I just finished a long day at work, and I was really ready to get out and get home. The customers just kept coming and coming with no real let up. As I was putting out the last blueberry case for the night I caught a short conversation that made the whole long day worth it -

Five Year Old Kid (grabbing a pint of blueberries): “Are they ‘ganic?”

Mom: “No, but they’re local.”

Five Year Old Kid: “Yay! Local!”

Maybe there is hope…

Our last stop on the CFSA Farm Tour was Perry-winkle Farm in Chapel Hill, NC. Cathy Jones and Mike Perry farm roughly three and a half acres of intense vegetable and flower production. They also have chickens for eggs and meat as well as a new addition of pigs.

The weather was pretty crappy when we arrived at the farm. Shortly after parking and getting out of the car, a thunder storm rolled in and dropped hail on us for a half an hour. After the storm, Cathy took us on an in depth tour of the farm and gave us plenty of time to ask questions since there weren’t many folks left at that point.

One of Cathy’s cash crops for the spring season is green garlic. She gets a good price for it at market, and it helps her pay her labor bills. We listened as Cathy told us to make friends with the people who grind up trees and the folks who collect leaves for municipalities. Both are sources of free mulch that can quickly add organic matter to poor soils.

The farm boasts a passive solar greenhouse made of AAC block.

The greenhouse had plenty of seedlings and larger plants ready to go into the ground.

The best part of the tour was hanging out with the pigs. These Tamworths were digging and rooting machines. They inspired plenty of ideas for our near-future farming projects.

On the right side of the picture is the pigs’ previous work, now mounded into rough rows. If the pigs could form the rows, they would be even better. But unfortunately they still need help in cleaning up their mud-hole messes.

Tamworths are known for their digging abilities. They were ripping out roots right in front of us, and they had no intention of looking at us until they were disturbed.

Near the pigs was the chicken mansion, a large version of a chicken tractor.

I forget how many chickens were living in the mansion, but there were quite a few different breeds. I don’t know anything about the names of chicken types…

All of the creatures, veggies and flowers were located behind and eight foot tall electric fence. It was designed to keep deer and predators away from the crops and chickens. Noel is trying to figure out how to build one out of grass clippings and concentrated solar energy. Not really, but that would be awesome.

Thanks to Danielle for loaning me most of these photos.

Yesterday we got the bug to clean up our room and get rid of some of the piles of papers and such that had collected over the last few months. I am pretty big on creating piles of crap – receipts, fliers, magazines, various notes, paystubs, etc. – but I am not so big on cleaning them up. The rain outside facilitated our cleaning rampage, and I even had time to roll up a few dollars in loose change.

In the afternoon the weather turned, and we decided to “blow off some stink” and take a walk to the train bridge. The rain had been pretty intense so the massively polluted Burnt Mill Creek was pretty high.

On the walk to the bridge, Kristin grabbed some honeysuckle and started eating the nectar. It is really good, but you don’t get a lot out of it.

You basically just pick the flower off the branch and pull out the filaments.

When the filament comes out of the flower, a drop of nectar will form at the base.

Among other uses, honeysuckle vines make strong cordage.

Along the walk to the bridge there are a huge number of mulberry trees, all hybridized into various shades and tastes. We found red, black, pink and white, some tasty and some not so tasty and others that we pretty gross. I thought the white mulberry had the best taste, but a few of the trees we sampled had no flavor at all.

Here is a white mulberry ready to pick -

Me picking black mulberries, sporting a well-worn AK Press t-shirt -

You can see all the various shades and sizes of the ripe berries in the sum total of our picking -

Unripe mulberries are hallucinogenic. With the hallucinations come severe nausea and cramps, so it might not be the best idea to run out and get some unripe fruit. Also, large amounts of ripe fruit can act as a laxative so take it easy unless you need that sort of thing.

Our walk brought us into contact with a bunch of creatures, most notable a huge amount of young frogs. The frogs were no bigger than a fingernail, and they were everywhere under our feet.

We also ran into a family of geese near the flooded creek.

While I was taking pictures of the geese, a man came down from this house to ask if we had seen the alligator that had come out with the flood. We hadn’t. He said it was about six feet long and traveling slow.

The next creatures we had to dodge were the fiddler crabs hanging out in the grass near the creek. Since the creek is inter-tidal and brackish, there are usually thousands of these crabs hanging out in the mud. With the flooding there were plenty in the grass and puddles as well.

And of course the flooding also brings out the record of human progress. Plastic bottles, Styrofoam to-go food containers and plenty of basketballs rush towards the ocean at low tide and back into the neighborhoods at high tide. The trash never really makes it anywhere as it builds up into floating rafts of debris or settles into the mud on the sides of the creek.

This is our legacy. If you contributed (and we all have at some point), thank you for helping build this pile of shit. If you need a reminder of why you should use refillable containers, why you should use the recycle bin or simply use a garbage can, then just come back and look at this picture…

Our second stop on the farm tour was Eco Farm, a small diverse operation in Orange County, NC. Eco is run by Cindy and John Soehner and has been in operation since 1995.

John proclaimed that the large hackberry tree on the property is in fact THE largest hackberry tree, anywhere.

Back to the beginning…the first thing we saw when we arrived were a handful of pigs feeding on fruit and vegetable scraps from the Lantern Restaurant and other such places. They seemed to be enjoying the spent lemons and limes which seemed to make up the majority of the piles.

Elsewhere on the property were young turkeys…

…and Vernon, the farm’s pet pig. Vernon seemed to have full access to the farm as there was no fencing around his little pig house.

Eco Farm makes use of a passive solar greenhouse made of AAC block, the same kind of block we are going to build our house out of. The block has a very high insulation value, which makes it a great material for an unheated greenhouse.

One of the big products from Eco Farm is shiitake mushrooms. Dozens of stacked log piles were scattered throughout a shady wooded portion of the farm.

Logs are drilled all the way around with 5/16″ holes for dowel plugs or 1/2″ for saw dust plugs. The holes are then covered with wax as are the ends of the logs. A close up of shiitake plugs -

It takes two years for shiitake logs to really start producing.

John mentioned that he has good luck using gum tree logs even though most growers suggest using oak only. John said he can grow mushrooms on pretty much any log, but the lifespan will vary greatly depending on the type of wood used. Typically the logs used in mushroom production last four to five years before they become too rotten to produce decent flushes of mushrooms. After their life in production, logs can be further composted and used in the fields.

Prime time for shiitakes is July through September. During this time the logs are submerged overnight in cold water then left in stacked piles. Mushrooms will emerge in about a week after soaking.

Near the mushroom logs was a small field of greens. The tatsoi had been left to flower and go to seed, probably to bring in beneficial pollinators. I was able to get some good bee pictures, but was briefly interrupted when a student reporter with The Daily Tarheel asked me a few questions. None of my answers made it into the article. I don’t really remember saying much that was quotable or newsworthy, so I guess it was for the best.

The bee pictures pretty much speak for themselves…

A close up showing a pollen basket -

And a parting shot of some Eco Farm strawberries, which I’m sure by now have been picked -