Back in 1979, after two years of college, I took off to live on a farm in Floyd County Virginia. I knew about this farm, Hanatuskee, through Dave Allen, one of my teachers from high school. Dave was developing a farm using old-fashioned practices, for example we used draft mules rather than tractors. The goal was to turn the working farm into a school. In the late 70’s and early 80’s anyone could come and help out on the farm for room and board and I did that for 18 months. In 1979 when I arrived Nancy Friedman was already there and one of the many people who passed through during those 18 months was Steve Potter. Later Nancy and Steve got married and they stayed at Hanatuskee for many years and are still married today and just this winter we have become reconnected. Nancy and Steve are amazing growers of food and Nancy is the author of this blog post. Nancy and Steve grow food on a scale far larger than I have ever done and I am excited to share with you Nancy’s expertise.

One of the reasons it has been so remarkable to get reconnected with Nancy and Steve is that those 18 months were among the most significant and consequential of my life. While I did not know it at the time those months had a profound impact on my professional life as an educator. Dave Allen had a vision that if students combined working on school work and farm work they would feel the value of their own labor. When Dave taught at the small private high school I attended he saw that missing from many of our lives as students was a sense of purpose and an understanding of our own worth. As a teacher he realized that many of the students he taught were adrift. He believed his childhood experience of growing up on a farm had created a space where he could feel the value he brought to his family every day. The school he envisioned would give all the students that sense of worth. Unfortunately the school he hoped to develop never came to being. But opening up his land and home to strangers had a huge impact on many. I know that these months at Hanatuskee and Dave’s ideas have been a backbone of my work with students these last thirty years. The years that Nancy and Steve spent in Floyd have also been central to their lives as they have made growing food a central part of their lives for the past forty plus years.

In the text that follows Nancy describes short how-to descriptions of how to grow, harvest and store eight different crops. I hope you enjoy reading these half as much as I do. Years ago I harvested green beans for hours in the River Bottom Field at Hanatuskee. I wish I had known the technique Nancy describes here.

Steve and I were lucky enough to spend 9 years being gardeners at an intentional community in the midwest. We lived at Camphill Village Minnesota and had a 4-acre garden that produced food year-round for about 50 people. There are more than 100 Camphills around the world where adults and children with developmental disabilities live and work with volunteer coworkers. Camphill was started in Scotland and is part of the larger Anthroposophic community which includes Waldorf education, Eurythmy and Biodynamic agriculture.

We grew everything you’d grow in your own garden including:

Peas: A visitor was having lunch at our house and I was shelling peas and I set her up with a bowl. She was maybe in her 50’s and said, “I’ve never shelled peas before.” I was really glad she had her chance at last! We grew shell, snow and snap peas by the bushels. Shelling peas to get ready for freezing is wonderful work and we were lucky to have a hard working crew in the Summer Kitchen. Food processing is one of the most democratic and fulfilling jobs around. You get to spend time with each other and with beautiful vegetables, and then, in the winter, you get to eat your hard work.

Green beans: We grew a lot of green beans. We did succession planting with beans–starting a new bed every few weeks. Instead of picking a few beans as they got to the right size, we’d wait until most beans were ready and then would pick the whole bed at once. We would often pull the plants out and make big piles of the plants in the shade and everyone could sit around and pick beans into buckets. We’d plant a bed or 2 of beans right away and let them dry for seed for next year’s garden. 

Peppers: Even if peppers weren’t so delicious, you’d want to grow them for their beauty. So many kinds and colors and shapes. A young volunteer was showing his family around the garden and picked a sweet pepper for them to eat as they walked around. It was hot! And that’s how we learned you can’t plant the hot peppers near the sweet peppers. 

Other lessons we learned: Cover the brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage) to prevent flies from laying eggs that become root maggots (very bad); cover them to keep off moths and keep worms out of broccoli and worm poop off cabbage (ick); use cans or other means to protect stems from cutworms (death knell). 

Tomatoes: Of course we grew tomatoes! And canned them by the thousands! And made salsa! And ate as many as possible. We learned to choose short-season varieties–we usually started to get red tomatoes by the end of August and were in the glory days in September.

Onions and garlic: There is something about onions and garlic that has no equal. We’ve grown onions from seed and from plants (we usually get plants from Dixondale Farms in Texas) and both ways have pros and cons, but both ways produce beautiful onions. We select long-day varieties, because that’s where we live. Where to start with garlic? You plant it in the fall, after you pull the plants at the end of summer, after it comes up in the spring. You harvest the garlic when a certain number of leaves turn brown and every year you say, is it ready, or should I wait? Once it’s out of the ground, you let it cure until it’s dry then cut the tops and roots off and select the best bulbs to plant for next year. A few weeks before you plant, you “pop” the garlic (separate the cloves). In Minnesota, we plant our garlic usually the first week in October, cover the bed with straw, and then garden fabric (Reemay). And then you eat all the rest of the garlic!

Potatoes: Most people love potatoes, and almost no one likes picking potato beetles. We did learn that the job is a little better if you put the beetles in a bucket, instead of squashing each one as you go. Even the chickens turned up their noses when offered  a bucket of beetles. 

When you start digging, you never know what you’ll find–small, large, a few potatoes or a few dozen. Before we put the potatoes in the root cellar, we pick out next year’s seed potatoes. In the spring, a few weeks before we plant, we “chit” the seed potatoes. Chitting wakes the potatoes up and helps them grow sturdy sprouts. To chit potatoes, place them  in low light–not direct sunlight, and warmish temperatures–about 60 degrees.

Carrots: Because we have to wait until the root cellar can stay consistently cold, carrots are always the last thing left in the ground. Sometimes, if the forecast is for really cold night temps (in the teens) but after that, there’s a few warm weeks, we’ll cover the carrots with Reemay or pull dirt over the roots. A perfect carrot digging day is in the 30’s, with no wind, and lots of sun. We grow in raised beds and plant 2 rows of carrots per bed. Once the carrots are forked loose on both sides, you start pulling out the carrots and tearing off the tops. Grabbing a handful of straight, perfect carrots is something everyone should do at least once. (So don’t forget to get your free carrot seeds from Ted!) We like to leave the carrots laying on the bed in the sun for an hour or so, then into buckets and into the root cellar. We pack the carrots in damp sand and dig them out all winter, spring, and, if you grow enough, you eat your last carrot right before you dig your new crop!

I want to learn so much more about traditional ways of storing food in a root cellar. Hope Nancy can teach us all so much more.

Thank you Nancy and Steve, for your 45+ years of expertise and passion for the land and people. I think the story of Hanatuskee shows how things many not work out as you hope and your ideas may not become fully realized but the ripples that flow from openness and opportunity are always worth it.

If you missed Nancy suggestion to order free carrot seeds above you and do it here too.

On Juneteenth, as I have for the past few years, I planted the “Carrot Day” carrot crop. Back in March I had planted an earlier sowing of carrots with hopes of again this summer picking carrots with grandchildren when they visited Hull. The photo on the left below shows the Juneteenth “Carrot Day” carrots and the photo on the right shows the March sown carrots. Maybe by the end of Izzy’s stay in mid July we might be able to pick a tiny carrot, but I have high hopes that at the end of July, before Reggie goes home to Texas, he will be able to pick a small but decent sized carrot.  Later in this blog post I write about the planting error I made with the Juneteenth sowing and while the purslane is more obvious than the carrots, in the end the carrots germinated well.

There are many things that I am good at in the garden. Some of them include: crop location with good strategies for moving them from place to place year on year, adding seaweed to the soil every winter, digging as little as possible, weeding, succession planting and vertical gardening to make the most of a small space, and my greatest skill — harvesting. What I am okay at is thinning, I should thin more than I do but at least I know that and try my best. What I am not good at is sowing seeds. I have been gardening for 50+ years and still I have not developed the right set of skills for planting seeds. When I garden with children they often do a better job of putting seeds in the ground than I do.  The Juneteenth planting of carrots was no different.

On Juneteenth I was barefoot in the garden as I prepared the carrot bed. For carrot plantings I do dig the soil with a shovel to prepare for the seeds but this year I did so in bare feet.  I did not wear shoes this year because I hoped that bare feet would help me not to overdig. The less you dig in a garden, the more the ecosystem that lives in the soil can develop. I almost never use a shovel, instead I usually use a small hand held garden trowel or my hands and leave most of the garden undug. By using minimal digging and by adding adequate organic material to the top of the soil the soil ecosystem will deepen and the soil will be enriched year after year. A great example of the impact of healthy soil is our peppermint. Between the street and the garden is mostly mint. These pictures of the mint tell the story of how differently the peppermint grows in the enriched soil near the garden and the unaugmented soil closer to the street.

As you can see from the photographs the mint near the road is pretty small. A typical stem is less than two feet.  The mint near the garden is more than twice as big.  The mint on the left in the photograph, which grew near the street, is far smaller and a paler shade of green compared to the mint on the right, which grew right next to the garden. The one from near the road measures 22″ while the one from right next to the garden is 52″. While we grow more mint than I can make into tea to drink or give away, the health of the soil makes a huge difference. I probably don’t need such healthy mint but these mint plants tell me just how much soil matters.

The photographs above are of the mint hanging to dry and bowls of the mint leaves stripped of their stems before I put the mint away for the winter in quart baggies. I made 18 quarts of mint tea and i am drinking a cup as I finish editing this blog. It is really really good.

As I mentioned earlier in this piece I am not good at sowing seeds. Let me tell you more about the error I made in planting the “Carrot Day” carrots.

On Juneteenth I had fun digging in the soil and building a level bed to create a shallow well to conserve water if I needed to water the late planted carrots. Then I made little troughs and put in the seeds. I then watered the bed without covering the seeds. Well my level bed was not as level as I thought and I imagined all the seeds floating down hill. So I made some more troughs and put replanted the bed with some more seeds. From looking at the germination pattern on the higher side of the carrot bed I think that the second planting of carrots done on Juneteenth are the ones that germinated. Even after 50 years I am still making mistakes. As Van’s song, which I shared in the previous post tells us, “Sometimes it goes like that.”

Below are some photographs of other late spring/early summer crops. One of the photos of the last of the lettuce — I did make another planting of lettuce but only one lettuce plant came up. I did not prepare the soil well enough as I relied just on my hands and did not even use a garden trowel. “Sometimes it goes like that” and the lettuce does not germinate. The arugula keeps going, this year as it has for the past twenty.  And beets – well Katy loves beets and so do I. And not photographed is the chard, but it is a banner year for chard. Katy asked me for more chard and less kale and collards. Soon it will be high summer with cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and zucchini will be pouring in — or so I hope.

Happy gardening. The next time I write to you I expect I will be urging you to thin your carrots.