Spring is Busting Out All Over!

I would have more time to write if our garden weren't doing so well. We have been enjoying fresh greens, onions, and peas from the garden.

Baby Red Russian kale.

Tim on the tractor about to rip rows for the watermelon, cantaloupe, squash, and pumpkins -- the final seeds we are planting this year.

Radishes tell you when they are ready to be picked! The "shoulder" out of the ground.

Baby kale in my beloved salad spinner.

Braised baby kale with tilapia and rice. My photograph does not do it justice. It melted in your mouth with red onions from the garden and garlic.

Sweet peas from the garden. 

Tim teaches me how to crack open a pod of sweet peas. Step one, break off the end that was attached to the plant, but not quite all the way.

Step two, peel back the string that is sealing the two sides of the pod.

Step two continued.

Step three: split the pod.

Step four: eat the delicious peas. These are on the small side, but I was impatient to try my first fresh-from-the-garden peas!

The garden is crawling with lady bugs! How lucky are we!

I guess the ladybugs are a testament to the sustainable gardening practices we use. We are happy to have them because they eat all the other bugs that will eat the plants!

Tornado Alley (from inside the storm shelter)

Even though I grew up in Illinois, I only once came close enough to a tornado (or had a tornado come close enough to me) to actually see any damage locally from it. When I was in about 4th grade, we were herded into the basement of the grade school as we had been for drills, but we knew this one was for real. Sure enough, the Howard Johnson's roof got torn off only a mile or so from the school.

We had some tornadoes pass last night, and while I am not brave enough to have video to show you, I did get some interesting audio from inside the storm shelter. Now, I may be a coward about tornadoes, by my Oklahoma-born-and-bred husband is not. The tornado warnings kept us in the storm shelter (legitimately) for over an hour. The banging you hear is the hail hitting the storm shelter door. This is what it sounded like, not once, but multiple times:

(There is no video, just audio. Close your eyes for the video of what the inside of a dark storm shelter looks like ;).

Technically, we are just south of "Tornado Alley." According to the Weather Channel, Tulsa is the 6th most dangerous city for tornadoes and Oklahoma City is the 7th, but because it is drier where were we are, we are supposed to miss the worst of it.

Thankfully, there was no damage and no lives lost from this storm locally. The grapevines all survived just fine. The hail was worse north of us.

Vineyard-Planting Festival is a Huge Success!

The Founder's Club (missing are: Noel & Phoebe Kaiser and Jack Rucker)

Thanks to our wonderful volunteers, our Vineyard-Planting Festival was a HUGE SUCCESS! The photo above shows the crew (after lunch and perhaps a little too much wine), minus two volunteers, Noel and Phoebe Kaiser, who left before this was taken (you can see them hard at work below).

The day ran 7 1/2 hours. Most volunteers either worked all morning or worked all afternoon. By now,  you have probably concluded that this was all a big marketing pitch to get volunteers to come help us plant our vineyard. They knew it too, but many of them are frustrated gardeners who don't get their hands in the soil enough.

How to Plant a Vineyard (in 7 easy steps)

STEP 1: Prepare the soil. We cheated. We pastured the cattle on the vineyard land most of the fall, so we let the cattle (ahem) prepare our soil in the most natural way. They fertilized it for us, and also spread out hay to encourage earthworm growth. We didn't tell them our nefarious plans. They just thought the grass looked good.

STEP 2: Tim used the subsoiler and the middlebuster to rip the rows for the vineyard. I am leaving out the steps involving the vineyard posts and the irrigation system, which also require installation. I talk about the posts in a previous blog. You don't want to rip the rows too far in advance or the soil will dry out. Tim ripped the rows on Thursday and Friday evening. Gentle rain fell between Thursday evening and Saturday morning, so the soil was moist and soft.

STEP 3: Measure and position plants. Tim cut 2x2 boards to 7-foot lengths so that volunteers could measure the right distance from one plant to the next. Volunteers started with a bundle of vines, then, working in pairs, measured and positioned the vines. Another volunteer (or sometimes the same team) would go back and actually cover the roots of the vine with soil.

Tim takes a bundle of vines to be planted.

Tim hands off the vines to Matthew Chandler. Andrew Chandler is waiting with the measuring stick.

Ashley Benoit and Jack Rucker measure and place vines.

Matthew and Andrew work as a team to place the vines.

Elisabeth Chandler works as part of a team to measure and place vines.

Barry Chandler (father to all the fine Chandler children) plants a vine.

Rebekah Chandler, dressed perfectly for the cold day, plants a vine.

While most of the crew was working outside in the soil, a few of us were inside preparing the food and drinks.

Trianna Gutzman and Rachel Kaiser were helping me in the kitchen.

To our amazement, all 650 grape vines and muscadine vines got planted before lunch!!! That's ten 450-foot rows!

However, the work was not done. (3 steps to go)

This seemed like a good time to break for lunch.

The Chandler Family enjoys the Greek feast.

Jesse Wagner, Mike Kaiser, Ashley Benoit and John Dew relax at lunch.

Phoebe and Noel Kaiser enjoy the feast.

Jesse looks ready for an afternoon in the field.

Tzatziki was one of the Greek delicacies served.

Ashley REALLY enjoys the wine.

With lunch over, we returned to the field.

STEP 4: Build "grow tubes" and put "grow tubes" over the vines using bamboo sticks to stake the tubes in place.

Jesse straightens out a bamboo stake.

Barry Chandler with two of his daughters, Rebekah and Hannah.

Sharon Allison inserts a bamboo stake into a grow tube.

Katie Allison puts in a bamboo stake.

Sarah Wagner, Ashley Benoit, and Stacy Curttright stop work to pose for a photo.

John Dew installs a bamboo stake.

Mary Allison poses for the photo.

Tom Allison shows the kids how to roll grow tubes.

Mike and Jack stop for a photo in between installing grow tubes.

Linda and Matthew Chandler and Sam Allison build grow tubes.

STEP 5: Stretch irrigation tubing down each row.

STEP 6: Pound stakes along the row to support the weight of the vines on the trellises.

STEP 7: Stretch wires for the trellis between the poles, along the rows, connected to each vine. THEN, when the vines are tall enough, they are attached to the wires and you're in business!

The vineyard from the gate. Each of those things in the field is a grow tube on a vine.

As you can see, it was a HUGE job. Thanks a million to the volunteers who made light work of it all!

Vineyard Comes to Life

Tim and I had a very exciting weekend at the farm! After spending nearly a year reading about what's involved in starting a vineyard, Tim attending OSU's Grape Management Course, and many, many, many hours on the Internet researching suppliers and supplies, our vineyard came to life this weekend!

60 Blackberries with an irrigation tube

In addition to the 650 grape vines we had ordered from Double A Vineyards in NY State, we had also ordered 60 blackberry bushes, which we planted right away. Since blackberries require a trellis to grow, we planted the blackberries in one of the rows with the end posts. The grape vines are mostly waiting until next weekend, for the Festival.

We had planted 68 fruit and nut trees in November. Tim got the drip-irrigation system finished up this weekend to the orchard: 1800 feet of pipes for the orchard. Each tree gets its own emitter.

An intersection in the irrigation system in the orchard

Tim installs an emitter in the tubing for a tree in the orchard.

You are looking at an orchard, but the trees are just sticks at this point (many with leaves or buds), so all you can see at first glance is the irrigation tubing.

On Sunday, we got a row of Traminette grapes,a hybrid of Gewurztraminer and Johannes Sayve, planted. As you can see, they all have blue "grow tubes" around them, which forces them to grow straight up (saving us the trouble of training them) and also keeps critters away.

Our first row of grape vines with blue grow tubes protecting the grapes.

Tim assembles grow tubes

It has been a long road of planning, study, and preparation, and it is very exciting to have some grapes in the ground. We can't wait for the Grape-Planting Festival next weekend! With the help of our volunteers and family, we will plant 10 more rows. To give you an idea, one row makes 200-300 bottles of wine!

We still have room for a few more volunteers, if you want to come help. Let me know! alexis@forbiddenfruitsfarm.com.

Oklahoma Food Coop

Last Thursday, I spent a very pleasant day attending "Producer Training" at the Oklahoma Food Coop. What an amazing feat of logistics they accomplish every month to get fresh local food sorted and delivered to locations around the state so members can take advantage of the healthy bounty Oklahoma has to offer.

Sarah (right) from the Coop and Angela  from Dream Acres Farm.

I attended orientation with Angela from Dream Acres Farm. Sarah conducted the orientation. To be honest, the place is a little overwhelming. I'm not sure photos capture it. We got a chance to see how all the different products get sorted. We also spent four hours helping sort products into coolers for delivery (mostly) later the same day.

Brandon takes in frozen food deliveries from producers.

The most impressive part of the operation has to be their handling of frozen meats and other prepared foods. I didn't think to get a photo when a bunch of farmers were lined up with their giant coolers. There is no question the food is coming from real farmers and ranchers (complete with cowboy hats and work boots). Each producer checks in his or her deliveries, already sorted and labeled by customer and location. A volunteer takes the frozen foods off of Brandon's table and sorts them on the folding tables on the right. Those hanging pieces of paper list up to four towns where deliveries are made.

Luke was my partner for most of the day sorting meats.

Other volunteers take the piles of frozen goods in shopping carts over to the coolers to sort and record what is stored where. Luke and I spent most of the day sorting meats. As you can see from the winter coats and hats we were all wearing, it is cold in the warehouse!

A particularly nicely packaged piece of meat.

I took a photo of this package because I liked how the producer packaged the meat. The label is easy to see and won't come off or smear if it gets wet in the cooler. Brown paper wrappers were my second favorite. Reused plastic grocery bags were a distant third. 

Angela and Isaac sorted produce.

Volunteers (other than producers going through orientation) get credit towards the purchase of food, based on how many hours they work. It is a much better deal to work at the coop to earn the credit because no taxes are taken out of the "work credits."

The Public Market Building on S. Klein is where the Central OKC pickup takes place and where we sort all the goodies.

A volunteer inventories eggs (very carefully, of course).

A volunteer sorts produce by city.

You can't really read it, but each of those white posters above the coolers has a name of a delivery point. The volunteer above is making sure the kale ordered for a customer to pick up at that location is in the right cooler. That row of coolers looks like it stretches on forever, but there are 8 or 10 more rows of coolers!

Thanks to the folks at the Oklahoma Food Coop for a very interesting Day. We will meet up again on Saturday (March 2) for the Membership Meeting.