Our visit to Soil Born Farms, The Farm on Hurly Way

This morning our family had a chance to visit The Farm on Hurly Way. The Hurly Farm (as Farmer Eric calls it) is a small urban farm that belongs to Soil Born Farms. This particular farm is managed by our good friend Farmer Eric and his partner Farmer Sarah.  

Farmer Eric

As starting out urban farmers we are in LOVE with Soil Born Farms. Back in 2000 Sean Harrison and Marco Franciosa, two friends who were young and inexperienced organic farmers (reminds me of us Happy Green Lifers) decided to start an Urban Agriculture and Education Project. Today youth and adults can visit the farm and learn to grow, eat, and love farming!

Farmer Sarah

Last year Farmer Eric and Farmer Sarah joined Soil Born Farms for their Farming Apprenticeship program. They started with 40 other applicants and worked their butts off until there was just four farmers left, their prize was wining their current position as co-managers of the Farm on Hurly Way (or the Hurly Farm).

Since taking over the farm the two have planted lettuce, artichokes, and TONS of garlic! Farmer Eric showed us their experimental espalier fruit trees. This is the process of training fruit tree branches to grow in a specific way. The trees on the Hurly Farm are being trained to grow into a wall.

espalier fruit trees

Over the winter the fields that weren’t full of crops were planted with vetch and oat grass. Vetch is a legume that is planted to put nitrogen back into the field between harvests. Farmer Eric pulled up some Vetch for us and showed us how it had been affected by a bacteria called Rhizobium. The rhizobium creates nitrogen nodules to grow on the roots. These put nitrogen back into the soil so that the next group of plants that grow there will have the proper nutrients to grow.

Nitrogen nodules

Rows of different lettuce

After checking out the plants we got to meet the farm ducks and chickens. Indian Runner ducks were chosen for the eggs that they will produce. They do not fly and they run instead of waddle, we got to see this as the men were trying to catch them to show the kids. The farm has a large variety of chickens also chosen for their eggs. Rhode Island Red, buff orpington, barred rock, araucana, and australorp’s can be found throughout the farm eating bugs and helping fertilize the ground.

Lots of Garlic!

We had a wonderful time visiting the farm. They invited us back to help work, which we will be doing so we can learn to work on our own farm. They will also being making a visit out to our little farm to help us harvest and plant our spring veggies!!

If you live in the Sacramento, CA area you need to check out Soil Born Farms. They have a lot of activates scheduled for families including a kids day and kids summer camp!! https://www.soilborn.org/

-Amanda

The farm is ready!

Our farm is ready! Two weeks ago the Happy Green Life crew (and some other friends) got our garden ready for our fall crops! Like I mentioned before we started off by contacting our friend Farmer Eric and asking him what we should do. We were instructed to rototill the area that we wanted to plant, test our soil, add fertilizer if we needed it, then remove any large rocks and clumps of grass.

We had some options for how we wanted to plant the garden. My parents plant in raised box beds, they build boxes and then fill them with soil and fertilizer, this seems to be an easy way of doing it but we didn’t want to spend the money on boxes so we went a different route. The last three years I planted directly in the ground (I didn’t raise my beds), this works but I had a little trouble with flooding. So we decided to do raised soil beds. We marked out our beds, 3 feet by 18 feet, and 18 inches apart. We did this by hammering posts into the ground where the corners of the beds would be, then tying string to them, this way we had a perfect guide for our beds. Next we dug a walk way around each of the beds and threw the excess soil into the beds. By doing this we were able to raise our beds approximately 2 feet from the ground and create walkways that double as trenches for water so that our beds don’t flood.

Once we had enough soil in the beds we turned the soil with a fork and then flattened it out with the back of a rake-making sure that we didn’t pack the soil just smooth it flat. Once our beds were ready we measured out where we wanted to plant. For our brassicas (lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and kale) we staggered our plants between three rows 8 inches apart. This leaves them enough room for a medium to large plant.

For our root plants, carrots, beets, radishes we planted in straight rows dropping our seed throughout. Once they have begun to sprout we will thin the rows out allowing the plants enough room to grow approximately 2 inches (some plants up to 8 inches, check the seed pack to see how much space they need).

We have seven beds left, five will be planted with wheat and peas and two will go to herbs (our tomatoes are currently in them). We will be “nicking” the sweat peas outer shell so that they can absorb more water and then planting them 2 inches apart. For our wheat we will be spreading it out across the beds (no rows for this stuff). We will have enough wheat to make approximately 40 loaves of bread!

After everything was planted it was time to water. Farmer Eric taught us to check our soil by taking a handful and clumping it together, if it clumps into a ball then it has moisture, if you are unable to break it up in your hand it has too much moisture and you should hold off on watering. We are to water our veggies once a week for about an hour.

Once our veggies are grown we will be rotating our plants around so that we can add nutrients back to the soil. It will take approximately 60 days to see some veggies. In the meantime we are growing some veggies from seed in the house so that they are ready to plant after the first harvest. We will keep you updated on our farm, wish us luck!  

Our Happy Urban Farm

I am getting ready to graduate with my masters in environmental studies and as my classes and projects get more intense so do my desires to live sustainably. Like I have said before I grew up on a mini farm that practiced sustainable living but my poor husband did not. He grew up in the city; his closest interaction with farming was mowing the 5x10 foot lawn in front of his mom’s house.

When I decided to go back to school he was very supportive, I had originally studied government and had talked a lot about law school so he was all smiles at the thought of us boosting our family income. But then I broke the news that I was going to pursue environmentalism. He smiled and said, “Whatever makes you happy, I support you,” but he was thinking, “I have married a hippie lunatic!” He thought this again when I informed him that we were going to tear out his precious back yard lawn and start an urban farm!

So this is our new project, we are going to start urban farming. Our current garden measures 3 x 10 ft. (it runs along the side of our house), but our new one will be 10 x 30. We are starting off with 20 vegetables beds and then a 10 x 10 patch of wheat. We currently have four fruit trees along the back perimeter of our yard, by next summer we plan to have added 10 more. We also plan to add chickens in the spring for eggs and meat. We want to grow enough food to feed the entire Happy Green Life Crew and our extended families, and maybe someday have enough to sell at the farmers market.

What is exciting, besides the prospect of never having to go grocery shopping again, is that all of our family and friends want to be a part of it. All of our friends and family have offered to come and help us. Even friends of friends have gotten excited by the idea of us doing this and have offered to help; we even had offers of land if we find that our dinky back yard is holding us back!

We are so excited, and a little scared, after all this is crazy! Remember my husband is a city boy and while I may have grown up on a farm I spent the majority of the time watching 90210 in my bedroom-far far away from any farm like activity.  Luckily we have friends with knowledge! My husband is in the military and one of his fellow soldiers is a member of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition. This group offers training and grants to veterans who want to become farmers. Our friend Eric has been working for the last two months with us getting all of our preparations for our urban farm. He has taught us everything from soil testing and PH levels, to layouts and crop rotations. This weekend along with the whole Happy Green Life crew we will be putting in our first winter crop! We are all very excited! This is going to be quite an adventure for all of us. After our first crop is in we will be learning how to harvest and then rotate, and then as the spring gets near we will be looking into what to plant as the season changes. We will be looking into chickens and how to build a coop and our resident chef Michael will be teaching us green ways to cook with our garden!

I am so excited to share this crazy adventure with you guys. I am sure it is going to be full of ups and downs but I think it will be fun.
-Amanda