Cornman Farms

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!

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.