Hewing Bigtooth Poplar - 2020 Axe Cordwood Challenge (with a Harbor Freight Axe) Oxbow Farm 2020-04-19 | Hewing a 6"X6" timber from a Bigtooth Poplar log (Populus grandidenta). Once again using the Harbor Freight "Pittsburgh" brand 3.5# axe that I've used for all of the 2020 Axe Cordwood Challenge.
2020 Cordwood Challenge Rick Oxbow Farm 2020-04-11 | Once again participating in the Axe Cordwood Challenge. Decided to use a horrible axe from Harbor Freight to demonstrate that an axe will chop if it is sharp, no matter what you pay for it. This year I am limiting my cordwood cutting to a single rick, but I intend to participate in the hewing and axe-cut joinery challenges as well.
Goats! Farm Update Oxbow Farm 2020-03-01 | First video in a while, thanks for the folks who still remember Oxbow Farm! 2019 was a big and busy year for the farm and we made big progress and big changes. Unfortunately we didn't get much of a chance to document any of it on Youtube due to hardware, software, and enthusiasm issues. One big change we made was to move away from raising cattle and switch to trying to raise some homestead milking goats. After visiting many local goat farms and breeders we decided to purchase a pair of Nubian dairy goats from a wonderful Nubian breeder who happens to live just a few minutes away from the farm! We also constructed out goats a high tunnel barn/greenhouse barn/hoop barn which was easy enough for us to do given our experience building high tunnels for the vegetable farm. The main difference being the goat's hoop barn is fixed and concreted in place with lots of solid wood attached for the walls and feeders etc. So far the goats seem very happy and chores have been easy and efficient. Right now we are in the countdown to kidding as both goats are due to freshen in the second week of March.
Planting True Sweetpotato Seed Oxbow Farm 2019-04-20 | In addition to growing potatoes from true seed (TPS) this year we will be growing some sweetpotatoes from true sweetpotato seed for the first time. Sweetpotato (Ipomea batatas) is one of the most nutritious and high yielding crops, right up in competition with potatoes themselves. Becoming self sufficient in sweetpotato production has been a goal here at Oxbow Farm for a long time. We have successfully grown sweetpotatoes the standard way growing them from slips, but just like with potatoes, we really want to try growing them from seed and producing our own varieties. Commercially bred sweetpotatoes are for the most part developed for warmer regions with longer growing seasons. Sweetpotatoes like to grow in hot weather with very warm soil conditions, so selecting for sweetpotato clones that can develop good sized roots in our climate should be a fun and interesting endeavor. A great resource online is Aster Lane Edibles blog, where Telsing Andrews details her journey growing new sweetpotato varieties from true seed near Ottawa in Ontario. If Telsing can succeed with sweetpotatoes up with the polar bears then we should have no problem down here. Check out her wonderful sweetpotato content! http://www.asterlaneedibles.ca/project-updates/my-l-ittle-and-big-sweetiesThere is not a lot of information about growing sweetpotato from seed available online. The biggest resource is actually forum posts by Reed on the Homegrown Goodness forum and on the OSSI Plant Breeding forum. As it happens , Reed is the source of most of my stock of true sweetpotato seed that I'm planting in this video. I received seed in trade from him and some more seed derived from his breeding work from another friend FarmerMike in California. Between the two of them I suddenly had a good stock of seed to experiment with. The main issues with saving seed from sweetpotato is that like most species in the genus Ipomea, sweetpotato is self incompatible. So any pollen produced by an individual is incapable of germinating and setting seed on its own flowers. Since most sweetpotatoes are grown in large patches of a single clone, there is never any compatible pollen to allow for seeds to be formed. Many sweetpotato clones produce huge quantities of flowers, but two genetically distinct clones neet to be grown together to get any quantities of seed to be produced.
Flash Flood Cleanup Oxbow Farm 2019-04-18 | Last fall the remnants of Hurricane Florence gave us a significant flash flood in the middle of the night on September 18th 2018. While our home and the farm fields were remarkably undamaged, the flooding in the creeks and on our road moved an astonishing amound of gravel, boulders and sediment. Along with all the natural debris there was an astonishing amount of man-made garbage that was washed down onto our property and we are in the process of cleaning up before the vegetation begins to grow and makes some of it difficult to see and collect. The range of garbage is pretty varied from things you would expect, like tires, plastic bags, and beer cans to quite unexpected things like a cast iron bathtub. Its all part of living in the country in these modern times.
First Harvest of 2019 Oxbow Farm 2019-04-13 | Harvesting our first vegetables for 2019, pac choi, senposai, mizuna, and horseradish. Its great to be harvesting fresh food again.I also mention that we typically only harvest horseradish on a few markets each year right before Passover in April. I should probably explain that sometimes we don't harvest or sell horseradish at all, since due to the irregular nature of the Hebrew calendar, Passover will fall so early in the spring we basically don't have any crops to harvest at all. This year the timing works very well.
Early Spring 2019 Oxbow Farm 2019-04-01 | Just a quick look at what is growing around Oxbow Farm. Lots of stuff in growing in the greenhouse and one high tunnel is full of Senposai, Pac Choi, Kale, Tatsoi, Lettuce, Mizuna, and Komatsuna. Things are moving a little slower this year as the weather has been cool and cloudy for most of the late winter till now. Time to get fired up for the growing season and new projects on the homestead and farm.
Planting Onions for Seed - Seed Saving Oxbow Farm 2019-03-30 | In 2018 we discovered a really useful open pollinated yellow onion variety called Dakota Tears. After our initial onion seeding turned out to be a terrible disappointment, we purchased seed of Dakota Tears from High Mowing Seed in a late order with some other things we needed, almost as an afterthought. This meant the onions weren't seeded into trays in the greenhouse until April, almost 2 months later than the standard onion seeding time for this area. From the very beginning these onions were impressive, as they germinated quickly and thickly and rapidly grew to very strong vigorous seedlings. We were able to plant them out at a fairly normal time and they produced a beautiful crop of onions. They were so impressive that we decided to try saving the seed from this variety as it was open pollinated. With hybrid onions, the plants have cytoplasmic male sterility and will be unable to produce pollen, making seed saving impossible unless you cross them with a pollen fertile variety. In terms of storage, Dakota Tears performed very well, only two onions in the overwintered onion string of 36 onions sprouted before we were ready to plant them for the seed crop. Many of the onions were starting to push rootlets through the skin at the base though. In future years I would like to store more onions for seed to be able to select for the least root and shoot sprouting to improve the storage capabilities of this variety even more.One area which may be a problem in seed saving with onions is our population size. This year we only planted 32 onions from 36 total onions stored for seed originally. The recommended minimum population size for saving onions seed according to John Navazio in his book "The Organic Seed Grower" is 120. Saving and planting 120 onions for seed seems incredibly impractical at our scale. We don't particularly want to go into the seed selling business, and we don't have a need for producing such a huge quantity of seed that would result from so many onions being saved. Even the 32 onions we are growing out in this year will produce far more seed than we can use. We will have to see if the small population size becomes a problem in future years.
Hewing White Pine - 2019 Axe Cordwood Challenge Oxbow Farm 2019-02-19 | For the 2019 Axe Cordwood Challenge, Ben Scott has added several new “challenges” in addition to the firewood chopping challenge that has always been the primary focus. One of these new additional challenges was to do some hewing. Since hewing is one of my favorite activities to do with an axe, I was eager to do some. At some point in the last year a double-stemmed white pine fell across the creek at the northwest corner of our property. It seemed like the perfect candidate for the hewing challenge. The tree was quite straight, and it would basically be salvaging a deadfall. I was able to get two 8x7" timbers from the lower end of the double stem portion, both timbers ended up 13 feet long. The first face hewn, wasn't square to the layout, and I had to re-hew the face a second time. I also ended up having difficulty as I decided to leave the timbers in the creek bottom, due to their awkwardness and weight and the icy conditions. I failed to level my cribbing, and so I was unable to handle the logs properly. This made proper layout difficult, and I didn't make the absolute best use of these logs, better timbers could have been made had my layout been more careful.This year for the challenge I have decided to use one axe for essentially the entire challenge, so all of the hewing done in this video was done with the same 3.5# felling axe I used to chop my wood for the rest of the Axe Cordwood Challenge. I use a style of hewing in this video that I call “tie-hacker style” which is just hewing with a long-handled, double bevel axe with the log cribbed quite low to the ground. It matches the style of hewing used in the late 19th and early 20th century by woodsman in the southern US who produced oak railroad ties on a massive scale. It is a style that is readily accessible to anyone with an axe. I do love the use of broadaxes as well, but I wanted very specifically to demonstrate that all sorts of work can be done with just one tool. Its OK to own lots of axes, but you can get by with just one if you need to.A mention of thanks here at the end for Steven Edholm and Ben Scott for creating and managing the Axe Cordwood Challenge and for furthering the goal of keeping working axes alive.
A Bucking Strategy for the Axe Cordwood Challenge Oxbow Farm 2019-02-07 | Since Steven Edholm from Skillcult.com started the Axe Cordwood Challenge, a lot of good videos have been created regarding axe usage and technique. I don't have a lot to add to that discussion typically. I did think that it would be worth demonstrating this log handing technique I find useful for controlling the log as it is being bucked, as I think it allows good control when you are bucking a tree up where it was felled.
A Farewell to the White Ash Oxbow Farm 2019-02-04 | Just a few highlights walking around looking at our ash trees, which are dying and will soon be gone from the Emerald Ash Borer.
2019 Axe Cordwood Challenge -Completed Stack Oxbow Farm 2019-01-30 | Video documenting my rick of wood for the 2019 Axe Cordwood Challenge, plus a little discussion on why I don't want to make axe related video content anymore and my general frustrations with the "axe community".For those interested in learning more about the Axe Cordwood Challenge, I recommend the following videos.Skillcult's original videos describing the challenge and what it is for. youtube.com/watch?v=qbQcNuID-ss&index=18&list=PL60FnyEY-eJCy1SDSbsIgDSFiZ1uHnd5ryoutube.com/watch?v=5da_eTAD8Vc&list=PL60FnyEY-eJApmP9K1F1OU1gnREB22E7z&index=1Ben Scott's video on the 2019 Challenge. youtube.com/watch?v=-ShLrSCAwTc
Making a Simple Campfire Tripod Rig Oxbow Farm 2019-01-08 | This is a very basic blacksmithing project to make a simple set of hardware for quickly rigging a tripod for campfire cooking. There are many campfire tripod videos on youtube, and they mostly fall into two styles. One is a fully metal version with iron stakes with rings on the top for forming a tripod with a chain or trammel hook for the cooking pots. The other is a bushcraft style that uses three cordage lashed poles and a length of cord for holding the cooking pots. The rig set I am making in this video was inspired by watching a wonderful Japanese anime film called Bakemono no Ko. In the film, there is a wonderful scene (amongst many wonderful scenes, such a great movie) where Kyuuta and Hyakushuubou are sitting outside their tent in the evening and talking by the fire. They are boiling water for tea on a simple tripod set, which is three wooden poles lashed/tied together with a small chain. And suspended from the chain by a small S-hook there is their tea kettle. I had seen quite a few blacksmith project versions of the cooking tripods, but I was never interested in making one as their seemed to be so much metal in the stakes. For an item I wasn't likely to use all that often it seemed like a waste of material. But this chain rigging system in the film was to me a nice combination of a small blacksmithing project that would combine with easily found poles in the woods on the occasions we might want to boil some water out there. The materials I used in this project were simply some old small gauge chain and a few lengths of 1/4" round bar for making the S-hooks. Most of the metal shaping I did in this project could probably be accomplished by working the metal cold, if you don't have a forge. Ultimately I decided that my grab hook idea for making the chain loop did not work very well, so it probably isn't worth the trouble of doing that, just open up one end of the chain out into a ring to use in making a slip loop. The S-hooks will fit in any link in the chain so there is plenty of options for adjusting your pots up and down to get to the right heat range.
Grafting Apples- Successes and Failures. Oxbow Farm 2019-01-05 | Over the past three years i have done a considerable amount of apple grafting. Starting as a complete novice grafter I've added several varieties to several wild trees and I am also in the process of topworking over some varieties we planted when we originally purchased the farm.My experience with grafting has entailed some successes and lots of failures. One early mistake I made was not practicing my grafts enough before I started. From my limited experience, the key principle of achieving grafts that take, is getting good cambial contact between the scionwood and the stock. This means for grafts like the whip and tongue graft and the saddle graft, that your cuts be as straight and uniform as possible. The cleaner and more accurate you can match the mating surfaces of the cambium, the better your chances are for making a successful graft. When I researched grafting, the overwhelmingly most popular recommended graft was the whip and tongue when using dormant scions. When I practiced making this graft though, I did not practice enough grafts to start achieving really tight joining surfaces. So I did not use whip and tongue because I thought I wasn't good enough at the cuts to have success. Instead I used the bark graft/rind graft, in many places where a whip and tongue would have been more appropriate.The big problem I found with using the bark graft like this is that with such small stock size, you have to thin down your scion at the mating surface to matchstick thin slivers to slip under the bark. This makes a very weak spot where the graft is prone to failure. Normally the bark graft is done on much larger diameter branches where the bark is much thicker, and you can make a much larger wedge with your scion to slip under it. My experience with using mostly small diameter bark grafts has been really frustrating. Mainly because the initial success rate was very high, something like 80% of my first grafts took! So I was very happy with the tree full of live grafts. Then by the middle of summer when the grafts had put on considerable growth, they started snapping off at the cut. The wind was putting so much leverage on the thin wood of the scion at the graft union that it was snapping off. Don't make this mistake. Practice your grafts before you begin so you can make the appropriate graft for every situation instead of forcing a graft to fit because that is the graft you are most comfortable with.The other interesting grafting technique I've experimented with is bud grafting in the summer. I have had a pretty good success rate with doing this, and the only failures were cause by my on foolishness in unwrapping the grafts before they had fully taken, so they dried out and the buds died. Obviously I am not an expert at grafting apple trees. For great information on apple grafting I highly recommend two channels in particular.Stephen Hayes youtube.com/user/stephenhayesuk He has a fantastic channel with all kinds of apple growing content and lots of discussion of various types of graftng. The only odd thing about Stephen is he is a big advocate of the saddle graft, which is a really difficult graft to execute even in comparison with the whip-and-tongue. Skillcult youtube.com/user/1sustainablehedonist The California Steven that breeds his own apples. He's also got lots of great apple content as well as a host of other great stuff you should check out. Good grafting videos, and good apple variety review videos. I hope this video is useful to other small farmers and homesteaders who are looking to do a small amount of their own grafting, and can learn from my mistakes and not repeat them as they make their homestead orchard.
TPS Tuber WEIGH-OFF with RECORD YIELDS !! Oxbow Farm 2018-11-20 | This is a follow on video to our last potato reveal, in which the Sarpo Mira cross F2 seedling row was dug. It was clear that many of those seedlings were very high yielding, and likely to exceed the previous Oxbow Farm record for yield of a potato seedling grown from true potato seed (TPS). With the weather conditions being so wet for the second half of the summer and all the fall, the tubers were extremely muddy. They were laid out in the greenhouse to dry the mud and so as much soil could be removed as was practical before weighing the yield of each seedling.It should be obvious from the video how variable potatoes can be even when descended from the same parent varieties. With all of these seedlings being tetraploids, the possibilities for recombining of traits is dramatically increased, so it is always exciting to dig and taste each new batch of seedlings. Some of the seedlings in this set gave us astoundingly high yields, just about pushing the maximum possible yield for a single potato plant, at nearly fourteen pounds of tubers from a single plant. That is probably the highest single plant yields we'll ever see, given that it takes a very long season potato to produce yields that high, and our growing season was approximately 3 weeks longer this fall than it normally is.In terms of selection, more and more we are focusing on a spectrum of traits that need to be considered, beyond simply keeping the highest yielding seedlings. In the case of the biggest seedling in this weigh-off, the yield was mind-boggling (13 pounds 13 ounces!!!) but the tubers were extremely irregular and rough, as well as being unattractively colored and the largest tuber had severe hollow heart. An oddly shaped potato like this is unlikely to become shapely in the second year, in fact any tendency towards secondary growth is likely to increase. So it is not likely that the record breaker will have a place in the future, unless it is unusually delicious when we cook it and taste it. The frequent presence of hollow heart in our potatoes has pushed us to focus on breeding away from varieties that show hollow heart as seedlings. There is a school of thought that the highest yielding seedlings are most prone to hollow heart and other growth defects like secondary growth and cracking. It is difficult to know exactly where to strike the balance between tuber yield and quality. With luck and persistence we will improve every year, and hopefully we can collaborate together with other potato enthusiasts to find great potatoes for small growers and gardeners.
TPS Potato Reveal #7- More Sarpo Mira F2 Crosses Oxbow Farm 2018-11-16 | As the fall is rapidly turning into winter in my area, I am scrambling to harvest my True Potato Seed grown seedling potatoes. A potato reveal of this row is of particular interest to me, as many of my highest yielding seedlings from the past were the parents of the seed that produced this seedlot. I've already dug some of these in a previous video. The grandmother of all of these seedlings was Sarpo Mira, which is an extremely popular potato in the UK and parts of Europe. Sarpo Mira was developed by the Sarvari Trust, and is a long season, pink skinned, floury potato with extremely high yields and excellent field resistance to Late Blight. A fellow potato breeder here in the US crossed Sarpo Mira with a bulk mix of pollen from several high performing potato varieties. That Sarpo Mira X Bulk Pollen TPS was the source of the parents of this seedlot. I collected berries from the seedlings of the original mix, and saved the true potato seed as a bulk seedlot instead of collecting from individual seedlings. So there are a variety of parents in the row, and the possible fathers of each plant is completely unknown. The genetic variabilty that is possible from tetraploid Solanum tuberosum is fully evident as we dig these, as record breaking seedlings are pulled out right next to plants that yield almost nothing. The range of color is also marked, as well as shape. In the next video when we weigh these up, we will get a better sense of their flesh qualities, and what colors and textures they are showing. I am hoping very much to find some floury potatoes with great yield.After digging these seedlings, I've been able to weigh them to get a record of their yield, but the weigh in footage will have to be saved for another video to keep video length reasonable. I will say that 5 of the seedlings dug in this row have broken my previous record of 8 pounds. So stay tuned for a future view of that!
Ruth Stout Potato Trial - Fall Prep for 2019 Oxbow Farm 2018-11-14 | After viewing and commenting on Back to Reality's Ruth Stout Potato Garden video, I realized that I was actually not speaking from direct experience. I have grown potatoes for years, and my typical growing method involves heavy mulching. I tend to have vole damage on my potatoes, and I felt sure that the Ruth Stout system would expose most of the potatoes to being attacked by voles. On further reflection, I felt that there might be some aspects to my current method that result in higher amounts of vole damage than might be the case with the Ruth Stout system. In my system, I only mulch after I have hilled the potato rows twice. This typically happens when the plants are already fairly large and have big top growth. Usually the mulch is over the soil between the rows, right up under the plants. Typically there is a strip of open soil right along the top of the row, where the plants have grown together. It has occurred to me that this un-mulched strip may actually encourage voles to travel up and down the row, directly on top of the potato row. So I might actually be creating an environment very favorable for vole damage on my potatoes. It is possible that the Ruth Stout system, with its continuous mulch cover, would not produce the same sort of vole travel pattern, and might result in less vole damage over all, even though the potatoes are generally found right at the soil surface under the mulch, which is the area where voles prefer to be as well. The only way to know for sure is to test both systems side-by-side, and compare the yield and the amount of damage. So that is the plan for 2019. In this video the plot is shown being prepared this fall, to be ready for planting next spring. Approximately 650 square feet in a 13 foot by 50 foot plot is mulched with greenchop. The greenchop was mown from an area of the pasture that we didn't use this season, and it took approximately 9000-10000 square feet of pasture to provide the mulch. Half of the plot was also mulched with leaves prior to adding the grass mulch. I'm very curious about how this system of no-till biomass mulching will work compared to my normal potato growing method. My intention is to plant duplicate rows of the same varieties in both plots to attempt to get a comparison of the systems.Trollforge did a similar comparison trial of potato growing between Ruth Stout's system, and the Back to Eden Gardening system. youtube.com/watch?v=SI_FneFxw5kyoutube.com/watch?v=sq2THLEA7Qo&t=31sHere's the Ruth Stout video from Back to Reality.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf0Q2YlQOUU&t=203s
Potato Reveal #6 Yog Shogoth Oxbow Farm 2018-11-12 | This is a potato reveal, but these potatoes were grown from tubers of my highest yielding TPS seedling from 2017. My working title for this clone is Tollocan #11, but I've started calling it Yog Shogoth, after the father of the Dunwich Horror and its little brother in H. P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. I'm not actually a big fan of Lovecraft, I find him pretty hard to read, but I liked that story and loved the sound of "Yog Shogoth. It also sort of illustrates my ambivalence towards this potato, it is kind of an extreme, unruly, weird potato that I can't make my mind up about whether having it around is a good idea. Kind of like having Yog Shogoth for a son-in-law might result in your grandkids being giant invisible monsters that eat your neighbors cows, which lowers the property values for everyone. I am trying to become more selective about which potato clones I keep for growing on in following seasons, so I need to get an idea of the average yield per plant. There are differences in the way a potato variety grows in the seedling year compared to grown from a tuber in following seasons. I think you can get a pretty good idea of what the texture, flesh, and skin color will be from a seedling. But the average yield per plant seems to be something you can only truly assess from growing from the tubers, also, the average size and shape and number of the tubers the plant makes can often change relative to the seedling year. It is not at all unusual for the tubers to be larger, and more prone to defects like secondary growth, cracking, and hollow heart, it also seems that tuber grown plants seem to have fewer, larger tubers per plant than seedling plants. This is all based on my own observations, I cannot back any of that up with scientific papers suggesting this is true. The potato grown in this video produced 4 pounds of ping pong ball sized tubers in its seedling year. This season the average yields seems to be about 2 pounds 3 ounces, but the tubers are much larger in size on average. They aren't all tiny ping pong balls. It can be difficult to decide which clones to keep and which to drop. This is a good potato from some measures, but it is also a challenging potato to grow, it sprouts long stolons in all directions and produces potatoes 3-4 feet from the seed piece at times. So it is necessary to dig over a large area to find the potatoes. This is a pain. It also produces HUGE plants that flop over in all directions so it can swamp other potato rows or other plants you have adjacent to them. In addition it is a waxy potato with somewhat variably dark purple flesh combined with white. It isn't the most beautiful spud to look at. Should I keep Yog Shogoth and grow it in future seasons? I probably will for at least one more year. It is an unusual variety, and I like unusual potatoes. I probably won't plant anything like this long of a row of them next year though.
Mizuna Azazuke Pickle - Fast and Simple Recipe Oxbow Farm 2018-11-11 | Mizuna is a fantastic vegetable to use fresh, but it can also be made into a traditional Japanese salted pickle which makes an excellent condiment or salty accent side dish. The ingredients in this recipe are simple:2 bunches fresh Mizuna1/4 Kombu kelp, cut into matchsticks and rehydrated1-2 teaspoons of sea saltOther ingredients can be added, chile, sesame, etc to taste.The mizuna is chopped into 1-2 inch pieces, and the other ingredients are added and mixed to combine and allow the salt to begin releasing liquid from the greens. When thoroughly wilted and well mixed, pack into an appropriate size container and press with something that will have sufficient weight to put some pressure on the vegetables as the flavors blend. The azazuke is ready in 3 or so hours and is good for several days.
Saving True Potato Seed- Large Batch Method Oxbow Farm 2018-11-08 | If you have a large quantity of potato berries of a single type, there are some differences in scale and methods of processing them to extract the TPS (true potato seed) than you would use for a couple of berries from a hand pollination etc. In this video a method for extracting as much of the TPS from the potato berries as efficiently as possible is detailed. There are a number of different possible ways to accomplish each step in the process, but this is the way we do it right now at Oxbow Farm. First step is to coarsely grind the berries in an old meat grinder. This separates the seeds from most of the berry pulp without damaging the seeds the way it is possible to do using a blender. If you do not have an old meat grinder like that shown in the video, blending the berries is an acceptable alternative, but you will damage more of the true potato seed.Second step is to sieve the ground berry pulp using a metal sieve that has small holes in the 1.5 to 2 mm range. This allows the seeds to drop through, while keeping the vast majority of berry pulp. Thirdly the seeds are rinsed numerous times to separate the seeds from as much of the small fragments of berry pulp that made it through the sieve, and also to remove much of the gel/slime and germination inhibiting compounds that are naturally surrounding the potato seeds. Fourthly, the cleaned seeds are poured into a fine collander to drain as much liquid as possible from them, and then they are transferred into a 10% trisodium phosphate solution. The trisodium phosphate is a cleanser that digests the seed gel/slime and also largely disinfects the seed of any possible pathogenic fungi they might have on the seed's outer surface. The seeds are soaked in the trisodium phosphate solution for 20 minutes and then drained, rinsed and placed on a paper plate to dry.The seeds are dried in the dehydrator set on a very low setting of around 90 degrees F. They should be completely dry within 12 hours. To learn how to make a 10% trisodium phosphate solution, you can watch our fascinating video on the subject. youtube.com/watch?v=L0TVOfqeHnY
Making a Trisodium Phosphate Solution - True Potato Seed Cleaning Solution Oxbow Farm 2018-11-04 | Basic recipe for a 10% Trisodium Phosphate solution. For one cup of water 24 grams of trisodium phosphate are required. For folks without an accurate gram measuring scale, 1 level teaspoon of trisodium phosphate is about 6 grams. So you can make a 1 cup quantity of 10% trisodium phosphate with 4 teaspoons of trisodium phosphate and a cup of water. You also can make a smaller quantity at the same concentration with 1/4 cup of water and a single teaspoon of trisodium phosphate.It also needs to be said that cleaning your true potato seed doesn't require the use of trisodium phosphate. It is true that trisodium phosphate is a polluting chemical when it is allowed to enter into our surface water. When soluble phosphate compounds like this are poured into surface waters, the result is algae blooming due to the phosphorus fertilization. Dispose of your trisodium phosphate solution safely in the soil, vis down the drain. Soil is highly reactive with trisodium phosphate and will rapidly bind the soluble phosphate ions into insoluble phosphate compounds which will be available for plant nutrition over long time scales. The main benefit of using trisodium phosphate to clean your true potato seed is that it is capable of extremely complete cleaning of the mucus and germination inhibitors present in the gel surrounding each potato seed. The more gel that remains on the seeds, the more they stick to one another as they dry, and the more difficult they are to germinate effectively. It also does this cleaning very rapidly. TPS dwell time in the trisodium phosphate solution is only 20 minutes, so multiple batches can be processed quickly. This becomes incredibly useful when you have large numbers of berries to process, and/or large numbers of small batches of berries that need to be individually processed. As it happens, this year I have BOTH, and trisodium phosphate has been a fantastic tool for keeping me ahead of the rotting berries and the mummifying berries.
TPS Potato Reveal #5 - SG Crosses Oxbow Farm 2018-11-02 | IIt has been hard to wait until the skins set on this row of SG cross seedlings, because the monster plant that gave over 8 pounds of potato berries is one of them. With a plant of such large size, it was likely to have a huge yield of potatoes underneath it. You won't be dissapointed watching this potato reveal of true potato seed seedlings. It is not unusual for seedling potato plants to have large variations in characteristics from each other, but it is unusual for one plant to so totally over-dominate the others in its same group that several of them essentially were shaded out and killled! That's what happened with this row of seedlings, there should have been 10 or 11 seedlings to dig, but in the end only three were worth collecting individually, and only about 7 produced a noticeable yield of tubers. So the variability in the different seedlings of this cross was incredible. One change I have decided to make when I am evaluating my true potato seed plants is that instead of cutting up a smaller tuber to evaluate the seedling for flesh color and other characters, I will now be cutting up the LARGEST tuber the seedling produced. This is to check for the presence of hollow heart. Hollow heart is a physiological defect of potatoes that is caused primarily by uneven growth of the tuber. If growing conditions change, usually moisture conditions, the tuber can grow so quickly that it forms voids inside the tuber. These lead to rotting and poor storage ability of the tuber, and potatoes seem to be prone to hollow heart on my soil, so I am very focussed on selecting away from seedlings that have severe hollow heart in their seedling year.I am also not concerned with the soil attached to the potatoes when the TPS seedlings are weighed for evaluating yield. Since the soil is more or less similar with all the seedlings, it doesn't truly impact the basic evaluation. The weight of the soil on the potatoes isn't enough to prevent the scale from giving me a good general idea of the total yield each potato has produced. Washing the potatoes actually negatively impacts their storage potential, so I don't want to compromise any that I decide to keep for planting next season.
Yellow Flesh Potato Smackdown! Comparing Yellow Flesh Diploids with Yukon Gold Oxbow Farm 2018-10-30 | After my most recent potato reveal video digging some diploid potatoes, I stated I would make a video comparing their uncooked and cooked colors alongside Yukon Gold. Yukon Gold is a very popular and common tetraploid potato in the USA and Canada, and so it makes a good reference potato with yellow flesh for comparison to these diploids. It is very common for phureja type diploid potatoes to have very brightly colored skin, and often for the flesh colors to be intensely pigmented with yellow, red, or purple pigments. The yellow carotenoid pigment levels in these diploids can range almost 22 times higher than in standard tetraploid potatoes like Yukon Gold. I am happy to see that some of the diploid potato seedlings I am growing this year are so much more intensely yellow than plain old Yukons.Although these yellow carotenoid pigments in potatoes are very close structurally to Beta Carotene and other provitamin A carotenes, the human body cannot convert them into Vitamin A. They are however very powerful antioxidants, and the two primary potato carotenes- Lutein and Violaxanthin- are very important pigments for the protection of the retinal macula from damage from ultraviolet and blue light. So these pigments are an extremely healthy addition to the diet for a variety of reasons.
Frost Defoliates Black Walnuts in one morning! Oxbow Farm 2018-10-29 | This may be a common occurrence and I've merely never observed it before. Our Black Walnut trees (Juglans nigra) began dropping their leaves one morning after the first or second very hard frost of the season. It was a perfectly clear still morning with bright sun and relatively little wind. So the sound of the leaves falling like rain caught my attention from the house. By noon the entire tops of both trees were completely defoliated with a few leaves snagged in the branches and a few nuts still hanging from the trees. I'd be interested to hear some comments from other folks about how common this phenomena is with Black Walnuts. Honestly they aren't my favorite tree, and I wouldn't have chosen them for my backyard, but we are short of nice trees here near the house, so we are unwilling to cut them down.
Growing Four Corners Potato - Solanum jamesii Oxbow Farm 2018-10-25 | This year we grew a few different species of wild potato, including Four Corners Potato - Solanum jamesii. This species is sometimes known as Colorado Wild Potato, Pecos Potato, Texas Wild Potato, or James' Wild Potato.There are a large number of species of wild potato native to North America, but only three species are indigenous to the United States. Four Corners Potato is probably the most famous of these three. It is a desert adapted species that is found mostly in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and it ranges south into Mexico. Ethnobotanical and archeological evidence has shown that this species has been utilized by Native American cultures in the Southwest for at least 8000 years. There is also compelling evidence that Four Corners Potato was at least semi-cultivated by the Ancestral Puebloan peoples sometimes called the Anasazi. The collected genetic diversity of S. jamesii is strongly correlated with ancient acheological sites such as Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. It is believed that these cultures collected the potato from other sites and replanted them in and near their agricultural fields as an additional crop.Four Corners Potato grew surprisingly well for me considering I do not live in the desert Southwest, the seedlings grew vigorously. I did have some problems with damping off, but that isn't unusual for domesticated potato seedlings either. The plants are aggressive stolonizers as is true of all wild potatoes, and they began showing this from the seedling stage. I should have planted my Four Corners Potato in some large containers to maintain control over where the tubers where placed, but I didn't consider the implications of growing a wild species fully. So I have tubers all over the place as you can see.Some incredible attributes that this plant possesses include: Tuber freeze tolerance to well below zero degrees F, extreme tuber dormancy (up to 10 years of viable dormancy in the lab), extreme drought tolerance, and total immunity to Late Blight Phytophthora infestans. That's an astounding list for such a tiny tuber. Its such a fun species to play with. In terms of safety and edibility, it is wise to be extremely cautious when consuming Four Corners Potato. It is known that S. jamesii was and is used as food by Native American cultures, but the glycoalkaloid levels of tomatine in the tubers has varied between accessions. The toxicity of tomatine is also not entirely clear, but it is known that human taste receptors do not easily discern between high and low levels of tomatine in foods. This means it may be possible to eat a food such as Four Corners Potato that contains dangerous levels of tomatine without being able to taste any warning signs. With other glycoalkaloids from other potato species such as solanine in domesticated potatoes, dangerously toxic concentrations are detected as bitter and repellent. IT IS WISE TO BE CAUTIOUS WHEN EATING WILD POTATOES. I have eaten some Four Corners Potato with no ill effects, but I've only eaten a small quantity at one time. Please be careful, and avoid being a reckless idiot.Here's a link to Cultivariable's page on Solanum jamesii for more information, I cribbed a lot of his notes in this description and in the video. cultivariable.com/instructions/potatoes/how-to-grow-wild-potatoes/solanum-jamesiiHere's a link to a Salt Lake Tribune article about Four Corners Potato being grown for a benefit dinner at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Great picture in this of the stolons and tubers in a pot. sltrib.com/news/2018/10/06/ancient-potato-that-has/?fbclid=IwAR0nIU8uG_NK8RAnwMM4MahFuTNhytnDS0FJqP36U-Q4vpeVACQajkKO38w#gallery-carousel-8882268Here's a link to the weed seed dormancy study done by Professor William Beal over 120 years ago at Michigan State University, I'd like to try a smaller scale experiment with Four Corners potato to see how long they remain viable at soil temperatures. https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2000/120-year-old-experiment-sprouts-new-gardening-knowledge/
TPS Potato Reveal #4 Diploids -Chaucha Amarilla Larga, Criolla Rosada, and Round Burgundy Oxbow Farm 2018-10-23 | A bit of a mixup while filming this potato reveal. In the end of the video you will see me weighing up some seedlings of three different seed lots, Doug Strong's Round Burgundy, Criolla Rosada, and Chaucha Amariila Larga. The first footage I took of digging some Round Burgundy and Chaucha Amarilla Larga was deleted accidentally (by me). So I had to go back and dig some more Round Burgundy and Criolla Rosada to get diploid potato reveal footage. The diploid potato genetics that I have been growing are mostly from a group of South American potatoes that used to be considered a separate species, Solanum phureja. They are now classified together with the rest of domesticated potatoes in Solanum tuberosum, but they have some very special characters that make them interesting, and difficult to work with in a high latitude growing environment.These potatoes are very often completely without a dormancy mechanism in the tubers, so the tubers will begin sprouting even before the mother plant has died back. It is ideal to harvest them before the mother plant does begin dying back, to catch as many of them as possible before they sprout. I am attempting to select for individuals with more dormancy, but they are definitely a very short season sort of potato, with the peak of flavor and food value for only a month or two after harvest. In Columbia and Peru where this type of potato is grown they are often harvested as needed and replanted immediately, in areas where there is a year round growing season. Diploids of this type go by a variety of names in South America, some of the most common being Papa Amarilla, Criolla Amarilla, Criolla Rosada, and Yema de Huevo. Many of the names reflect the intense flesh and skin colors that they exhibit, and they can be stunningly beautiful. They also can be incredibly knobbly, oddly shaped and/or tiny and difficult to use in the kitchen. The compensation being outstanding texture and flavor, much more intense than anything available from common commercial tetraploid potatoes. They also often have photoperiod adaptations that limit their ability to form tubers in long day conditions, so some seedlings won't begin tuberizing until AFTER the autumn equinox. This often leaves them almost no time to form anything before the end of the growing season in high latitude locations. I did not have that problem very much this season, but we had an unusually long growing season this fall. If you want to grow potatoes like this, the best source for them in the US is Cultivariable.com. Bill has TPS for sale from this type of potato, as well as a limited amount of diploid seed potatoes available at certain times of the year. Highly recommended. cultivariable.com/catalog/potato/potatoes-andeanI also highly recommend listening to Cultivariable's Podcast, and I specifically mentioned Doug Strong's interview on the podcast and his system of growing diploids from "pull starts". cultivariable.com/podcast-7-doug-strong-of-windmill-hill-farm
Before and After the FROST Oxbow Farm 2018-10-18 | A tour around the farm looking at several areas before a hard frost, and then revisiting the same crops and places to see the effects of a hard frost. The potato fields were well killed down, and not before time. The tomatoes and uncovered peppers in the high tunnel were severely damaged, but it the plants were in decline in any case. The eggplants in another house weathered the cold with flying colors and were fine. Also a brief look at our Musa basjoo Hardy Banana, both before the frost, and then after harvesting the leaves for tamales, and the remnants were blasted by frost. More or less the end of the warm season crops here on Oxbow Farm, although the eggplants will be kept going as long as possible.
Potato Berry Reveal - Massive Single-Plant Harvest of Berries for True Potato Seed (TPS) Oxbow Farm 2018-10-14 | A frost advisory is on for Saturday night, so it is time to harvest any remaining potato berries, I won't have time tomorrow as I'll be scrambling around harvesting peppers and tomatoes and covering things with rowcover etc. This plant is a TPS seedling descendent of SG, with two possible male parents. One is Wheroroa, and the other is CIP 386286-7. Most of the seedlings from this batch of true potato seed were fairly small and unimpressive, but this plant grew hugely, and in fact overwhelmed and buried 5 other plants in the row under its vines. All the while it set a huge crop of berries. So we'll harvest them and weigh them out to get a yield from this super-fertile potato seedling. Also there's a little bonus shot at the end of some of my other batches of potato berries laid out to after-ripen before I extract the TPS from them.
Roasted Tomatillo Salsa - Salsa Verde Oxbow Farm 2018-10-12 | This is a simple roasted tomatillo salsa recipe. The ingredients are 3 and 1/2 pounds of fresh tomatillos, 10-12 ounces of fresh red ripe Hatch or Anaheim type chile peppers, a large onion (or equivalent) and a head of fresh garlic, salt, and honey to taste. The primary feature of this recipe is the roasting of all the main ingredients under the broiler to carmelize and blacken them. This brings out some wonderful smoky flavors and results in tiny char flecks in the finished salsa. For heat, the recipe uses low-heat Hatch type chiles. These chiles are hottest, sweetest, and impart the most flavor (and color) when they are extremely red-ripe. By using these low heat chiles, in order to produce significant heat levels in the salsa you have to use quite a few of them, which results in great roasted chile flavor and a significant red tint to the "salsa verde".Since I am canning the salsa in this video, I do not bother adding any cilantro. Cilantro is a wonderful ingredient in a fresh salsa, and if we were making this salsa as a fresh batch for immediate use, we would have added it. But it doesn't impart any flavor to a canned batch of salsa after cooking and processing the flavor is essentially destroyed. The National Institutes of Health have studied tomatillos safety in canned goods and determined that any recipe including 50% or more tomatillos will have sufficient acidity to be safely water bath canned. Here is the study link. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9839810
Vegetable Variety Review: Lady Murasaki Komatsuna Oxbow Farm 2018-10-09 | A review of the new dark purple komatsuna variety Lady Murasaki. This variety is an exciting new crop for us, for while we have grown komatsuna often in the past, there has never been a red or purple variety easily available. What is even more interesting is that Lady Murasaki is open pollinated.While there have been quite a few dark purple leaved Asian varieties on the market in the last few years these have invariably been hybrids. In brassicas, the modern hybrids have been developed using cell fusion cytoplasmic male sterility, in which cells of the crop are isolated and have their cell walls removed, and their chloroplasts also removed. These cells are then fused with cells of another species that has had its nucleas removed by retains its chloroplasts. When the cells are cultured and allowed to grow, they plants will grow normally, but are unable to produce viable pollen, which makes these lines perfect mother plants for producing hybrids, but it also means they are permanently useless as breeding material for amateur plant breeders. So the intense purple color in an OP komatsuna is very exciting. It lends itself to breeding with any number of other Asian greens in the same species, Chinese Cabbage, Tatsoi, Pac Choi, Mizuna, etc. It also is a perfect candidate to cross with red cabbage (B. olearacea) to create a red version of Senposai.It is available from Fedco Seeds. fedcoseeds.com/seeds/search?item=3216
TPS Potato Reveal #3 Sarpo Duro Crosses with a Record Breaking Seedling! Oxbow Farm 2018-10-07 | In this video we are digging true potato seedlings from a cross of Sarpo Duro with a bulk pollen mix. The pollen parents included in the mix were Chellan, Chaposa, Sarpo Duro, Fiesta Gold, DG-D8-330, Tollocan, Monstruo Azul, and Azul Rose. Essentially we cleaned up this row of Sarpo Duro crosses after digging many of them in TPS Potato Reveal #2. This time the results were a lot more interesting, demonstrating that when you are growing potatoes from TPS (true potato seed), the seedlings from the same parents will often show a huge variation in color, shape, size, and yield among other things. We ended up harvesting two seedlings that yielded over our 2 pound cutoff limit, one pink skinned fingerling that yielded 2 pounds 10 ounces, and a personal high yield seedling with a violet skinned russet with a yield of 8 pounds!
Vegetable Variety Review: Cañoncito Chile Oxbow Farm 2018-10-04 | We are trialing a group of New Mexican Landrace chile peppers this season, and we have over 20 plants of Cañoncito Chile. This hot pepper is a "landrace" chile from Dixon, NM. Traditionally it is grown in irrigated fields from DIRECT SEEDING. This means the pepper does not have the extra time indoors to grow into a seedling before the beginning of the outdoor growing season, it must grow its entire plant and mature peppers to ripeness in the short growing season of Dixon's high altitude (6000 ft) Northern New Mexican location. Selection has made Cañoncito an exceptionally early ripening pepper.More about it can be found here. http://www.elpalacio.org/articles/winter12/heirloomchile.pdfWe purchased our seeds for Cañoncito from Wild Garden Seed.wildgardenseed.com/product_info.php?cPath=80&products_id=336&osCsid=208db99906c245da5a39bf35bc7bad9a
TPS Potato Reveal #2 Igorota, Tollocan, Sarpo Duro, and Muruta Oxbow Farm 2018-10-01 | Second potato reveal from the 2018 TPS seedling plot. This reveal shows seedlings from three different lots of TPS ( true potato seed). The first three seedlings were from a cross between Igorota and Tollocan. Igorota is a late blight resistant white potato developed by the CIP (International Potato Center in Lima, Peru) and is very popular in the Philippines, over 70% of the potato crop there has been Igorota. Tollocan is another blight resistant yellow/white potato that was developed by the Mexican National Potato Program. So this cross is likely to produce mostly white tubers that at least potentially have good blight resistance from both parent varieties. We did not have any blight this season so I can't speak to the blight resistance of these seedlings.The next group of seedlings shown are from Sarpo Duro crossed with bulk pollen. This seed was produced by my friend Nathan, and I believe he used the same bulk pollen that he used to make the Sarpo crosses in Potato Reveal #1. Sarpo Duro is a variety bred by Tom Wagner and is a descendant of either Sarpo Mira or Sarpo Axona. So while its name is "Sarpo" it is not a potato developed by the Sarvari Trust in the UK. Finally, we harvested one plant of Muruta TPS. Muruta is another potato developed by the CIP, and it is a popular potato in Burundi in Africa for its high yield potential. It is supposed to be somewhat late blight tolerant and resistant to bacterial wilt and tropical diseases, but highly susceptible to Potato Virus Y.
Vegetable Variety Review: Fushimi Pepper Oxbow Farm 2018-09-29 | We trialed the Japanese pepper variety Fushimi this season. Fushimi pepper is a long pointed sweet pepper typically used for frying and tempura. It is very similar to another Japanese variety called Shishito, which we also grow, and have reviewed in another video. All in all, Fushimi is an OK pepper, but is really not worth growing if you already are growing Shishito. It is later, less productive, harder to use as a quick seared hors d'oeuvre the way we love to with Shishito, and the peppers themselves seem more prone to rots, and defects. Possible use for this pepper that might be worth exploring is as a dedicated pickling pepper. Also, the strain we purchased was a hot pepper when red ripe, which is inconsistent with the descriptions of Fushimi we have read, which consistently describe it as a sweet pepper. So at least some strains of Fushimi are hot.
When to Harvest your Potato Berries for TPS Oxbow Farm 2018-09-27 | It can be difficult to tell when a potato berry is ripe enough to harvest, they are green and hard even when it is time to harvest them from the plant. This video demonstrates the signs to look for to determine when your potato berries are harvestable. After they are harvested it is best to sort them to separate any damaged berries from the perfect ones, because they will spoil much faster while you are after-ripening them before you extract the true potato seed (TPS).The quantity of berries I've harvested in this video is really too much seed for my own needs, so I will be donated most of it to the Kenosha Potato Project to be added into the Beginners Seed Train so people new to growing TPS potatoes can acquire some TPS to try growing their own seedlings. If you are interested I recommend joining the Kenosha Potato Project and getting on the Beginners Train. I highly recommend the book "The Lost Art of Potato Breeding" by Rebsie Fairholm for people interested in learning more about breeding potatoes and growing them from true potato seed. http://www.skylightpress.co.uk/horticulture.html
Mortared Stone Bench: A Comedy of Materials Handling Oxbow Farm 2018-09-23 | Almost two years ago now we found this large flat stone in a creek in our woodlot. With no small difficulty we finagled it out of the creek and back to the garden. It was obviously a perfect stone for turning into a rustic mortared stone bench for our herb and flower growing area near the house. Unfortunately we did not get good footage of building the piers or setting the stone into its final position. Hopefully the video we did get will interest some folks in trying DIY stonemasonry.
TPS Potato Reveal #1- Sarpo Mira F2 Crosses Oxbow Farm 2018-09-21 | This was inspired by Torp Tomaten's many fine TPS potato reveal videos. In the Oxbow Farm 2018 TPS seedling plot, there were quite a few individual seedling that had matured and were ready to harvest and assess. The seedling group shown in this video was grown from open pollinated F2 seeds collected from our 2017 TPS seedling grow out of Sarpo Mira crosses done by our friend Nathan. We acquired this seed via the Kenosha Potato Project 2017 seed train. And very fine seed it was. 4 or 5 tuber clones growing out in our 2018 potato plot are selections from the orignal seedling planting from that seed. It is clear that many of the seedlings that matured early enough to appear in this video were of similar genetics, and were possibly from the same parents, or even the same berry. You can see as they are dug, almost all the matured seedlings had very similar skin color markings, even when they varied for yield and tuber shape and size. So although no two were alike, they were clearly in the same clan. But many other tubers from other plants pop up in the video as they are being dug, and some of them are very different from the pink and white splotched tubers harvested in the video.We hope this video demonstrates more of the variability that potatoes grown from true potato seed will produce for you, and also the excitement you can experience by digging up a brand new variety. Especially with common tetraploid potatoes, the range of recombination of traits is almost endless. So a person can breed and grow potatoes and find something new and interesting every year.We do try and grow my TPS potatoes with some level of seriousness, despite not having the time or money to operate a full on potato breeding program. This means that our seedlings are evaluated for yield as a top criteria, so any potato seedling that doesn't yield at least 2 pounds as a seedling is rejected for further growing. We feel that this focus on yield is important so that we are continuing to grow a crop that is capable of feeding us, even though it is a hobby amateur plant breeding project.
TPS Potato Growing - What to Expect? Oxbow Farm 2018-09-16 | This isn't Yukon Gold anymore Dorothy!There are differences when you are growing TPS seedling potatoes compared to growing commercial potato varieties. This video will point out several of those differences so the newbie TPS grower will not be surprised. TPS potatoes often show growth habits and features never seen from commercial potatoes, because any seedlings that show these traits are destroyed/culled by professional potato breeders. The main reason for this is they make the potatoes unusable by commercial growers who harvest their potatoes with machinery. When you grow potatoes from True Potato Seed (TPS) you will likely see the followingLong rampant vines, sometimes in excess of 5-8 feet from the planting location.Extremely abundant flowering and fruit production, especially in the seedling year (weather permitting).Long Stolons and/or runners, including sprouts from the plant popping up out of the ground many feet from the planting location, they also may end up producing tubers many feed from the planting location. Variability. TPS seedlings are genetically unique from each other and even when grown from a self pollinated parent variety, TPS seedlings will exhibit variability for shape, color, size, and yield, as well as plant growth characters like maturity, vine vigor, stem and leaf color, flower color, flower fertility, and disease resistances. No two seedlings will be alike.This video was created in response to a question about TPS availability from a commenter. He described himself as a "prepper" and he wanted to buy a pound of TPS to have in his survival seed stash.Presumably he was planning on being able to grow his own potatoes once the world had come to an end. The problem with this idea is that TPS do not grow themselves. Unless you have an understanding of how to grow the tiny seedlings, pot them up, and get them established, your chances of success are minimal. The only people who would have success are folks who actively garden/farm and understand the needs of plants in general, and potatoes specifically. A pound of TPS in the stash is useless, but a knowledgeable grower can produce hundreds of pounds of potatoes from a few grams of TPS. I also wanted to give a big recommendation to the Torp Tomaten channel, to those interested in TPS growing. She has some fantastic TPS growing videos, as well as general gardening videos. youtube.com/channel/UCTy-RuKf39RZMGC6B9rLdgQ
Hardy Banana Musa basjoo Oxbow Farm 2018-09-12 | We've added a new plant to Oxbow Farm this year. Just some initial impressions of growing Musa basjoo, Japanese Hardy Banana. AKA, Japanese Fiber Banana, Hardy Banana. Growing hardy banana here in USDA zone 5A is towards the upper hardiness limits of this species, so we will need to protect our hardy banana over the winter. Also, a big shout out to Esoteric Agriculture, who traded some seeds with Oxbow Farm for this plant. We highly recommend you check out Esoteric Agriculture, if you like our channel, he has lots of interesting and informative videos on homestead food production and gardening. youtube.com/channel/UCYBzJGQIZXDBUYdzq7mLeqA
Pepper Trials 2018 Oxbow Farm 2018-09-07 | Tour of the two pepper variety plots we are growing this year. Both are to test different varieties for suitability to our conditions, and for producing dried hot peppers. One trial is of New Mexican Landrace chili peppers, Cañoncito, San Juan Tsile, Isleta Pueblo, Chimayo, and Tarahumara Chile Colorado. The other plot is a group of open pollenated and hybrid Ancho/Poblano type peppers and some other Mexican drying pepper varieties. Negro de Valle, Poblano, Ancho Gigante, Ancho, Tiburon, Mosquetero, Crimson Hot, and Chilhuacle Negro. Seeds were acquired by trade with other growers, and from Native Seeds/SEARCH nativeseeds.orgReimer's Seeds http://www.reimerseeds.comWild Garden Seeds wildgardenseed.com
Vegetable Variety Review : Upstate Abundance Potato Oxbow Farm 2018-08-28 | Review of the newly released potato Upstate Abundance. This potato is a new variety from Cornell University potato breeder Walter De Jong. It is a white potato that produces small round medium textured tubers. It is marketed as being very buttery and highly productive. It is available from Row 7 Seeds, www.row7seeds.com.
Breeding Asian Greens, Simple and Small Scale Oxbow Farm 2018-04-30 | Happy accidents of the homestead seed saver. When I most recently saved seed from this Tatsoi, I clearly had a small amount of outcrossing with a pac choi that I was saving seed from relatively nearby. Out of 200 plants or so, I had 5 show up as crosses. This video just demonstrates visually selecting an off-type plant and deciding to save them for seed.Pac choi and tatsoi are Brassica rapa, they have a diploid genome and are self incompatible, so I need at least two of these F1 plants to survive in order to get viable seed. If all four plants survive then I should have great harvest of seed and a strong foundation for a new vegetable variety, assuming the F2 and further generations are similar to these F1 plants so that I can select for this plant style.The other four plants in the nursery bed are Brassica juncea, wich is polyploidy, and is very capable of self pollination. I would be able to get a decent harvest of seed even if only one of the plants survives.
Early Rhubarb with Simple Low Tunnels Oxbow Farm 2018-04-18 | Its possible to harvest rhubarb two or three weeks earlier by covering with a simple low tunnel or cold frame.
Diffuse Light Seed Potato Storage Oxbow Farm 2018-03-23 | My stored tubers from my 2017 and 2016 TPS growouts have started to sprout. The storage conditions in the cellar have basically gotten too warm to prevent them from sprouting at this point. So in this video I'm culling out the damaged and over-sprouted tubers, assessing the different lines for storage ability, and then they are all going into a diffuse light storage system in a spare room. The light will induce greening in the tubers and any existing sprouts. This will cause them to form green sprouts which are short and suberized. This prevents the sprout from losing excessive amounts of water and weakening the tuber, so it is maintained in much bettter condition for planting.
Hand Forged Chest Handles (2018) Oxbow Farm 2018-02-21 | Continuing progress on hand forged hardware for our six board chest thermal cooker project. I cut out the escutcheon plates, forged and riveted the staples to them, and then forged the handles and fit them to the plates. I’ve learned a lot about forging and making my own hardware on this project and I’ve advanced my skills in forge welding, splitting, and shaping decorative ironwork. In this video I got to practice working with sheet metal and plate, and riveting things onto plates. Shaping the plates with the cold chisel was a new process for me, and I was pleased with how quickly and accurately you can make complex curves with such basic tools.In needs to be mentioned that I am not a professional smith. I am a beginner and I only am making these pieces for the first time, so don’t consider this video a tutorial. For a great tutorial video on making this type of hinge, I recommend DF in the Shop’s video on making this type of hinge. I followed his process almost exactly. Here it is. youtube.com/watch?v=Tk2WlL9PDXk&t=226s
Heart Hasps and Hinges Oxbow Farm 2018-02-15 | Stumbly, bumbly shop footage of putting the finishing touches on the hand forged strap hinges and hasp I am making for my six board chest thermal cooker. For much better videos on making hinges and other kinds of hardware, I recommend two great channels.DF in the Shop youtube.com/channel/UCLRaymZrLmdb6dZlrJU6nNgBlack Bear Forge youtube.com/channel/UCdOM6Qc53TcWuExrnDLVjXg
Making a Double Pot Thermal Cooker in a 6 Board Chest Oxbow Farm 2018-02-13 | This is an intro video for our Thermal Cooker 2.0. This thermal cooker (aka Hay Box, Retained Heat Cooker) will be a more attractive and versatile unit that will allow us to cook large and small dishes by choosing the size pot that is appropriate. The box that contains the cooker is an appropriately sized 6 board chest made with pine boards and hand forged nails and hardware. The insulation will be perlite stabilized with sodium silicate with additional filler materials in some larger gaps.
Oxbow Farm Honorable Mention Seed Companies - Yet More Opinions! Oxbow Farm 2018-02-02 | This is the second video on our favorite seed companies, the companies discussed in this video don’t make our top ten list, but have something to offer that we appreciate. Cultivariable cultivariable.comNative Seeds/SEARCH http://nativeseeds.orgSouthern Exposure Seed Exchange http://www.southernexposure.comFruition Seeds fruitionseeds.comTurtle Tree Seed http://turtletreeseed.orgWest Coast Seeds westcoastseeds.comPinetree Garden Seeds superseeds.comKitazawa Seed Company http://www.kitazawaseed.comJungs Seed catalog group jungseed.comTomato Growers Supply Company http://www.tomatogrowers.comFertile Valley Seeds http://www.caroldeppe.comReimer Seeds http://www.reimerseeds.comAgroHaitai http://www.agrohaitai.com
Oxbow Farms Top 10 Seed Company Picks- Opinions Galore! Oxbow Farm 2018-01-30 | Since it is a new year and a new growing season is beginning, I thought it would be good to give a list of the top 10 seed companies we use here at Oxbow Farm. As promised, here are the links !#1 Osborne Seed Company http://www.osborneseed.com#2 High Mowing Organic Seeds highmowingseeds.com#3 Wild Garden Seed wildgardenseed.com#4 Adaptive Seeds adaptiveseeds.com#5 Seeds from Italy http://www.growitalian.com#6 Gourmet Seeds International gourmetseed.com#7 Burrell Seeds burrellseeds.us#8 Evergreen Seeds http://www.evergreenseeds.com#9 Sustainable Seed Company sustainableseedco.com#10 Fedco Seeds fedcoseeds.com
TPS Potato Harvest 2017 Oxbow Farm 2017-11-17 | A bit of footage of the new potatoes I've been harvesting from this years TPS potato plants. There's a huge diversity of shapes colors and textures showing up, but some of them are too low yielding to keep, and others have already broken dormancy and are beginning to sprout, so they are not well adapted to the winter storage necessary for potato growing in my climate.
