Victory Seed Company News

Happy belated Earth Day!  (I wonder how long until we see greeting cards stating this?)  Although I am a fan of the concept and message behind Earth Day, I do not actively participate in a collective or “sanctioned” event.  I guess I have a different philosophy about this subject.

In the hectic, busy schedules that most people in our society live with, I suppose that a lot of folks need special days set aside to remind them of important events.  A day in February to remind us what we love someone.  A day in May to remember our Mother’s and later in the month to remember those that have passed on.  A day in July that reminds us that we are part of a great nation.  A day in November to be thankful and to give to charities that feed a turkey dinner to folks less fortunate than ourselves.  You get the idea.  There are “reminder days” happening all the time.

But I try and “live” with these ideas.  People you love should know it daily.  You should remember your mother and loved ones daily.  Charities need support every day and not just at the end of the year.  And to me, everyday should be Earth Day.  That is, we should live our lives aware of how we are personally affecting the world around us.

One popular Earth Day event is to plant trees.  If you happen to be someone following the goings on around the Victory Seed Company and the farm, you already know that we have been planting trees since we moved here back in 1988.  We started close in to the house with fruit trees, shade and other ornamental plantings.  Then started working on the woodlot on the hillside for erosion control and a visual barrier and finally, some years back, we started working on the hedgerows and barriers around the perimeter of the whole farm.

To modern corporate farmers, planting dense stands of trees is probably counter-intuitive.  It takes up land that can be farmed and creates shade.  To me however, it is a logical decision.  Aside from their biological function of scrubbing the air, trees are aesthetically appealing, provide habitat and for our seed producing activities, create a barrier to potential pollen and chemical drift from neighboring farms.

In the following picture for example, you can see how stark the property line was last year about this time.

This was what the fence line looked like last year - 4/20/11

We found a “deal” with a local nurseryman and had fifty large ‘Austrian Pine’ trees planted.  They were in the eight to ten foot tall range and the visual change was immediate.  We followed that by planting another 100 smaller, two foot tall, ‘Austrian Pines’ that we ordered from a wholesale nursery.  Even though these were all good deals, for fiscal reasons, we cannot do all of the perimeter planting at once.  The work continues to happen in phases as we can afford it.

Last month we started the next phase which was to plant another row of large conifers, staggered on the row planted last spring.  We were able to find very large (12 to 20 foot!) trees.  All are conifers but we got a mix of four kinds of cedars and a cypress.  The thought is that these will be more tolerant of the extremely wet conditions in some of the areas around the perimeter.

And again, the visual change was drastic (in an awesome way )  The following photograph was taken from the same angle as the previous picture to show the difference that a year can make.

The change in one year and two different plantings.

Even though I probably will not see all of these plantings mature in my lifetime, someone will enjoy them and benefit from my efforts.

If there is anything for folks to get out of “reminder days” like Earth Day, it is that although our individual lives on this planet short, our impact continues long after we depart.  And the decisions that we make, the goals that we sets and our accomplishments do not end when we step out of time.

~Mike

A lot of time has passed since my last post.  It is our busy sales season so supporting the order fulfillment process takes priority and all of my time so not a lot of “spare” time.  That is good though.  It is what funds our work for the year and we greatly appreciate you all keeping up busy with your orders!

John came home from college Friday afternoon for Spring Break and I had a big list of projects and tasks waiting for him.  Saturday John worked on the first mowing of the the fence / tree lines and some other outside maintenance tasks.  It was a beautiful sunny day.

Yesterday (Sunday) our focus was getting a site prepped for the new greenhouse.  John and his fiancé worked on moving some old berry plants and rhubarb that were in the way.  I got the tiller running and prepared a bed in the garden for them.  Then I got the tractor and started hauling gravel from the pile I had delivered on Thursday.  By the end of the evening, we had the site ready to put up the new greenhouse.

Preparing for a new greenhouse

Today they continued by setting, leveling and squaring up the base, I hauled more gravel over to build up the area, and then they started to work on the assembly.

One of the ongoing tasks around here is maintaining hedgerows and creating wind and visual barriers.  They help with seed isolation issues, provide wildlife habitat, are aesthetically pleasing, and although we don’t currently have an issue with neighbors, will acts as a barrier to airborne chemical drift.

We have planted a lot of trees over the years and stepped up the process last year by installing a couple of hundred Austrian pines.  Two weeks ago I had a visit from the nurseryman that installed the pines.  We worked out a deal that I could not pass up so starting tomorrow, another one hundred, 14 to 15 foot tall tress are getting planted around the perimeter.

I am really excited to see an “instant forest” on the place.  Instead of pines, these will be a mix of Western Red, Deodora, Golden Deodora, Golden Cedar, and Leland Cypress in the really wet areas.  As the work progresses, I will post them on the farm page for anyone that is interested.

Well, it is 5:30 pm, not raining yet, and I want to get out of the office to work outside for a bit.  The forecast is calling for cold, wet, windy weather for the next seven days. 

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere of the planet, it is not quite time to get out and start digging and sowing in the garden.  On nice days like we had here on the farm this morning, there are always garden related tasks that we can steal away to.  This morning we got some of the flower beds around the house cleaned up . . . weeds hoed out of the bark, various leaves, twigs and other debris raked up, etc.  But the greenhouses sit empty and the fields fallow.

However, we all know Tempus fugit, and it will not be long before we will be in the full swing of gardening.  What does this mean right now?  It is time to plan!  I have not started to actually lay out our gardens, but I have been figuring out the list of what things I need to be growing out to replenish stock as well as the new varieties that I want to trial.

For the home gardener, this is the perfect time of year to review your gardening notebooks from past years, noting your successes and failures, your favorite varietiess, and getting your seed orders submitted.

I can tell you that as I write this entry, we have no work backlog and are getting orders filled and mailed within a day or two.  Those of you that have been supporting our seed variety preservation work with your orders over the years know that we can get busy the closer we get to planting time.  This is just a heads up to folks who are in a position to take advantage of the slow time.

And once you do get your list of seeds made and ordered, there is still more planning you can do to be prepared for gardening time.

1)  You can start getting your pots cleaned and organized.  Most folks skip this step and I admit, I can be lax on this point when time is a factor.  But if you are ahead of the game, take the time to put a little chlorine bleach in a five gallon bucket of water and dip each old pot.  It is just another precautionary measure to help prevent soil borne diseases.

2)  Buy fresh seed starting potting mix.  This is actually pretty important.  Old potting soil will likely have lost any nutritional value that it might have had.  And depending on how and where it has been stored, it could be harboring insects and disease.  You want to give your seeds and seedlings the best possible conditions that you can in order to improve your odds of success.  A good, organic, sterile, seed starting mix is a good investment.

3)  Get your garden journal ready.  This is nothing fancy.  I use a three ring binder with clear plastic sleeves to store things like seed packets, garden layout drawings, and blank pages for keeping notes about things like weather, the emergence of various pests, when things were sown or planted, first maturity dates, harvest dates, what inputs were applied and overall summaries of how each variety fared.  This is great data to review when planning each future garden.

4)  Set up your seed starting location.  I have a small cabin on the farm that I heat and move a shelving unit into that I attach lights to.  If you use a spare bedroom, heated greenhouse or potting shed, etc. , now is the time to get an area cleaned up and ready.

5)  Draw up your garden plan!  I actually measure out the space and on graph paper, draw my gardens to scale.  It takes a bit of time up front, and I have been known to change my mind a bit when we actually set to planting, but I would never head out to a fresh garden space without one.

It would be like a painter starting a painting on a fresh canvas without the first thought or prior sketch of what they were about to paint.  Yes, they might end up with something beautiful, but you an bet there would be many revisions and a lot of wasted time and materials.

Plan!  Draw the outline of the space.  Make a reference to where south is and where the sun will be at the peak of your gardening season.  Use your list of seeds to decide where they will best thrive and remember to consider their height and girth at maturity when assigning them their locations.  If you are a seed saver, this is also a good time to consider isolation distances.

These are the types of things that we can actually control in our explorations into gardening and food production.  Of course, nature always has a few surprises to throw at us over which we have no control, but by planning and working with our knowledge of how nature typically acts in our location, we stand a good chance of achieving some level of gardening success.

And in closing on this subject of garden planning, the following is a news segment from a Eugene, Oregon television station.  It offers some tips and we really like the seed choices that the garden writer made