FCPJ Today

blueberries and flowers and veggies

I'm so tired this will only be a short post.  Bob and I planted a row of blueberry bushes out here today!  Yes, it's true!  I don't know how the Farm came to be this far along without someone thinking to plant blueberries!  We got the plants from Fred at Santa Fe Blueberries, just around the corner.  He gave us lots of good advice about how to grow them, including the fact that they should be grown entirely in pine bark mulch.  So early this morning we got in the truck and got a load of pine bark mulch from Elixson Wood Products in Starke.  3 cubic yards fills a truck and it cost $27.   Then after doing some other errands and getting supplies for other projects you'll no doubt hear about on this blog, we came home and had lunch.  In the afternoon I started digging the holes in the site we had selected (for the best sun and soil drainage and access to irrigation).  It's right behind the wild plum thicket near the vegetable garden.  Digging eight 2 foot deep holes in hard compacted sandy soil wore. me. out.  We finished planting the last plant just as dark fell.  There's a row of 8 plants there now.  Well mulched and well planted.  We really babied them.  We won't have a crop this year because we'll be focusing on establishing a good root system but next year!  Man-o-man I can already taste 'em!  There is room, by the way, for this little blueberry patch to be expanded in the future but please.  Someone else dig the holes?

Other garden news: zucchini, crookneck squash and eggplants have all sprouted and are thriving.  They are ready to be transplanted into the garden any day now.  I planted zinnia seeds in the vegetable garden today.  Zinnias are heat-tolerant and produce beautiful blooms all summer long that make excellent cut flowers.  You can't have enough zinnias in my book, especially to place in little bouquets on picnic tables during Peace Camp.

Labyrinth News: My original idea to improve upon the labyrinth this year by planting it full of sunflowers has been modified somewhat by the lack of water in the area and the desire to reduce our watering needs here on the land.  There still will be SOME sunflowers but the labyrinth this year will be seeded mostly with native Florida wildflowers that like dry sandy soil and will re-seed themselves year after year: black eyed Susans, galliardia (blanketflower), beach sunflower and coreopsis (tickseed).  These will bloom all summer long and while it's not the same as walking through a wall of sunflowers it'll still be beautiful and much more eco-friendly.  Sunflower labyrinths are for Kansas; coreopsis labyrinths are for Florida (by the way respectively those are the state wildflower for each state).  By the way I think the labyrinth gopher tortoise will appreciate the wildflower plan over the sunflower plan; they also like dry sandy conditions.

The Florida Native Plant sale is this weekend.  I plan on going and getting some native landscaping plants for around the PEC (Peace Education Center).  It'll be beautiful.  The Teaching Farm this year'll knock yer socks off!

Compost: Our goals for 2007

This is the second time I've spent a summer out here on the Teaching Farm and both times I've worked in the vegetable garden.  As I'm preparing the soil, weeding, composting and planting out here I'm comparing my experiences with plots in community gardens in Gainesville with what it's like growing out here and I think there is a world of difference. 

The community gardens provided by the City of Gainesville are all, by law, organic which means that in the established gardens the soil has been built up for years with enormous amounts of compost material of all kinds.  This past winter I gardened at the community garden near GRU, one of the first established community gardens in the city.  I had the easiest most successful gardening experience ever.  Anything I planted grew and I had no pest or disease problems at all.  Such is a garden that is in balance.  They have healthy populations of beneficial insects and a variety of organic materials as fertilizers: bat guano, traditional kitchen waste compost, leaf compost and horse/cow manure just to name the most prevalent.

Out here at the Teaching Farm our sources of compost are much more limited.  We have a compost pile of leaves and kitchen waste but mostly to prepare the soil this year we trucked in loads of horse manure from a farm.  It's good stuff but it's filled with sawdust and whatever chemicals or steroids the horse farm gives its horses.  That's it; that's all we have.  I'm not being pessimistic when I say our vegetable garden here probably won't be nearly as productive until we establish more sources of organic compost here on site.  More compost means healthier plants and healthier plants mean more beneficial insects and more resistance to disease and an overall more balanced garden system.

So one of my goals for the Teaching Farm for 2007 is to work on establishing more on-site compost production.  Because as you all know, to have a productive garden you can either use LOTS of organic materials or you can use chemical fertilizers but we should not expect a successful garden if we do neither (or if we don't do enough of the former).  Florida soils are simply too nutrient poor to support a lot of vegetable crops without assistance.  Here are some of my ideas for easy compost production we could do here on-site:

• Build a bat house.  Bats are great; they eat insects (including mosquitos), kids love to get freaked out by seeing them at night and their poop (guano) is like gold to plants.  I really hope we can build one or two out here this summer, maybe the kids at Peace Camp will do it, but if not, someone should (any volunteers?).  As great as a bat house would be, it is not an immediate solution to the compost problem; it's hard to attract the bats to the place and it can take them up to two years to even find the house so there's a certain amount of luck involved but they can't come if we don't build it.  This is a long-term investment in our gardens.

• Re-establish the worm farm.  Worm farming also known as vermiculture is one of the best ways to create compost.  You can buy bags of worm castings but they're very expensive and why buy it when worm farming is so simple!  We used to have a worm tub out here but I guess it fell out of use.  I would like to set up a worm farm out here again.  Worms are similar to bats in a way: they eat things we don't like, kids love to get grossed out by them and their poop also is like gold to plants.  In the past we've used an old bath tub and there are still 2 or 3 tubs on site here.  While an old tub sitting in the yard may not be the prettiest sight in the world with some nice plantings around it, it might not be so bad.  An alternative would be to set up worm bins in the pump house (the tub wouldn't fit).  It's cool and dark and out of sight there.  We could pull the bins out for demonstration purposes like when the kids come for camp but otherwise don't have to have them out in view.  Bins in the pump house might have the added benefit of helping to deter ants from getting in (a problem with our current compost pile and a potentially lethal problem with compost ants).

• Rabbits.  They don't eat anything gross but rabbits do have the latter two benefits: kids love 'em* and their poop (which looks like Coca Puffs cereal) is an excellent fertilizer.  We could partner with the Gainesville Rabbit Rescue a nonprofit organization which takes in unwanted rabbits (a few months after Easter they have more than enough rabbits to go around) to become a foster home for rabbits while they are awaiting adoption.  Rabbits are generally easy to care for and I have experience building rabbit hutches!  Being a foster home for the rabbits rather than simply adopting them may more practical for us here since we have no long term permanent caretaker yet out here on the land.   On the occasion when there is no one around out here to care for a rabbit we can simply suspend the program until there is.

And finally it goes without saying that I'm hoping to improve our traditional compost pile by turning it more frequently and maintaining it so that it produces quality compost more quickly than a neglected unturned compost pile does.

Doing any one of these things would help; doing all of them would mean the Teaching Farm would be much better positioned to become a real organic farm in the near future with each successive vegetable garden becoming more and more productive as we become better composters!

------

* Rabbits don't make good pets for small children though.  Being a prey animal they hate being held and take some training to not panic at being picked up.  GRR has lots of good info on rabbits and kids.  Having our younger Teaching Farm visitors see and pet our rabbits on visits however, shouldn't be a problem.

A visit from Al and June

The best days are when Al Geiger and June come out to visit.  Al's always fixing something (well, something's always broke!) and June works in the gardens.  I showed June everything that had happened since the last time they were here (the gopher tortoise burrow, the vegetable garden, the butterfly/herb garden etc.)  Bob showed Al the plans for the cabins we've been working on.  Then June and I pulled some weeds while Bob and Al worked on fixing the saw. We had some great conversations about Florida ecosystems and xeroscaping over lunch at the picnic table under the cedar trees. 

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Al measured the water in the well just to see how low it is during these dry times: it's 16 feet down to the water level and the well itself is only 19 feet!  By the way, he said that well is one of the oldest things out here --probably around 100 years old!  Pretty cool, huh?

And if all that weren't enough, after they left Bob and I decided to do some home improvments on the trailer.  I worked on a flower bed while he reconstructed a step off the back porch.  It's a raised platform with decorative stepping stones that some kids made during Peace Camp one year.  It looks great!  Come on out and see us some time --there's lots of work to be done at the Teaching Farm.

Spring garden

by barb howe
Hi everyone, welcome to the new blog of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice!  I thought it was time for me to introduce myself since I'm one of the contributors to this here blog.  My name's barb howe and I've been involved with the Coalition for probably around ten years more or less?  Not that I've been the most active member during that time but I think I've probably met a good many of you at one time or another.  I was a studying at UF but now I've graduated and am living out here on The Teaching Farm, doing a sort of informal work exchange: I'm putting in this year's gardens since the Hooley's have left for the summer.  It's a lot of work; I'm exhausted but the good news is there's A LOT going on out here!

First, the vegetable garden.  It's organic, of course.  Bob plowed the garden with the tractor (see right; click photo to enlarge) and then we brought in a truckload of composted horse manure and worked it into the soil.  We were lucky to have an irrigation system already set up thanks to Chris and also an inner fence to keep the deer out (we'll still have to put a perimeter fence up around the whole garden eventually). 

Unfortunately, one of the things we discovered is that since we're an organization and one never knows who's going to be working the garden from one year to the next, it would be useful to have a garden plan so that we don't accidentally dig things up.   We didn't  know there was asparagus planted that hadn't come up yet and so some of it got damaged when we plowed.  We decided that from now on perennials like that should go inside the inner (permanent) fence of the garden which doesn't get plowed.  Inside the trailer/office you can find a layout map of what's planted where in the garden (which is also useful for certain crops that should not be planted where other crops have grown).

Also I'm sorry to report that our first tomato plants got fusarium wilt and so had to be removed.  Fusarium wilt is apparently pretty common in Florida and there's not much an organic farmer can do about it to get rid of it.  It's a fungus that lives in the soil and it affects tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe and some other things.  It'll kill or severely damage affected plants.  Most recommendations are to plant disease resistant varieties and try to live with it or grow your tomatoes in disease free soil in containers.  We're probably going to go the former route since it'd be difficult to keep the containers from drying out and overheating in the hot summer sun.

Besides tomatoes and peppers (which so far don't seem to have fusarium wilt), we have planted a nice patch of strawberry plants in the perennial garden inside the inner fence, some Kentucky Wonder pole beans along the sides, and some sunflowers and zinnia to in the center.  I've also incorporated butterfly attracting plants in this area (milkweed and butterfly weed) although I still plan on doing a separate butterfly/herb meditation garden in the usual spot near the Cracker house as well.  That garden so far has rosemary, sage, coreopsis (a.k.a tickseed, our state wildflower) and salvia.

Finally, I have many seeds starting in trays around the potting shed: marigolds, more tomatoes, crookneck squash, zucchini, more sunflowers, watermelon and pumpkin.  (We're going to have separate areas for watermelon this year AND a small pumpkin patch near the garden but not in it).   We have lots and lots of sunflowers because my hope is to plant them along the pathways of the grass labyrinth we have etched into the front meadow (if you haven't seen this you really should!  It's beautiful!)

It's going to be an exciting growing season out here on the farm.  If you haven't been by, please come pay us a visit.  You might go home with a bagful of fresh organic veggies, some sunflowers or some amazing photos of wildflowers.  We guarantee a relaxing peace-filled experience!