Frijolito Farm » Blog

Massive Green Onions!

wayne — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:01:27 +0000

Last year, I planted probably a couple hundred feet of onions in the spring, but the weeds got so thick I didn’t even see the onions anymore. I thought they had died. Not realizing that onions are a biennial, I got excited when I saw onion sprouts popping up in rows in that same plot in February or March. I thought, “Well, there’s at least one thing going right so far!” I hoed between the rows. I pulled thistles out of the rows by hand. I laid down cardboard between the rows. I’ve been visiting weekly to keep the weeds down. I side-dressed all the onions with organic compost.

They’re amazing to see. They’re the biggest onions I’ve ever seen! A bit of reading over the weekend told me why. Nobody grows onions the second year unless they’re growing them for seed. Being biennials (meaning they live for two years), onions spend their first year putting all their energy into growing fat bulbs. That’s the part we typically call an “onion,” the part that grows underground. Sometimes people will pull them while the bulbs are still really tiny so that the leaves can be used as green onions. (Also called “shallots” depending on what part of the country you’re in.) The plant then uses the energy stored in the bulb to survive the winter and send up its first shoots in the spring–just like daffodils and tulips.

The second year, though, the plant is focused on reproduction. It grows huge, thick, tall leaves and a flower stalk that eventually blooms and makes seeds. It’s still edible and tasty. It’s just that the bulb gets really small–a real disappointment from such a huge plant. The leaves, on the other hand–the part we call “green onions” or “shallots”–are huge! Basically, it’s like a large leek, but with more flavor. I’m guessing they’re about three feet tall right now. The flowers haven’t opened up yet. I’d like to yank these out of the ground now and sell them before they bloom, so they’re at their most nutritious. Also, I’ll be able to plant something else in this nicely tended plot once all the green onions are harvested.

I won’t be in the Clintonville Farmers Market until June, though, and these big green onions won’t wait! They won’t keep like long-storing onion bulbs, but they’d be great chopped up in any dish that calls for onions. (They’ll also add more color.)

Wanna raise some chicks?

wayne — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:28:07 +0000

“When the constrictor clenches its coils around you, become mist.”

A farmer in an adjacent county, having heard about my chicks getting stolen, offered to lend me money for more and also offered to raise the chicks for their first few weeks. I thought it sounded like a good idea, but I know how to make it a great idea. Instead of this other farmer raising them so far away, why don’t you all do it?

I’m serious. If you have an empty corner in a critter-proof garage, shed, or barn you could raise maybe 15 or 20 chicks for me. If you don’t have it already, I can provide a baby pool (for a brooder), feeders, waterers, bedding, feed, grit, and a heat lamp. You just keep them fed and watered and toss in fresh bedding as needed. At the end of three weeks, I’ll take them back home to free-range, and I’ll remove everything, including the soiled bedding (unless you want it for your own compost pile). That will give me enough time to get the house at Woodland Avenue habitable enough for me to move into by myself and to generally beef up security there (I’ve already started this). During that time, the thief won’t know where the chicks are, and even in the unlikely event that they find one batch, they won’t find all of them. By the time I take them back, they’ll be much, much harder to steal, as there will be someone guarding them at all times. We won’t say anything about when that three weeks starts or ends. There’s a light on in my broiler house, and it’s going to stay on whether there are chicks or not. That means the thief will have to make routine visits just to find out whether I have any chickens or not, greatly increasing their odds of being caught. Depending on how long it is until I can get chicks, that might mean the thief has to keep coming back to find nothing until August.

For your trouble, I can pay you a dozen eggs a week and give you a whole chicken once I slaughter them at seven weeks. Or, if you prefer, I could just give you a gift card for $30, which is also good for produce.

Three-week old chickens don’t crow. They don’t even cluck. They cheep like songbirds when they make any noise at all. Nobody will know you have them (or won’t know what they are). Even if you live in a place where raising chickens is prohibited, I’m guessing nobody will know enough to complain until the day they see me picking them up.

If you’re interested, send me an email at wayne@frijolitofarm.com . Participants will be selected based on proximity, available facilities, experience with animals, and how well I know you.

Proof of Concept: The Inherent Resiliency of Community Supported Urban Agriculture with Ecology as the Basis for Design

wayne — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:39:41 +0000

I tell people about the necessity of urban agriculture, how having several small farms scattered throughout a city strengthens its food security, especially in times of crisis. If you think about Katrina or any other huge disaster where people had a hard time getting what they needed, it’s always the case that they depended on their goods coming from elsewhere. Things fell apart because distribution was crippled. Had every home in New Orleans had a cistern full of rainwater in the attic and a three-month’s supply of food put up somewhere dry, things wouldn’t have turned out half as bad as they did.

This past week, we’ve been eating a lot of lamb’s quarters. That’s a plant, in case you’ve never heard of it. It’s a weed that grows all over this region. I think the only weed more prolific in our yard is garlic mustard, which often finds its way into our dishes along with the lamb’s quarters. Add in nettles, chickweed, purslane, red clover, dandelion, Japanese knotweed, and the occasional squirrel or rabbit, and you can make several meals just on what grows wild in any un-sprayed, un-mowed urban lawn. Imagine, then, how much food people would have on hand if they actually went to the trouble of growing gardens and storing the produce rather than relying on the grocery store having what they need every few days. Even if a tree were to fall on your house and wreck your pantry, there’s more food growing right in your yard. You could have a warren of rabbits or a flock of chickens in a garage and be well supplied until the next harvest from the garden.

Without intending to, I’ve made Frijolito Farm a demonstration of this sort of resiliency. The first year, I started in my back yard with a tiny budget. For the most part, I had no idea what I was doing, as I’d never produced more than just a little food as a hobby before then. My garden was 30 miles away and I didn’t have a working tiller. All the same, I grew…I think it was about $11,000 worth of food that year. The following year, I grew over $14,000 worth, and $5,400 of it was profit. In 2010, we had a baby (meaning Mayda was no longer able to work the Jefferson Township market while I was at Clintonville), code enforcement forced me to relocate the chickens, and I lost several hundred of them to predators. That really put a strain on us. I ended up $2,300 in the hole that year, but I still managed to produce $12,300 worth of food. And then last year–the nightmare, the Perfect Storm, with the floodiest spring on record and no money for chicken feed and a broken truck and everything else–I actually managed to make a profit. It was only about $500, but I still produced about $15,500 worth of food. And each year, the farm has gotten bigger, more established, more efficient, and has gained a larger customer base and media presence.

Now, this year, we’ve stepped it up a notch. Mere predators, climate change, and economic catastrophe haven’t been enough to sink this farm. Now we actually have a crazed animal rights extremist (or more than one) attacking our farm. They haven’t blown anything up (yet), but they have stolen entire flocks of chicks, stolen equipment, and ruined feed. To pull this off in the manner they have, they’ve had to have been stalking me, constantly surveilling the farm. To counter this, I’ve found myself resorting to measures I haven’t practiced since the Army taught me how 20 years ago. We haven’t run into each other yet, but it’s inevitable if they continue.

The whole situation reminds me of the joke that Republicans complain that the government can’t do anything right, then they get into office and prove it. These animal rights people are like that. They complain that all meat is raised inhumanely in factory farms, then they set out to make their claim true by attacking the free-range farms. If your statements don’t bear any resemblance to reality, just change reality until the lies are true.

If I can’t catch these people or keep them out, the only apparent option for raising chickens will be to raise them completely indoors, locked inside for their whole lives. I could do that with the facilities I have now, and it would still be local and antibiotic-free. I could even give them grass and weeds from outside to pick through, but I’d rather let chickens be chickens outdoors. It’s like these people are trying to force me into adopting the very practices they claim to oppose.

I think they think they’re going to drive me out of business, but that’s just ignorant. Broiler chicks cost around a buck apiece. If they stole every last chicken I owned, I could raise enough money to get more just by panhandling for an hour. Heck, some hatcheries will give certain chicks away for free. Previously, I’d lost this many birds (and more) to predators. If financial losses were enough to put me out of business, I’d have quit a long time ago. As long as you don’t let debt get so out of hand that you lose the farm, there’s no such thing as ruinous failure in this business. If you lose EVERYTHING, nature just makes more. And since I’m raising chickens instead of cows and horses, it costs relatively little to start over.

I don’t think these militant vegans realize the resiliency of small-scale, local food production, especially when it’s supported by the community in an urban area. To put me out of business, they’d have to steal every chick out of every hatchery that ships through the mail in the continental United States. They’d have to burn every pallet and steal every piece of salvageable building material in central Ohio. They’d have to cause every bakery, grocery store, and restaurant in the area to stop throwing away food. They’d have to make every edible plant in the area stop growing. They’d have to stop the sawmills from making dust, stop offices from shredding paper, and stop leaves from falling off trees. They’d have to stop the clouds from providing me with water. And then they’d have to keep doing it in perpetuity, because if they ever stopped, I could just pick right back up again. Agriculture on the scale I’m doing it has endured for 10,000 years, and it’s seen far greater challenges than those presented by a few half-baked idealists with a poor grasp of ecology.

I think Mayda really put it best. She said, “It’s like trying to make someone not be a writer anymore by stealing all their pens.” They give those things away free at the bank. I might not ever get rich at this, but the only way to make it impossible for farmers to ever grow food again is to kill us all before we can teach anyone else…and it’s already too late for that.

So ALF, PETA, MFA, Earth First, lone whacko, whomever is behind this: You’d do well to go sit by a creek for awhile and observe. Life consumes life. Some of them have faces and some don’t, but everything gets eaten by something else eventually, and everything tries not to. Do chickens enjoy being eaten? Of course not. Chickens run away from you for the same reason that roses have thorns. Even bacteria try to avoid being killed, but I don’t hear you advocating that we should all suppress our immune systems to be kind to pathogens. Everything dies and everything eats–including us. We’re not alien visitors who follow some “prime directive” to not interact with the other creatures on this planet. We’re supposed to leave footprints. We’re from here. We’re part of here. We are animals evolved to consume and be consumed as part of this ecosystem. Committing crimes in a war to stop other people from eating meat makes as much sense as waging war on squirrels to protect the lives of acorns. There’s a reason you have canines, binocular vision, a large brain, the ability to throw, and a physiological need for certain nutrients not easily obtainable from plants. It’s the same reason you don’t have multiple stomachs and endlessly growing teeth. If you want to deprive yourself, fine. Godspeed. But keep screwing with my farm, and you’ll accomplish nothing…other than perhaps learning firsthand about the limited dietary offerings of correctional institutions.

Even the ants herd aphids. Agriculture is inevitable.

An Open Letter to the Chick Thief

wayne — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:57:25 +0000

As posted on the back of my hen house today, in case the rain ruins the sign before you get to read it:

Thank you for letting out my hens. If you do so again, please shut the gate. There are red foxes on this property that hunt during the day. They kill any chickens not protected by a fence. At night, the raccoons and oppossums kill any chickens not safely shut indoors. What the hens would really appreciate is a pan of fresh water. The automatic waterer (the orange thing) doesn’t work without a regulator to reduce the water pressure. My regulator is broken. Since I have to replace the chicks you stole, I can’t afford a regulator. The hens now have to wait for fresh water–not a big deal in the winter, but it’s been getting hot lately.

The chicks you stole are cornish-rock crosses, the same breed used by factory farms. They’re bred to put on weight quickly and be slaughtered at 7-9 weeks. If you want them to live longer than that, you MUST underfeed them and make them exercise, or they will become crippled or die of congestive heart failure. The breed is not meant to live to old age. If you don’t give them a quick, humane death while they’re young, the alternatives are getting eaten alive by predators or dying a long, slow, miserable death after a life of physical impairment.

I also ask that you carefully consider the ethics of what you’re doing. There’s right and wrong, but there’s also more wrong and less wrong. If you steal all my chickens, I’ll have to buy compost for my crops. That means money that ends up going to CAFOs for the manure of animals that are mistreated. And if I don’t have poultry to help control insects, I’ll have to use pesticides, which will run off into the water and kill fish. I’m trying to work WITH nature to change how farms work and how people get their food. You’re getting in the way of that, and in turn, you’re supporting giant agribusinesses that abuse animals and destroy the environment, the economy, and our health.

Moreover, you’re hurting my family very badly. You didn’t just deprive us of the $60 we spent on chicks or the extra $40 I had to pay to replace them on short notice (on top of the regular $60). You didn’t even just steal the extra time I have to spend watering birds since I can’t buy them a regulator now. You stole the $600 profit we’d have made raising these birds. My household income last year–me and my wife combined–was around $8,000. Don’t believe me? Look on the back of this cardboard. [I wrote this on a box from the Mid-Ohio Foodbank] You are stealing from peasants. We have two children and I’m supporting another from a previous marriage. You could attack KFC or McDonald’s or a huge factory farm that treats its animals badly. Instead, you’re ripping off poor people who care about raising animals better. And for what? To let some of the dumbest chickens ever bred get crippled and die of heart attacks. Think. Do the right thing.

Adventures Tonight!

wayne — Tue, 01 May 2012 01:21:28 +0000

As those who follow our Facebook page already know, I discovered yesterday that someone has been stealing my broiler chicks. I know this is the case rather than them escaping or getting eaten by predators, because when I went to check on them yesterday, I saw a clothes basket or plastic trash can that I didn’t recognize inside their house, and there was a bit of bedding in the bottom of it. There were only 14 chicks left out of the 45 there should have been. Apparently, someone had been taking them out a few at a time in this basket, and they ran away suddenly when they heard me coming.

This morning, after I dropped Noah off at school, I let the hens out and checked on the remaining chicks. They were fine. I opened my greenhouse to ventilate it and left to go buy a hasp and padlock for the shed the chicks were in.

When I came back this evening to install the hasp, the rest of the chicks were gone…and the concrete block that I prop against the door was still there holding it shut.

After I finished putting on the hasp, I considered putting one on the greenhouse, too. I decided against it, but shut the door.

I went in the house for something, and when I came back out, I saw two young men walking toward the pond behind the greenhouse. I yelled at them to stop and asked what they were doing there. One of them handed me a broken pocket knife that had been inside my greenhouse. That told me they had opened up the door of the greenhouse, walked in, and stolen the knife. My cell phone battery had just died while I was in the house, and I wasn’t going to ask to borrow a cell phone from one of them to call the police, so I marched them over to my neighbor’s house and asked her to call the police.

While we were waiting, one of them said, “I’m not going back to jail,” and he walked up the street. I remembered the saying, “He who chases two rabbits will lose them both,” so I just put my hand on the shoulder of the one who was still there, figuring he could tell the police where to find the other guy. He seemed to be the more honest and cooperative of the two, so I hope he does.

I don’t know that these guys are the ones who took my chicks. In fact, I think it’s improbable. But I’m glad I caught somebody today. Maybe word will get out that I catch thieves and prosecute them.

Red Russian Kale Rabe Ready Now

wayne — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 01:28:47 +0000

We won’t be in the Clintonville Farmers Market until June, and our store still isn’t open yet, but I have a full 30′ row of Red Russian Kale Rabe. I’d guess that’s at least a couple of bunches, probably more. Anyone interested? Picked fresh while you wait, unless you want it delivered. Click here for . . . → Read More: Red Russian Kale Rabe Ready Now

Egg Delivery Special This Friday

wayne — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:34:39 +0000

The Ten Dollar Deal: Buy Two Dozen Eggs, Get Delivery for $2

Delivery for orders under $20.00 normally costs $5.00. But this Friday, when you order two dozen eggs ($4.00/dozen), I’ll deliver them for just two bucks! And remember, delivery is always free on orders of $20.00 or more*.

*Delivery available in Franklin County, Ohio only.

To order, email wayne@frijolitofarm.com. Please include your street address, how many dozens of eggs you want, what time you’ll be home on Friday, and whether you’ll be paying by cash, check, or gift card.

Garden Progress, Cardboard Needed

wayne — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 02:10:37 +0000

The garlic I planted last fall is doing beautifully. The onions that got lost in the weeds last year came back this year. So did the weeds, but they’re not any taller than the weeds yet. A friend is going to help me weed the onion patch on Friday, and we’ll put cardboard down between the rows like I did in the garlic patch. It looks like we might have a pretty nice crop of onions this year!

I finished the 7′ x 16′ greenhouse I was building. This evening, I moved the flats of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and okra that I’ve had under lights into the greenhouse. It’s going to be chilly the next few nights, so we’ll see how it goes. I also assembled some hanging baskets to hang from the rafters in the greenhouse. I’m thinking of planting some petunias in at least some of them–maybe to sell, or maybe just to pretty up the farm market once it opens.

Some of the kale, collards, mustard, and turnips that I grew last year also came back. The Lacinato kale was growing from old stems and had bolted when we had a couple days with highs in the 80s. It was bitter, so I mowed it down. I pulled up some other greens that had bolted, as well as the turnips and some weeds, and fed them to the hens. My red kale (not sure yet whether it’s Redbor or Red Russian–probably both) and collards are both doing so well that I may not even need to plant any this spring.

Mayda has planted some peas. I’ll be planting more next week, along with a few other things. We have garlic mustard popping up all over the place. I’m going to harvest a lot of it this week so I can sun-dry it to blend with other herbs and spices. I think dried garlic mustard combined with garlic and red pepper would make a good pizza seasoning.

If any of you have some non-plasticized cardboard that you were planning to take to a recycling bin, could you drop it off at my house instead? Pizza boxes are just about the perfect size for mulching between rows. Larger boxes can go under the raised beds I’ll be building for the tomatoes, or they can be cut to fit where I need them. You can just set them on the front porch at either 2624 Woodland Avenue or 2130 Paul drive (both 43211). Thank you!

Do you need space for your own garden? We still have plots available at the community garden I manage on Maize Road. For more information, click here.

Frijolito Farm and Elephant Revival at Woodlands Tavern Tonight

wayne — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:41:50 +0000

Elephant Revival, a band from Colorado, is on tour and will be performing in Columbus tonight from 8:00 – 10:00. Their fiddler, Bridget Law, emailed me the other day to say that they’re promoting local food and sustainable farming. They invited me to be there to answer questions and to promote the farm. Come out and see us at Woodlands Tavern in Grandview. It’s at 2100 W. 3rd Ave., Columbus, OH 43212. I’ll be there selling gift cards, if you want to come get one.

See you there!

Officials Push Suburban Farmer to Suicide

wayne — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 03:39:04 +0000

I think the headline above would have been a better one for this article from BusinessInsider.com: “Georgia ‘Chicken Man’ Blows Himself Up As Police Arrive To Evict Him”

The following articles describe how the city of Roswell, Georgia harassed Andrew Wordes for three years. It wasn’t just about his chickens. The city allowed unchecked development nearby while failing to upgrade the storm sewers accordingly. As a result, Mr. Wordes’ home was flooded by three to four feet of water every time they got a couple inches of rain. But when Wordes attempted to protect his property by berming it up–with an earth mover loaned to him by the Mayor–the city cited him for illegal grading.

Roswell Chicken Man stands alone against city hall

Roswell ‘Chicken Man’ facing eviction

The Roswell Chicken Man and His Fight For His Constitutionally Protected Rights

The city continually charged this man for doing things that weren’t against the law–like charging him with “Terroristic Threats” for putting up a No Trespassing sign. Courts kept finding in his favor, and a former governor even represented him in court one time. Frustrated, the city just went ahead and changed the laws to target Mr. Wordes, and then made it impossible for Wordes to comply. For example, the city passed a law saying that only six chickens could be kept, and that they must be in an approved enclosure at all times. Since Wordes lived in a flood plain, the city refused to issue a permit for the chicken enclosure.

They jailed this man for three months over code violations. We’re not talking about theft or assault or tax evasion. We’re talking about stuff like “Your grass is too long,” or “The trim on your garage has to be painted the same color as the trim on your house,” or “You can’t leave your garbage can at the curb for more than 12 hours on garbage pickup day.” He also got sentenced to 120 hours of community service. After he did 111 of those hours, the city arrested him again, timing the arrest such that he wouldn’t be able to attend court to prevent the foreclosure of his home.

Officials like this are just plain bullies. I can’t think of a more fitting word for them. They aren’t protecting anyone or improving the lives of the citizens they claim to represent. They’re abusing the power of their positions to push their personal agendas. They hide behind the officious mantra of “the law is the law; it applies equally to everyone,” as though The Law were handed down from Heaven above rather than drafted by a small handful of council members in a private meeting like a clique of mean school children conspiring about how best to torment the nerdy kid.

Now a man is dead. This is as much a story of bullying as any you read about where a child commits suicide because of relentless harassment by classmates.

Agriculture is thought to be about 10,000 years old. It is one of the most basic of human activities and is the foundation of civilization. Cultivation of the land is the only reason humans stopped being nomadic. The whole reason cities were established, nations formed, and armies raised, was because of agriculture. Particularly in hard times, it is inevitable that people will once again revert to growing at least a portion of their own food rather than just relying on “the store” to feed them like clockwork, like a factory-farmed hog that waits for feed to come down a steel tube at the same time every day. The movement is growing like a tidal wave, and no number of efforts by tiny tyrants on the municipal level can hold it back forever. Shame on them for even trying.

Urban agriculture didn’t need a martyr, but now we’ve got one. His name was Andrew Wordes. We can only hope that his death will serve as a wake-up call, an opportunity for the City Hall bullies to get some perspective and ask themselves whether suppressing “weirdness” is really important enough to destroy and end people’s lives. They can think about that as they watch what a flooded, blown-up, vacant house does to surrounding property values. They’re not going to get another penny of property taxes out of Mr. Wordes now.