March Employee of the Month!

Iron Fish Farms is heavily invested in staff appreciation.  That's why we are pleased to announce our March employee of the month!  Everyone around the farm has been jockeying for this revered slot.  It was a difficult decision, but one Iron Fish Staff member simply stood out.

We are pleased to honor Yoshi.   Yoshi is a two week old Rhode Island Red chicken.  She joined the Iron Fish staff just a day or two after hatching and has really hit the ground running.  When our chicks were introduced to worms, Yoshi took to it like a chicken to a junebug (almost literally) and while some of her flockmates were still staring at the squirming worms with weary suspicion, Yoshi knew just what to do.

Yoshi was named by our nephew Asher.  The Yoshi of SuperMario (according to Wikipedia --I know, I am so hip) "has a long, sticky tongue that he uses to eat almost anything, even things much larger than himself" and can lay eggs!  Yoshi plans to get into laying eggs in four or five months, but for now says she just wants to focus on "being a normal chick".

Upon hearing of this honor, Yoshi said, "I'm really just your average chicken.  You could say I was at the right place at the right time.  I saw the worm, he was wriggling, and I did what had to be done."

In recognition of this honor, Yoshi will be given a lifetime supply of chicken food and worms, and enjoy a premium roosting spot on the chicken log throughout the month of March.

Garden Nemesis: The Squash Vine Borer

Here's a little water cooler gossip.   You know who I don't like?   Squash Vine Borers!  SV Borers are actually moths that lay their larvae near squash plants.  When the larvae hatch, they burrow into the center of  the squash vine, where they will consume the plant from the inside.  Since this destroys the plant's water and delivery structure, the plant will ultimately die.

A squash vine borer that reaped havoc on my
Ohio squash plants.  I battled them every season.

If your once-prolific squash plant suddenly stops producing fruit, this could be an early sign of a squash vine borer infestation.  Search the stems for a deposit that looks like little bits of sawdust leaking out of the plant.  This is the borer's waste, which gets pushed out behind it as it makes its way through the plant.

Borers always seemed to hit my squash crops by August and while my methods to combat them extended the season a bit, I ultimately seemed to loose the battle.  The methods of control I tried included covering the squash vines with foil so the borers can't get in.  Perhaps this would have worked better if I'd been more aggressive about it....but squash plants grow quickly and besides, I always felt like that made my garden look like I was attempting to communicate with alien life forms via my garden gourds.   I once tried using netting to keep the moths out.  This meant I had to q-tip pollinate my squash, and they ultimately still got infected...most likely because they were planted near to a previous infestation and the larvae can hide out and over-season in the soil and come up when the soil warms.

Wikipedia Image of the borer in moth form.

The last line of defense is to do a little garden surgery at the infected area.  Take a sharp knife to cut into the vine until you find the borer, and then extract it.  Don't stop at just when you find one, as there are often multiple borers in one hole.  You can add diatomaceous earth (DE), (an organic-approved pest control that consists of a type of naturally occurring sedimentary rock that dries out the insects that come into contact with it) to the infected spot in case you missed something.  DE will affect good insects too like earthworms and bees, so I use it judiciously at the infection point and never near the flowers that will attract pollinators.  You can then bury the cut area in well-composted soil and hopefully it will put out new roots in that section.  If the vine is long I try to pre-emptively look for sections to bury so that my vine has multiple areas to pull water from.  It will put out roots from any of its vine joints.

                                        

                                                Icicle Radish (Photo from gardening.about.com)

One VERY exciting thing I learned about at the 2013 South Carolina Organic Growers Conference, which Ches and I attended last week, was that the Icicle Radish will repel squash vine borers.  We got a pack of seeds and plan to put them around our squash.  Their seasons for radishes and squash aren't the same, so most of these radishes will just sit as deterrent crops and be allowed to go to seed rather than being harvested.  

Other Squash Vine Borer deterrent ideas are most welcome!  I am hoping they just aren't as bad in North Carolina as they were in Ohio.  Also, with significantly more land, we will finally be able to truly adopt a crop rotation system which should help alleviate perennial squash moth visitations.

Chicken Update

We have chickens!!!  The ability to house animals has been a something I've looked forward to and even thought about as a balancer to some of the sacrifices of rural life (e.g. no longer living across the street from a giant grocery store).

I had originally assumed we would order from one of the larger hatcheries, but as we did our research we learned that at many hatcheries the demand for hens so outweighs the demand for male chicks that males are often disposed of shortly after hatching.  This did not match sync with our vision of being stewards of the land and animals, so we started looking into local options thinking that smaller scale operations were likely better equipped to handle this challenge.

The chicks traveled home in a small post office box.

We learned that a neighbor just down the road from us hatches chicks, and had Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpington's hatching this month.  The chicks are be "straight run", meaning we'll get a mix of male and female chicks.  We're not set up to house roosters, but our neighbor has offered to buy the roosters back from us after a few months when the sex becomes apparent.

The brooder the chicks came from.  The hatchers said that they usually leave them in the
brooder for about 12 hours after they hatch, until their feathers become soft and poofy

The chicks spent their first night in a large storage tupperware under a heat lamp.  I had purchased cedar chips to use as their bedding but then read in the backyardchickens.com forums that cedar shavings have an oil in the wood that is poison to chickens.  Last night we had enough of the shavings we were sent home with to get by.  So, today I'll be marching back to the store to return my giant bag of cedar shavings for pine shavings which appear to be the bedding of choice.

Buying chicks looks like serious business in this photo.  Definitely the photographer was not referring to the chickens as "chicki-doos" at this moment. 

We have friends, cousins, nieces and nephews who are up to the task of helping us name the chicks.   Names to date include, "Chickie Nikki", "Beauregard", "Clucky" and "Nugget".  Which just goes to show that chickens are the original creativity muse....right?!?  We have 16 more chickies to name, and are open to suggestions.

Welcome Guests!

We have some new visitors in our guest room --real free-loaders who seem mostly interested in our free water provisions.  We have most of our tomato varieties in starter soil.  Tomatoes probably win the prize for the most discussed seeds before finally choosing our varieties.  The verdict: Slicers and Beefsteaks:  Mortgage Lifters, Black Krims, Brandywines, Martino's Roma, Cherokee Purples and Ace 55s.  Cherry Tomatoes:  Yellow Pear, Red Pear,& Black Cherry.  I have a predilection toward "black" tomatoes - I love their smokey flavor.

There are so many more.  If you have a favorite variety, please share!

 

We Have a Farm!!!

“A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm -- it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism.”
~ Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front


We are ecstatic to be leasing land from Ayrshire Farms, the FIRST ever certified organic farm in North Carolina!  They have been farming organically in North Carolina for over 30 years and they have a few plots that they make available for lease.

About our Plot: - We have seven very long rows surrounded by deer fencing.  We'll be growing squash, sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes, okra(!), peas, shelling beans, beets, radishes, microgreens, melons and more!  The soil-building benefits of organic farming are so apparent at Ayrshire.  When I first saw the red, red, RED, soil of eastern North Carolina I remember telling Ches I felt like I could scoop up a handful of soil and spin a nice pot.   As you can see from the photos, the Ayrshire soil is a brown, loamy tilth.  Eventually we will be buying our own land, so we plan to learn all we can from Ayrshire's owner, Daryl Walker, to learn how she and the Ayrshire founder Bill Dow built this vibrant place (Follow the Bill Dow link for his contribution to an oral history project about the Ayrshire farm's origins).

Spring is just around the corner (the first day of spring is March 20th!).  This weekend are hoping the ground will be dry enough to till our plots and direct seed sugar snap peas.  We couldn't be happier than to be partnering with Ayrshire Farms!  Stay tuned for more updates as the season unfolds.

An added benefit of the high deer fencing...if we get tired
of weeding we can lock ourselves in until we're finished.