Cornman Farms

The past week was about spring cleaning, I guess. Chef Alex’s greenhouse has housed a couple chickens and some ducks through the winter. I quickly realized that creatures with wings can roost and poop in some pretty high places. Cleaning out their bedding gave us a couple hundred pounds of great compost material. Alex gave the compost pile a turn with his tractor, I’ll try my hand at posting a picture because the amount of compost I’m talking about is tons. We’re trying to estimate the actual weight because the pile measures a good twenty feet long by twelve feet wide by at least eight feet high. The mid-size Kubota tractor we use has a front end scoop that can hold 2ooo pounds so it could be 20 to 30 tons. Then there’s another pile of more aged compost which is about five tons.

The really cool thing about these piles is that they are the result of a recycling composting effort we started last spring at the Roadhouse. One of the restaurant bussers, Sarah, was asked to help implement our program and develop the culture of composting. It basically started with getting everyone to throw coffee grounds and tea leaves in a special bin instead of in the trash. Each night a dishwasher or busser was in charge of emptying these out into some special white 30 and 55 gallon plastic bins marked for composting. Pretty soon we got the cooks involved. Its amazing to see the activity in action now almost a year later. Vegetable scraps are either saved for soup stock or the compost bin. We even use egg shells and fish bones. This caused some anxiety at first being afraid of attracting crazy animals to our compost piles, but making sure those things are buried inside the pile masks their smell pretty good. It ends up being about 1000 pounds of material a week and one less dumpster unloaded at the restaurant per week. Wow - poop, compost and fish scraps - I honestly didn’t intend for this to be the topic when I started typing, but great compost helps make great soil which hopefully grows great veggies so … Cheers !

Winter just won’t quit, but that’s okay. If you call yourself a gardener or farmer a necessary skill to have is timing. Knowing when to start seeds, when to transplant, when to work the soil, when to direct seed- these are all judgment calls that can change from year to year. I guess this week’s snows can be valued for keeping one’s enthusiasm in check. So we wait.

There’s all sorts of activity inside, though. We’ve been busy for over a month with onion starts, herbs, brassicas ( that’s the veggie family that includes broc, cabbage, kohlrabi etc.) and tomatoes. They’re starting out under grow lights. You might be familiar with starting seedlings under some fluorescent lights in a basement or a sunny windowsill. We have a lot of plants to start, though, so we use a more professional system of grow lights. The lights consist of an overgrown hood fitted for 400 watt metal halide bulbs that are almost as big as a football. The logic is to approach the intensity of natural sunlight. The metal halide bulb emits a light that is very intense in the blue spectrum, which somehow aids in creating a compact seedling which doesn’t get leggy and reach for the light. So much for the science lesson, the point is we want a vigorous and healthy transplant and these are the steps we’re following.

Final thoughts : I don’t know if any poet or writer has ever written about that smell of the ground thawing in the spring or described the scent of newly turned soil, maybe Wendell Berry or Thoreau or some Japanese haiku master. But I’m longing for it like sugar cookies baking at Christmas or lilacs in May or really good BBQ. At least I can get my olfactory BBQ fix at the Roadhouse, everything else will have to wait. So what do you think, any good dirt prose out there?

This will be the first week of spring so it seems like a good time to get this blog thing rolling. Winter doesn’t want to end here in Ann Arbor and we haven’t really begun any digging in the dirt just yet but maybe next week. The planning for this years crops began in early January with the arrival of seed catalogs. We have looked for veggies we want to grow based on flavor. Sometimes seed catalogs will list items that are easy to grow for beginners but maybe they aren’t that flavorful. Our radar was focused on heirloom varieties that have always been appreciated for their flavor but have fallen out of favor perhaps because of fickle growing patterns or commercial production issues. For example, many foodies prize the balanced flavor of a juicy Brandywine tomato but its thin skin doesn’t hold up to shipping across the country. To taste it you have to grow it yourself or know someone who does. So I’ll let you in on the first Cornman news of the season. We intend to grow just about every Brandywine variety there is out there - potato leaf Brandywine, Sudduth’s Strain Brandywine, Brandywine OTV, Yellow Brandywine, Brandywine Landis Valley Strain - about 50 plants of each in all. If we have a good growing season we’ll schedule a tasting to see which is best. Sounds like a great way to spend a hot August afternoon.