Our first stop this time around was Edible Earthscape, about a half hour drive from our land.  Edible Earthscape, home to a one acre farm intensive incubator farm, is also home to the Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative.  Edible Earthscape is farmed by Haruka and Jason Oatis with the help of several interns.  One of the interns, Brandon, gave us our tour.

On many levels, Edible Earthscape is committed to sustainability and biodiversity within their small farm setup.  Their primary irrigation system uses runoff from the greenhouse stored in a series of 275 gallon totes.

All vegetable rinse water is recycled back into the irrigation system through pipes connected to the wash sinks.

Fall cover crops of cowpeas were recently sown among the freshly mulched raised beds.  Adding leaf litter and other mulches gives our primarily clay soils more “spring” and allows for better drainage.  Over time, heavy mulching also helps with everything from water retention to freeing up nutrients that might otherwise become locked up in the heavy clay.

Bamboo is harvested locally and serves as trellising systems throughout the farm.

The farm focuses much of its energy on Asian heirloom varieties with an added emphasis on seed saving.  Burdock root is grown using a small bamboo chute or trench in order to train the root.  Normal burdock root grows deep and is difficult to remove from our clay soils.  The bamboo chute allows easy access to the root for harvest.

Turmeric (in the ginger family) does moderately well in our climate if removed from the ground and placed in greenhouses to overwinter.

Hops also grow well in our climate, the ones in the picture below were recently harvested for beer brewing.

Flowers add to the biodiversity of the farm both by having the flowers themselves and by attracting beneficial insects.

One of the awesome sights on the farm were the huge trellises of beans, gourds and squashes.  Asian varieties of noodle beans, cucumbers and more formed dense walls of green in contrast to the red clay below.

Add in stevia, borage, Thai bottle gourds, Japanese purple sweet potatoes, echinicea…

A diverse farm is also home to plenty of creatures -

Tomato hornworms (Manduca quinquemaculata) are quick destroyers of the leaves of tomato plants.  They can quickly defoliate entire plants in an organic system.  However, braconid wasps (Cotesia congregatus) will parasitize hornworms in the biodiverse system of yarrows, clovers, and lemon balm that Edible Earthscape has created.

The white cocoons on the hornworm are the developing wasps, which have already started the process of eating their host.  Once most of the wasps emerge, the hornworm will be dead or dying.

What small farm would be complete without a chicken tractor?

And finally the wild edibles that can be found in the places where agriculture is not considered a war on the land.  Winged sumac (Rhus copallinum) supposedly makes a decent lemonade type drink.  Kristin thinks it might be a bit too sour though.

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.

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 -

We started our tour on the back of biodiesel burning hay wagon, winding up and down through pasture roads and crossing through small rocky creeks. We were accompanied along the way by various sizes of dogs, all of which wanted to get a ride on the wagon.

Our first stop was the farm store where both Braeburn and Cane Creek sell their meats out of a walk in freezer and walk in cooler. They offer grass-fed beef, pork, sausage, hotdogs, chicken and turkey. Cane Creek focuses on the pigs, chickens and turkeys. They raise heritage breeds of animals, including the Ossabaw Island Hog, which is descendant from the hogs left by the Spanish in the 1500′s on Ossabaw Island in Georgia. Cane Creek Farm is run by Eliza MacLean who also runs the store.

The next stop was to the goat pasture where a bunch of new kids were running around with their moms.

I’m not sure how old the kids were, but they weren’t all that big.

Goat kids are sickeningly cute especially when they are well taken care of and allowed to run around like the crazy animals that they are.

You can see that they really aren’t very big yet -

I got to see a few minutes of head-butting between a couple of goats.

Last stop was by the grazing cow herd. These are part of Braeburn’s grass-fed New Zealand Red Devon herd. While we didn’t come across any, Charles said that donkeys are used as guard animals on the farm.

The cows are rotated daily to one of the thirty fifteen-acre pastures. The pastures remain ungrazed for twenty-nine days in between sessions.

Charles passed along a few interesting beef facts -

• One half of every cow will become ground beef.
• The term “ground beef” means that the beef came from a single cow while “hamburger” means a mixture of meats from lean milk cows and the fat from feedlot cows.
• Out of a 1200 pound cow only eight pounds will be tenderloin, which explains the price of that cut.

All of the meat products from the farm are available at the farm store, Piedmont area restaurants and farmer’s markets as well as Chatham Marketplace. Hopefully we will bring in some of their products to Tidal Creek as well.

The choices came down to our individual interests and proximity of those farm choices to each other. The proximity issue was important since the 35 farms on the tour were spread out over several counties. Our hope was to visit four farms in three counties.

Since we have seen vegetable production in full scale operation as part of our jobs and lives, we decided we wanted to visit farms that incorporated animals, passive solar greenhouses and alternatives to the things we see everyday. We went over the maps and each made our choices. With little debate we picked four farms that were pretty close to each other and fairly diverse. After the choices were made there was nothing to do but make fun of each other.

Saturday night was the full moon, but it was obscured right after I took this picture and didn’t return. The rain came soon after. We could faintly hear the Shakori Hills Festival going on nearby as the thunderstorm came through.

We fell asleep in the Wolf Den to the pounding of rain.

Sunday morning was a chance to explore the new growth around the farm. The spring oats that we spread out a bit ago were a few inches high. It looks like it is going to take. The yellow clover was harder to figure out, and we aren’t sure what will happen with it.

The mint patch near the house was already a few feet high.

Wildflowers were coming up everywhere. I haven’t identified anything yet since I forgot to take pictures of the leaves, which is where my key likes to start.

Noel thinks this is a Quince tree.

The picture below is Cedar Apple Rust (Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae), and its presence makes the poor health of the surrounding apple trees make more sense. The fungus needs both cedar and apple trees to complete its life cycle. This cedar tree is about ten or so feet from an apple tree. The only source I could find on the edibility of the fungus simply said, “I have no information on the edibility of Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae.” Thanks.

I find new things every time I visit the farm, and of course I had to set up a nice still life with the note I scrawled in the lean to when we bought the place -

I will have reviews of the four farms from the farm tour coming up over the next few weeks…

The farm tour is put on by Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA). CFSA does a lot of work to promote, develop and sustain local and regional sustainable food systems in the Carolinas. Their vision:

Healthy and thriving communities of farmers and consumers in the Carolinas are supported by local and organic agricultural systems that are environmentally responsible, economically sound, and socially just.

Hopefully the next few posts will be all about the farms we visited with details about how the farms themselves fit in with this vision.

Oh, and this year CFSA is doing an Eat Carolina Food Challenge. They are looking for folks to participate during the week of July 7th through 13th. You can sign up by going to the website.

SEEDS has youth programs but is also community oriented with community garden plots, teaching facilities and after school programs. SEEDS has 1 1/2 acres in mixed perennials and annuals as well as fruit trees, large compost facilities, two greenhouses and an outdoor classroom.

The DIG garden is about as urban as it can get without being situated in raised beds on a loading dock somewhere. Nestled near factories and train tracks, the noise of the city was never very far away. There was also the constant reality of “poaching”, which has the potential to ruin a kid’s experience with the garden if the particular crop they had started from seed became the target of theft. While not unique to cities (I never paid for sweet corn, peas, cabbage, onions or pumpkins when I was a kid in the country), it presents a unique problem when working in a non-profit, youth oriented setting. Stealing from acres upon acres of row crops is one thing, but taking all the peppers from a twelve foot row is completely different.

Like the garden’s coordinators, I would turn a blind eye to the occasional person jumping the fence to get some needed food. Sometimes folks have to steal food; as an adult I understand the concept. I might even be the one jumping the fence someday, but I would find it hard to explain it to a ten year old if they happened to catch me in the act of digging up their only row of sweet potatoes. The question that the coordinators are wrestling with at the moment – how to encourage the fence jumpers to get involved in the garden? Anyway, that is a long aside…

Through many years of soil work, composting and mulching, the garden beds have become very fertile. The okra plants in this picture are actually ten to twelve feet high, something I had never seen before. The bases of the plants were several inches around and looked like tree trunks on some of the larger plants.

To maximize space, the DIG garden incorporates some terrace beds where there used to be a steep slope.

A further indicator of the care they give their soil, this chard should have been dead in the summer yet it keeps on producing. The DIG folks have harvested this chard every week since mid-March. The stem bases of these plants were several inches around indicating a constant harvest and constant new growth.

On the other side of the street is the larger SEEDS space with its greenhouses, cold frames and education facilities. The gardeners use burlap coffee bags from a local organic roaster as mulch. The bags break down after a few months.

The outline of the garden is covered in perennials, mostly herbs and fruit trees. The cardoon pictured below was part of a wormwood and rosemary area.

Community members also tend to mushroom logs in a back corner of the garden.

I had visited SEEDS a few years ago under different circumstances. I was helping Kristin corral a few kids from Wilmington’s Community Boys and Girls Club. The kids were on my last nerve towards the end of the visit. They were more interested in picking unripe strawberries, making strange comments and laughing uncontrollably as our guide pointed out the Pussy Willows in the landscape. The garden has changed a lot since that visit and seemed to be more bountiful with more community garden beds and more compost bins integrated into the areas where they would be easiest to reach. The SEEDS project is set to take on another five acres elsewhere in Durham, which will extend its education possibilities as well as well get more kids involved in working on a small farm.

Rather than renting out plots, this garden truly brings the community into “community garden”. Folks work side by side over the entire 1 1/2 acres of current cultivation and share in all of the produce that comes out of the area. Membership is a mere $10 per year and requires two hours of work per week in order to get a share of produce. Member potlucks are held at least once a week after a day’s work.

The variety of cold weather crops was pretty amazing as was the actual garden bed construction. The farm employs the biointensive methods outlined by John Jeavons in his book “How to Grow More Vegetables“. The basic theory is that the deeper, more nutritious and well watered the soil is, the more plants it can sustain per square foot. A healthy soil eliminates the need for the plants to compete for nutrients and more calories can be harvested from less space.

The farm also uses raised beds dug to a depth of at least 18 inches with some beds dug 24 inches deep. Heavy mulches, rotation and use of farm made compost contribute to the bounty of the small farm.

Here is first year asparagus -

Broccoli ready for the first cut -

Brussels sprouts -

The farm’s new off-grid greenhouse -

A sweet looking bibb lettuce variety -

For irrigation the farm uses drip tape, which is a great way of reducing evaporation by getting the water to the soil surface one drip at a time. The result is a penetrating soak that uses much less water than overhead irrigation and gives a deeper watering. Usually this irrigation method is used with mulch for maximum benefit.

For cool season extension, the farm uses floating row covers. Underneath this cover was a variety of head lettuce as well as tatsoi, bok choi, pak choi and mustard.

The Anathoth garden is able to feed many more than its eighty members. It also delivers food to the elderly, to food banks and other community members. Overall I felt this was an extremely well functioning community garden, pulling a great member base in a low population rural area.

Consisting of 36 acres and twelve homesites, this community presents a somewhat unique development model. The requirements for the homes are fairly strict in that they must meet certain energy efficiency requirements and be almost completely solar powered.

Another interesting part of the development is the small farm component. Together with the homes, the developer is also building a three acre market farm to serve the community and also to sell at markets outside of the community. A full time farmer will live in the development and respond to the communities food needs.

Currently there is only one home built. The developer, Allan Rosen, lives here and directs the project on site. If you are thinking this is a great idea for a community, you might be right. Current development models are very devastating from an ecological perspective, and this seems to offer a very strong alternative. However, simply from a price perspective, this project is about as bourgeois as a farm can get. With a two acre home site going for $140,000 and a solar home price tag of $300,000 to $400,000, you would have to be in it for the ambiance and not the politics. Don’t get me wrong. This is a great model, but it is geared towards the upper middle class and is not affordable for most of us.

The farm is divided into several 1/2 acre tracts. The above picture is two of those tracts. Tony Kleese (former CFSA executive director), the farm consultant on this project, has worked to greatly improve what started out as very poor soil. To give an example, Tony has brought the pH up from an average of 4.1 to 6.1. That is a manageable pH if the organic matter content is also increased. The cation exchange capacity, a measure of how readily available the soil nutrition is to the plant, has been increased on average from 2.5 to 10 with the goal of getting all the plots over 10. Calcium was improved from 13 to 70 with a goal of 65. It goes on and on from there. This was in a period over a little over a year.

The future orchard is 1/8 of an acre.

One good thing about the scale of this farm is that there is no need for a full sized tractor. All of the land can be maintained with walk-behind gas/diesel powered tools.

This isn’t a development that I could ever see myself living in. It would have to be a totally different structure. If the lots were $5,000, the biggest house you could build was 1000 square feet, and the farm was run by all the inhabitants, then maybe I could get behind it. As this development stands, it still has a separation of the food growing process from the producer and the consumer. Yes, the farm is in the community but the community is not participating in that farm other than financially.