The 2016 outdoor harvest is finally officially over! Everything is dried, cured, and stashed - now we just need to trim it all. The plants have been ripped up and piled in a burn pile and the gardens are totally cleaned up and ready for winter. I can finally leave the property for more than a few hours at a time and life can start to get back to normal again.
All the outdoor raised beds and new
smart pots were seeded with a cover crop and had composted dairy cow manure layered on top. We use the Organic Soil Builder Mix from Peacefull Valley Organics. It contains a blend of Bell Beans, Biomaster or 4010 Peas, Purple Vetch, Hairy Vetch, Common Vetch and Cayuse or Monida Oats. It has proven to be a very effective cool season weed suppression mix and adds both nitrogen and organic matter to the soil. Just for the heck of it I mixed in additional Fava Beans (Bell Beans), and Biomaster Peas, plus Yellow Peas, and Sugar Snap Peas to see if we couldn't get some food out of the cover crop this year as well.
I replanted the 'whale powered' cold frame with 5 different types of kale, purple broccoli, two types of cauliflower, elephant garlic, California garlic, red onions, yellow onions, leeks, and two types of cabbages for some winter edibles. I am hoping to have time this winter to covert the spot where the cold frame is into a full functional veggie garden by spring so we can finally have a good spot to grow annual edibles all year long again.
Even though we just finished the 2016 harvest we are already working on prep for next year. I had someone up from a third party forestry company yesterday to take a look at the ranch so we can get going on our water resource management plan which will be a requirement next year to get a cultivation permit. Over all he said our place looks really good - there are two things I need to fix near the greenhouse, and a few of our culverts may be undersized, but we will have 5 years to replace them once we file our plan with the North Coast Regional Water Board. I will need to adjust and move some of my fences as well to get the proper set backs from the creeks and to shrink the 'cultivated space' down to as small as possible so we are not paying taxes and fees on garden space that is not being used. Apparently we are the first cannabis farm the company has seen in the entire emerald triangle that actually got permits for our ponds, which is going to prove to be really, really important. No permit for the pond = no legal use for that water for cannabis cultivation. Having to rely strictly on well and spring water would definitely make things more difficult.
We started getting an additional 5,000 square foot garden ready at the top of the hill we are on for next year. The plan is that it will have fifty 4'x4'x1.5' raised beds terraced into the hillside plus a 500-700 square foot nursery greenhouse. We will be running 100% seeds at that spot. The new greenhouse still needs a ton of work too. The cooling wall and radiant heat systems need to be completed and the auto-dep system needs to be installed. If figure we have about 3 months before we want to start growing in it again for an early summer/late spring harvest.
