Interning with Urban Plantations

This morning was my second intern day at the farm.

The view walking up to the farm at 7:30 this morning

It is such a beautiful place to go to work, I don't even think work is the right word, being here is nothing but a complete pleasure.

Fluffy Hummingbird

Shortly after I arrived, I was greeted by this fluffy little hummingbird. Yael, the farm manager, saved one a few weeks ago and she believes this is the same one, coming back to visit. I think she is right because this is a very unique looking hummer. I have never seen one so fluffy before. He was totally chill and relaxed, which is another strange characteristic in a humming bird.

Yellow cherry tomatoes

The first order of business at the farm is the harvest. Today, I harvested cherry tomatoes. They have about 10 times as many tomato plants as we do so it is kind of a big job. I hope Yael was happy with my work, I felt like I might be a little slow but I didn't want to damage the gorgeous fruit by moving too quickly or carelessly.

Sunflower starting to show some seeds

There are sunflowers planted in a row in front of all of the tomatoes and this one caught my eye. The seeds are starting to develop and I would love to have some of these to plant in my garden next spring. I can't remember what variety Yael said these were but they have a nice big head on about a 4 foot plant. I like them very much.

A cluster of what will become purple tomatoes. 

The kitchen sends down a list of the things they would like to get from the harvest, and today they wanted full clusters of tomatoes, in addition to the individual ones I was collecting. They are planning an entree with the large clusters, which I imagine is going to be amazing but I was having a hard time finding clusters of ripe tomatoes at first.

Cluster of yellow cherry tomatoes

But then I started finding them on the yellow cherry tomato plants.

Another cluster of yellow cherry tomatoes 

After harvesting tomatoes for about an hour, we moved on to training, pruning, and mulching the berries. I worked on blackberries, while Todd, another Urban Plantations employee worked on the raspberries.

Blackberries on the beautiful trellis system they devised

They bought the plants as just a root. The farm itself has only been there for about 6 months, if I remember correctly, so these plants are looking great.

View while walking up to the restaurant to use the restroom.

After a quick break, Yael went through her incredible composting system with me. She is an excellent teacher and I learned so much from her in just 20 minutes. I fully plan on creating a worm bin and accepting her offer of giving me the worms to get started. I should have taken photos of their system, it's awesome, but it is taking way more space than I have to give, so she helped me understand how worm bins would be a great option for our garden.

The lovely Yael next to a Mexican Sunflower. I feel so blessed to be working with her. 

Shallots and eggplant that Yael offered to let me take some of.

I took 4 of these adorable little eggplants and a couple of shallots home with me. Sweet! I'll be eating them myself as Farmer D isn't so fond of eggplant.

As I was leaving, Todd gave me the thumbs up

I can't wait until next Monday, and already feel that the 4 weeks is going too fast. Maybe they will invite me back for another 4 week stretch, because I really love being there, and I am learning more than I even realize, while I am there. 

Moulin Rouge Sunflower

When I arrived home I noticed that our own Moulin Rouge Sunflowers are starting to open. These ones are being antisocial as they are facing the house and not the street. There are many more blooms getting ready to open though, so I'm sure our neighbors will get to enjoy them soon.

Gidget is depressed because she is convinced she could have caught a rabbit, but I made her stay home. 

Our first day at the Golden Hill Farmers Market

This blog post is a day late but I was so tired, and relieved after our first day at the market, that I decided to skip the daily blog post and do it today instead.

Yesterday started early, around 4:30 with Farmer D and I laying in bed talking about everything we needed to do when the alarm went off at 5am.

Frijole was surprised to see us up so early

I wasn't a very good blogger yesterday as I did not take as many photographs as I should have. We're missing many pictures, like one of our good friends at Sonny San Diego, who came over just after 6am to help us get everything set up. They are such wonderful friends.

We were one of the first to arrive to get set up, and now that we know the drill, I don't think we'll be getting up at 5am next week. We can probably sleep in until 6am, so that makes us happy. 

Brian is the market manager and is very helpful and chill, the kind of personality we like most. He helped us get situated and treated us like he was really happy we were there. Most of the other vendors were equally as cool, and we really enjoyed meeting them. They made up for the extremely rude encounter that we had at the beginning of the day, overall it was a really great experience.  

Here I am with our glorious little spread before me.

Farmer D can add salesman to his long list of skills - he was awesome yesterday!

Our teardrop trailer

We brought our teardrop trailer to attract attention, and it certainly did. People can't help but take a peek inside when they see it, and then we were able to draw them over to our booth to look at our extremely local produce. Next week we are going to set up a laptop inside, with this blog up, and invite people in so they can subscribe to it. 

I did ask our first customer if I could snap a picture, and she was not happy about the idea, so I didn't want to make anyone else uncomfortable, by asking them to pose for photos. I will take more photos of the rest of the market to share next week, yesterday was very busy and the camera didn't get used after 8am. 

We sold about 75% of the produce we brought, and people were very excited about our little farm. The most popular thing we had were baskets that included a variety of tomatoes, peppers, herbs and a cucumber. We sold them as a salad basket, just chop it all up and throw it together for a delicious salad. We plan to continue to do that each week. I was surprised that our Japanese eggplant did not sell, but not disappointed, because I ate it last night and it was incredible!

Plant Give Away

On Thursday, I set some plants out to give away to the neighborhood. This is our weedy driveway and I am embarrassed to show it to you, but it gets neglected in favor of the areas where we can actually grow food. Maybe we will get around to improving it at some point but I'm getting off track. We set plants out to give to the neighborhood, and will do it once per month. This group included a palm tree, some Aloe vera, lemon-rose geraniums, corn, cucumbers, and a baby avocado tree.  

Moving forward, I will announce the free plant day and time here on the blog so stay tuned. One of our customers scored a lemon-rose geranium, and came by to thank me, and bought some basil while she was there.

I really hope all of the people who supported us yesterday enjoyed the produce they bought. I look forward to receiving feedback next week. We appreciate your business!

Gidget is destroying a roll of toilet paper to express her disgust  in the fact that we didn't bring her the free range chicken she asked for. 

Gidget's goodies; our first harvest for the Golden Hill Farmers Market

We waited until evening to harvest for tomorrow's market, we want everything to be as fresh as possible.

When it came time to harvest Gidget said "Leaf me alone."

We started with the Roma tomatoes. 

For the most part they are looking beautiful. 

Roma tomatoes and a pepper of some sort. 

Gidget woke up to supervise the harvest - she's not impressed

After the Romas we moved to the Japanese eggplant, I thought we had 2 for sale but one is bug bitten so we'll  eat that one ourselves, after cutting the bug bite off.

The second Japanese eggplant was perfect. It's for sale. The only one. 

A Japanese cucumber - for sale. We kept a few others that weren't as pretty but we are sure will be just  as tasty. 

Purple Podded Pole Beans

We found some purple podded pole and other green beans. Enough to add to one of our signature baskets, for eating raw (my favorite way) but not enough for a whole side dish yet. We will have though - two weeks, maybe three.

The first common eggplant

We are selling this eggplant, Farmer D recently told me that he is not a big fan of eggplant so - grab it up, and tell me that is was fabulous.

We are bringing 8 red cherry tomatoes, and splitting them up in a couple of our signature baskets .

Space Master cucumber - we will have several of these.

The spread before rinsing and sorting. 

What we have to sell;

• Peppers

1. Sweet banana pepper
2. Jalapeno
3. Pepperocini

• Tomatoes

1. Three Sisters
2. Champion
3. Roma
4. Yellow Pear Cherry 
5. Gardener's Delight Cherry

• Cucumbers

1. Japanese
2. Space Master
3. Persian
4. Lemon Heirloom (not pictured here)  

• Eggplant

1. Japanese
2. Common

"I got my bag, I'm ready to go. They are selling chicken, right?"

Gave everything a good rinsing in vinegar and water

The start to some of our baskets.

We still have herbs and strawberries to harvest in the morning. We want everything as fresh as possible. We look forward to seeing you in the morning at the market. The Golden Hill Farmers market is open from 8am - Noon and located at 27th and B Street. It is a great market and we appreciate your support.

Growing strawberries part 2

Strawberries are easy plants to grow once they are established. We showed you some tips for growing them about a month ago, and now I am going to expand on that. There are lots of runners coming off of our plants so we either want to cut those off, or help them turn into the next generation of strawberry plant.

Our strawberry plants with lots of runners

We started seeing the runners about 3 weeks ago and we showed you how we secured them onto a pot of good soil so they would develop roots.

Runners start to develop leaves, and when secured to soil, will develop roots.

It took about 3 weeks for the roots to develop enough for me to feel comfortable transplanting them. I could have left them longer but I have many more runners by now that I also want to get to root.

Root ball developing on 3 week old strawberry start

I felt comfortable that roots were developing before I took the plant out of the pot because I could see them finding their way out of the drainage holes on the bottom.

Root making its way out of the bottom of the pot.

Removing the metal piece off a binder clip that I used to secure the runner to the soil 

After cutting the main runner near the new plant, I removed the metal clip I used to secure the plant to the soil because I do not want it to stay in the soil and corrode.

I also noticed that I missed some more runners coming off my new plant. I should have removed these as soon as they started to develop because I want all the energy to go into the one plant I am trying to root. I missed these ones because they were hidden behind the box the strawberries are planted in.

"Do I have to come and help you with everything?"

Additional runners coming off of the plant I was getting to root. 

I cut these runner off before planting my new plant. I also went through and cut many of the new runners off of the main plants because I am unable to try to root them all right now, and I want the plants to have enough energy to continue to produce some fruit as well. Our plants are currently developing lots of berries along with lots of runners.

The runners after clipping the plants.

I went back and cut the runners at the base of the main plant. I did start 3 new plants with the healthiest runners I saw before clipping all of the other runners off. If your plants are directly in soil, you can simply secure your runners in place on the soil surrounding your plants, they will root in a few weeks and then you can cut the runners from the base of the original plant, and from the new plants. 

Runners, or "shoots" that I cut off of my main plants.

The four new plants that we started  from runners 3 weeks ago

After your initial investment in strawberry plants, you should be able to propagate more every year.

The plants I propagated last year from my own plants are the healthiest in our garden. I think they like being started right where they will live.

There's nothing like a long, relaxing bath after supervising my humans in my garden all day.

Timing in your San Diego vegetable garden

I am reading lots of articles over the last couple of days regarding starting Fall crops but I will not be fooled again this year. Starting Fall crops may apply to the rest of the country but for those of us in the very southwest of the county, this rule does not apply. We still have another round of warm season coming to us.

Gidget says; "Rules are overrated."

The most important factor in San Diego to consider right now is how much sun the area you are planting in will receive over the next few months. If you know your property well enough, you should be able to determine how much sun each section of your garden will receive, throughout the year. This has been a two year discovery process for me, but now I think I have a grasp on how the sun will change in our north/south plot, throughout the year. We have sections that are full sun in the summer, yet get no sun at all in the winter. This is the first step to planning your year round San Diego growing season.Starting some Fall crops now for the areas that may get less sun makes sense. In your year round, full sun locations, you still have a limited window of opportunity to start more summer crops.

Our rooftop gets year round full sun

I am going to try to grow some warm season crops year round on our rooftop because it is in full sun all year long, and the rooftop stays warmer. It is yet to be seen if we will have tomatoes in January but I think we will.

Gidget is daydreaming about a mouse farm on the roof instead of year round tomatoes

I still have a lot of practice to do before I would be willing to say I know exactly how to use our climate to the fullest advantage, but I am certainly learning the general suggestions on seed packets, in catalogs, or in articles may not apply to Gidget's Garden. We have a longer warm season, and in some cases our cool season is not cool enough, like for magnificent raspberries. Of course not every rule applies every time, there are nice berries here, but it takes a specific variety and more care than growing berries in Washington state would.

This bed 2 weeks ago with bolting lettuce, chard, zucchini, and cucumbers

This bed gets full sun in summer and heavy partial sun during the rest of the year. I did well with lettuce and greens here during the winter and left some of those into early summer, partially because I wanted them on my sellers certificate, and partially because I think they are pretty when they bolt. The rest of the area is planted with zucchini and cucumbers that I started there in March. The plants were very productive but after four months, it was time to replace them  with the second round of warm season crops before the sun starts changing too much.

Newly planted bed, for second warm season

Zucchini on bottom right corner and in far left corner, along with  8 Big Bertha peppers, 1 Red Bell pepper, a Rio Grande pepper, and some various cucumbers. This bed will get at least 8 hours of full sun over the next few months.

Frijole suggests planting more beans.

Newer sunflowers, beans, and cucumbers

I put the sunflowers here a couple months ago, and they have been slow to take off, but they really seem to be coming along now. The sun changes on our plot are dramatic, this time of the year seems to be the best for maximizing sunlight in this specific place.Right now, it is full sun for most of the morning, then shaded like you see here for a little more than an hour, and then full sun again for the rest of the afternoon. Generally vegetables need at least 6-8 hours of direct sunlight to be successful. I put some beans and cucumbers here over the weekend and they seem to be doing very well.

 Evaluating sunlight may not be as big an issue if you have wide open growing spaces but for urban farmers, sunlight can be a challenge. To maximize your growing space, it pays off to know where you have good sun on every inch of your property, during each time of the year. Pay special attention to the areas around walls and fences, knowing which is the sunnier side will help for planning edibles. 

Sunflower just blooming, started in April.

If you are in San Diego, or Phoenix, or in between, you should be successful with planting a whole new warm crop starting now. There is no reason why you cannot have sunflowers in the winter here, provided they are in full sun. The seed planting and seasonal  gardening advice that you generally read may not apply to this part of the country. I would suggest you experiment with extending the warm growing season. It is also a good time to start planning your Fall seeds, and even starting some of them, for those places on your plot that do not get full sun.