Acorn Community

Jess was very excited to make these Chocolate chip bacon cookies.  And decided to also make some vegan cookies that are/were gluten free and not sweeten with white sugar for special diets.

Vegan gluten free no white sugar cookies

And as one would guess the Bacon cookies were more tasty than the vegan cookies.

Nightshade and the vegan cookies

Both types of cookies were made at the same time, in the evening after dinner.  and when the morning came, there were only vegan cookies left…mmmm…vegan cookies for breakfast….

New Structure at Acorn!  Built be one of our full members, Jon.  He built this structure in two days, using resources laying around the farm, so at a very minimum cost.  The Pallet Chalet, as it is called, is movable via tractor.  cool huh?  It also features a big door that opens to be a canopy area.  It’s so awesome and just in time to provide shelter from the elements since we are getting pretty full at acorn these days.   Hope to someday live in a structure very similar to this one,  although I do have plans to build a dome structure one of these days.

Someday there will be blueberry bushes at acorn, but until that day we have to find a different source for our blueberry needs.  Fortunately for us there is a pick-your-own-blueberry farm that is few miles from us, it’s on blueberry lane.  We have had several group trips to this magical place of blueberry plundering and gathering.  The blueberries are sold by the quart and I believe collectively we gathered 85 quarts of blueberries.  Many were bagged, sealed, and frozen for the winter…others were processed into blueberry jam…and many were eaten raw or in muffins….oh and some lucky blueberries were dried for winter too…

Goats and Barns? Two unrelated topics that are joined together  here for the convenience of having to only make one post.
At Acorn a small crew of us have been hard at work this past month building a new barn. Its two stories tall and 30 by 32 feet. The first floor is framed with post and beams and the second floor is stud wall framing. We are parking tractors and keeping garden tools on the first floor and the second floor is a massive new drying space.

Also, we recently got two goats. We bought them from a nearby goat rancher we are friends with. The breed of goats is Kiko, a type from New Zealand. Whalers would leave goats on the island and in between trips come and harvest the goats for meat. The goats became quiet feral and after a long while they were rounded up and selected for various qualities. The Kiko are very hardy foragers and have high tolerance to worms and wet climates. We keep them in a stationary overnight paddock and we have a rotating day paddock that we bring them too that we move every two days to fresh browse

Filling in the forms for the post anchors.

Fancy homemade welded post anchors

Our gardens are a tremendous mish-mesh of styles right now. We’re constantly experimenting with how we grow things.

Andy has been forming his raised beds by hand with an eye hoe. Tiny variations in the beds are amplified with each iteration, so we have these gorgeous curves. He’s also planning to irrigate minimally.

Andy’s in the background of the picture, using a scuffle hoe on aisles that barely show weeds – the idea is to break up the surface just as the weeds are germinating, so they never even get a chance to get established.

River’s garlic and perennial onions, on the other hand, are in beds formed using the bed-maker implement on our tractor. We mulch them all winter long, with our own straw, to keep the moisture in and the weeds out. With all that mulch, they need to be hand-weeded to control the few weeds that do make it through. In the spring, we pull the mulch off and into the aisles.

Jon’s experimenting with strip tilling and hoeing those strips into hills. I know he wants to write about this so I won’t steal his glory.

I am dumbstruck by the size of these Imperial Star artichoke plants! We're growing them as annuals - these were started very early this spring in the greenhouse, then transplanted out under row cover. Along with cotton, it's one of the few things that's been under row cover this spring.

Andy transplanted out these Purple Hyacinth Beans today. They're an eighteenth century heirloom flower grown by Thomas Jefferson himself, and they can grow 10-20 feet tall.

Our Hanover Kale is beautifully in flower! One of the joys of growing things for seed is getting to enjoy the flowers.

The collards are enormous! With our spring spinach not yet bolted, we're overwhelmed by fresh greens. Tonight we ate sauteed Bull's Blood beet greens with dinner.

The greenhouse has been covered with shade cloth and is in the process of transforming into a drying barn.  On the right side in the background you can just see the two-story drying barn and tractor shed we’re busily building.  But for now, we’re moving out our pallet-tables, like the one in the foreground (which made convenient waist-high tables for growing transplants) and replacing them with the collapsible wooden drying racks you can see just inside the doors.  Soon we’ll be drying onions and garlic!

Corn plants grown for transplant in the greenhouse.

To fill in any gaps in our direct seeded corn rows, we started corn plants in the greenhouse for transplanting. We sowed seed thickly – maybe a 3 inch spacing – directly into the soil in the greenhouse! No black plastic trays, no fuss. A little bit of extra time to dig them out with a handy spatula. We carefully place them roots down into a five-gallon bucket with an inch or so of water in the bottom for transport to the field.

We love using less plastic – those trays do break down over time. I saw people in France using this method with a variety of vegetables. With lettuce and cabbage, they simply sowed a tightly spaced “nursery bed” outdoors and covered it with a portable wooden cold frame. I don’t think I’d try this with anything with tender roots, like melons, cucumbers, or beans, although corn itself is often grouped with these as being harder to transplant.

Florian Red Flint Corn

Here’s the latest spring photo update. I hope everyone else in the Northern Hemisphere is enjoying the start of the growing season as much as we are.

Andy's Chinese-style raised beds and low-resource trellising setup.

A bubbling broth of aerated compost tea

Hairy Vetch Flowers. We use Hairy Vetch as a nitrogen fixing and weed supressing cover crop.

Mounds for Winter Squash in a strip-tilled plot. (More on strip-tillage in a future post)

As a gardener for a seed company it is my duty to grow turnips. As communards it is their duty to eat them - I wish!

About 10 years ago the dam at Acorn was broken to drain the pond for dredging. Unfortunately, after the dam was broken the guy who opened the dam left and the pond was allowed to sit, mostly drained for a number of years.

Last fall and winter several hard working acorners spent some time clearing out all the 10 year old trees and brush that had grown up below the ponds old water line.

Once it was dry enough this spring we hired a man down the road (who actually first dug the pond 50 years ago!) to dredge the pond and rebuild the dam.

Now that the pond is all put together structurally, we just need to do some landscaping, and wait for the pond to fill.

Here’s what’s new, exciting, and delightful at Acorn in photos.

Barn and Chicken Yard

The greenhouse is so full!

Peas and Radishes

Garlic in the foreground and the farmhouse in the background.

Heartwood, new siding on the left, old siding on the right.

Secret Blue Bell Patch!

Here’s all those photos of spring what-not that I promised. Enjoy!

Greenhouse Seedling

Bees!

Red Maple Flower

The Fall Garden, flourishing after a winter slowdown.

Purple Dead Nettle: One of the first flowers.

Thriving Mustards from last fall.

March is probably one of the busiest months of the year for Acorn.  Our seed business continues to require lots energy because of all the spring orders coming in.  The garden is also starting to pick up steam as we prepare beds and sow seeds.  We are also working on numerous side projects too.  Here are some pictures:

Heartwood Residing

Lynn & Phillip

One of the major projects we are doing is residing Heartwood, our main residence here at Acorn.  We are replacing the upper half of the siding with new, sustainably harvested cypress trees.  The lower half will be stucco with some kind of mosaic.  The project has actually evolved to greater depths, and we have replaced our main doors and many windows.

Bike Shed

This is our new bike shed.  Hans made it recently just before he returned home to Oregon.  He did a great job salvaging, using fallen cedar for posts, and old siding taken off of Heartwood.  Now we have somewhere to put all the bikes we fix up!

The Chicken Coup

Here at Acorn, we love seeds, and what we really love  is clean seeds. Nice, healthy, ready to germinate seeds that don’t have any bad seeds or bits of chaff in them. We clean seeds in lots of different ways. We clean wet seeds with lots of buckets and water (look for photos this summer). With dry seeds we use tools as simple as a fan or a hand screen but also some very complex and interesting machines that make the job much easier for us.

There are two very common operations you do when cleaning seed. One is winnowing, this is where you use a fan or wind to blow stuff out of your seed that is lighter than it, usually chaff. Another common task is screening, this is where you are cleaning out seed that is too small and non-seed objects that are too small or big. This usually involves using screens. What you see here is an air seed cleaner which combines those two tasks into one machine.

This is a small air-seed cleaner we also have a much larger (5 by 6 foot) one.

Sometimes when you are cleaning seed, you have seed that you know is bad but is the same size as the other seed you are cleaning. You can’t screen it because it is the same size but often, bad seed is less dense than good seed. That’s when you use a gravity table. A gravity table is a vibrating inclined plan with air blowing out the surface of the plane. Dense stuff goes up the slope and into one chute, lighter stuff goes down slope and out the other. Once you tune it for the seeds you want you can really do some excellent seperation and make big improvements on a batch’s germination rate.

Gravity table