Tag: food security

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Let’s Plant Onions

There was a break in the weather and it gave us time to plant onions. We have almost 1,000 onions sets started this year. We planted the onions and then covered with hay. The hay helps suppress weeds and makes weeding so much easier. The hay also serves as a soil amendment as it composts.

Word of warning with using hay, or any compost, in your garden: it is important to make sure that you aren’t introducing herbicides into your garden through the hay or compost. The vast majority of hay is sprayed with a herbicide. Compost from your local municipality usually contains grass that was treated herbicides. That free compost from the city or county can kill the plants in your garden. Here is a good resource on the topic – click here

How to buy produce and cuttings from Simply Us Farm

When we have produce available, we’ll announce it here and through our email list. Many of the the items from our farm are only available for a short season and often just once per year.

Onions planted, next is covering with hay
Hay covering the onions and garlic
Garlic is weeded and covered with hay
This toad was hiding in a patch of weeds in the garlic

The daffodils are blooming. Nice to see the beautiful colors

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Small But Mighty Growing Potatoes Classes

We had a great day on the farm teaching how to plant potatoes.

Yesterday (Friday, the day before class) I was out on the farm getting the rows ready to plant. It was all going well until it started raining. One of the challenge with planting potatoes is rain and wet ground, which also seems to happen when we go to plant potatoes. I’m not sure if I would know how to plant potatoes without standing in mud between the rows.

Today we accomplished the following:

– demonstrated and did hands-on cutting of seed potatoes in pieces to plant
– planted approximately 200 linear feet of three different varieties of potatoes
– installed and tested drip tap for the potatoes
– planted approximately 320 onions

This is the first day in a multipart class where we plan to prepare, plant, maintain and hopefully harvest some awesome potatoes grown without synthetic fertilizer, no herbicides and no pesticides using a low till approach. We work hard to practice regenertive farming.

I realize that if there aren’t pictures of video then did it really happen? So, lets take a look at the pics. Check out the purple potatoes! Scroll to the end for some bonus pictures.

More normal looking potatoes
Purple potatoes ready to plant!
Getting ready to dig in
Planting potatoes, albeit muddy
Drip line installed and potatoes planted
Surveying the work – agricultural therapy at its finest

P.S. Planting one more tree

About this time of year, I declare I’m done planting new trees or perennials until fall. But there is also the temptation to plant just one more fruit bearing tree or bush. Friday, it was just me on the farm and I had brought with me a fig that somehow didn’t get planted this fall or winter. So, I decided to plant one more tree. Thanks to Connie for getting the fig cutting and turning it into a figlet that was ready to plant. One day, if all goes well, we’ll be trying to figure out what to do with a lot of figs.

My dad always says “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the next best time to plant a tree is this afternoon”.

Jean montie roland, quoting someone else, but still great advice

Getting ready to plant the “last” fig until fall
Figlet planted
Wire cage to keep the deer away from the figlet so it can grow

P.P.S. Parting Throught

I haven’t run this meme by my wife yet, but I’m confident she will agree. I’ll ask her after I water the chickens.

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Nice Day in March and New Bees

Walking through the farm reveals a plethora of bushes and trees that are budding out. A few weeks ago, many of these bushes and plants were dormant. Now buds are forming and you can see the first signs of growth of the year.

Last year we sold out of honey from the farm. This year we are adding more bees. The first new hives arrived this week.

The first of the new bee hives have arrived!
Peach tree budding out
More peach buds

Fig tree buds
Terminal bud on a fig tree
Buds on one of the blackberry plants
Blueberries are putting out buds
Mulberry trees are growing quickly
The mighty goji berries seem upstoppable already
Elderberries are off and running, they do so well here
Hazel bush buds arriving. Looking forward to having hazel nuts in 2-3 years

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Join us for Farm Tour Day!

Every year we do a farm tour. This is a great chance to meet the farmers and see the farm. We’ll show you our work in progress and talk about how we do regenerative farming.

Farm tour includes

– detailed tour (family friendly)
– 1/2 lb of honey from our remote mountain location of Troublesome Gap, NC

What to Bring

Just bring yourself and your family and comfortable shoes. We plan to walk on grassy fields and uneven ground.

We are Dirt Farmers and Pesticide / Insecticide Free

If we grow good dirt, then plants will grow and produce abundantly. We use a minimum of organic fertlizers. We avoid the use of synthetic fertilizers. We also don’t use any pesticides or insecticides. We do use natural amendments like woodchips, hay (pesticide / herbicide free) and feather meal.

Diversity of Plants and Trees on the Farm

Let us introduce you to some of the variety of plants, bushes and trees on the farm including

Row Crops
– garlic and onions
– potatoes
– moringa

Fruit Bearing Trees
– mulberry
– hazel
– black walnut
– figs
– olive
– persimmon
– paw paw
– yaupon holley
– pecan

Fruit Bearing Bushes
– blueberry
– goji berry
– elderberry
– blackberry

Specialty
– native cactus (edible / nopales)
– comfrey
– honey bees




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Pruning Blueberries and Blackberries

February is shaping to be a month of blueberries. We took a class in pruning blueberry bushes last weekend. Seems like there is a always something new to learn. This weekend, on a gloriously nice Saturday (mid 70s), we are pruned our blueberries at the farm. Next up is blueberries at my bonus child’s house (he has a bunch), then doing the grapevines and blueberry bushes at my parents house. Finally doing the blueberries at our home.

Blueberry bushes need to be pruned in the winter. February is the last opportunity until next Fall. Blueberries are a native plant but do much better (from a production standpoint) when they are properly pruned. A properly pruned blueberry bush will produce bigger and tastier berries than one that isn’t well maintained. The blueberry bushes at the farm were planted last spring, so it will be a year or two before we have a crop of blueberries from them.

We’ve pruned the blackberries at the farm. Next step with the blackberries is to prune them at the house.

If you want your own domesticated blackberry plants, we will have thrornless blackberrry plants in mid March. These will be ready to plant. Contact us if you want plants or want to learn how to prune your blackberries.

Another bit of good news is that at least one of our olive trees looks like it made it through the winter.

The elderberries have started to bud out. The diakon cover crop went through a winter kill with the cold weather. The clover cover crop is growing very slowly but should really take off as the weather warms up in March. It won’t be long before it is time to plant onions, potatoes and rotate cover crops.

The bees were very active today. Spring will be here soon.

Blueberry bush after pruning
Blueberries on the farm are planted on a Hugel Kultur mound with the goji berries
Blackberries after pruning
Olive tree made it through the winter, next step mulch
The bees are active today
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Daikon Working While the Farmer Rests

Daikon (sometimes call field radish or mooli) is a large radish of Japanese origin. We use it as a cover crop on the farm. The daikon helps in 3 ways:

  1. keeps roots and plant life active in the soil over the fall and winter months. This helps keep the soil biologically active. A good farmer first grows soil. If you have good soil then you can grow great plants that are full of nutrients
  2. the tuber sinks down into the ground and helps keep the soil from compacting while expanding the soil at the location where the tuber is growing
  3. acts as a bioaccumulator that takes into nitrogen from the process of photosynthesis and stores it in the tuber

This spring we will terminate the cover crop, leaving the tuber in place to compost over the summer returning the nutrients to the soil. We avoid the use of synthetic fertilizer and cover crops are a big part of making that possible.

Thanks for checking in with what is happening at the farm.

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Our Love Affair with Elderberries

Elderberry plants are robust and easy to grow in most of NC. The umbrals are easy to harvest. The flowers and the berries have many healthy uses. We have found that many people don’t realize the healthy benefits from elderberries growing in the ditch that they drive by every day on the commute to and from work. However, a surprising number of people take a teaspoon of elderberry syrup every day during the fall and winter to help fight off colds.

Elderberry is a plant of contrasts. Join us and walk through some of these contrasts. Let us share what we have learned by growing this amazing plant.

Elderberry flowers
Elderberries almost ready to harvest

Elderberries grow wild in NC, usually on a ditch bank or in wet soil. They are everywhere, but many of the wild plants are in locations that are hard to reach at the time of harvest. If you enjoy foraging, then consider adding elderberries to your summer foraging retinue. The berries you harvest will be worth it.

Elderberry plants spread along the ground and a row of elderberry plants tends to be come a hedge. If you plan ahead, it is easy enough to manage the hedge by mowing and just have to prune once a year when the plants are dormant. If you were to plant your elderberries in the middle of an area where you can’t mow around them to control spread then you might have a difficult time managing them. They can be invasive, but if you plan ahead before you plant them it really isn’t a problem.

Elderberry plants growing in a row

Harvesting elderberry umbrals is straight forward. Removing the berries from the stems can be a challenge. Some of the ways to remove berries from the umbral are easier than others. At some point in the future, it would be great to add a destemmer to the equipment we use on the farm.

This year we have making different elderberry products including:

  • elderberry syrup
  • infused elderberry honey
  • elderberry oxymel
  • liquid of elderberry
  • dehydrated elderberries
  • freeze dried liquid of elderberry
  • freeze dried elderberries

It is really cool seeing the dark, dark and luxurious purple liquid that comes from the elderberries. Especially knowing all the health benefits in the liquid.

Growing and processing elderberries has been a wonderful learning experience. We’ve enjoyed teaching how to grow elderberries in hands on classes. Thanks for letting us share with you.

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Putting the Farm to Bed for the Winter

Everything has a season. The cover crops are planted. The hay is put down. The last of the trees and bushes planted. In the last 2 weeks, we have planted paw paw, elderberry and figs.

The cover crop is a mixture of austrian peas, daikon radish and clover. We’ve also planted clover in areas where we cleared brush and limbs. If all goes well there should be plenty of clover for the bees next year.

The first deep frost has come and gone. The fig tree leaves and the elephant ears show the passage of the frost. Many of the young trees we planted have dropped their leaves. It was good year and its nice to be able to take a break.

It takes a lot of help and input and learning to make a farm work. I thank everyone who helped make this year a success!

Pecan tree in the ground and ready to grow roots this fall and winter
Last of the figs before the frost
Connie spotted this grasshopper
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Sunrise on the Farm

This week we had a large brush pile to burn. Camping out on the farm to made it easy monitor the burning brush pile and have a relaxing evening. Thursday morning I got an early start on preparing the rows in the back field for planting elderberries, figs and persimmon. It was nice watching the sun rise as I worked.

We were able to turn the rows that the figs, elderberry and persimmon were planted in. The first picture shows the steam coming off the freshly turned soil. We try to minimize tillage. The approach here is to turn the soil once, then run the harrow and finally the disc through it. Then a cover crop was planted. The fall cover crop consists of daikon radish, austrian peas and clover. The trees and bushes were then planted in the same area as the cover crop. This approach helps prepare the soil over the winter for the trees and bushes when they bud out in the spring. Doing this while monitoring the burning brush pile helped make effective use of time on the farm.

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Goji Berries and Moringa

The goji berries are here! It is amazing that we have a small crop of goji berries this year. The goji berries we planted this spring. Our test plantings of moringa are also doing well. We have been busy putting in cover crops and working hard to improve the soil. We work hard to have great soil to make the farming easier.

The clover we planted last week is really coming up strong. All that rain helped. We were worried the storm would wash away the clover seeds but the hay seemed to help hold the seeds in place.