Bob looked at the grocery receipt this last week and announced “our bill is running twice what it was this summer.”

So what’s making the difference? Vegetables, of course: we have to buy them now that the December freeze turned my winter garden to mush. Still, “twice what it was” doesn’t tell you much about what you saved by growing your own.

But Nancy Lewis-Williams, Master Gardener and teacher of last year’s popular vegetable-growing class, HAS kept a running tally of what her harvest has been worth to her pocketbook. From June through December first, she weighed all the produce she’d harvested and kept a running tally, in pounds, of 33 different crops, from apples to zucchini. 

“Well, maybe 75% of it—I didn’t count the stuff we ate right off the vine,” she hedged. “And it also doesn’t include all the greens we grew in early spring, before I started this count.”

Her computer went on the fritz the same week I asked for her end-of-harvest totals, so I stepped in and looked up current prices at Thriftway. So here’s another hedge: we didn’t use height-of-season prices (except for the raspberries, which I had recorded for myself in Quicken when I bought a half-flat this summer).

Given all these qualifiers, what did we find? That Nancy had harvested nearly $500′ worth 0f organic vegetables per MONTH from her 2000 s.f. garden. 

The harvest total was worth $1810, using winter Thriftway prices for non-organic produce. If compared to organic prices, the harvest would be worth $2952.

“And I’ve still got a month’s worth out there in leeks, kale, carrots, chard, turnips, rutabagas and spinach,” she said.

The Big Pay-offs

The big pay-off, both in weight and in dollars grown, was from POTATOES. With a pound of seed potatoes for “Rose Finn Apple Fingerlings” from Ronnigers in Colorado (www.ronnigers.com), her return was hundredfold: 110 pounds worth $440 smackaroos. She also planted around 10 lbs of seed potatoes for regular spuds and got 250 lbs in return, worth $250 or $500 at organic prices. 

Leda Langley told me last spring that you get the biggest bang in calories and productivity/acre with potatoes, and here Nancy’s proved her point.

Other seeds with a large return, literally, were: TOMATOES at 109 lbs, worth at least $218 and probably well over $300 organic; 95 pounds of WINTER SQUASH (delicate and butternut) worth $1 per pound; 36 pounds of CUCUMBERS worth $72 or twice that if organic; LEAFY FRY GREENS like kale, chard, and spinach that come bagged at premium prices anywhere from $4-6 per pound. “I didn’t count all the corn: I must have pared kernels off of hundreds of ears.” 

If you’re a fruit-fancier willing to pay for fresh off-season berries, you might want to invest in a few bushes and a freezer. Nancy’s 28 pints of RASPBERRIES were worth at least $65 compared to in-season local berries, or $448 compared to last week’s Chilean winter imports at a Buck an Ounce. 

Other results: HERBS: 13 handfuls worth $65; 15 lbs of LEEKS worth $45; 32 pounds of BEETS worth anywhere from $1.50/lb to $5/lb for organic; 29 pounds of CARROTS worth from $22-30; 15 lbs of CABBAGE worth 50¢ a pound but four times that organically. 

The Investment

My husband, always the skeptic, pointed out that there’s costs involved: water, fertilizer, seed trays, seed. 

“And you HAVE to have a deer-fence,” Nancy added when I asked about her costs. Deer-fencing runs about a dollar a running foot; you could fence a garden her size (2000 sf, equal to a 40′x50′) for  $100 plus the poles and gate materials.

Looking at her records, she estimated she spent $100 on seeds, $30/month on water, and $100 on organic fertilizer and amendments. Given that one doesn’t water in three of the months of her trial, that’s approximately $300 a year to install a 2000 s.f. vegie patch producing $3000 worth of food. That’s a tenfold return for your money.

Now Nancy’s put in a greenhouse last year; with such a large expense, you’re looking at costs close to what the author of “The $64 Tomato” ran up. But you don’t have to spend a lot on gear, as Steve Solomon points out in his latest book, “Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times”: you can direct seed instead of growing or buying transplants, you can start warm-season fruiting plants in a sunny window, you can blend your own fertilizer, and you can restrict your tools to a hoe, a bow rake, a good shovel, a sharp knife, and a hose. 

You may not be able to grow as large a bounty as Nancy did, but most folks DO realize some savings. In a poll done last year by the National Gardening Association, they found that “a well-maintained food garden yields a $500 average return per garden.”  

So save yourself a few or a LOT of bucks: Grow Your Own.

Stories I’m working on:

• A Seed Swap at the Food Summit Meeting: bring some, take some.

• Gates for deer-fencing

If you have ideas for stories or inputs on the above ideas, comment here or write me at karendale@centurytel.net.

Damon, Rebecca and baby Sophia among their Pinot Noir vines

Organic, sustainable practices in a new local vineyard

In this week of thunder and rain, it’s pleasant to think back to a golden haze of a day on November 1, when I drove to the heights of the Dilworth Loop to visit the Alli Lanphear Farm and Vineyard.

Here, on fives acres that were farmed for decades by the Hoshi family, you can see a new beginning. Slopes that had gone over to scotch broom has been cleared, then planted in cover crop or left to grass. A new house now crowns the hill, fronted by flowers, warmed by sun, overlooking row after golden row of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and other trellised wine grapes. 

It’s easy to see this as another of Ron Irvine’s “sunny slopes” endowed with the perfect exposure for growing wine.

Damon Lanphear and Rebecca Alli Lanphear come out of the house to greet me. Little Sophia rides on Mom’s hip. Young couple, new kid, new house, big dreams. But as soon as we walk over to the new half-acre where new vines will go next year, I gather from the talk that farming, to them, is NOT new.

Learning by Doing

Damon is pointing out the cover crop. “We always start with cover crop: This is a, a—”

“Leg/oat,” Rebecca throws in.

“Yes, a legume/oat annual mix.” Damon picks up. “You lose a growing season, but you gain reduced weed pressure from perennial weeds, you break up the sod, you add structure to the soil.”

“We like to learn by doing,” Rebecca told me, “I began as an intern at Hogsback Farm ten years ago and worked there for a year and a half. Damon and I had a personal plot on a portion of their farm, and as we have always been interested in experimenting, we planted spelt, quinoa, amaranth, and a “three sisters” garden.” [That's the Navajo practice of growing beans, corn, and squash together for mutual support: the corn supports the climbing beans, the beans provide nitrogen, the squash shades the ground.]

This is not their only claim to experience: they’ve already made wine, beer, and mead, they’ve joined the Puget Sound Wine Growers Association, and they have gone to workshops through the Washington State Ag Extension office in Mt. Vernon, which serves as a research and education station for Puget Sound viticulture. 

They also toured France’s Burgundy wine country by bike in May 2008, seeing, learning, sitting down with wine growers, tasting their wine and being inspired. And they’ve tasted their way through wines recommended for our region—in some ways, deciding to buck the recommendations and plant for the wines they prefer, such as Chardonnay.

Developing the vines

We walk over to the Chardonnay vines—perhaps the only on Vashon and at eleven rows, definitely the largest planting. As we walk up and down the rows, we talk about spacing, watering, and vine development. 

The vines, “in their third leaf” are on three-foot centers, trellised along twin parallel rows six feet apart. New cover crop bristles in 4-6″ growth underfoot. I’m surprised to see drip-lines tied up to the 2-foot height trellis wire, but Damon explains “that’s both to give more trellis support and to get underneath to weed.”

He talks about “devigoirating the vines. Stressed vines make better wines. When the plant is stressed, it doesn’t grow such a full leaf canopy. When the canopy is open, more sun reaches the fruit, and that sunlight and airflow also protects against powdery mildew and fruit rot.”

I mention sulfur-dusting as a protection against mildew, which prompts Damon to expand upon the difference between organic wines “which among other practices, means no sulfites are used to produce the wine, and organic growing, where you can use sulfur to guard against diseases like powdery mildew.”

Rebecca cut in. “That IS part of our goal: we want to do organic, sustainable practices in the vineyard. 

Developing the soil

Deep in the rows of Pinor Noir, I reach down and scoop up a handful of soil the color of milk chocolate, ask about it. Damon says, “It’s an ‘alderwood-gravelly’ soil, basically a gravelly, sandy loam.” 

“We had a trench for our water-lines cut across the property, running in front of the house, so we could see down six feet, all that way,” says Rebecca. “It was amazing how much it changes, but basically, six feet down, it’s beach sand.”

“You feel how spongy and soft the soil is—like applesauce?” she continues. “That’s the tilling: it leaves the soil without any structure. You have to ‘clean cultivate’ the vineyard its first couple years to prevent any root competition from other plants.”

They started with a cover crop that covered the ground for a full year. In the second year, after turning under that first cover crop, they cleared the ground of all growth and planted the vines. For two growing seasons after that, they kept the soil “clean cultivated” so the roots of the young vines had no competition for nutrients.

At the end of the vine’s third year, the Lanphears planted two kinds of cover crops in alternating rows. In the odd rows is a perennial cover crop, New Zealand White Clover, which doesn’t run like other clovers and can be mown for tractor access to the rows.

In the even rows, the Lanphears have planted an annual cover crop of peas and vetch. These annual rows will be plowed under before the vines break into bud, hopefully with a chisel plow whose parallel tines will pull green matter under without pulverizing the soil’s structure. 

Both cover crops help reestablish a living soil structure that promotes drainage, holds nutrients, and brings oxygen to microbial soil life. 

For the rest of each summer, Damon plans to follow a European practice he saw in Burgundy: after plowing, these rows will be replanted in annual flowers like sunflower, lupine, and poppies to encourage beneficial insects. This is known as Integrated Pest Management, an organic practice standard. “In Europe, the red poppy is now a symbol of organic practices,” he says. “The vineyard should be alive.”

Developing the Farm & Winery

Their ultimate dream, I learn as we sit down around the kitchen table, is to produce 100-200 cases of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and other wines at affordable prices. They also want to develop other value-added products like pickles, vinegar’ed products,  miso and to collaborate with other Vashon food producers to create an alternative, integrated experience  in the same spirit as Sea Breeze Boucherie.”

Right now, they’re in the process of facility design, with plans for a barn, barrel storage, a full winery, a place for people to come try their wines and other local products.

I ask about the presence of Chardonnay, along with the much-adopted Pinot Noir. “We asked ourselves first, do we like it, can we be excited about it. Chardonnay has this troubled history: it’s associated with Napa practices of pushing toward fat, buttery, cloying tastes. This wine has more acids, minerality, a broadness on the palette that has been lost in the ‘message of chardonnay’. We want to become part of that movement to resurrect Chardonnay, of making an interesting white.”

Rebecca says, “We intend to follow organic and sustainable growing practices, but we may not opt to get organically certified. We probably won’t make certified-organic wine due to our use of sulfites and commercial yeast; however, as we progress, we intend to try winemaking without those additions.”

Many projects are ahead of the Lanphears. They’ve learned a lot already, but there’s much still to do, to experiment with and test, to see how well they can produce wine and how the public takes to it. But they seem like good caretakers of a land that once yielded much. Good luck to them.