Cornman Farms

We’re planting potatoes this week.  Alex and Anna turned the soil last week in preparation for the process which, along with setting up the drip irrigation lines for half the beds will mean a busy week at Cornman Farm.  We have about 1000 pounds of seed potatoes, a mix of Kennebecs, Red Pontiacs, German Butterballs and Russet Burbanks.

  Royer Held from Project Grow is also starting from seed several special Bolivian varieties that he will grow out at the farm.  This collaboration with Royer is a great project to help him maintain his stock of potatoes and a way to help someone in the community, but I gotta tell ya, I’m also excited about it for selfish reasons.  As someone interested in heirloom veggies I get excited about something that has a history dating back maybe a hundred years or so.  But these are UBER heirlooms - spuds from the cradle of potatoes, the food of the Incas, not a 100 year history but thousands of years!  It will be interesting to watch them grow and see what they’re like in September or October when we harvest them.

The area for the potatoes is big, I keep on thinking in terms of a football field.  Its a little shorter and less wide but think of the Big House field covered with potato plants instead of grass and white lines.  The planting process involves making furrows with a plow equipped with metal disks and walking down the rows dropping a seed potato every foot.  Then we change the angle on the disks and run the plow down the rows to bury the potatoes.  This all requires very straight rows so we’re not chopping up the spuds and ruining the crop.  Alex, who has the most tractor driving expertise will likely be tackling this job.  So I’ll let you know next week how we did.

Here’s a question for y’all … What other chef in the country besides Alex has 472 heirloom tomatoes planted in a passive solar hoop house right now on the 6th of May?  I really don’t know the answer to this query and I’m not trying to talk trash, (OK, maybe just a little) but our grand experiment of having some beautiful tomatoes by the 4th of July is well under way.  Over the last 3 weeks we’ve been busy building our hoop house - pounding posts, leveling and squaring the site, setting up ribs and purlins, bolting everything into place and placing the covering over the top and the ends.  Its 30 feet wide by 90 feet long and is about 12 feet high down the center.  Alex, Anna, Jess and I spent the last two days prepping the soil and digging holes with a post hole digger.  We planted Striped Germans, Brandywines, Mortgage Lifters, Juliets, Green Zebras, Black Cherries, Sungolds, Cherokee Purples and Buffaloes.  Altogether it adds up to 472 beautiful plants in the ground, a pretty good start for the month of May.

I wrote last week we were planning to start from seed all our tomato and pepper starts. In the course of 2 days Anna and I started 3600 peppers and 3700 tomatoes. We want about 3400 total starts of each and the extra is insurance if some seeds don’t germinate or the plants don’t make it to the the end of May when we will transplant them. The tomatoes sprouted out of their small cell containers in the course of 5 days, which is pretty good, and the peppers will take about a week or ten days. Referring to the seedlings Anna says, “They’re babies.” I guess that’s true - they need warmth and protection from the wind and chilly nights and they have to be watered every other day for the next 6 weeks until we put them in the ground. So we’ll keep you posted until then on how our little green kids are doing and we’ll find out what kind of horticultural parents we are.

I think spring is finally here in Southeast Michigan. Yeah, the crocuses have been up for a while and the tulips and daffodils are showing lots of green. But a veggie gardener has other ways of measuring the progression of the season. The garlic has been emerging under its layer of mulch but this week it popped through. The green manure crop of winter rye, crimson clover and hairy vetch has turned the pepper and tomato patch into a green carpet. The ground temps should rise above 40 degrees this week and that means its time for some peas and turnips and radishes and salad greens. Unfortunately, the first weeds are showing up also, but this too is a sign of spring for me. We plan on erecting the hoop-house this week and starting all our main season tomatoes and peppers, about 7000 plant start in all. Lots of work, I’ll update y’all next week if we finished everything.

I’ve been posting several entries now and realized I haven’t really told you who I am, so a formal intro is only proper. I’m Mark Baerwolf. I’ve been a line cook at the Roadhouse since the day it opened its doors 4 1/2 years ago. Gardening is something I’ve always done and I’ve gradually drifted toward heirloom veggies and an organic approach toward raising them. Chef Alex’s garden efforts are something that’s always interested me and I told him after his first gardening season how much I respected what he was doing. I’ve helped him out when I could and basically made my time in the Cornman Farm garden into a part time job last summer. With the help of some great volunteers from the Roadhouse and other Zingerman’s businesses Cornman had a rewarding growing season - lots of tasty tomatoes, peppers, carrots, potatoes and other veggies. We want to greatly expand our growing efforts this year and the exciting thing is Cornman Farm will be my full time job for the spring, summer and fall. Anna, who is a barista in the Roadshow will also be a full time Cornman employee along with some part time help from Jess who works at the Deli and some more great volunteers from around Zingermans. So we’ll be put out to pasture for the season, I guess.

So back to garden details. Its amazing what a little warm weather can do. Crocuses and other spring flowers are popping up and last years chives must have shot up six inches by this Sunday evening. The 500 row feet of garlic planted last October and covered with a good 12 inches of straw is just starting to emerge from the soil underneath this mulch. Over the winter I was worried about how to care for these beds this spring. I read a book written by an organic garlic grower in California, Growing Great Garlic, which was quite informative. The garlic bulb’s first shoot that emerges is apparently specially designed to force it’s way through a mulch layer - its tough and persistent, traits a gardener loves in any plant that’s not a weed. The garlic’s in a bed where we grew squash last summer. These rows were heavily amended with compost and organic fertilizer in preparation for the squash because these big vining plants need lots of nutrients. A benefit for this year as we thought about our plant successions is that a squash bed usually has less weeds the following year. All those huge leaves really shade any weeds underneath them and smother the weeds. So we tilled in the crop residue from the squash in the early fall and applied another good inch of finished compost to the beds prior to planting the garlic. We’ll start foliar spraying them in early May with some good compost tea and continue this every 2-3 weeks until mid-June, up to the summer solstice actually. Then we’ll drastically cut back the irrigation as the bulbs go through the final stage of maturity and sometime in July we’ll see what we have. I’m still a cook at heart so I’m dreaming of some kind of creamy green garlic soup with crusty bread drizzled with a grilled garlic scape infused olive oil. Yum!