Happy fall! Last week we had our first frost – and our first freeze. Justin went out in the morning to feed and water the chickens and was surprised to find the hose frozen. The folks we bought the farm from told us it was in a very specific (cold!) microclimate – it’s one thing to hear that and quite another to experience a freeze when all your friends who live nearby have no idea what you’re talking about!
We’re ready to start settling into quieter winter days. The redwing blackbirds have been singing and enjoying the sunflowers, we’ve pressed and canned and eaten all the apples and we foraged our first chanterelles of the season. We have a few more loose ends to tie up to get to those restful days, but we can feel the days getting shorter.
In the next few weeks we’ll finish up digging the sweet potatoes (Wednesday) and planting garlic. Cover crop is seeded and sprouting, fall crops of carrots, cabbages, and greens are in the ground and growing. We’ve moved our laying flock of ten chickens and four ducks into a section of the garden where we had a round of summer cover crop, and we’ll move them into the hoop house once it’s cooled down a little more consistently. They’ll help us fertilize the soil a bit to prepare for next season before we move them back out onto the pasture. We also have about 40 meat chickens at pasture right now that we’ll harvest at the end of November or early December – they’re a breed we haven’t raised before so we need to see how they grow out a little longer before we set a date.
And then it’s on to next season! We’re excited to sit down this winter and plan out our crops for next year. We’ll definitely grow many of our usuals – sweet potatoes and corn among them, of course – but we’re hoping to do a big field of winter squash, more flowers, beans, and lots of other goodies that we’ll tell you more about as we go!
We also have two perennial crops we know we want to try, but plan to do (relatively) small scale experiments with before committing to a larger investment: tea and hazelnuts.
A single plant – a specific variety of camellia – is used for green, black, and white teas. The difference is in how they’re harvested and processed. We’re hoping to plant about 20 of them in the spring to see how they do and how we like the process. It’ll be a few years before we’re harvesting more than enough for a cup here and there for ourselves.
Hazelnuts are something we’ve been talking about ever since the first year we grew sweet potatoes on Bainbridge Island, but have never had the right space for…until now! We’re going to start with about 20 hazelnut trees and are prepared to fight the squirrels for our harvest, though that’ll be a few years out too. Nuts have always felt like a meaningful way to contribute to the food resilience of our community…and we love eating them.
Microgreens are still available at least weekly at Bay Hay and Feed, and we’ve started selling our chicken eggs there too. We’ve added Briny Bagels on Bainbridge Island to our list of local restaurants who buy our microgreens as well, so check them out if you haven’t already – they’re right next door to Bay Hay and Feed.
That’s all for now 🌻