Winter in Strawberry Park

With 2010 behind us, we at Elkstone Farm are taking what we learned last year and are ready to put that knowledge to work, and do it all over again! This year will continue to see a lot of the foundation of our farm being laid, building on what we accomplished last year: building soil, grading it, installing the fence, and planting fruit trees and shrubs, perennial vegetables and flowers.

With the Orchard behind the greenhouse and the fruit trees and shrubs around the Pond Garden planted out, we will likely put in the understory plants this year: perennial fruit, herbs, vegetables, flowers, and probably annuals too. We will continue to build the best garden soil we can by adding our composted sheep manure and the mulch that was made from trees felled on the property. Jeannie and I spread about 60 giant trash bags of leaves in the Pond Garden last fall, which will break down this winter and help to add some good organic matter to that compacted clayey soil.

In the greenhouse, we're currently growing salad greens, herbs, beets, onions, carrots, and of course the exotics which are hanging in there through this cold, gray winter. I tried to be earlier with seeding our winter plants, but I found it so hard to pull productive summer tomatoes, cukes, basil, & peppers in order to get the winter greens growing well before the days got so short and cool that growth is snail- like in pace. Next year I won't be such a pushover, and will yank those plants in early September! Our goal is to have summer plants, mainly tomatoes, producing earlier. This will not only help with our succession planting later in the season, but early tomatoes fetch a better price than those of mid summer, when the market is overflowing with them.

Meanwhile, the Caretaker House, newly dubbed Bo Hai, nears completion! It will be so nice to have a workspace out of the greenhouse.

Our newest team member, Henry, is so excited to get to work that he has started smiling.

While inside the greenhouse the plants are still chugging along, a little on the dark side but staying warm enough to continue growing. Even the pineapple is getting bigger and the size of the papayas is not to be believed

A lot of snow coming down out here in Strawberry Park at the greenhouse. I will be shoveling the front vents off soon.

Dec. 3, 2010

We have a new addition to our family here at Elkstone Farm, little Henry was born on Nov. 21 to Kim and Mark. I miss having Kim here on a daily basis but I know she is enjoying her time home with the little guy. Soon enough she will be back in the swing of things here at the farm.

The fence around the farm is mostly complete. Sorry, but you hungry elk and deer will have to go around now instead of cutting through and nibbling on our trees. This is a picture of one of the people only gates, this one is behind the CT.

The drywall on the CT unit is moving along, here is a photo of the upstairs loft.

Our orchard is planted! Hooray! We have successfully put in the ground about 200 apple trees, pear trees, gooseberries, currants, and pea shrubs. Now, they have about a month to root in before starting to go dormant for winter. We have had frosts already, including a hard frost last Monday, Labor Day. The bottom photo is looking west over the orchard, as the final 2 guilds are about to be planted.

So, now I'm starting to look forward to our winter greenhouse planting. Having made it through last winter, I am feeling confident and more in tune with what we want to be doing during the dark, cold months. My plan is to take out any tired summer plants in the next few weeks, and get the cold hardy varieties in the raised beds and growing before real winter hits. That, of course, could be in November, with -40 temps, as we experienced last year! But we'll be ready, and hopefully the plants will be too, and we can continue to supply our followers with fresh, local, organic produce. That's not something one sees often in January in Steamboat Springs.

Hello and happy late summer!

It's been a full year now that our beautiful greenhouse has been planted and growing.

Here are a few photos of the greenhouse in full summer growth. We continue to learn a lot as we watch what works and what doesn't. We're also trying new methods of dealing with pest insects; for most of the past year we've used beneficial insects from M & R Durango ( green lacewings, Orius -thrips predators, leafminer predators, etc) which seemed to work pretty well, but we were curious as to our other options, so we stopped with regular releases of these insects and started a new regimen. Mainly, we still need to focus on improving our soil in the raised beds, although it is much better than a year ago as we've added a lot of peat, composted sheep manure, worm castings and worms, and more topsoil. With better soil, the plants become healthier, and can fend off disease and pests better for themselves, rather than treating the problem after it's arrived. Until then, we're currently spraying Neem Oil, which is a natural pest control made from trees and sprayed on our plants. We've also been applying a microbe spray that Jerome recommended and is supposed to help improve the micro organism count in our soil to help the plants uptake nutrients.

We've also finally started to plant our orchard behind the greenhouse. We laid out the guilds on the hillside, and are tackling it one guild at a time. We start with the center fruit tree (apples or pears) and then plant 3 or 4 Siberian Pea Shrubs ( which fix nitrogen- take it out of the air and pull it down into their roots, where it can then be released into the soil) and 2 or 3 berry shrubs ( currants or gooseberries) around the central tree in a circle. We will have plenty of room in each guild to add more shrubs and/or other understory perennials and annuals, but for now we want to get these established.

Our harvests are going well, and our passionfruit are not just beautiful- they're delicious! There is also a photo of an artichoke which we did not pick but let go to flower... surprisingly lovely thistle!