Plants I've Worked With / Things I've Learned - Week 1

The farm keeps their chickens in an electric fence at night to keep the predators out.

Jeff and Janet are growing spinach for seed and they're trying to create a hybrid variety. In order to do this, you have to have males from one variety pollinate females from a different variety. You have to plant the spinach in rows based on the gender, so there are male rows and female rows. At the moment, we're at a stage where we have to go through the female rows every couple days and remove any male plants. If male plants are left in the female rows, the females will be pollinated by males of their own variety, which ruins the project. However, it doesn't matter if there are females in the male rows because, after pollination, all the male rows will be tilled back into the soil. This is because you harvest the seed from the females, and you wouldn't want to eat the spinach after it had gone to pollination, because it loses it's flavor and nutrients. The local spinach expert comes out about once per week to help us along, and he taught us all how to recognize a male versus a female.

One of the worst things for blueberries is a fungus called mummy berry. This fungus ruins the blueberries. What's worse, though, is that any blueberry that has mummy berry will fall off the plant, live throughout the winter, and send up buds during the spring to infect the new berries. So, this fungus can really devastate a crop. Last year, Finnriver lost 1/3 of its crop to mummy berry. The blueberry plants are at a stage right now where the blueberries that have mummy berry are shriveling up and turning a really deep purple color. We've spent a lot of time this week going through the blueberry field pruning off the mummy berry.

This afternoon, we planted a Three Sisters field in the bottom-lands. Three Sisters is a Native American growing technique to grow three of their staple crops - corn, beans, and squash. The technique calls for creating a pattern of circles or mounds in a grid. In one mound, you plant beans and corn, alternating. In the next mound, you plant squash. You continue to alternate this pattern. The idea behind this planting technique is that the corn provides something for the beans to grow up on, eliminating the need for poles. The beans create nitrogen, which corn really benefits from. Then the squash creates a good ground cover to eliminate most of the weeds and also to retain moisture in the soil.