14 Jan be our compost buddy!

We are now a Garden Partner with Compost Now.

Compost (produced from sustainable resources like your food scraps) is an essential part of a healthy food system and a vital part of the success of farms like ours.  Compost Now customers can now share their compost to our farm.

If you are a Compost Now customer, please consider allocating your compost to us.

Click here to set up your allocation with Compost Now or learn more!

31 Jul What’s in Bloom: Fruit and Pollinator Garden edition

There is a part of the Well Fed Community Garden that is always open to the public, and that is our pollinator garden.  When you are taking a walk down Athens Drive feel free to pop into the pollinator garden, enjoy the beauty of the blooming flowers, and touch and smell the aromatic herbs in the raised beds.  There is plenty to explore and there are some signs up to help identify the plants.  Below are some of the herbs, fruits, and flowers that can be found in the pollinator garden or along the fence that protects our vegetables from deer.

The greenery pictured above is shiso.  Shiso is an herb in the mint family that is sometimes used in sushi.  It has a unique fragrance when a leaf is torn and a unique flavor when eaten. You can sometimes find this green variety or a purple variety growing wild in the woods around here.

The fruit tree pictured above is a pawpaw tree.  Pawpaws are native and can also be found in the woods around here.  We only have two trees at the Well Fed Community Garden and this year is shaping up to be our biggest harvest yet! The pawpaws also have a unique flavor that is hard to describe if you have not tried it yourself.  The yellow-orange flesh tastes similar to a muted banana and mango combined, but watch out for the large brown seeds speckled throughout the fruit. To learn more check out Andrew Moore’s 2015 book Pawpaw: A Search for America’s Forgotten Fruit.

Fig trees do amazingly well here in the Triangle.  Since varieties can be all different colors when ripe, give the fig a light squeeze; if it is very soft, it is ready to harvest.  The fig pictured above still needs some time to ripen, but in the next couple weeks we’ll have figs galore.

The exotic flower and fruit pictured above is a passion flower vine, also called Maypop.  There are many varieties of passion flower and this is one native to North America.  The fruit is delectable and tastes like candy.

You can see in the picture above that our pear trees are being weighed down by all the fruit being produced.  The low hanging fruit will make for an easy harvest.

The Well Fed Garden was designed by the permaculturist, Will Hooker.  One of the design features is a living fence made with dwarf apple trees pictured above.  The new growth of the apple tree branches are tied and pruned directing the plants into the shape of the fence, creating an edible living fence.  The apples are ripe and ready for picking.

The pollinator garden has a wide array of flowers planted for the pollinators in the area.  Pictured above are a honey bee and a bumble bee enjoying the echinacea flowers.

This bright yellow and orange flower pictured above is a daylilly.

The little orange blooms pictured above come from a milkweed plant.  Milkweed is the sole host plant for the monarch butterfly.

This vibrant pink bloom pictured above is a Stargazer Oriental lily.

Below you can see bees and butterflies enjoying some of our beautiful flowers.  If you would like to enjoy our flowers too come visit us for our weekly volunteer day Thursday mornings 9:30am-12:00pm and our Wine and Weeds event Thursday evenings 6:00pm-8:00pm.  You can also find our flowers at the Irregardless Cafe; we provide the flowers for their table arrangements. We hope to see you soon!

Hibiscus

Yard long bean plant

Zinnia

Mexican sunflower

22 Jul Potato Harvest 2019

Potato harvest time has come to the Well Fed Community Garden! This year we partnered with NC State Extension and a potato breeder at NC State to try out some fun and different varieties. Some were new varieties and some were typical potato varieties, such as Yukon Gold.  NC State Extension gave us 23 different potato varieties in all.  The goal was to see how the varieties grew here and how well they produced.

You can harvest potatoes as soon as they start sizing up.  If you harvest them early, when the plant still has green foliage, they are new potatoes.  New potatoes taste great, but their skins are soft and fragile and they do not store well. To harvest for storage and maximum yield, you must wait until the plants are completely dead.  This allows time for the skin to toughen up.  Above is a potato plant well on its way to being ready for harvest.  In the background, you can see some potato plants that are completely dead and ready for harvest.

For bigger farms producing potatoes, a potato plow, an implement attached to the back of a tractor, is used to unzip the row of potatoes and bring them up to the surface.  Because we are a small operation we used our hand and small trowels.  Our interns said it was like digging for buried treasure and it really did feel that way with all of the beautiful different colors of each variety of potato. Potato harvest is a fun way to get your hands good and dirty in the soil.

During our harvest we made sure to take notes on how each variety grew and the total weight of potatoes we harvested per variety. A few varieties really stood out to us as great producers and we are excited to try growing them again next year! Below you can see some of the variety in skin color of the potatoes; some were yellow, white, purple/blue, and red.

Above is a US Blue potato cut in half.  It has a beautiful purple skin and a white/mosaic flesh inside.  We had some varieties with purple skin and white flesh inside and others that had purple skin and purple flesh inside.  It was really fun getting to see the different color combinations of each variety.

Pictured above are all of the potatoes boxed up after harvest and ready to go to NC State Extension.  The potatoes will then be brought to different restaurants in Raleigh to explore what the subtle differences in taste are for each potato variety and what varieties are the chef’s favorites.  Since we are in partnership with Irregardless Cafe, we also set some aside to bring to Irregardless Cafe for Chef Arthur Gordon to investigate which potato variety is his favorite.

Farmer Heather was able to go to a special potato tasting with Chef Ashley Christensen, where they were able to compare the nuanced flavor of each potato variety. Pictured below are the more than 20 potato varieties they tasted.

20 May Reducing Our Waste

One of our focuses here at the Well Fed Community Garden is environmental sustainability.  We use organic practices, focus on building the soil versus depleting it, and have a pollinator garden to help our local pollinators and birds have sustenance and materials to build their nests. Any produce that does not go to the restaurant or is not donated goes into our compost pile. Then is added to our fields to help with soil health. Recently, we held a workshop that touched on a couple ways we could all be a little more environmentally conscious (even if you do not have a garden!): reducing our plastic bag use and food waste.

Worldwide, nearly 2 million plastic bags are used a minute. The amount of energy required to make 12 plastic bags could drive a car for a mile. Roughly fifty percent of all produce in the United States is thrown away. Although these statistics can be daunting, here are a couple small and fun tips to help you get in the mindset of Reducing Our Waste.

Our workshop in April was about making your own produce bags and learning about natural dyes using the skins of onions that usually get thrown away.

The breathable fabric was sourced from local thrift stores, either from curtains or sheets.  After being cut into a rectangle, folded over, and sewing the edges you have your very own produce bag which is light and fun to use in the grocery store.

Above is a pot of boiled onion skins which was used to naturally dye our produce bags.

Miriam, a regular volunteer and teacher for our workshop, showing the group what our finished product could look like.

Stirring our produce bag into the onion skins.

The longer you keep the produce bag in the onion mixture, the deeper the color.  We placed our produce bags in a bit of the cooked onion skins in jars for folks to bring home with them.

There are many small steps one can take to start thinking about ways to reduce waste.  Learning to look at the possible uses of the things we throw away and sourcing what we can locally can be a fun adventure unto itself.  Keep an eye out for our monthly workshops on a variety of topics, from composting to rain gardens!

11 Feb How to Stay Warm in Winter: Urban Farming Edition

Winter brings cold temperatures, freezing rain, snow, ice, and wind.  It can be hard to keep your core warm. Although layering clothing is key, we have some fun ways we like to stay warm here at the Well Fed Community Garden that we would like to share with you.

Chunk of ice found the morning of a cold day.

With the help of Farm Dog Bella, our Farm Manager Morgan gathers bricks to move to different rows around the farm.  The bricks are quite heavy piled up in the wheelbarrow, and hauling them around is a great way to warm up. Once they make it to their respective rows, the bricks will hold down the edges of the row cover. Row cover is a special white fabric that (along with hoops) creates a warmer micro-climate for the plants.  This helps keep the plants a little warmer and more protected from the elements than if they were left bare.

Bella and Morgan loading up the wheelbarrow

Morgan with a full load of bricks ready for hauling

Spinach and beets are being protected by layers of row cover held down by the bricks brought over by Morgan.

We also use row cover inside our passive greenhouse to add a little extra protection for our more vulnerable hydroponic lettuce and plant starts.

Even without much help from us, our chickens handle most of the cold days the North Carolina winters bring well.  We usually will prep their coop for winter by covering any summer ventilation openings and layering their bedding to provide more warmth.  However, their water will freeze after the especially cold nights and we thaw their water with some warm water from the tea kettle. The chickens love this and always come running.

One of our chickens running over to get a nice warm drink of water.

Farm Manager Morgan, Farm Apprentice Hannah, and Farm Dog Bella digging holes to fertilize our blueberry bushes so that the pH level of the soil will be in the optimal range for nutrient uptake.

One way to stay warm on the farm is to work inside our caterpillar tunnel. The plastic layer protects us (and the plants) from the cold winds and it warms up really quickly inside with just a bit of sunlight.

Regular volunteer, Miriam, using a scuffle hoe to clear out lettuce mix.

After the beds are cleared of the lettuce mix, we use a broadfork to break up the soil for aeration and drainage without tilling. Broadforking in the caterpillar tunnel is a great way to lose a couple clothing layers in the winter.

These pac choi starts were hardening off outside. When starts grow up in the greenhouse they need to spend about a week or two outside before being planted so that they can get acclimated to outdoor conditions. These starts were quickly stashed in the caterpillar tunnel before the temperature dropped from the 70s to the 30s.

Farm Dog Bella laying out in the sun.  A shining example of how to keep warm on a cold day on the farm.

We hope everyone stays warm the rest of this winter.  Feel free to come warm up with us Thursdays 9:30am-12pm for our regular weekly volunteer hours throughout the year.