Sunroot Gardens

After three days of bed prep, I seeded some special varieties of greens I got from Chabo & Lee of Natural Harvest Farm in Canby. It is quite an honor to be planting seeds from these folks. When it comes to farming, I have called Chabo “the master”. He has been the inspiration for quite a bit of how I do what I do, and he is doing his own thing. I won’t try to put a label on it.

We visited their farm back in January. He was interested in some of my quinoa and tobacco seed, so I brought some of both, plus preserves from personally sealed stash (a jar of my famous pickles, some apple-pear sauce, and apple-pear juice), plus some nicely cured tobacco leaves, and, for their 2-year old son, a stuffed animal, made by my maternal grandmother from fabric from one of her mother’s dresses. An heirloom for heirlooms.

I came back from that visit with a bag full of envelopes full of treasures, mostly greens, all Japanese varieties, many of them unavailable unless you can read a Japanese catalog or offer a family heirloom to someone who can.

The most impressive envelope was one we filled out in his hoop-house, by light of a head-lamp, from big bags of dried seed stalks, still unsorted, from that season’s crosses, as yet unseen. We had seen the greens in that hoophouse by daylight and they were some of the most spectacular I have ever laid eyes on. We ooh-ed and aah-ed about every two feet.

So I seeded some of these varieties on Monday, carefully, using the tool pictured below, which is an original design by Red Pig Tools in Boring. It is based on a Norwegian agricultural implement. The grooves hold the seeds back and help you tap out just a few at a time.

I enjoyed using it. The only way to get it to work was to concentrate on doing just that and nothing else at all while I was doing it. I have been finding, in farm work, that most tasks work this way: if you just pay attention in a focused way on whatever you happen to be doing at any given moment, not much is difficult and it’s all enjoyable. All of it.

So a bunch of seeds are planted at the Firepit where folks can see them when they come for produce pick-up, and where we can let them go for seed and keep an eye on them. We will also, of course, have to taste all of them to make sure we like them, and this will require many other tongues for a meaningful survey.