Microfarm's Cedar Cold Frame

Like all seasoned organic gardeners, Ann Bass knows how useful a good cold frame can be.  Whether it’s used for protecting potted plants, over-wintering a small garden, or starting seeds in late winter for early spring planting, a little protection from frost goes a long way.

The Microfarm Cedar Cold Frame design offered exactly what she needed ; an attractive balance of form and function.

It measures 3’x5’, and features lids that can be propped up at two levels for optimum ventilation. Our cold frame is made with untreated Western Red Cedar and hot dip galvanized hardware, and the lids can be fitted with either glass or polycarbonate panes.

As shown, the Microfarm Cold Frame is $550.

Want to extend your growing season with a Microfarm Cold Frame, or know of a gardener on your gift list who does?

Click Here to get started.

How to Clip a Chicken's Flight Feathers

Sometimes free range chickens grow bored of their run, and set their sights on greener pastures.  Can’t blame them I suppose, and depending on where you live this may not be that big of a deal. But if you’re tired of finding your hens foraging on the neighbors’ front lawn, you might try clipping their wings.

Trimming the flight feathers of your backyard flock can help keep them on the ground and safely at home...and you on good terms with the neighbors.

The standard wing clipping method involves using sharp shears to cut the first ten flight feathers from ONE WING, which causes a chicken to lose the balance needed for flight. Remember that new feathers will grow back during the next molt, which can be only a matter of months in younger birds, but as long as a year in older ones. The flight feathers are easy to differentiate because they’re usually a different color than surrounding feathers.

When you clip your flock’s wings, remember that some of the clipped feathers may not fall out on their own during the next molt, and you may need to help pull them out by hand.

Wing clipping doesn’t seem to bother chickens, and isn’t really noticeable because the flight feathers are hidden when the wing is folded.

Mesclun Mixes

Mesclun mixes have become popular gourmet fare, but what exactly makes it a mesclun mix? It might be easy to mistake mesclun as a type of plant, but a mesclun mix is simply a blend of salad greens that are harvested at the same time and served together. The varieties in a mesclun mix  - which vary, but often include arugula, mizuna, and a colorful blend of leaf lettuces- are typically grown closely together, and harvested  while the plants are still small, much like spring mix.

Some mesclun mixes emphasize bitter flavor- leaning heavy on endive and radicchio - while others use arugula, mizuna, and mustard greens to achieve a spicy flavor. Some mixes use varieties that bring a wider range of color and texture to the party.

Seed companies have caught on to the popularity of mesclun mix, and many now offer their own custom blended mixes.

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange  has a mesclun mix for all four seasons…

Spring Mesclun Mix : Long Standing Bloomsdale spinach, Australian Yellow lettuce, Red Deer Tongue Lettuce, Schweitzer's Mescher Bibb lettuce, Oakleaf lettuce, Tatsoi mustard greens, and Mizuna mustard greens

Summer Mesclun Mix : Tatsoi mustard greens, Magenta Magic orach, Parris Island Cos lettuce, Buttercrunch lettuce, Anuenue lettuce, and Jericho lettuce

Fall/Winter Mesclun Mix :  Parris Island Cos lettuce, Rouge d’Hiver lettuce, Red Deer Tongue lettuce, Devil's Tongue lettuce, Red Salad Bowl lettuce, Tatsoi mustard greens, Mibuna mustard greens, Long Standing Bloomsdale spinach

If you want a little more kick in your mesclun mix,  try the Spicy Mesclun Mix from Sow True Seed Co.  :

Spicy Mesclun Mix :  Giant Red Mustard, Ruby Streaks Mustard, Arugula, Mizuna, Tatsoi, and Red Russian Kale.

For a colorful mesclun mix, check out the Elegance Greens Mix from  Johnny’s Seeds :

Elegance Greens Mix : Pac Choi, Red Mustard, Mizuna, and leaf broccoli.  

Helping Leanne Ely Save Dinner

Wondering how to get your family back to the dinner table?

Perhaps Leanne Ely can help.

She’s the founder and creative force behind the popular Saving Dinner series and web resource savingdinner.com, and ‘The Expert on family cooking’, according to Woman’s Day Magazine. The NY Times bestselling author has also been has been featured in a long list of media outlets, including HGTV, The Wall St. Journal, and Redbook to name just a few.

She’s a seasoned veteran of multi-city book tours and national TV shows, Leanne also authors the Dinner Diva - a weekly column that’s syndicated in over 250 newspapers in the US and Canada.

Leanne’s core web presence – savingdinner.com – is a handy (and popular) resource that offers healthy lifestyle webinars, menus, e-books, weight loss help and more.

Like many chefs, she’s also a gardener, but with a schedule that reads like a Tokyo subway map, it isn’t easy to find time to work in her own kitchen garden, which is set on a hillside in the backyard, just a stones throw from the kitchen.

So she tapped Microfarm for a little help.

We started by filling the four 3’x12’ brick raised beds, which had been previously made by Leanne’s mason, with a blend of pine bark fines, mushroom compost, and PermaTill. We love this organic soilless mix for raised beds because it gives plants the right combination of soil drainage, root aeration and optimum nutrient uptake.

Once the beds were filled up, we worked our Microfarm Mix amendment blend into the soil. It’s a combination of dried blood meal, bone meal, kelp meal, rock phosphate, green sand, and dolomite lime, and gives organic garden soil the right combination of fast, medium and slow release sources of N-P-K, as well as trace minerals like calcium and magnesium.

Because Leanne’s recipes draw on a wide range of ingredients, we planted a variety of leafy green varieties like spinach, Swiss chard, mustard greens, and arugula, as well as root vegetables including carrots, parsnips, beets and turnips. And of course we made room for cool season classics from the Brassica family including collard greens, broccoli, cabbage, kale and cauliflower.

Since the garden is in a wooded area where deer sightings are as predictable as the mailman, the tall plastic deer fence is an essential step on the way to actually enjoying a harvest one day. Drip irrigation was also installed to ensure that the garden receives the right amount of water, regardless of Leanne’s busy schedule.

Is it exciting to think that our handiwork in Leanne’s garden might appear in front of so many people in so many media outlets in the form of her cooking? You bet.

But whether it’s a new kale smoothie promoted on national TV, or a fun beets recipe on savingdinner.com that brings a family together at the dinner table, or a simple mixed greens salad that Leanne harvests to enjoy at home with her own family, we’re just glad to help.

Target Caterpillars With B.t.

It’s an easy decision to buy non-toxic  insect control products for the garden nowadays.  Even big box stores now carry neem oil, pyrethrin, insecticidal soaps, and other plant based  pest control products. While it’s true that these are a much safer choice than synthetic insect killers, these products can suppress such a wide range of insects – both good and bad – that they may not always solve the pest problem in your garden.  Sometimes if natural insect predators are killed alongside the target pests, the target pest can actually resurge and reestablish itself before its enemy can do the same, starting an entirely new pest problem.

The initial pest problem may be resolved but there could be a new one in its place. Bt is a nice option because it targets only pest insects, leaving natural enemies unharmed.

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a natural microbial pesticide that has the ability to target specific insect pests while leaving beneficial insect predators unharmed. The most commonly commercially sold form of b.t. targets primarily caterpillars, including tomato hornworm, cabbage looper, imported cabbageworm, tent caterpillars, and the diamondback moth. 

B.t. pest control products sold in stores are formulations of naturally occurring microbial organisms taken directly from the wild, and have not been genetically altered by humans. 

The Bt microbe contains two parts: an active spore and a thick-walled storage spore that includes a toxic protein crystal. When Bt is ingested by a larval insect, the walls of the storage spore dissolve, which releases the toxic crystal, destroying the gut wall of the insect, and permitting the active spore to pass into the blood stream, where it multiplies, killing the insect from blood poisoning.

Because B.t. is a stomach poison that must be eaten by the target pest, timing of application is critical. For best results, it should be applied between the time the eggs hatch and the full grown caterpillars move off of the leaves to pupation sites.

Because many caterpillar species hatch and feed on the underside of leaves in their initial stages of growth, it’s crucial to apply the B.t. spray solution to the undersides as well as the tops of plant leaves and stems. Larger caterpillars, of course, eat through both sides of the leaf, so it’s not as difficult to ensure they ingest the poison.  As with most organic pest control products, reapplication aver few days will improve results, and remember that it’s impossible to kill every single insect pest in your garden. It’s actually helpful to leave a few pest insects alive in order to help sustain the population of natural enemy insects.

Always follow the product’s directions carefully, and remember that because B.t. is a living organism, it’s best to mix the solution using purified water or harvested rainwater. Chlorinated and/or hard water can harm the microbes, severely hindering the effectiveness of the product if not rendering it totally useless.