Farmers unwittingly adjust to climate changes

The Ohio wine industry has been getting more and more dependent on French grapes over the last 30 years. The vinifera, or French grape, the species of grape known to produce the world's best and snootiest wines, is very tender, which would make sense since it is adapted to a Mediterranean climate. But for the last few decades Ohio winemakers, and those in many other temperate regions, have been planting more and more vinifera to replace the good old American grape varieties they used to grow. American grapes, like Concord, the grape juice grape, and French-American hybrids are much hardier in the normal Midwestern winters—or what used to be known as normal winter. But American grapes are better known for producing juice or sweet wines, while hybrids have never been able to compete with the old French standbys in wine quality in the eyes of the Wine Spectator crowd.

 

An Ohio vineyard testing the limits

 

Regions like the West Coast have climates much like that of France, and it's in places like this where vinifera thrives. But before climate change began to bring milder winters (devasting floods and hurricanes) to the rest of the country, wineries were forced to look to American grapes, and to breeders to develop cold hardy French-American hydrids, in order to have productive vineyards to base a business on. Vinifera vines could not survive most Midwestern winters without a down coat, only questionably able to survive as low as -10 degrees F at their hardiest.

But as the climate has changed over the last few decades, the tender vinifera has crept into the locally-made wine market in the Midwest. It started out as a sort of testing of the waters, with a few renegades planting small vineyards and finding the grapes could survive most winters in the new era of 400 ppm. After a few were successful, they attracted the attention of others who saw dollar signs. Ohio wineries realized that their hardy native grapes didn't produce the kind of wine that demanded top dollar, and didn't produce what is the socially-accepted definition of good wine. So they scrapped their American vines and replaced them with the much more valuable (and vulnerable) French vines. It's unlikely that any of them suspected they were only able to grow the vines now because the climate was changing and the world was gradually warming.

All primary buds on these vinifera were killed. Secondary and tertiary buds sprouted. Many vines died back to the ground.

 

Then last winter, Ohio winegrowers were surprised by a sudden change in their mild winters. The warming arctic had pushed the polar vortex from its normal position atop the globe. Huge acreages of the state's vinifera vines were wiped out by the frigid winter. Those that did survive died back to the ground, saved only by a thick cover of snow that insulated their roots against the far below zero temps.

Season of abundance

It's been a pretty good season so far. I think I bit off more than I could chew with the amount of space I chose to garden this year. I started a small CSA here and so expanded my garden. I also purchased a couple of tractor implements to make it possible to do agriculture on a larger scale out on our ag land. Before this season, most of my gardening was done on smaller hand-tended plots. More and more though I have been finding that doing things by hand is very time consuming. As much as I like the idea of simplicity, and as much as I dislike what conventional and large scale agriculture have done to our valuable agricultural lands, I cannot compete with the scale of fossil fueled agriculture by doing things by hand. Humanity gave that up by and large thousands of years ago, so it's not surprising it couldn't compete today. Hand gardening might be fine for the hobbyist who wants to grow a few supplemental veggies during the season, but if you are trying to sell your stuff or grow most of the food you eat, you are basically just wasting your time because it is so much less efficient. I've kind of known this and had never planned to try to make money selling vegetables, but here I find myself, at least partially trying to scrape a living doing something I love.

Onions growing between rows of grapes

There is virtually no market to speak of around Dancing Rabbit. We live on an island of awareness in a sea of people who don't understand the value of what we have to offer. Considering that we want to reduce our impact, it seems a little in error that we located the ecovillage so far from people who would be truly interested in and supportive of what we are doing here. We'd have to travel pretty far to get any products we produce to a market that appreciates them. This means extra fuel in transporting them. And for that matter, people have to travel pretty far to visit and see what we are doing. But this is the situation we have to overcome or accept. There are other reasons this location was chosen for DR.

Why I Eat Rabbits at Dancing Rabbit

I realize that there are those who think it's just wrong to eat animals and I don't have any argument with them, but for those who are open to the idea, I thought I'd explain the reason why I eat rabbits here at Dancing Rabbit.

From what I understand, Dancing Rabbit got its name before the people who started it even bought the land in Missouri where the future ecovillage was to be located.  When they eventually moved here, they were surprised to find rabbits running around, possibly dancing (maybe if you squinted your eyes a bit), everywhere. So the name was never some kind of tribute to the abundant rabbits found here.



Rabbit in the pressure cooker

My first experiences with rabbits here were fairly positive.  I liked seeing them hopping around but always thought of bunnies as fuzzy cute things, never as food.  After gardening at Dancing Rabbit for a while, I came to realize that the bunnies made things very difficult.  They are pretty much the reason people have to fence their gardens.  If you don't have a fence, it will be difficult if not impossible to get most vegetables going, and forget about edamame or carrots for the entire season.  And they always seem to find ways to get into fencing and devastate your crops. Although rabbits eat all of some tender plants, they have a pernicious habit of lopping off the tops of anything you plant and just leaving the top sitting there uneaten. 

This habit has been incredibly destructive in the vineyard where, even though I protect the trunks of the vines, when it snows enough in the middle of winter, I'll find a year's worth of growth hanging free from its trunk on the trellis.  The vine will take at least another year to recover. Sometimes rabbits just damage the trunk and crown gall sets in, strangling the vine slowly over a few years if it isn't pruned to the ground.  It's setbacks like these, that a rabbit does seemingly on a whim, that are the most frustrating. "Oh, maybe I'll hop over here and set back his vines a year doing something that takes me about a half second to do---and then not even eat the vine at all."!!?

The Mid-winter Locovore

So this is a meal Julie and I had last night that consisted of tamales, carmelized carrots, and salad.  Everything except the butter in the tamales and some of the ingredients in the salad dressing were grown in my garden.  The tamales were my first experiment with grinding my own masa from the Abenaki flour corn I grew in my garden last year.  I treated the dried corn with pickling lime before grinding it in my new hand-cranked mill. This is the nixtamalizing process I talked about in a previous post. The masa did not grind up as finely as I'm used to, but I liked the texture and they held together just like tamales made from finer masa. Even the corn husks are from my garden. They were the same husks that covered the cobs of the flour corn. We dipped the tamales in salsa made entirely from ingredients I grew in my garden as well.

This season: a review

 

Pug the pug visiting my house and looking for handouts

 

I haven't really been posting much this season because I've been concentrating on other things, but I do have a lot to talk about now. I've been gradually finishing projects on the house and am now pretty much done with it. There are a few other finishing touches to add, like a stove for the kitchen, the first floor ceiling, a bit more soffit, and the railing for the stairway, but pretty much everything else is done for now.

 

I had to spend some time resurfacing the earthen floor since the light clay straw insulation sort of failed and had sunk about an inch all around and was cracking in many places. I'm hoping the floor had sunk all it was going to sink, so that when I added the layer on top it wouldn't sink again in time. We'll see, but everything looks fine so far. If it doesn't work this time I'm going to tear it up and put in foamboard insulation.   The picture above shows the entrance pad with tile laid into the earthen floor in the higher traffic area.  I also laid tile into the kitchen area part of the floor.

 

 

I finished all my curtains myself in the early spring and got them all up.  It was good to refamiliarize myself with a sewing machine.  The warm windows fabric does make it a lot easier though.  I'm really happy with how they turned out and how they work!  They make the place have much more contrast and give me a sense that I'm in some other country, which is what I was going for.  The picture above also shows the wood rack I built for my firewood, with bin on the bottom for the big stuff and shelves for kindling above.  Of course I've only lit a couple fires so far this year because the weather has been either warm or sunny, and my thermal curtains are keeping the cold out.  I reorganized this part of the downstairs for the winter, complete with comfy chair for sitting by the fire.

Quick Update

So I'm going to try to make this update brief since I feel like blogging takes a lot of time and I don't have extra right now, but I really want to get up some pictures of the changes happening with my projects this season. We'll start with the successes.

The vineyard

All this rain has been great for the vines. They need plenty of water when they are getting established and this season has provided it steadily up until the last couple weeks.

Many of the vines have been growing so fast I was forced to get going on putting up the trellises. They went up just in time and now many of the vines have reached the trellis wire and some have even fully filled out their allotted space on it. I'm hoping that by the end of the season nearly all the vines will have filled in their space so next season they can produce a full crop.

These are locust posts harvested from nearby Sandhill farm. They are an organic rot-resistant alternative to treated posts, and they look a lot more organic too.

Chicken tractor

We went to the flea market aka The Dog 'n' Gun in early May and I bought 16 chicks from a hatchery there, 7 Barred Rocks and 9 Rhode Island Reds. At first we had to keep them in a box in the house because it was still a little too cold outside for them. During the day we put them in the coldframe where I'd started many of my vegetable plants.

That seemed to keep them warm enough. Usually people keep chicks in a brooder and try to maintain a temperature of about 85-90 degrees for the first couple weeks of their lives. The brooder has a heat lamp in it much like the kind they use to keep fast food hot. The lamp takes the place of a hen who would, under more natural conditions or in the old days, keep the chicks warm. I would love to have a hen to sit on the chicks but "broody hens" are hard to come by these days apparently. Heat lamps have taken their place for the sake of convenience and mass production and broodiness has been bred out of most breeds because it is not desirable in the world of mass-produced eggs. Anyway, since those lamps use at least 500 watts of power I had to find an alternative. I just kept them in a box with a compact flourescent lamp in it. They stayed at around 80 degrees in the box at night and though they huddled together under the lamp, they made it through just fine at that temp.

Eventually they grew more feathers and were insulated enough to be outside in the chicken tractor all night. The nighttime temperatures eventually warmed enough for them to be fine outside. Now they are close to their adult size and have been in the tractor out to the vineyard for about a month. So far I've had no problems with predators, which was my main worry. The chickens are still making chick sounds and the roosters have yet to crow, but I expect they will start sounding like chickens soon. They are doing a great job of fertilizing the vineyard. At first I was feeding them chick starter, which is prepared food, but now I've switched them over to local organic grains, like barley, corn, and flax. They love the clover I planted in the vineyard rows and can't wait to get into the fresh pasture each time I move the tractor.


Last week I was able to work more on the soffit on Wisteria Lodge and finally finished it. That meant I could finish the arbor on the front of the house. Mary Beth came up with a design for the cross pieces and I installed them, so now the arbor is done. Just in time too, because the wisteria vine is rapidly making its way up the arbor post. It still has about a foot and a half before it reaches the cross pieces.


The garden is mostly planted. I got the ok to rent additional garden space on the south side of Skyhouse garden and with the hard work of my work exchanger Charles, we have sheet mulched, fenced, and planted almost the entire new space already. Sheet mulching allows you to quickly create a garden without having to till up the soil. You just mow the wild plants, cover the ground with cardboard, and put straw mulch on top. To plant, you just cut a hole in the cardboard and drop your plant in. The space went from a wild field to a garden in a very short time. The space had actually been someone's garden in the past, but hadn't been tended for several years. I decided to put the tomatoes, squash, cukes, and beans there because they are easier to plant in a sheet mulched garden.


We've been harvesting tons of strawberries lately. The small beds we have just keep producing. We've made jam, syrup, and strawberry ice cream. The ice cream was really good because Mary Beth used only cream to make it. It was a hit with everyone here and was quickly eaten. We are probably going to make strawberry wine with the next harvest.

Another crop we've been enjoying lately is salad greens. It's nice to have fresh local veggies again. Soon we will be adding other veggies and herbs to our diet.

Mary Beth created an herb spiral in the garden recently. She'd been inspired by the herb spiral we saw at the Hostel in the Forest. Hers looks really good now, and the many herbs she's planted are taking hold well. Rosemary, lemon grass, nasturtium, oregano, marjoram, creeping thyme, parsley, cilantro, chamomile, thai basil, sweet basil, and epazote, a mexican herb much like oregano used to flavor beans. We'll be doing a lot of drying of herbs so we can use them year round.


The vineyard is growing like crazy in this rain we've been getting. Some vines are already almost 6 feet tall, which is as tall as I want their main trunks to be.

The summer is flying by

It's been a busy season and my camera has been on the fritz for the greater part of it. I've been reluctant to buy a new one because I'd rather not contribute to the creation of another disposable thing made in China. So now I've been handed down a camera second hand and I'm back in business taking pictures for my blog. This season I have been kind of overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I've had to do. It's inevitable in this place where we are trying to build a village that I should get distracted by everyday community activities having to do with helping keep the village running and growing. I've also been consumed by the task of gardening for the Bobolink eating co-op, which has been a struggle with the weather this season.

Fortunately I have been making progress on some things. So far the vineyard, though a little nibbled by deer, seems to be surviving and growing. I've been harvesting black locust trees from out along Woerhle Rd to use as posts for the trellising system the vines will grow up. Black locust is a very rot-resistant tree and makes posts that last as long or longer than treated posts and grows like a weed along the road. Using real tree trunks for posts will also, I think, give the vineyard a more natural look. I will be installing the posts this season and they should be pretty well settled by next spring when the vines will be trained along them.

Some greenwood cuttings of vines to be planted out in the vineyard. I took the cuttings a few weeks ago. They only take a couple weeks to form roots and will be established in the vineyard by the end of the season. This is a much quicker way of multiplying my vines.

Last year when I came here, I brought a bunch of vines from Madison and ended up having many extras which I gave away to others here, creating sort of a boom in the grapevine population here at DR. Rachel planted a few of these vines in her garden and this year one already produced a significant crop of grapes. Since she was away for the harvest, she allowed me to take the grapes, and I'm making a small batch of wine with them. It was inspiring to see such a harvest of beautiful grapes in such a short time from my own vines. Of course mine are not fruiting yet because I had to temporarily store the vines in a nursery row while I waited to get access to land to plant. I expect I should have a small crop next year in the vineyard though and the following year the vines should be close to full bearing.

Another project this season has been researching and buying a power system. Right now, I am typing on my computer powered by my own solar power. I was able to get some of the components for my systems second hand from Tom, another DR member. I also bought some batteries, an inverter, and another solar panel. It's not a huge system, but big enough to power my simple needs in my small house. I should be able to power a stereo, lights, a laptop, and a few other low power items with the current system even during the short days of winter.

The garden has been a mixture of success and failure this season--I guess as it usually is--but maybe more failure than I'm used to. The early and heavy rain delayed planting not just for me, but for most farmers in the region. I planted potatoes three times and still most of them rotted in the ground. Next year I will wait and plant them later to avoid the wet weather and to be able to harvest them closer to winter, when its easier to store them. But the rain here continued through July, so it made things difficult for many crops beyond potatoes. Fortunately, some crops like peppers and eggplant are flourishing in the rain, and are the best I've ever grown. The rain also made establishing the vineyard much easier because it meant I didn't have to irrigate to get the little vines root systems going.

Another efforts this summer has been gathering wood for building. Since all the wood we use if building has to be reclaimed we all have to either buy used wood from local people who take down houses, or we have to do the demolition ourselves. I've been working on scavenging wood from a couple different places. Recently I was getting some barn siding from a local barn. I'm using this to side my garden shed and my house. I also hope to get some posts and beams from the site for use in my future house, the progress of which has been set back slightly by the fact that I've decided to make it bigger than originally planned. I have also completed taking down a small house in nearby Rutledge from which I was able to get many 2x4s, 2xs, and sheets of plywood and OSB.

These are some of the peaches from the Dr orchard. It's been really great to have fresh fruit again this season. These peaches were so delicious.

Last week I started putting siding on my garden shed to cover up the OSB, which looks really ugly and didn't contribute to the quaintness of my garden one bit. I took siding off a barn recently and decided that the wood was a little too crappy to put on my house, so I thought I'd practice on the shed before getting better wood and putting it on my house. Despite the crappiness of the wood, the siding looks really good. I will put some one by two strips on to cover up the gaps between barn boards. I've been asking around and calling up the local radio show to try to find barn boards I can use for siding. I stopped by one house on the way to Kirksville that had a few nice looking outbuildings that weren't being used. An older man with a big cowboy hat answered the door and said that though he didn't use the buildings he didn't want them taken down. I will keep asking around. I've got to get the house sided before winter.

I have a lot of things to do still before it gets cold so I suspect I'll continue to be busy for a while yet.

Garden and Vineyard

Spring is definitely far along now as the grass gets higher and the fruit gets bigger. Stuff planted out in the garden seems to be doubling in size every day. I've been focusing on getting the vinyard all squared away and getting the garden in. It's been a tough spring in many ways for farmers. Most notable it has been very wet and cold. I couldn't really work the garden beds until pretty late. In fact I think I got stuff in later than I usually would in WI.


The orchard bloomed lushly,with only a minor frost scare one night that appears not to have done any damage. We will hopefully have a bounty of peaches and pears.


Spring out here also means mushroom season, and morels are some of the tastiest you can find. I went out at the same time I had last year and didn't see any. But later in the season I went out and found a bumper crop. It seemed like everywhere I looked there were huge specimens of these strange looking mushrooms. I fried some up for breakfast a couple of days in a row.


The vineyard has been something I've been dreaming of for a long time, and this spring I was able to find a good spot on a south facing slope to plant about 200 grape vines I'd brought with me. I took cuttings of vines I'd been growing for years in my community garden plots in Madison and brought them here. Last year I'd planted them in close together in a nursery row so they could establish their root systems. This year they were ready to plant out in the vineyard.

I was able to get our old tractor going and borrowed a tiller from neighboring Sandhill Farm. I tilled up ten rows about 200 ft long and planted one vine every eight feet. Some visitors to DR helped with digging holes and planting the vines.

It only took about a week to plant the vines, between many other things I was doing. I left about two rows open for softwood cuttings I will take of some wine varieties early in summer. Until I plant those vines, I've planted rows of dry beans in those open rows.


I planted a cover crop of buckwheat around the vines to fill up the tilled areas. This will smother out weeds so I can plant a more permanent cover crop later in the season. I will also scythe the buckwheat throughout the season to add green manure to the soil to improve its fertility. The last steps have been mulching around the vines with straw mulch and staking each vine. I will train the vines up stakes and hopefully by the end of the season they will have good tall trunks. Next season I will put up trellises and train the grapes laterally.


I plan to make and sell wine, juice, and fresh grapes in the future. I will sell the wine to people outside as well as inside the community, whereas the juice and fresh grapes will be for me and some within DR.

I have been doing a little experimenting in the garden with drip irrigation. I don't think anyone here has tried it, but I thought it might be a good idea because we try to conserve water here and because last year I spent more time watering than doing anything else. I laid out a system of tubing with drippers that regulate how much water is dripped into the soil. The system is hooked up to the cistern I set up last year, and gravity is enough to pressurize the system, though if I want the water to come out faster I hook up a little solar powered pump. I am now able to water about a third of the garden by just turning a valve, instead of having to water each plant individually. The system seems to work well so we may expand it to other areas of the garden.


The main drawback to drip irrigation is that it requires a lot of plastic, which is of course made from fossil fuel. I bought thicker tubing instead of drip tape, which is often used in garden systems. Though if you are careful, the drip tape might last 5 years, it is much easier to puncture and difficult to repair. The tubing should last much longer than 5 years, I'm hoping, and is easily repaired. We've been getting so much rain this season, I haven't had to use the drip irrigation much yet.


Everything is growing well though. All the starts I planted, though they took a while to get going in the greenhouse, took off once things warmed up and they were transplanted into a medium of well-composted manure. I've since planted most of them out in the garden.

the plants in the above picture are garlic. I have some really big varieties and planted them last fall so they are getting really big already.

Above are some pics of the gardens, though now these plants are much bigger. We've had a really wet season so far, and I had to wait longer than usual to work up the beds unfortunately. I am just getting the rest of the tomatoes into the ground. We've already harvested walking onions, which are kind of like scallions, lettuce, spinach, and just in the last two days, strawberries.

Speaking of food, apparently the Food Network wants to do a show on DR to showcase groups that grow their own food. The other day Brian, whose videos you may have seen on DRTV, interviewed a number of us on the request of the FN to talk about the food we grow and our diets here. The FN was really excited about the DVD we sent them and will be sending a crew here sometime soon to shoot some footage. Maybe I'll be on TV.

I plan to get started on the new house as soon as I'm done with the garden and vineyard, so watch for more updates.