Starting Beans

Suddenly it's raining every day. Too wet to plant things outdoors. But a perfect time to get things started in seed trays in the classroom.

I read three times a week to one of the classes at my daughter's charter school and in spring our attention turns to the garden. Sprouting seeds is always a fascinating activity for the kids. So I brought a bag of last year's bean pods and had the kids open them to see what's inside.


Even Kindergartners catch on fast. I didn't have to show them how to pry the seed pods open. As you can see, we have two different kinds of pole beans. If all goes well, they'll soon be climbing the chain link fence that surrounds the school's sprawling container garden.

I simply filled the seed cells with soil from the garden. It's mostly compost, very loose. Everyone planted two seeds along with a craft stick with her name on it. We also planted a few leftover cells for good measure and created a special germination exhibit, hiding some seeds in damp paper towel. We'll check on them occasionally so we can watch the plant emerge.

Kids love to mess with seeds.

Winter's Revenge

Leigh Hauter said he never saw it coming.

"I didn't realize it was getting that cold," he said of the afternoon the Big Freeze descended. "We went for a walk and the water in the boiler was already frozen."

The wood-fired boiler in question is the one that heats farmer Hauter's greenhouse and his thousands of new seedlings. They represent nothing less than his spring crops for the coming CSA season. If he couldn't somehow get his frozen boiler working again in the face of a near-record March cold snap, he was looking at thousands of dollars in damage.

Leigh rose early the next morning and got to work trying to feed fresh water to the boiler. That meant hauling many hundreds of feet of fresh plastic pipe up Bull Run Mountain to the artesian well that supplies his water. The old 1 1/4"-inch water pipe was not only frozen solid after a night of temperatures dipping into single digits, it had burst open in several places.

Soon Leigh's water-soaked gloves were frozen as well, then his hands as he struggled into the second day to replace the pipes. A blast of wind ripped off his hat and made his work seem all the more desperate. Meanwhile, thousands of trays of seedlings inside the greenhouse were beginning to feel the effects. The potting soil was freezing. The seedlings were wilting.

After two days of this, the return of winter--in the form of a nasty cold front that had dumped snow from Birmingham in the deep south all the way to Boston--finally moved out to sea and Leigh surveyed the damage. He called a nursery in Indiana and placed an order for replacement seedlings that set him back at least $2,000.

But look here. As the greenhouse thawed again, there were signs of life where none could rightly be expected. Tiny seedlings, barely an inch tall, had managed to survive even when the soil they were rooted it had frozen stiff. "It's amazing, isn't it?" said Leigh as he reached down to inspect his little broccoli plants. "The sorrel wasn't affected at all," he says, pointing to plastic trays where hundreds of sprouts are growing.

So it is back to getting ready for a new year at Bull Run Farm outside The Plains, Virginia. Leigh continues to plant and water his seed trays. Meanwhile, his CSA subscribers are ready for a new season as well. Sunday was an open house wherein subscribers were invited out to the farm for tours and to collect their own eggs. Leigh has two busy chicken tractors in the fields. At one, the chicks that arrived last October just a day old are now full-grown and have started laying eggs.

Around the other tractor, the chickens mingle with geese strutting and honking around the enclosure, as well as several heritage turkeys that have formed a gobbling chorus. Leigh uses the geese to perform weeding chores on the farm. But apparently they also like to eat chicken eggs, so Leigh has the nesting area covered with a tarp. He pulls back the tarp and we collect a dozen eggs, all laid within the last couple of hours and still warm.

Leigh had expected a few visitors but instead several dozen subscribers showed up. He'd been giving tours all morning. I wondered if our current economic hard times had not discouraged CSA subscriptions and Leigh calculated that out of about 500 subscribers, a dozen or so had recently "come up with excuses to back out." But wife Wenonah said others are joining, and not because they are fanatic about local food but because "they just don't trust the food at the supermarket anymore and they heard about us."

The Hauters were a bit aggravated when the visitors drove their vehicles over newly planted rye crops. The rye is a cover to provide fertility for fields where Leigh plans to plant vegetables in June. It looks just like grass, which it is. On a sloping area outside the greenhouse Leigh's field of garlic is several inches tall, the little plants raising their heads above a thick mulch of hay.

Bull Run Farm is set back in a narrow, thickly forested valley. It's hard to imagine how Leigh and Wenonah grow crops on the mountainside. But as you walk about, you see clearings here and there where a plastic-covered hoop house abuts a field, indicating an area that soon will be planted with broccoli and Chinese cabbage and sorrel.

This day temperatures would climb over 70 degrees. The last blast of winter was already fading into memory.

How the Farmer Plants His Seeds

Imagine trying to get 10,000 tiny seeds from seed packets into these growing trays. Now imagine 70,000 seeds.

That's what Leigh Hauter has been working on the past week--getting a jump start on the crops for his CSA at Bull Run Farm. So far, Leigh and his helper have 20,000 seeds planted and the broccoli and cabbages are sprouting. Now just 50,000 more seeds to go.

I get dizzy thinking about planting just a few hundred seeds. That's because I use my fingers. Fortunately for modern farmers, there are some mechanical aides to make the process a bit easier. But let's not jump too far ahead.

Seed starting for Leigh Hauter actually begins in January when an 18-wheel truck arrives with pallet-loads of organic potting medium. The road to the farm wasn't designed for an 18-wheeler, so the bags are dropped at the end of the driveway. Leigh has to load them into his pickup truck and deliver them the rest of the way to the greenhouse.

Waiting at the greenhouse are many hundreds of plastic seed trays in which the new year's seeds will sprout and grow until the last frost date passes and they can be transplanted into the fields. Some growers forgo manufactured seed trays and make their own "soil blocks" in which to sprout seeds. But Leigh says he usually gets several years' service out of a plastic tray. He orders about 200 new ones each year to replace the ones that wore out or were "mishandled" the previous year, meaning run over by the tractor.

Leigh's strategy is to give his seedlings ample room to grow in the trays, so he chooses trays with 50 cells. Other trays have 72 or even more cells, because the cells are much smaller. He also likes to add some fertilizer to his growing mix--a little compost, a little bone meal, some kelp. "I know some growers like to transplant their seedlings into bigger pots and fertilize them at that time," Leigh said. "But that would be too much work for us. I could not see us doing that. So having a little bit of fertilizer in there now saves us work."

Leigh and his helper pour the starting mix into the trays in assembly-line fashion, then tamp it down with plaster molds that match the shape of the seed cells. Now comes the fun part: getting one seed into each cell. Leigh's helper is stubborn. He still uses a simple manual seeder that drops one seed at a time into the cells. But Leigh has graduated to a vacuum device that delivers five seeds at a time. It has different-sized nozzles depending on the size of the seeds being planted. Some growers use similar vacuum machines that can plant an entire tray, each seed placed precisely in the middle of its cell. But these cost thousands of dollars. Leigh is content to deploy his own time and labor instead.

Once the seeds are placed in their cells, more growing medium is poured over them and tamped down. At this point they are watered. There's a hose with a watering wand that hangs from above in the greenhouse. Until they sprout, the seeds may only need to be watered every two or three days. But once they turn into little plants with leaves and root structures, they will need to be watered as much as two or three times daily. In the past, extra hoses and sprinklers made watering easier. But Leigh said the greenhouse was moved from another location and the more elaborate watering system fell by the wayside.

Planting and watering all day in the greenhouse doesn't exactly fire the farmer's imagination. But Leigh says it's pleasant enough work. "Better than being outside in the cold shoveling snow or something." With its wood-fired boiler, the greenhouse stays toasty. Last week when temperatures climbed to 60 degrees outside, Leigh had to roll up the sides of the greenhouse. "It would have been 110 degrees in there."

I was curious where Leigh buys his seed. In my own case, I've narrowed seed purchases to a few distributors: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, located in Virginia; Johnny's Seeds in Maine; Heirloom Seeds in Pennsylvania. I like the idea of buying seeds from people in our area who work organically and focus on open-pollinated heirloom varieties. Leigh says he also buys some seed from Southern Exposure and from Johnny's, but his favorite seed company at the moment is E&R Seeds in Munroe, Indiana (sorry, they don't have a website). "Johnny's seeds are very reliable and they've got a great catalogue, but they've gotten expensive," Leigh says.

So for now at Bull Run Farm it's fill trays, plant seeds and water. And don't forget to keep the fire in the greenhouse boiler burning. "Yesterday we were out cutting firewood," said Leigh. "We've got about 100 acres of woods and lots of trees the gypsy moths killed a couple of years ago." What the gypsy moths killed will soon be heating water that runs in copper tubes under all those seed trays. Peppers and tomatoes can't be far behind.

This is the second in a continuing series of articles about Leigh Hauter and the methods he uses he grow remarkable organic produce at his farm in The Plains, Virginia.