Acorn Community

heirloom tomatoes

Heirloom tomatoes…are ripening everywhere, and acorn is rich in them. Our tomatoes are used for seeds, eating, processing, snacking on, etc….and some of the lucky hand selected tomatoes are even fortunate to get their photographs taken by Airy.

Photo by: Airy

Bacon cookies

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.

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

It begins to take form.

Sitting the notched beams

Placing the gable truss.

The second truss is placed.

Celebratory Truss raisers

The roof is nearly done

View from the roof

Phase one of the barn is complete.

The goats overnight paddock, the structure is an old hog shed.

There they are!

Fresh browse for the goats. They prefer broadleaf plants over grass. The powerline strip has been great for that.

After the goats have cleared out an area.

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.

It’s so much fun and such an opportunity for all these young innovative gardeners to try different techniques. Everyone has responsibility for different crops, but everybody helps each other out and manages to share the fields and greenhouse spaces with aplomb.

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

These plants are the variety Floriani Red Flint, which is not a sweet corn for eating off the cob but is grown instead for drying and grinding into cornmeal. We’re growing it to sell for seed, but we like growing it because we love eating it. We grind it with our hand cranked Corona grain mill. We like eating it as grits for breakfast, but the variety was bred in Italy for making polenta. The kernels are deep red, but it’s actually only the husk that’s red: inside the kernels are yellow, so after grinding all that’s left of the color is flecks.