use that method in the future for all the cucumber transplants. They are also the last of our seeds we have saved from two crops. When I planted these plants I left the rest of my saved seeds out in the rain and found them all germinated about two weeks later. So if we don’t get some cucumbers to harvest we will have lost all our selected saved seeds. I think that I am going to try and save two years worth of seeds in case something bad happens to our crops. I am having some difficulty with our filter for our drip tubes getting clogged up rapidly. I hope I can fix this issue. We put pressure regulators on the pipes because the drip tube pressure was too great and was blowing the tubes apart. The tubes need about 12 psi of pressure but not much more than that or problems will arise. I buried some of the tubes to see if we can lay the tube that way and still have an effective germination.

Pumpkin Seeds For Sale

Organically produced, tropical pumpkin seeds for sale!
I am offering organically grown tropical pumpkin seeds for sale. These pumpkins or calabasa squash as they are also called, are internally the same consistency of pumpkin or butternut squash. An organic grower who made pumpkin pies with them introduced me to the plant a year ago at the Plant City Farmers’Market. I bought one, saved the seeds to plant, and ate it. I now love the plant both from a culinary and horticultural standpoint. Each plant has produced over 40 pounds of fruit, which I have eaten, given away, or sold. I have made soups, pies, and side dishes with the ones we harvested for ourselves. Once cooked, the flesh will store well in the freezer. You can use them any where you could use either sweet potato or pumpkin recipes. The plant produced beautifully in our hot, humid, tropical summer here in zone 9 with virtually no care. I will sell them as long as supplies last for $1.75 for 25 seeds. Email your name and address to ststeed@verizon.net if you would like a seed package.

Year Two Starts

I consider this the second year of growing organic vegetables since we started a Fall crop last year. We have planted our first seeded crops for transplants this year. They are some cole crops such as cabbage and cauliflower and we have started our cucumber plants from our own seeds that have grown now for two seasons. Those plants are already six inches tall from seeds sown a week ago. I’ve got a load of horse manure to compost before I put it out in the fields. For organic standards it needs to have composted for 15 days at a temperature of 120-140 and turned minimally 5 times. This should work out just right for our planting time of the first week of September.
Our cover crop experiment with the cowpeas versus soybeans is about over. The cowpeas won hands down. They had so much more biomass, and looked very green as if they had fixed the nitrogen. The soybeans in contrast looked very scraggly and yellow and covered nothing. I will not plant soybeans as a cover crop for my area again. We learned something from this small scale trial and I will need to add more horse manure and fertilizer to help the plants grow in that half of the field. I will be mowing the beans and then cuttings up and turning it into the ground this week. I just read a research report from HortScience about nitrogen release from cover crops. Apparently it took about 30 days for the plants to break down and the nitrogen to change to a plant available form. This should work out according to when the plant needs the nutrients the most.

Covered up

Our new field has been disced twice, seeded with two types of legume covercrops, soybeans and cowpeas. I decided to do half and half to see which one worked better. So far the cowpeas are out growing the soybeans. We have had perfect weather for our seedlings that are coming up, two inches of rain right after sowing. The test plot has about run its course except for the pumpkins which are still growing and producing more fruit. I am amazed about how much area and fruit they are producing. We have harvested 64 pounds of tropical pumpkins or calabasa so far. I bet there is about another 50 pounds still growing on the vines. The topdressing of the basil worked out well and allowed me to harvest again. I disced one half of the test plots and will disc the other parts when I get tired of looking at pumpkins. I am busy planning which crops to grow commercially and which to trial in our test plots. We are nearing year two of the necessary three years for organic certification. I hope to start planting around September for our Fall/Winter crop.

Missing Pictures

Here are a few of the pictures that I have been wanting to post.

This is a picture of the other side of the garden plot where I have planted a row of citrus trees. The vine you see growing is a tropical pumpkin or calabasa squash. From this end to the orange tree in the foreground is 75 feet which is the length of the vines.

Here is a picture of a harvested topical pumpkin. It weighs about 10 pounds. We have picked five fruit already from just three plants. I included a picture with a Valencia orange for scale. We have probably harvested about 50 pounds of squash so far with a bunch more on the vines.

This is the new ground for the next plot that has been cleared of citrus trees.

New Plot

I have finally cleared our next growing area for our organic vegetables. It was pretty difficult pushing up trees with my Massey Ferguson frontloader tractor. It is a great work tractor and is only two years old. There were two models that I was considering at the time of purchase. One had an automatic type of transmission and the other was a standard. The standard is the one I went with mainly because the loader was able to lift a ton. The other one could only lift ¾ tons. I probably should have bought the shuttle drive, which has a pedal on the floor that works as an accelerator and gear changer in one. It would have been much easier ramming trees without constantly changing gears. If tractor abuse was a crime, I would be extremely guilty. No Trial necessary. I wouldn’t even try to plead my way out. My tractor is not made for doing this kind of work but my options are limited. I am hoping next year to be able to borrow real machinery to push up the trees. I spent the last few evenings picking up roots and branches in the new plot before I bring in the disc to even out the field and plow in the weeds that have been growing there. I think that I will disc it again after about a week to allow the weed seeds to germinate. Then I hope to plant a legume covercrop to add some organic matter to the soil and raise the nitrogen levels.
The trial plot has about run its course. Only eggplant, basil, tropical pumpkins, and red onions are left. I cut the basil back hard last week and it is growing back. Some of the older plants have died, but the majority is growing back nicely. I wasn't sure if it would survive. The corn was not so great due to over crowding, and the beans were sub par due to insect damage. The tropical pumpkins are ripening nicely and are looking great. I believe that we will harvest about 50 to 70 lbs of pumpkins from only 3 plants.
The pumpkins are teaching me something about growing in Florida. We get the majority of our rain in the summer months from June until August. We grow most of our crops in the spring and fall. These crops don’t seem adapted to the heat, humidity, insect, disease pressures we face in the months with the highest rainfall. Logically, the summer should be the time when I could water the least and it would be the best time to grow an environmentally friendly crop. I will start looking for some crops that grow extremely well in the tropics; crops that tolerate insects, diseases, heavy rains, and high humidity. If you could suggest some I would be very interested to know.

Produce, Pests, and Pumkins

This week we harvested more of the Genovese basil, which has been an excellent crop for us so far. I then cut them back pretty severely due to the poor quality of the majority of the plant. I then fertilized them with some Sustane fertilizer to perk the plants up some more. I am hoping that I can get a few more harvests before they run their course. The eggplants are still producing and I hope that I can get two more harvests on them as well. The peppers are still doing fine and still have some insect pest issues. We harvested all the white onions and they turned out wonderfully. They took a little long to grow. They are very common in terms of organic vegetables goes and the market in terms of dollars per crop are low. So I don’t think that I will grow them in terms of a crop but for pure enjoyment. The tropical pumpkins are growing nuts, climbing everywhere and starting to lighten in color to an orange tan from a dark green color. I have to look up when to harvest this plant as I have never grown it before. I have also planted our sweet potatoes for this year. I think the biggest pests we will be facing in the future are weeds. It is pretty amazing how well the weeds like to grow in a heavily nutritious ground. They really take advantage of bare, fertile soil. Next week I hope to prepare our new ground for the cover crop and till in the fall trial area for next years preparation. I need to do a better job of cover cropping when a crop is finished in order to stave off the weed pressure.

Growing a Little Bit More

We have started expanding the organic section of the farm this last week. Unfortunately I have had to push up dying citrus trees with my tractor that really isn’t made to do this kind of heavy work. I have pushed about 50’ x 50’ section, which I hope to work with a tractor if I can find the implements to do it. I should have about 15, 50 foot rows of crops to plant out. I have a few stubborn trees giving me some trouble. I will let them sit for a little while before trying to get them out again. I then hope to prepare the ground with a cover crop for the fall planting. I also hope to start the fall trial garden again and will fine tune what to plant. I am not sure how I want to deliver the water for the new section. I would like to eventually like to use drip tape on the farm but I haven’t figured out the logistics of this method yet.
We are harvesting basil, peppers, eggplant, and some parsley. Our tomatoes are barely edible from all the bug damage. I have sprayed Entrust but it does not knock down stinkbugs which are our biggest pest. I have been thinking about what could possibly prey on them and will revisit this topic later. Our peppers are just starting to senesce while still young. Which means that they are falling off the plant. The peduncle or stem end is turning yellow and the pepper drops off too early. I am not sure what is causing this but could use some help if anyone knows of an answer. I have topped dressed everything with a little more fertilizer.
In the next few weeks I will be planning out our fall growing as well as the transplant numbers to try and sell to local stores. Our one store did well and we only got back a few trays due to hot weather. I would rate it as a very big, small success. I am looking forward to expanding this value added segment. I will have some pictures soon to show.

The Future of Our Food

The Corner Store hosted a movie night and the starring attraction was the movie The Future of Our Food. We sat down with our root beer floats and our popcorn and gathered round the television in the dining area of the store. It was a great movie and made me even stronger in my commitment to produce organic vegetables and save our own seeds from our crops. The movie showcased the consolidation of seed companies by chemical companies like Monsanto and the bioengineering of our crop plants. These transformed plants are called genetically modified organisms. They have transformed plant genetics with virus, bacteria, and other organisms incorporated into the plant genome to create new species of life. This is to create a better agribusiness organism with better economic returns to the farmer and the chemical/seed companies. They however are running roughshod over the genetics of plants and are not being forthcoming on the impacts to the environment and other life forms including what the GMO's are doing to people eating those products. The movie highlighted a Canadian farmer who was saving his seed for a generation of farming and some of Monsanto's GMO Roundup Ready canola patented genes got into the genetics of this farmers seeds. He was sued by Monsanto and after a court battle to the Canadian Supreme Court lost to the biotech company. The court ruled that this farmer had infringed on the plant patent. And yet there was no explanation by Monsanto how their genetics got into his plant seeds and the court didn't care about this seemingly trivial fact. The future of our food supply looks bleak if corporate greed will be controlling our seeds and genetics of our crop plants. I think as Americans we should require labeling of GMO food inputs into our food supply. We should ask Congress to pass legislation that will change how GMO products become ingredients into our food supply. It should say on the packaging ingredients whether or not that products we buy contain GMO ingredients. We should also hold responsible companies that make GMO crops and make them pay for cleaning up the environment when their genetic patents escape the intended plants and are found elsewhere. If you get the chance please watch this movie, discuss, and then act!

That was easy!

We harvested our first basil of the season. Only about 2 weeks after transplanting and we harvested about .61 pounds from 12 plants. We also harvested about .5 pounds of jalapeno peppers from about the same number of plants. We sold a nice box of veggies to the Corner Store this week which contained the basil, peppers, oranges, and cucumbers. Our tomatoes have started to ripen but are pierced by green stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs. They are also ruining our beans, peaches and some of our peppers. At least we know who our enemies are! Next year when the stakes are higher we will be prepared for the battle. This year we are just letting our bad neighbors over to identify them. Next year we eliminate them! Enjoy your meals now my nemesis. Whaaa ha ha ha ha!
Our eggplants are growing nicely and I cannot believe that the tomatoes are getting as big as they are. The bell peppers are about the size of my inner palm and I am waiting to see if they get a little bigger before changing colors. The tropical pumpkins are getting bigger and the peaches I think are only a few weeks away. I am now off to a web search on how to control green stink bugs ans leaf-footed bugs organically.

Onions are ready

We are picking our fall seeded onion.

I started to pick onions this week. I am very happy with how they turned out. They look like commercially available onions. I don't know why I get so excited by the fact that I can grow produce. I do have a Bachelors and a Masters of Science in Horticulture. You think that I should just expect that the plants would grow the way I want them. I still am amazed that some plants produce the way they are supposed to. Maybe that reveals that I am relying on more luck than knowledge. I really believe that I could grow fantastic crops with no problem conventionally but it sickens me to think of eating my own produce with loads of chemicals on it. If I was in the position of putting my family in jeopardy by starving to death by not having a crop or eating pesticide residue, we would all be eating chemical laden produce. But since I have a choice on how I grow my plants I chose to grow organically.

I planted basil and cilantro this week in the trial plots and worked some Sustane fertilizer in the beds. I pulled the squash, zucchini, and melons out do to poor performance. I top dressed the eggplants, tomatoes, and the peppers again with Sustane. I feel like they are just not gaining size like they should be doing at this time of the year. Next week I hope to plant some mint and oregano.

Tag, I'm it!

I've been tagged by Liz at Organic Allotment http://organicallotment.typepad.com/ So I will play along.


The Rules:
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write six random things about yourself.
Tag six people at the end of your post linking to their blog.
Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up.


Six Random Things about me:

1. Having a newborn helps me remember that I really need and would enjoy more sleep.

2. I have discovered that growing organically in Florida is extremely hard to do.

3. I really love to grow peppers but hate to eat them.

4. My hobbies are reading non-fiction, growing, fishing, and golf.

5. I love my family more than they could ever know.

6. I am really beginning to feel we need to fix health care in America.

I am going to tag:
Thurston Market Farmer http://thurstongarden.wordpress.com/
Tiny Farm Blog http://tinyfarmblog.com/
My Tiny Plot http://www.mytinyplot.co.uk/

Gardner to Farmer http://gardenertofarmer.blogspot.com/

Seasons Eatings Farm http://seasonseatingsfarm.wordpress.com/

The Bifurcated Carrot http://www.patnsteph.net/weblog/

Still growing

Things are going alright with the trial gardens. I had to rip out the squash and the melons have all but died. It is the same thing year after year with melons. They look great, put out fruit, and then die right before the fruit become harvestable. Oh well. I won't try to grow them for a while. The peppers, eggplants, beans, corn, and tropical pumpkin are growing fine. I sprayed a concoction of Bt, spinosad, and oil to control a multitude of pests that are attacking just about everything in the garden. I would like to keep harvesting cucumbers but they now have mites so I think that will end them soon. I got great harvests off them. I picked about 2 pounds per plant.


I am just about to plant some herbs to see how they will do. Basil, oregano, peppermint, cilantro, and Italian parsley. That should be planted this week.


I have harvested most of the seeds that I wanted and will turn in the winter trial. I am growing a zucchini squash for the seeds and that thing just keeps getting bigger. I am surprised that it has gotten this large.

Seed stock zucchini 24" x 5"

In the front of this picture is a purple nutsedge flower. This is one of the world's worst weeds in terms of economic crop damages and loss. It is spread via seeds and under ground tubers. I spent about 4 years working with this weed in some capacity at the University of Florida in various weed science labs. I despise this weed for all the drudgery incured at school but admire its tenacity and vigor.

Summer trials

Warm season trials

It has been a hectic couple of weeks at Steed Farms. Our whole family has been sick for the last couple of weeks, and I have flown to New York to share in the wedding of my cousin Bridget Steed. I met my brother Kevin, Dad, and four cousins from NY and two cousins that flew over from Ireland (Micheal Steed and his wife and Gavin Steed). Had a great time catching up. I designed my Brothers back corner for a garden and small orchard while I was visiting. He has a beautiful spread to work with. It is not too large to be much to manage but just the right size to be very quaint and productive.

After coming home I sold all our carrots to the Corner Store where they were having carrots as the featured item on a cooking class. I will miss not looking at them anymore and being impressed that I grew such a great carrot crop. I also sold them some cucumbers. We are at about 4 marketable cucumbers per plant at about .5 lbs per cucumber. That's not bad yields. They still look like they are going strong.

We are harvesting blackberries, blueberries, zucchini, and some tiny peaches. I can't seem to get my peaches to size up on the trees. They keep dropping off at about 1.5 - 2 inches. The bad thing is that they seem ripe. If any one knows what I am doing wrong please let me know. Our squashes are all virus infected and the melons are starting to go downhill from powdery and downy mildews. That happens every year. They form great fruit and almost make it to maturity and then the vines die. Cucurbit crops are hard to grow down hear organically. Our tomatoes are the best tomatoes I have ever grown. they look great and have a load of fruit on them now. The pepper and eggplant look fine now as well. The topical pumpkins are doing very well right now. They have huge flowers as big as my hand and tiny pumpkins started.

Tropical pumpkin female flowers

I have tied up the pole beans, eggplants, and tomatoes. I have also top dressed with the 8-2-4 over most of the plants. My daughter also helped me plant the ornamental corn.

Harvest Starts

The first fruits of harvest!

We have begun to pick the first of our produce. Peaches, blueberries, blackberries, squash, cucumbers, and our Valencias were picked this week. I staked up the tomatoes, the eggplants and the pole beans. The plants are looking good except for the virus infected squash. There are still a few that are not infected and we may keep getting some fruit off them. The melons are sizing up and the tomatoes are putting out fruit. The peppers are beginning to flower and the eggplants are growing nicely. I think that this is the best bunch of vegetables I have ever grown. I really believe that enriching the soil with a green manure and horse manure has helped tremendously.

I also have been collecting seeds from a legume that grows wild on the farm. The seeds have been ripening lately and I have been picking them when I have the chance. I have pulled up the plants and have seen microbial nitrogen fixing nodules on the roots. I figured that this plant has adapted to the conditions on our farm with the bacteria indigenous to the soil. It should be a good match for our specific farm conditions.

Looking Good!

Virus infected squash.

The summer trial.

Good news! We sold our first value added organic products this week. I was able to sell some of our transplants to the local hardware store and they have already been moving out of the store. We sold 6 trays of 6 six packs vegetables tomatoes and peppers, and 2 trays of 24 cup peat pots. The proprietor Ronald Stevens of Stevens Hardware liked the plants and would like to buy more in the future. I don't think that he cares that the plants are totally organic but it makes me feel really good that they are and people are buying them. I believe next year we will charge a premium for the organic nature of the product and market the plants a little better. The trials for our summer crops are doing well except for the squash which got viruses almost immediately from whiteflies. I bought a screen but then forgot that the flowers were going to need to be fertilized by insects. We have a lot of bees and other natural pollinators around. The French melons are starting to get downey mildew but the cantaloupe, galia melons, cucumbers and tomatoes are doing great. I have already picked about 4 nice cucumbers off the vines, and a few yellow squash and one zucchini before they got viruses. I planted our sweet corn, two kinds of peppers and eggplants. I fertilized with Sustane fertilizer to follow the recommendations and I have sprayed copper for fungi and Entrust (which is an organic spinosad insecticide) for bugs on almost all of the plants. We will see how things progress. I hope to have some pictures of things this week. We lost our camera and are trying to replace it.

Variety Trial Results

Here is a compilation of the varieties that grew in the winter trial and how they fared. Now mind you this is for my trial in my climate and we had some fertility issues and a few freezes.
A 10 is I would not till the earth without planting this variety and a 1 being I would not waste my time planting free seeds that were given to me and someone planting them for me.
carrot- Nelson 7
carrot- Sugarsnax 6.5
collards - Champion 6
dandelion - Catalogna special 8
mustards - Green wave 6.6
arugula - 7
lettuce - Black seeded simpson 9
lettuce - Parris island romaine 2
lettuce - Sylvesta butterhead 8.5
lettuce - Cerbiatta oakleaf 6
lettuce - Natividad red lollo 2
lettuce - New red fire 8
escarole - Natacha 1
escarole - Eros 1
cabbage - Gonzales 2
cauliflower - snow crown 5
beets - Red ace 7
radish - 1.5 (had a bunch of cracking)
snowpeas - froze out
The onion and garlic have not finished yet so we are still waiting on those. My favorite were the carrots, beets, and the few lettuces that did well in our climate. If you had similar results or different results let us know and please state your climate and location.

Test Results In...A+!

I can hardly believe it. We got our results from the soil test in and it was incredibly good. We have increased our organic matter of the soil from about 2% to 7.1% in a single season! Organic matter in the soil is the water, nutrient, and microbial sponge that releases and protects the crop plants. Having a fertile soil is the mainstay of an organic crop. Our cover crop winter rygrass and our horse manure has greatly increased the fertility of our trial plot. We have the equivalent of 186 lbs of Nitrogen, 736 lbs of P2O5 (phosphorous oxide), and 439 lbs of K2O (Potash) per acre. Those numbers are very high. In fact much higher than needed to grow a decent crop. Our nitrate nitrogen was only 7 parts per million which means that the soluble form of nitrogen that plants use is very low. All our nitrogen is tied up in organic matter that has not released yet. Amazingly the recommendations from the agricultural lab was to add 100lbs of Nitrogen per acre and 20 lbs of potash to release those nutrients to the plants quicker. I called and asked why they would want even more fertilizer on the field and they said that it would depend on how the weather went if that fertility in the soil would release to the plants. I think that I will supplement some of trials and not other to see if there is indeed a difference. The crops are growing very well and looking very nice so far. We have little baby squash, cucumbers, and melons forming on the plants.

Spring Blossoms Forth New Life

Welcome Baby Nathan!

Welcome to the newest member of the Steed Farm and clan! Nathan Thomas Steed came into this world on March 31, 2008 16:05. He weighed 7lbs, 13 oz. and was 20.5 inches long. He is doing very well and Jennifer is doing great as well. His big sister Anna (20 months old) is handling her role quite well. Thank God everything went well. Jenn gave birth entirely natural. I am extremely proud of how well she did through the whole process. I had forgotten how little sleep we get in the beginning. I find it so miraculous that a child can go from not breathing air to inhaling his first breath in seconds. There will be plenty of work and play waiting for you Nathan as soon as you are ready for it!

A Carolina wren hiding in her nest.

Each year, much the same way that the return of the swallows at San Juan Capistrano, or the first Robins of the spring appear, or the return of the monarch butterflies are heralded, I too have inflection points throughout the year. Signposts of the season that remind me of the cyclical nature of the year. At our farm I always anticipate the finding of the Carolina wren nests in spring time. You can usually see them darting to and fro in the late winter hunting for a meal and nest sites. I have had them nest in tractors, one gallon stacked pots, and mostly in our shop. We have had them every year that I have occupied this farm. Sometimes they will have a couple of nest in a year. This year my father went to grab those pruners that you see in the picture and the mother wren flew out from her nest and scared the daylights out of him. I almost did the same thing until I caught sight of the nest. You can barely see her, but I assure you there is a mother wren sitting on four eggs in this nest. We always work around the nesting mothers since I like having them about. They are after all fun to watch and free pest control.

Planting Underway

Cucumber plants newly planted with some straggling cover crop still surviving

Transplants growing for the field and possible sale.

The weather is bouncing around as usual. Heavy rains, upper 30 F., lower 80's F. all within another week. Despite the climate, I have planted tomatoes, and bell pepper this week in our trial gardens. Everything seems to be doing well even when our fish fertilizer was applied wrong. The person that was helping me fertilize mixed about 32 times the recommended rate. When I realized what happened about 4 hours later, I tried to drench everything out with a leaching water. I got some leaf burn a few days later on the tomato transplants and some melons. But I think that they will recover. The plants that were planted last week are growing well. Our peaches, blueberries, and blackberries are maturing well. I am seeing very little pests around this year. It might be because I am seeing a bunch more ladybugs on the plants and weeds. We are still harvesting beets, lettuce, and carrots. I hope to plant jalapeno peppers this week. I am taking a soil sample to have it tested so we can see how fertile the soil is after the horse manure and rye grass was incorporated. Then I will adjust my fertilizer levels accordingly. I hope next week to be able to summarize the results of our test plots by variety and let you all know how the varieties we tried fared in this climate.

Welcome, Spring!

It is officially one day after Spring. At Steed Farms I am always happy to see the sun moving higher in the sky and the earth warming up. The draw back to warmer temperatures is the need to water more. I planted yellow crooked neck squash, zuchinni, three kinds of beans (two bush, and one Italian flat pole bean), a tropical pumpkin that I ate for the first time in the winter and saved the seeds from, and a cucmber that I have selected for its production in our garden plot. Everything is coming along fine. The squash seemed to be having a little shock from the transplant. I found a distributor for organic fertilizer both dry and fish emulsion the company is JR Johnson. I purchased a Dramatic K fish hydroysate 2-5-0.2 and a dry 8-2-4 called Sustane. We will start trying them out.

A New Planting

The oranges are in full blossom right now. I love this time of the year in the grove. The smell is like an intoxicating drug for me. I can't get enough of the aromas. We had three inches of rain, 80 F. temperatures, and then a light frost all in the span of a week. It is amazing how quickly our Florida weather changes. I have been itching to plant my transplants into the new plot. I have been trying to wait 30 days for the manure to settle before I planted just so I don't get any contamination on our food. But I couldn't wait any longer. I planted a French melon called a Charentais var. "Savor" from Johnny's Seeds. I have never heard of this but I was sold on the description and the pictures (nice job, ad guys). I planted a galia melon, "Arava". The galia is an Isreali melon. I had them before in graduate school. Another student and friend of mine was doing research on them for a new greenhouse crop. I helped him a time or two with his research and I got to eat fresh galia melons. They were very sweet and fragrant. I also planted cantalope var. "Earliqueen". I never had any luck with melons. They always seem to die right before the fruits become ripe. I hope I can break that streak this time. I hoed the ground before planting and then watered them in lightly.

We missed the transplants target date of this weekend. Due to a freeze, not getting our seeds until this week, and the slower rate at which organic plants grow. I worked for Speedling, Inc., a major transplant supplier to farmers and could grow most transplants in about 4 weeks. I need a bit longer than that for a marketable plant to sell organically. The seed company, Southern Exposure Seeds ran out of cherry tomato seeds that I ordered. They then forgot to call me and let my order languish because they had no response from me on what to do with the other seeds they had. I am glad I finally called them. It took two days to hear back from them and it took two phone calls and an email. I will plan better next year for these set backs.

We are still harvesting carrots, beets, lettuce, collards, mustards, and dandelion in our trial plot. We will continue to harvest Hamlin oranges and the Valencias will be ready shortly. Our peaches, nectarines, plums, limes, lemons, grapefruit, and other citrus are blooming now.

I hope to finish planting the rest of the new plot this week with cucurbits, squash, corn, beans, a little late lettuce.

Fertilizer blues

Dead tomato plants from a frost.

I have been having trouble with the fertility on the vegetables in the trial gardens. I haven't quite worked out how much to apply. Growing organically is so different from conventional growing in terms of fertility. I am having trouble adjusting to it. Conventionally you just apply some fertilizer over the top or in a band next to the plants and they respond. I have been apply organic fertilizers and it take a while for the plants to pick up the nutrients. It seems so much slower. I can tell that the plants are nutrient starved in the trial garden, but the amounts that I put on don't seem to do much. The amounts that I apply with an organic 6-2-4 would fry conventionally grown plants with the same amounts of synthetic fertilizer. I was getting concerned about my transplants not growing fast enough so I applied more fertilizer over the top. I happened to do this the day before the frost came. I have lost a bunch of my tomato plants. I thought that it was the fertilizer but I checked with my EC meter and the levels look fine. An EC meter is a great tool to check your fertility level. It stands for electrical conductivity meter. It measures the amount of soluble salts present in solution. There are different ways to measure it. I use a one part growing media to two parts water, stir it up, and let it sit for about 5 minutes, strain the water off, and put it in the meter and measure the results. Results of 0-0.5 are too low. 0.5-1.5 is acceptable, and 1.5 or greater is high in fertility. If it is too high it may burn your plants. Meters are fairly cheap and a great way to keep things in the right range. My transplants were 1.0 which is within a good range. So I guess the frost did more damage than I thought. It measured 39 F. but there was frost on the plants. I guess I need to get over the cringing feeling when I apply organic fertilizers. I always feel that I am going to burn the plants. I am learning that the soluble salt levels are lower in organic fertilizers and I can apply a larger amount without problems.

A load of poop!

A load of manure before and after spreading.

Today it was 35 degrees F. when I woke up. We closed down the houses but I left the transplants outside. I will see the damage later when I do my evening walk through. It had been upper 70F. earlier in the week.

This week we have been busy planting seeds in trays and getting our fertilizers in the ground for our spring/summer crop. We have planted lettuce, and dandelion. We got our first load of horse manure dumped in our garden area. It was an interesting experience both visually and aromatically to get our fertilizer in this way. I was trying not to get too squeamish when the smell was burning my eyes and nose and white maggots were moving through the pile after being disturbed from there meal. My Dad and I took loads to all the fruit trees and blueberry bushes. Then I spread it out over the area with the front end loader and tilled it with the other side of the tractor. It was a tight squeeze and will definitely need new ground for next year.

I thinned some of the peaches this week. I am doing an experiment on thinning on side of the tree to see how that works out compared to no thinning in terms of number and sizes of fruits.

We have been harvesting awesome looking carrots. They are still growing and getting larger by the day. Our radishes have been splitting so I don't think that I can sell them. Too much variation in temperatures and rainfall I believe is the cause. The seven potato plants are all dead. I think that it may have been ants. When I pulled them up there were tunnels in the stems and ants crawling through them. I at first thought that it was fungus but I have changed my mind. We are running out of lettuce that has been selling well to one customer and I am trying to catch a late harvest keep the revenue coming in.

I ate the first beets this week. They were very good. Jenn didn't like them. She said they tasted like dirt to her. I think they have a sweet and earthy taste. I like them except for the red dye they ooze out on everything including my teeth. I roasted them in a pan with some carrots in the oven and they came out really good. I also pan fried the leaves with olive oil and garlic and they were excellent. I have never cooked beets before but enjoyed them. I will grow them again for myself. They took terribly long for a sales item to plant. If you have any receipies please share them with us.

Next week I hope to get my seeds we have been waiting on for three weeks. I read their catalog again and they mention allow 3-4 weeks during the busy time which is now. Bad planning on my part, weak service on their part. Live and learn!

A wagon load of produce!

This week has been slow. The weather has been warm, lower 80's but then a bounce back to upper 40's tonight. We have moved some of our seedling transplants out of the greenhouse to get more sunlight. The greenhouse has 50% shade plastic to reduce the sunlight during cutting propagation. It is not really meant for propagation of seeds. The greenhouse pulls double duty as a greenhouse for ornamental cutting propagation. So if the weather is good I bring out the trays for exposure to the sun. They have already begun to strech a bit from just a week in the house.

I have fertilized the seedlings with a bit of topdress with an organic fertilizer from the Scotts company. I will give it a shot and see how it does. I have also drenched the seedlings with my liquid fertilzer as well as the trial garden with both fertilzers.

We have been harvesting lettuce, carrots, lemons, oranges, arugula, and collards. The potatoes that have been doing so well have all of a sudden collapsed and I think will die. I believe it was a fungus that has killed them. There was no disease present on the leaves, just a colapse of the plant or a wilting from the bottom up. No injuries at the base of the plant just looks like a vascular clogging.

I am hoping to plant another row of radish and arugula this week. Our red leaf lettuce has transplanted well and is growing off well. I am planning on making our next fall planting area and am looking for covercrops to plant. Still waiting on herb seeds from the vendor. I hope they show up this week.

Goodbye Leo

Leo chilling out in the ryegrass cover crop

Our market booth this last week.

We had a loss of a good friend at our farm this last week. Leo our 9 month old cat was struck by a car on the highway that borders our farm. I don't particularly like cats since I am allergic to them, but this cat was very special. He showed up at our house after a semi had crashed into our tree out front. He was very friendly and not the least bit shy. Leo was very cannine like. He would walk with me and Copper around the perimeter of our farm twice a day while I checked everything in the morning and evening. He would just trot along side of us as we did the rounds. I had just started to warm up to him when I saw him catching and eating grasshoppers in the organic trials. The day before he died he came over and sat underneath me as I harvested crops. He just sat there being as nice as could be and nuzzled my hands as I worked. I even began to think that I was really getting to like this cat. He got along great with the whole family as well as Copper. He did not show up in the morning for our walk. It was not highly unusual for him to miss our morning walk but it was odd none-the-less. Jenn confirmed the death before I could get home. I retrieved him from the road and buried him beneath the oak tree he used to hang out by and ambush squirels and Copper. You will be missed Leo. I am still trying to find a picture of him to post.

This past week I planted out the red lettuce and escarole. We have almost finished planting all our seed trays. We are still waiting on one last order of herbs. I have been trying to line up getting some horse manure for the fruit trees and the spring/summer trials. It has been difficult with the lack of a proper dump trailer. I might have to break down and buy one. I have mowed down the cover crop. It was amazing how much underground biomass was created with the crop. I pulled a clup of the earth out and it was covered with roots. I never really thought about how much the underground parts of the plant contribute to the whole picture. I guess it is a bit of out of sight, out of mind. I was very impressed.

I have all the seeds in for the next crop and am itching to plantinto the field. We have been planting the seeds in seedling trays and peat pots. They have been emerging over the course of the week. I will begin to pull them from the house this week and move them outside to get a little stronger.

The market faired a little better. We only sold half of the oranges we brought and all the veggies, which wasn't very much. I sold some plants which helped the over all picture. Increasing our prices seemed to help the overall economics.

Spring Time

A severe close up of our first peach and blossoms. Sorry about the blur.

Spring has sprung. We have been bouncing back and forth from temperatures in the upper 30’s F. in the morning to the mid 80’s on other days in the afternoon. The plants are always confused at this time of the year. They don’t know whether to stay dormant or start growing. However, the grass is growing, the peaches are blossoming, and the citrus trees have their buds enlarging. Last week we planted about a fourth of the seeds into our trays, we are still waiting on seeds to arrive so we can finish our planting. I find that sometimes the produce market can be a great place to buy seeds. I bought some jalapeno and bell peppers and pulled out the seeds to use for our transplants. I also saved one of our cucumbers from last year and got all the seeds from that. That particular plant produced a whooping amount of cucumbers all season long. I was supper impressed. The fruit has even stayed hard since the end of summer last year. I am hoping to supply my own seeds on certain vegetables. I feel that if I harvest seeds from plants that don’t flower too early or late and that yield well, then I will in essence be breeding and selecting plants that are a perfect fit for my microclimate.

We have been harvesting carrots, lettuce, arugula, cauliflower, dandelion, mustards, and collards. Our romaine lettuce hasn’t grown well. I have harvested a few heads here and there, but the majority of the leaves have been mottled and misshapen. I can’t tell if it is thrips damage or a virus. A thrip is a very tiny yellow insect that scrapes leaves with its razor like mouthparts and then sucks up the juices. They are barely visible to the eye. They come in waves during the spring and are attracted to the color white. I remember back in graduate school when I had field trials, one day I wore a white T-shirt and started feeling an itch on my skin. I scratched for a while until it started to really bother me and I investigated in more detail. I realized that I was crawling with thrips and they were busy dining on my skin. Another person not wearing white was not as harassed as I was. Now I can tell when they are around because I remember what they feel like when they are rasping my skin with their tiny mouths.

I will start preparing for the market this weekend. I am glad I will have a better array of produce than our first market experience. I am also looking forward to see how our increased prices will fare. I probably will not bring as much landscape material and increase the amount of organic vegetables from our farm this time.

I hope to plant our new red leaf lettuce and another variety of escarole this week. I also hope to find some sweet potatoes in the store in order to plant them in our fields.

Everything Covered?

Our cover crop. "Sit Copper! I said sit! Copperrrrr!" (Our Jack Russel Terror!)

Our organic transplant venture for our value added products is off and running. The input supplies have started trickling in. Our soil, flats, peat pots and some of our organic seeds have arrived and we will begin sowing seeds this week. I’m still waiting for some seeds to come in and then we will have everything ready. We will be doing a bell pepper, a slicing tomato, cherry tomatoes, jalapeno pepper, six different herbs, broccoli, cabbage, and eggplant. That should be a good assortment. If they don’t sell, I can use them in the trial gardens. I just hope I can have them ready quick enough to make it to the market and to a trade show I hope to exhibit at. That gives me about 5 weeks. That should just make it in time. We will see. I hope the weather works with us. Keep your fingers crossed.
Our cover crop of ryegrass is doing well. I planted it to keep the weeds down in our warm season crop area. It looks great and it did do an excellent job of keeping weeds to a minimum and it will add organic matter to the crop area. In retrospect, I should have planted a nitrogen fixing cover crop to add nitrogen to the soil. I have been doing some research on this and am still figuring out how to effectively use cover crops. It is a different concept from conventional growing on how to fertilize plant by getting the soil fertile enough to grow a crop. In conventional growing you just keep dumping fertilizer until you reach the fertility level you need. I just read a very good article from HortScience (43:27-33. Use of the Cover Crop Weed Index to Evaluate Weed Suppression by Cover Crops in Organic Citrus Orchards) from this month. The study was in a section on organic horticulture research. The article was from the University of Florida (my alma mater, Go Gator Nation!) on the cover crop effectiveness in reducing weeds in young citrus trees. They used combinations of plants, both annual and perennial. Their research indicated that mixtures of annual plants were the best plants to use, and provided both organic matter and kept weeds to a minimum. They used a novel and simple index for the cover crop effectiveness in reducing weeds. They took the weight of weeds and divided it by the weight of cover crop and came up with an index. Any ratio over 3 was deemed effective.
I harvested cauliflower and dandelion from our trials. The dandelion was bitter but that is my fault. I should have harvested it about three weeks ago. The cauliflower tasted great. It was the freshest tasting cauliflower I have ever eaten. I hope I’m not being too biased but it did taste excellent.

Bunny Buffet

This last week the Economist magazine confirmed our observations at the market last week. I just read that people will pay more for the same products because they view the purchase as getting a better quality or a preceived benefit. They view a lower price as being an inferior product. We will increase prices accordingly. Why turn away customers by being too cheap? This week I have decided to add vegetable and herb transplants to our line of produce. I am also considering cut flowers to sell at the market next fall for our value-added products. It has been hard to locate organic inputs to grow a fully organic transplant. The normal horticultural supply chain raises their collective eyebrows when you mention a need for the inputs to be certified organic. I hope to start planting tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, maybe some cole crops and herbs this week for our transplant line.
I have liquid fed the garden with my fertilizer mix. I have planted radishes, bunching onion, and Swiss chard. To see how well they do as well as get a fast crop of radishes to sell at the market to broaden our mix quickly. I have pruned the deciduous trees (e.g. peach, nectarines, and plums). These are low chill varieties bred for our location and climate. I harvested a few of the largest carrots from the plots this week. I have never grown carrots to harvest before, that I can remember. It was really exciting to pull them from the ground and see what has been going on down there since we planted them. It is very satisfying to know that I was able to grow marketable carrots. (I know they are not very straight, but probably still marketable.) I guess part of the excitement was not knowing how they were doing until I pulled them up from the ground. I harvested them mainly because the curiosity was killing me and to thin out clumps that were clustered too close together.

Off To The Market

I pulled out of our farm at 6:oo on Saturday accompanied by the sounds of bluegrass emanating from our local independent radio station WNMF 88.5 "Always at the extreme left on the radio" as one of their DJs likes to say. You can take this both literally and figuratively. It seemed somewhat fitting to go off to the market with an older type of folk music playing. I know that it is commonplace for some to go with their wares to the local market, but it felt refreshingly new and I felt somewhat nostalgic for a bygone era as I headed down the road in pitch blackness. The weather was great all day about 70 F and a little overcast so it was not too hot. I only had curly mustard greens, which were cut the night before, washed, bundled, and put on ice in a cooler. The other item was Hamlin oranges, which were also washed, and placed in an old wash tub. They looked awesome. Our oranges look great this time of year with a little chill to change the color and raise the sugar levels. They really sparkle with a little wash. To fill in the booth space I brought a truckload of plants from the nursery side of our operation. Everyone liked our booth display and I passed out all of the business cards I had from the interest in our plants. I sold all the oranges and eventually sold out the remaining mustard to The Corner Store, which is our first customer for our produce. I had numerous people tell me that our produce prices were too low. One woman who was snowbirding from New England stood there in disbelief and kept repeating the phrase, "Twelve oranges for $1.00?" I kept saying that was correct. She bought a dozen. I even had the other organic grower come over and tell me that my prices on the greens were too low. She was selling her bunches for $2.00 and mine were $1.25. She sold out and I had the majority of mine left before The Corner Store bought me out. Go figure! Jenn told me she thought our prices were too low. I am going to let her set the prices from now on. I also realized that people really couldn't buy landscape plants at the market. People can’t walk around with a seven-gallon shrub that they impulse bought to place in their landscape. I need to work on our product mix! Maybe some vegetable or annual transplants for the spring might work better, or some small "Wow" plants.
I did learn a lesson about value added products. The Corner Store was juicing our oranges and putting them in a cup and selling it for about four times the amount I sold them for. Another gentleman was selling organic jams and jellies he made the night before. He set up in about 20 minutes, had one table, had about as much value in the space as I did, and he almost sold out. He was selling his jars for $5.00. I was selling plants that took me three to four months to grow for $2.00. I had to deal with all the weather, the water, insects, and diseases. I will start thinking hard about value added products. We did cut up the oranges for people to try them. That was Jenn’s idea. It certainly helped us make some sales. Some people would start walking away from our booth with an orange slice and then come back and purchase some. If you have any other ideas for marketing or value-added products for the market you are welcome to share it with us and others on this blog.

My father bought us an action-hoe or loop hoe the kind that looks like a stirrup. I used it to weed in the trial garden. I love it. Thanks Dad! You didn’t have to do that, but I really appreciated it.

I added a little fertilizer to the beds to help them grow out of the freeze damage. Half of our tomatoes died in the transplant flat. I think that it was too high a salt content in my liquid fertilizer. I checked the salt level with a meter I have and it was off the charts. This week I diluted it down by 5 parts water. I kept thinking that the seedling lettuce looked much better than expected with a one time feed with a liquid fertilizer. They were probably right on the border of death with extreme fertilizer. Note to self: Always check the salt level of new batches of liquid nutrients. This was a very valuable week in terms of the volume of knowledge we have gained!

Blast of Cold

Ice, Ice, Baby!

We had our first really cold weather of the season on. Notice the burn on the plants and the green mustard. It reached 27 F. at our farm with a strong 12 mph wind. We moved some plants in the greenhouse and covered some of the tropical plants. I was also letting the trial garden face the extreme weather to benchmark it as a learning opportunity. Everything except the mustard, garlic, carrots, and onions got some damage if not a complete kill. I really didn't think that snow peas would die. "Snow peas" for crying out loud, who named this plant? It is hard for the plants to bounce from 80 to 27 back to 80 degrees in just a week but that is what we have to deal with.

It looks like our wormery residents are not cold hardy as well. I didn't know that they couldn't stand cold weather. I thought that they would bury themselves deeper in the soil when cold weather approached. I now know this for a fact. Sorry guys. I hope my karma is not affected by my lapse of judgement.

We are gearing up for our first fresh market attendance. I am not putting too much hope for a good turn out this weekend. I was there last month and there were very few buyers and sellers. We also piggyback the same spot with the antique market which also happens once a month. They seem more organized than the fresh market people. I hope that this can take off. It would be a great venue for us to sell produce and mesh with our local neighbors. I think that we should revitalize our downtown Plant City and people should buy their produce closer to home thereby saving fuel and inputs and keeping the money flowing in our area. I hope this catches on. Think global, act local!!!

Happy New Year!

This week we weeded the entire trial garden. My Dad and I had some good conversation about how they weeded in the "Old Country" (Ireland) while we toiled. They used to plant turnips and cabbage in rows. He would work down the rows weeding and thinning plants. Sounds like things don't change that much in terms of weeding. I did however try his new hoe. It looks like a stirrup and is called double edge hoe or a loop hoe. It was very effective and reduce amount of time to hoe dramatically over the traditional hoe. I will be purchasing one shortly. It passes through the earth cutting the weeds at the roots and doesn't pull the earth as well as the weeds like the traditional hoe.

I made a batch of liquid fertilizer/compost. I was wanting some liquid fertilizer to start off our seedlings that I will be transplanting later on. I figured that this would give the crop plants a big head start with the weeds and help them out-compete their adversaries. The fertilizer is made from old compost, organic fertilizer, a splash of Companion fungicide which is a beneficial fungus that competes with other fungi, and water. I let it sit for a few days while stirring to add oxygen whenever I pass the bucket. I would like to add oxygen to the container without using any electric. I think a small windmill that could stir and add oxygen would be just the ticket. The seedlings are for the trial garden to find better varieties than what I currently have. I planted Eros escarole, Marimba red leaf lettuce and starting a trial of New Girl tomato.

We harvested collard greens for New Years Day. Eating collards and black-eye peas is a Southern tradition for New Years day. The greens signify money and the peas represent luck for the coming new year. I have heard of hiding a penny in with the peas and whoever finds the coin gets the luck. We prefer not to risk the unfortunate rendezvous of currency with an unsuspecting throat, and we all share the good luck by eating the peas. It's a little safer that way. Jenn's mother puts a little olive oil, sugar, and salt in a pot with the collards and boils them. The sugar takes away the bitter taste of the collards and they are delicious. Best of luck to you and yours this new year.