Entrance to the farm on the morning of April 18, 2013.

The good news is that the 2012 drought is over! (That didn’t officially transpire until the rain event in April after which the above photo was taken, when we got 5 inches of rain in 24 hours.) The bad news is that planting has not been proceeding at our desired pace. What’s a girl have to do to get just three or four days in a row without rain these days?

We’ve been keeping ourselves fairly busy with other, less urgent tasks, but today I mostly wanted to just sit around and watch the fields dry in hopes that would speed up the process. Turns out that’s kind of like watching a pot of water boil on the stove…but slower.

To distract myself from our inability to do the one thing that REALLY needed doing, I turned to the one farm job that is best done when the ground is damp: pulling weeds by hand. Who said waiting can’t be fun?

A less urgent, yet pleasant “task.”

The day was sunny and not too hot, about 65 degrees, and the honey bees were having a major nectar-drinking spree in the Dutch white clover in the lane next to the garden plot. Stepping out of the shed in the still of the afternoon, we could hear a gentle hum as they worked away, sucking up clover nectar and then bee-lining back to the hives to pass it on to others who would dehydrate it into storable honey. I tucked in my pants so as to avoid an accidental bee up the knee, and also to gain “farm style” points.

(Did you know that I organized the Farm Fashion Show act at the Farmer Talent Show this winter?)

I had my eye on the garlic patch. We planted 5 beds of garlic last fall, and we mulched most of them with straw to keep in the warmth and moisture and to keep down the weeds. Despite our best efforts, some pesky Canada thistles have infiltrated the beds and are mooching that warmth and moisture.

Wikipedia informs me that these nasty buggers are also called, hilariously, “Cursed thistle” and “Lettuce From Hell thistle” – and that they don’t originate in Canada.

My dad found me some leather gloves on the work bench and I tucked in my t-shirt to avoid that terribly inconvenient lower-back sunburn, touched my toes, and went to town pulling thistles. They came up nicely, mostly with at least 8 to 10 inches of root attached.

As I worked, I noticed quite a few brilliant red ladybugs in the area. (Wikipedia now tells me that ladybugs are not bugs. Nothing is as it seems on the farm.) The, ahem, Coccinellids were all on the thistles – none on the garlic. Looking closer, I realized that the thistles, especially the smaller ones and those growing in bunches, were covered with tiny green aphids, and the ladybugs were eating them. Beneficial insects at work on the farm! Hooray for biodiversity!

Not a true bug, and I don’t know whether it’s a lady.

As I bent to tug at the next thistle, I started thinking about this combination of organisms: the host plants, the pests, and the beneficial predators. First I wondered whether we had let the thistles go too far – they were growing aphids! Would those aphids move to our tomatoes and peppers, which were already weakened by the cold and damp growing conditions? Then I wondered whether the thistles might be attracting the aphids away from the garlic, or even away from the nightshades (tomatoes & peppers). Then I considered the ladybugs…surely with all these aphids to feast on, the ladybugs must be multiplying. Maybe as a result of the aphid plenty, which were a result of the thistle plenty, which were a result of my procrastination on this prickly job, the beneficial predatory ladybugs would be plentiful and ravenous by the time our vegetable crops needed help fending off aphids.

So…does that mean that maybe I should leave the thistles, so that the aphids can multiply, so that the ladybugs can multiply? And come to think of it, dandelions are a great source of protein for honey bees. And another farmer told me that lamb’s quarters are good organic matter for building soil tilth. And Japanese beetles seem to prefer velvetweeds to the leaves of most of our crops, and milkweeds feed monarch butterflies, and mustards fumigate the soil between dry bean crops. Maybe I never have to weed again!

Honeybees love dandelion pollen.

Let’s just say that after this I felt pretty good about only pulling the thistles that were actually in the garlic beds and leaving the much tougher ones in the rows. I’ll get them later with the mower…and in the meantime, they’ll help me raise ladybugs.

The giant ragweed has to go, though – it makes me too itchy!

-Molly.

The good news is that things HAVE been happening on the farm! To get you up to speed, here’s an overview of Breslin Farms happenings in 2012:

Crop Report: lots of stuff planted and harvested

In early 2012, we realized that our winter wheat acreage wouldn’t yield enough to satisfy our customers, so we make a quick-change and decided to try out some hard red spring wheat.

Molly loading spring wheat into the grain drill.

The weeds were harder to control in the spring wheat than in the winter wheat, and it didn’t yield as well as the winter wheat. Because of the drawbacks, and because some of our baking customers prefer the flavor and “behavior” (I don’t know how else to describe it) of the winter wheat, we will probably try to stick with winter small grains in the future. Overall, though, we decided that we made the right decision at the time. Without those extra 3 acres, we would have been plumb out of wheat by now!

In addition to our little plot of sweet corn, 2012 saw our first crop of field corn, plain ol’ #2 yellow.

John, planting corn in the early morning light.

Most of the corn ended up as organic layer feed…meaning, as eggs! Some was sold to local farmer friends as a feed or feed supplement for their animals. We’re planning to eat some of that corn as pork this fall.

We significantly increased our acreage of our heirloom dry beans, especially the Tiger’s Eye (2 acres) and Black Turtle (4.5 acres).

Molly, checking out newly-emerged Tiger’s Eye beans and ignoring the ironweeds.

We thought that was a lot! (We started with just 1/4 acre of each of those varieties a few years ago.) But now, 6 months after harvest, beans are almost out of stock.

Another new experiment for us this year was a food-grade soybean.

Like corn, most of the soybeans we see in the fields as we drive around Illinois aren’t eaten by humans. The bean we grew this year was a tofu-grade bean, a larger bean with a higher protein content than a standard soybean, and a clear hilum. The clear hilum (the belly-button where it connects to the plant) is important because the normal dark hilum would lead to black-flecked tofu or soymilk.

The dark hilum is visible on the standard feed-grade soybeans in the photo to the left.

We got lucky with the soybeans: the family-owned organic seed company who had developed the seed, Blue River Hybrids, called us in the fall to ask whether they could buy back our crop to use as seed for next year. The seeds had to go through a 7-day battery of tests, including very rigorous testing to make sure they were GMO-free, and they passed! That success went to our heads, and we’re planning to grow more of these beans in 2013.

Almost 5,000 heads of hard-necked garlic were harvested in July, after we’d picked and sold off the scapes (garlic flower stems, a delicacy if you ask me) in June.

Garlic power!

Weird Weather and Drought

If you live in the midwest, you may remember that it was really warm last March. Folks were at the beach in Chicago on St. Patrick’s Day. The cold weather that followed in April may have been less memorable. It turned out to be devastating for the apple farmers, as the apple trees bloomed early and then had most of their blossoms killed off by later frosts. We had our own scare with the wheat, which could have the heads killed by a frost too late in its development. To find out if our wheat was okay, we had to slice open the stems and look to see whether the heads were still alive and growing.

Tiny wheat seed heads still in formation inside the stalks, green and healthy.

Luckily for us, our wheat survived. The ensuing drought lowered our yields on the wheat a bit, but the wheat was past its major moisture needs by the time the drought really got bad in July. Our corn wasn’t as lucky – it didn’t pollinate well because of the high overnight temperatures, and our sweet corn yields were about 10% of expected. Rain began again in mid-August, in time to save the soybeans and dry beans.

We were visited by a reporter and a camera man from Al Jazeera English in September to see how we were coping with the drought. Click on the photo below to watch the piece that featured Molly’s interview.

Organic Certification!

After keeping careful records for 3 years, several phone consultations with the good folks at MOSA, and a couple of winter days locked in a room together with a computer, we put in our initial application for organic certification in March of 2012. In July, an inspector came to our farm to inspect the farm, equipment, and our records. More documentation flew from Ottawa to Wisconsin by email. Then on August 4th, exactly 36 months and one day after the day we could certify that no further prohibited substances were applied to the fields, we officially became a USDA National Organic Program Certified Organic farm.

Ta-da!

New Equipment

We got some new stuff! Scale-appropriate equipment is always an issue for us. And equipment in general – organic grains require a lot of different pieces of equipment, because we use steel tools to do the things that other folks use chemicals to do. Some highlights from the year:

Molly cultivated her first field with our “new” (1976) tractor in June. It has a cab, which means less dust and noise…and climate control. Fancy.

We had some help from one uncle figuring out how to use a little two-bottom moldboard plow that we got from another uncle. (Also got a much larger, 5-bottom plow for turning in green manure crops in larger fields.)

A new (again, used) forklift allows us to store and deal with large pallets and hoppers of grain. Moving 2,000 pounds of wheat no longer means lifting 40 bags, one after the other, and shifting them by hand.

We later figured out that this kind of forklift only works on gravel that has been packed down by years of use, so we got really good at pulling it out of holes with the tractor. Later on, we put in concrete in part of the shed so that we could avoid that extra step.

Visitors & Volunteers

We had several distinguished visitors to the farm last year. A few we caught on camera:

Molly’s friends Amy & Dave Freeman from the Wilderness Classroom came to visit and buy some local food while on a break from their North American Odyssey adventure, during which they crossed the whole continent under their own power. (Teachers should check them out – classroom materials about their adventures are available for free.)

Our friend Clyde (above) helped us start our vegetables in the garage, and then he came back later to help plant them out in our garden test plots.

Later in the spring, the Green City Market‘s Junior Board welcomed us as new vendors to the market with a friendly “crop mob.”

The hard-working crew planted dozens of trees in our low-lying native wetland rehabilitation area.

That’s most of the excitement from last year. I promise to try to get my trusty Canon fixed before the 2013 planting season really kicks into high gear!

- Molly

Grain bins are basically just big buildings that are filled with grain for storage. The basic idea goes back to when Joseph (of multi-colored-coat Biblical and Broadway fame) was working in Egypt and recommended that folks store grain during years of good harvest to eat in lean years. Since we’re participants, like it or not, in a worldwide grain-trading economy, we put crops in the bin in hopes that we will be able to sell at higher prices after the harvest-time glut.

Bins are usually cylindrical and metal, with conical metal roofs. They are used to store whole grain between harvest and use or sale. Silos, on the other hand, are often made of thicker material such as concrete or fused glass and steel because they need to be very strong and airtight in order to contain fermenting grain and sometimes other plant matter (called “silage”). The fermentation process renders it digestible for livestock. The cylindrical metal structures that are made of a metal mesh that you can see through are corn cribs (which come in many other shapes and are often made of wood) – those are used to store whole ears of corn. Cribs were more common before combine harvesters, when dry corn ears were picked whole and then slowly shelled (had kernels removed from the cob) as they were needed.

Over the course of several months in 2012, we put up some bins on the farm. And when I say “we,” what I mean is that we purchased used bins from a neighbor and then hired professionals to deconstruct them, move them a mile and a half down the road, and reconstruct them next to our shed.

In the muddy days of February, we measured and laid out the bin footprints.

We hired some friends to help dig the and pour concrete footings for the foundations, which had to be about 2 feet deep and stocked with re-bar.

(Digging this deep in the mostly-frozen mud was not fun, but it was essential. As the bin foundations inevitably crack over time, pests would be able to enter by burrowing underneath shallower footings. Eew.)

Here’s where the professionals come in: metal forms were placed around the foundation-to-be, and a beautiful maze of re-bar and wire was balanced on chunks of broken cinder blocks to reinforce the concrete.

(We definitely left our marks in this perfect-looking concrete.)

Then one day as we were working on the west side of the shed, all of a sudden, the top of a bin came driving around the corner of the lane. It was surprising and magical, like seeing a walking house!

Re-construction took some time, as the crew would come for a day and then go to work on a more urgent job. That was fine with us – we didn’t need the grain storage until July (for wheat) at the earliest. Once the bin tops were in place on the foundations, they would be lifted with jacks so that one sidewall band could be added at a time. Wind was a serious concern, so they had to be re-fastened to the foundations between workdays.

Bins in varying stages of completion.

Our new/used grain bins had come from a neighboring farm where they had stored grain that was not certified organic. When they were finally complete, we had to clean them to the best of our ability in order to prevent contamination from the conventional (possibly GMO) former contents. Since water and dust make a pasty mess, we decided to use abrasion and air. This meant that I took an extension ladder inside each bin and manually brushed every inch of the interior walls, from the top down. When I had brushed as much as I could reach from one position, I would use an air compressor nozzle to blow the dust down to a lower level, climb down, move and reset the ladder, and then climb up to do another arm-width’s worth of cleaning.

View from the top of the ladder inside the bin. You can see the gunk on the walls below.

I had to change my dust mask every few hours while cleaning the bins.

Let’s just say that I’m glad this is a job I only have to do once! (As long as we store only certified organic grain in these bins in the future.)

Everything was clean and closed up, with electricity and moving parts installed and tested, by the time our soybean crop was ready for harvest in October. Soybeans moved from left to right in the photo below, from the wagon to the rotary seed cleaner and then via big red auger up to the top of the bin.

Soybeans being cleaned and loaded into the new bin.

Side note: The gravity-feed grain wagon (pale green, to the left in the photo above) was a product of my first solo trip to a farm equipment auction. Holy cow, auctions are nerve-wracking! I was lucky that my friend Rob Montalbano happened to be there to calm me down and bolster my confidence.

Our largest bin can store up to 6,000 bushels (168,000 tons) of corn. The two smaller bins hold 3,000 bushels each, and they are used for soybeans and either dry beans or wheat. With 12,000 bushels of storage space, we now have much greater control over the sale prices of our grain. Being able to store grain also increases our ability to sell grain locally: since we can keep it on hand, we can now sell a little at a time to more individual end-user customers. Eventually, we would like to be able to sell all our grain to local folks this way.

Added perk: the top of the bin offers a beautiful view of the farm.

-Molly

Shed under construction.

In planning the shed, we made two major arrangements with future conservation efforts in mind. First, we situated the shed so that its ends face east and west, making for a large roof face toward the south – in case we ever want to put solar panels up there.

Second, we asked our salesman from Wick to design the gutters so that they all ran to the same place at the west end of the building, with the idea that we might someday set up a rainwater catchment system from which we could irrigate our test garden crops (our grain crops are “dry-land” crops, meaning that they grow without irrigation).

The west end of the building featured a big Y all last year, probably prompting our neighbors to ask “whY?” In 2011, all the rain that fell on the shed roof was spouted out the west end and into a little drainage field of rocks that we’d picked up from the fields.

A little history:

When we started working on this farm back in 2010, our irrigation system consisted of a small livestock feed tank on a trailer, covered by a piece of plastic:

A larger-scale, more sophisticated system was soon developed: my dad got an old wagon at a sale, sold the box for scrap, and built a platform that would sit on the running gear. We got a used 750-gallon fertilizer tank for free, cleaned it very thoroughly, and installed it on the platform. Now we had a big water tank on wheels! Every once in a while we trundled it down the road to fill it from the well at my cousins’ house, keeping track of how much we used and paying them yearly.

The tank-on-wheels worked pretty well – we could pull it around to water all our tree plantings in the conservation/restoration areas on the farm (as my dad is doing above), and we set up a drip irrigation system for the garden that we could just plug in to the tank when the ground dried out between rains.

This winter when we went to Cuba, though, we saw several urban farms practicing the same kind of rainwater catchment we had been planning and talking about for years.

Whenever people asked us whether we learned anything from the Cuban farmers that we wanted to use on our farm, we said, “Well, they’re actually doing a number of things that we are planning….” Like this:

Rainwater collection bin, collecting water from the roof of the business next door. We have big plans to implement a rainwater catchment system on our farm, but the collection container hasn’t been installed yet.

I guess we just needed to see it in action to spur us on.

A couple of weeks ago we ordered two 2500-gallon tanks from our local farm supply store. When we went to pick them up, the wind was rolling them around in the yard – despite the fact that they are 8 feet in diameter, 8 feet high, and weight 400 pounds each! We had to keep them in the shed until they could be installed, to keep them from rolling away across the field.

Afraid that the weight of the full tank could cause a puncture on the bed of gravel where they would be placed, we made a little pad out of ag lime (which looks a lot like thick sand) for each tank to sit on.

My cousin Tom helped us maneuver the tanks into place, and we immediately put some bolts through the shed wall and strapped them to the shed with the same heavy-duty straps that truckers use to hold down loads on their flatbed trailers.

Then it was time for the plumbing. We had to make something that was secure enough to withstand the strong prairie winds (we have had 60 mph winds out here), but it also had to be flexible enough to avoid breakage in the wind or as the tanks settled on their sandy resting pads. It had to be able to handle a large volume of water at once. Any piping had to connect to 4″x3″ gutter downspouts, which were already attached to the building.

After many nights lying awake, drawing plans in his head, my dad hit upon a solution:

A superstructure made out of untreated Douglas Fir boards (we don’t want those lumber treatment chemicals washing onto the garden!) holds the redirected downspouts as they come out from the building and separate to fill the tanks. The structure is held to the tanks, and the metal downspouts are held to the redirection pipes, by strong rubber bungee cords to allow them to flex.

Then we put in a second set of downspouts that bypass the tanks, for winter (when we don’t want water to freeze in the tanks and burst) or for times when the tanks are full. The metal downspouts are surprisingly flexible; the plan is to just unfasten the bungee cords and move them to the bypass spouts as needed.

An overflow opening was drilled at the top of the tank – that’s the little black elbow that you see just under the board. We will attach additional downspouts from the overflow spigots in case of a heavy rain, so it doesn’t all just come out the top of the tank and cause erosion. Two-inch piping connects the two tanks at the bottom so that the water will equalize, in case there’s a major wind during a rainstorm and one side of the shed gets significantly more rainfall than the other. Soon, we will install a set of garden hose spigots at the bottom to which we can attach our drip irrigation system.

The structure was finally in place last Friday evening. That night, we got 0.4 inches of rain…which meant more than 600 gallons in each tank.

Ta-da! It worked!

Rainwater, caught!

Two inches of rain should fill both tanks.

What’s the big deal about catching rainwater?

When we use well water, we are slowly depleting aquifers (underground water reserves) and lowering the water table (making that underground water harder to access). As populations increase, more and more people need well water for drinking, and the pressure on aquifers also increases.

Additionally, folks who live in a town or city are using treated water when they water their gardens with city water – while it’s important to kill potentially harmful bacteria in water that we drink, plants don’t like the chlorine and other chemicals that’s used to do it. Besides, it takes a lot of resources to put water through that treatment process.

Using well water means using energy, both to pump the water out of the ground and to deliver it to our watering hoses. For most folks, that means pumping it through a city water system; for us, that means driving it a mile down the road from my cousins’ house. And energy costs money.

Buildings cause a different set of problems. When we build a building, a large area (in the case of our shed, 6,240 square feet) that used to absorb rainwater now just dumps all that rainwater into one place, often causing or contributing to flooding and erosion issues.

When we catch the rain that falls on our shed and then use it to water our garden instead of well water, we are decreasing flooding and erosion, increasing access to drinking water, decreasing our overall energy use, saving money, and growing healthier plants. We think that’s a big deal!

- Molly.

Titled Cuba Organic: Revolution and Evolution, this tour focused on visits to organic farms. We got to talk with farmers, researchers, and agriculture officials about Cuba’s abrupt and urgent agricultural transition to sustainable, non-chemical, local-input growing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Aboard a tour bus, we traveled almost the whole the length of the country in 12 days. We were among 12 tour participants from the United States, along with a Food First guide from the US, a Cuban guide, and a driver.

We visited 7 food-producing farms and at least as many community projects, including an exotic bird sanctuary, a botanic garden focused on ferns and orchids, and a community food preservation project. I came back inspired, with more than 1,300 photos and many pages of notes. Here are a few highlights:

One afternoon was spent working on an urban raised-bed vegetable farm, called an organopónico. Here, we transplanted chard and harvested tiny little round cucumbers. (My dad is the one bent over in the middle of the bed, wearing a white sun hat.)

Oxen and horses were widely used as draft animals on the farm, and we saw many horse carts and taxis used for transportation in the smaller cities. Knowledge about these animals had been all but lost in the country by 1990, but it was quickly re-learned and put to use when tractors, parts, and fuel became scarce.

Farmer Héctor Correa opened up his beehive so we could examine how these stingless tropical bees (not apis mellifera) build their hives – horizontally, as opposed to the vertical comb built by European honey bees.

Héctor and his wife Odalys were a particular inspiration to us because they focused on two main enterprises, mangoes and ceramics, but they also grew all their own food. They served us a meal that included not only their home-grown vegetables but also rice, pork, and coffee from their finca, or farm.

Of course, I sought out the grain and bean vendors at the agricultural markets we visited. This man was selling his corn whole, coarsely ground as cornmeal, and as fine masa harina. He also grew black beans and peanuts.

We visited both state-run and independent agricultural markets. The state-run market stalls offered a limited number of commodity crops (17 at one market, 21 at another) designated and subsidized by the government.

Prices were set by the state at those markets. At independent markets, there was much more variety, and prices were set by vendors.

These women were selling three kinds of beans. Prices at the markets were in the national currency, moneda nacional.

$1 (1 peso) in moneda nacional is about $.05 USD, so these black beans packaged in bags cost about fifty cents US – probably about 20 cents a pound.

Our most important take-home message was encapsulated on this sign at an urban farm called Organopónico El Ranchon:

It says, “Permaculture Design makes efficient use of: Time, Space, [and] Energy.” We vowed to use not just electrical energy, but also our own energy, more efficiently.

Parting shot:

We call this one “Breslin Cuban Gothic.”

More family photos from the trip.

Garlic Planting

We grew the garlic “seed” ourselves this year. It’s not true seed that we’re using – since garlic is a biennial, we are actually planting the individual cloves from the largest heads of this year’s garlic crop.

Several years ago we bought a mixed bag of garlic from an organic grower in the area, so we’re not sure exactly how many varieties we have. As you can see in the photo above, there seems to be quite a bit of beautiful variation.

The first step in the garlic planting process was to borrow a 5-foot tiller and use it to make some beds. We tilled the beds once in late September, and then we tilled the same spots again just before planting to soften the ground and kill the newly-sprouted weeds.

The strings, posts, and two-by-fours are an ingenious bed-planting alignment system borrowed from our friend Clare. It helped us make five neat rows in each bed. The newly-tilled ground was so soft that we could plant just by pushing each clove into the soil with our hands.

After about a day and a half on our knees, it was time to mulch. We got some untreated straw from a local farmer and forked out a thick layer over the beds. The mulch will insulate the garlic cloves over the cold winter months and suppress the weeds in the spring.

We were definitely ready for our tea break after that. And maybe a couple of Tylenols to go with those organic apples.

Come next June and July, we’re expecting to harvest many pounds of scapes and about 5,000 heads of garlic!

Other Fall Fun: Beans, Wheat, Power, Prairie Grass, and Cover Crops

In other news this month, we finally got a couple of dry days to harvest our soybeans (below) and four varieties of dry beans.

The waiting period was pretty stressful: we needed about three days without rain to dry out the bean pods and stalks so that they could go through the combine, and then a day or two to harvest them…and it rained about every 2.5 days for weeks on end.

The soybeans went straight to the local grain elevator (since we’re not yet certified organic, they have to be sold on the conventional market). We have had the edible beans tested, and we’re working on cleaning them for sale.

After the beans were out of the field, we planted 5 acres of hard red winter wheat and 8 acres of soft red winter wheat. Less than a week later, it had germinated:

Hopefully we’ll see the green fuzz of new wheat plants in the field soon!

Thanks to our new membership in the Corn Belt Energy Cooperative, we now have power on the farm. We longer have to run a noisy generator whenever we need to use a vacuum or a saw. This also means that we can start working on larger-scale grain storage options.

The tillage radishes that we planted in August after the sweet corn harvest have gotten huge. They’re definitely doing their job of breaking up the soil and creating deep-soil seepage pathways.

One of our major farm goals is to keep our soil covered at all times. We try to leave ground bare for no more than 3 weeks. In addition to the tillage radish, this year’s wheat ground is covered by red clover, the oat ground is covered by alfalfa, and the bean ground (as we mentioned) is now planted with next year’s wheat. No part of these plants will be removed from the farm – their job is to capture nutrients and store them for the next crop, along with preventing erosion, adding organic matter to the soil, improving soil water-holding capacity, and providing wildlife habitat.

We also noticed recently that some of the prairie grasses are starting to take hold in the prairie restoration area. Our NRCS biologist, Mark, says that he can identify both big and little bluestem among these grasses that are taller than we are.

Whew! Now that the harvest and planting are complete…well, we’re ready for some down time. We have plenty of work doing clean-up, putting the garden to bed, and preparing beans, wheat, and flour for sale to keep us busy for the coming months.

-Molly.

Photo courtesy of Ms. Natalie Sukhaphadhana.

After much research and many emails sent into the void never to return, I finally found someone who was willing to do custom milling for us! His name is Roger, and he runs Rogers Creek Grist Mill in Milledgeville, Illinois (how very appropriate!).

Roger built this mill because he was fascinated by the engineering behind water power. Though it’s not built on a creek (because he didn’t happen to have one handy), he set it up so that he could use water to power the wheel and turn the mill. It is a demonstration site, open for visitors and school tours – but it’s also a working mill. He mills grains for his own line of pancake and muffin mixes on this Meadows Mill built in 1922:

The mill is a stone mill, and the twenty-inch stones still have to be taken to the factory in North Carolina for sharpening every few years. Roger uses electricity to power the mill for work-a-day use. He put it to use for us one day last month.

We ate that first handful of flour in some delicious sourdough pancakes with some freshly-harvested local honey. (The bees were building comb where it didn’t belong, and this jar was the sweet, sweet collateral damage.)

We’ve had reason to make the drive to Milledgeville several times since that first visit a couple of months ago. In addition to orders from our vegetable-growing friends at Tempel Farms Organics, who included our flour in their CSA shares, we were also invited to be a guest vendor at the Green City Market in Chicago this month. They host a program called the Locavore Challenge, during which market patrons can pledge to eat only local food for two weeks. Since there are few grains or beans available through regular market vendors, they asked us to help them close the gap by making the staple crops we grow available at the market. We’re mid-way through right now, and we’re enjoying it greatly. It gives us renewed energy when we talk to people who are excited about what we’re doing.

One of our customers, Lauren from Peerless Bread & Jam, created a bread recipe using our wheat that we can give to customers and even baked some loaves for samples (right). Yum. Thanks to Lauren for the photo, too!

My dad made it up to the city to hand out samples and advice to customers last Saturday. He sold quite a bit of product, too!

Doesn’t the market stand look great? Stop by and see us there – we’ll be at the market on Wednesdays and Saturdays through September 21st. We have also been going to a market at the Whole Foods in Naperville on the second Sunday of the month, and our last market there will be October 9th.

- Molly.

Planted on May 24, this photo of the new corn sprouts was taken on June 6.

One month later, July 6, the dew-laden plants looked beautiful in the early morning light.

By July 19, the silks (above) and tassles (below) were out. Silks are the pollen receptors: each strand, if it’s pollinated, will become one kernel. As you can see in this photo, tassles are the framework for the tiny flowers whose pollen will rain down on the silks.

Then all of a sudden, the corn was head high and we were picking 80 to 100 dozen ears a day! Pictured below are some of our sweet corn picking crew who live on the farms surrounding ours. Sweet corn picking starts at 6am and usually ends by 9 or 10. This was nearing the end of our picking season, August 6.

Our corn (and wheat berries!) were advertised as part of the Montalbano Farms CSA share at the Logan Square Farmers Market on August 7. One day turn-around, from field to customer!

Many ears were also sold by our friends at Sweet Home Organics in St. Charles – along with wheat grass that our friend Lia grew from our wheat berries.

(Thanks to Kim for this photo.)

We finally mowed down the remaining stalks on August 11.

Wow, that happened fast!

Next year, we hope to be able to plant a few smaller batches, spacing them a week or two apart. We want to eat sweet corn for a whole month! Added bonuses will be a reduction in the risk of losing the whole crop due to weather or pest pressure, and elimination of the stress of picking a whole acre at a time. We’re learning something new every day.

- Molly

Luscious sweet corn ears are a beautiful bicolor, the plump kernels a mix of white and yellow. When the colors are subdued early on in the season, this coloration is sometimes called “peaches and cream.” They taste delicious – buttery and sweet, even raw. Our favorite way to eat sweet corn is to boil whole ears for 3 minutes and then roll them in butter, salt, and pepper. That’s luscious, all right.

Our “new” combine arrived on July 7th on a truck with “Oversized Load” signs all over it.

I call it “new” because it’s older than me – it dates from 1979, and the head (the piece that goes on the front) was made in 1978. But it’s in very good shape, and it’s new to us! And very exciting that we got it just in the nick of time to harvest our winter wheat crop.

There was one very exciting moment in the process of unloading – the head is so big that before it was properly situated, it lifted up the back wheels of the forklift. Fortunately, the delivery driver and my dad think fast.

This combine is also “small” – it has a 16-foot head, so it can harvest a swath 16 feet wide at a time. More modern combines harvest 30 to 40 feet at a time or more. Standing next to it, though, it sure looks big.

A few days later, after many hours of studying the operator’s manual, adjusting settings, and greasing fittings, we finally had a nice dry day and enough confidence to give it a try. It worked!

Uncle Johnny rode the first round along with my dad, giving him pointers. Wow, there are a lot of moving parts on that machine.

After the first round, we had to stop and test the moisture of the grain with this tester (left).

We were hoping for a 13.5% moisture content, but it tested at about 14.5%. We were anxious to get it harvested before the weather changed, though, so we went ahead.

A break for explanation:

This harvesting machine is called a “combine” because it does a combination of things: it reaps (cuts) the crop, threshes the grain by breaking it out of the hull or husk or pod, and then winnows the grain from the chaff. If this all seems like terminology you last heard from the pulpit, that’s probably because there are a lot of farming parables in the Bible – in fact, this Sunday’s Catholic gospel was chock full of them. Someone in charge of setting up the readings must know it’s wheat harvest time. (Too bad we can’t blame the weeds in our field on an enemy!)

Here you can see the head doing the reaping – if you look closely just below the lowest black horizontal bar, you can see a bunch of zig-zag cutters moving back and forth (very sharp, and very fast), cutting off the wheat stalks as we drive through them.

The reel (the black part that turns) pushes the stalks into the augur, which is the green drill-bit-looking part. The augur moves the grain toward the opening in the center, where it’s pushed in to the thresher.

From there, it goes through the winnower, which is basically a fan that is precisely set to let the grain fall down while blowing away the rest of the plant materials.

The grain comes out an augur into a bin up on the top of the combine, behind the operator’s seat (left).

Everything but the grain – the chaff – is blown out the back. I’m holding a handful of these “tailings” in the photo on the right.

When the bin is full, it’s emptied into a waiting grain truck with yet another augur:

We took most of the wheat to a local grain elevator, but some 200 bushels went to Kaneville Feed & Seed to be cleaned to food grade.

Now it’s available for sale! If you’re on the fence, check out some of these mouth-watering recipes.

- Molly

Velvet weeds are my aunt Mo’s favorite weed because, she says, “You always get the whole root when you pull it.” They’re kind of heart-shaped, and when they get big a fine little velvety fuzz covers them.

Ironweed is the local name for giant ragweed. I am so allergic to it that when it scratches my skin, I get huge welts. (The leaves have five fingers, so sometimes uninformed folks trying to start trouble think that it’s marijuana. As far as I know, this plant will not get you high. It may give you congestion, the sneezes, and itchy eyes, though.)

You probably all know the pretty spring dandelion – they’re not pretty any more. Bah, humbug.

The leaves of lamb’s quarters (left) have white undersides – presumably like a lamb’s haunches. They are tough to pull out!

What we call pigweed (right), is actually an amaranth plant. They’re often nearly the same color as the bean leaves, which makes them hard to spot.

This grass (left) probably has a special name, but I just call it “that dang grass!” It seems to have a special talent for growing right in next to the stem of a bean or corn plant, so we have to reach down and pull it by hand instead of getting it with the hoe.

The pale, bright green of these sedges (right) is a lovely color in the spring. They tend to grow in the wet areas, especially around the drip irrigation section in the vegetable test plot.