The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.34: Culinary Herb Production Done Well part 1 of 2

Episode Date: January 28, 2015

Veteran farmer Chris Blanchard built a thriving culinary herb business on his Iowa Farm, and thinks you can, too. In this episode, which features the first half of our conversation, Chris makes the case for focusing on herbs, and discusses the proper sourcing, and subsequent propagation, of herb cuttings.  Chris also oversees Purple Pitchfork, an educational and outreach organization dedicated to helping farmers and their farm businesses. Chris will soon launch a podcast of his own, which you can learn about on his site.  In our conversation, Chris references a culinary herb factsheet he has produced for Ruminant listeners. You can access it at farmertofarmerpodcast.com/ruminant Part two of our conversation airs in a week. 

We had a lot of fun developing the herb business at Rock Spring Farm, which was my farm here in Decorah, Iowa, and kind of learning our way around it and applying some different ideas to it. For us, it was kind of a learning experience putting together a bunch of different pieces of knowledge and kind of figuring it out, and I think we came up with a pretty darn good system that works for, I mean, it works whether you're doing a CSA or whether you're doing restaurant sales or store sales or whether you just got something in your backyard and want to make it a little bit easier and a little bit more fun to manage. Today, we're talking about culinary air production, folks. And for this conversation, I found the perfect guy to talk about it. I'm Chris Blanchard and I run a company called The Purple Pitchfork. We do education, consulting, and working with farmers on business systems,

looking at ways to help farmers make their jobs easier and be able to create more successful outcomes. I spent 25 years farming myself, and I have been doing the consulting and education work on the tail end of my farming experience, and then now I'm doing that full-time for about six years now. This is the Ruminant Podcast, a show that ponders the best way to farm. The ruminant.ca is the website, editor at the ruminant.ca is the email address, and at ruminantblog is where to find me on Twitter. I'm Jordan Marr. All right, let's go. Hi everyone. This episode of the ruminant podcast features part one of my conversation with Chris Blanchard, who ran a successful culinary herb operation for many years and took some time to

talk to me about the finer points of doing so. In this episode, Chris provides a good rationale for adding culinary herbs to your market garden, some advice for sourcing good herb stock, and some tips for successful propagation of cuttings. Next week, in part two, we focus on harvest, post-harvest handling, and marketing. But before any of that, I want to remind you about just how delighted I would be to receive a voicemail from you, in which you spend a minute or two describing something you're doing on your farm that you think other farmers should know about. I recently purchased a Skype number just for the purpose, which is 310-734-8426. That's 310-734-8426. I hope you'll consider leaving a message. I'd love to share what you're doing. There's not much else to say except you can

really help the podcast by telling people about it. Please consider tweeting about it or blogging about it or if you belong to any kind of farming organization or network, let your colleagues know about it. I'd also love to hear from you, so if you have anything you'd like to share, email me at editor at the ruminant.ca or tweet at me at ruminant blog. Okay, here's part one of two on herb production. And I'll talk to you again at the end of the conversation. Chris Blanchard, thanks a lot for coming on the ruminant podcast. I'm so glad I could be here, Jordan. Thank you. Chris, I have a subscription to the online publication for market gardeners called Growing for Market.

And I recently noticed that you had put out three articles with Growing for Market in 2014, all about herb production on a small scale for restaurants and retail sales. And I thought it was a great series of articles. So I asked you to come on and you said yes, and I'm really excited to talk about herb production today. I'm excited to talk about herb production too. It's really, we had a lot of fun developing the herb business at Rock Spring Farm, which was my farm here in Decorah, Iowa,

and kind of learning our way around it and applying some different ideas to it that we actually, I'm sure this is what they do out in California, you know, where they actually, you know, where there's large herb farms growing stuff year round. But for us, it was kind of a learning experience putting together a bunch of different pieces of knowledge and kind of figuring it out. And I think we came up with a pretty darn good system that works for, I mean, it works whether you're doing a CSA or whether you're doing restaurant sales or store sales or whether you've just got something in your backyard and want to make it a little bit

easier and a little bit more fun to manage. Well, yeah, for sure. And Chris, what I took from the start of your first article is that for you, up to the point that you got serious about herbs herbs were just kind of more of like an afterthought and i so i want to know if if you agree with that characterization and i also want to know if you like i have the sense that certainly on my farm but for many like people farmers growing vegetables they do have herbs but it's just totally an afterthought it's not something that they are focusing on they They just have a little herb patch. And if they're already selling their restaurants, maybe they're, they're harvesting a few herbs to sell, or they're just putting them sometimes in their CSA, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a product that not a lot

of farmers have in some tiny amount, but they're not really focusing on. Is that, is that fair to say? Oh yeah, I think it's totally fair to say. And that's the way we were before we got into the business, before we really said, hey, we want to make this a core element of our farm. You know, it was. We had a few herbs. We had some stuff here and there. You know, we were growing some for the CSA. Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes it didn't. A lot of times it went to flower, and it just ended up being an ugly mess. That sounds like my herb patch. You got weeds in your patch jordan herbs and just are weeds yeah and and also just constant flowers and it's it's an ugly mess but uh before so that's why i'm so keen to talk to you but uh before we get further into it can you also just provide a little more context of your farm the size and what you were focusing on before you got into herbs more heavily? Well, so we, I started Rock Spring Farm in 1999. We're in Decorah, Iowa, which is, and which is right up in the northeast corner of, of, of Iowa, right next to the Minnesota state line. And the, we, we had a, we had a 200 member CSA. We had,

We had a 200-member CSA. We were doing sales to, I think, eight or nine different natural food stores in the Twin Cities. And the natural food stores in the Twin Cities actually tend to be pretty large natural food stores. They're full-size grocery stores up there, not like they are in a lot of places. And then we were doing a farmer's market in Rochester, Minnesota as well on Saturdays. And then we were doing a farmer's market in Rochester, Minnesota as well on Saturdays. And so at the time we started getting into the herbs, we had about 20 acres of vegetables that we were growing. That included the herbs. We had a bunch of – we had several greenhouses doing winter production as well as summer production.

And, yeah, I mean, I guess that's about the sum of it. We had good land. You know, we had nice, beautiful bottom land, about five acres of really beautiful bottom land. And that's where we focused our herb production. And just so that listeners can keep this in the back of their mind, were you doing organic production or conventional or somewhere in between? Yeah, you know, I've always been an organic farmer. It's just that when I got started, there was no question that that's what I was going to do. And so, yeah, we were certified organic.

Okay. And so like a lot of farmers we just talked about, you were doing herbs, but not with any kind of focus. And then, but, but you did, you were making herb sales. And so at one point you, you, you, you got to a point where you really wanted to, to take that, that part of your business more seriously and ramp it up. Well, there was a CSA farm that I had visited back in the 1990s, and they had really pushed on and impressed on me the idea that herbs in a CSA box added a lot of perceived

value. You could take a bunch of rosemary that might have $2 worth of value at farmer's market and stick it in a CSA box, and it increased the value of that box by far more than $2, you know, because it was there. And I said, hey, this is cool and hip, and there's something fresh and different and fragrant in here that I, that I can't necessarily go and get in the same quality at the grocery store. Oh, I hear you, man. I mean, I think, I think, I think I hear you. Like I have a CSA much smaller than the one you were doing, but it's not just about the content in there. It's how it's presented. And, and I would think, and I include herbs in our, in our CSA bags, but you know, when you have something that they pull out, they open the bag and there's a waft of rosemary coming out.

It's just a wow factor. They're excited. Yeah, the waft. I think that should almost be a quality factor when you're talking about produce. And any time you're retailing produce, you want that waft whenever you can get it, whether you're at Farmer's Market or whether you're dealing with the CSA box. And so we were doing herbs. And so we had the herbs on the farm. And we were actually up doing deliveries. And we saw it was at Seward Food Co-op in the Twin Cities. And they had little baggies of herbs from Jacob's Farm's farm in california and it was

these it was these cute little maybe four inch by eight inch bags with a with half or three quarters of an ounce of herb in there and they were retailing them for two dollars and fifty cents and and we looked at them we were already doing a lot of stuff in bags because we did a lot of salad mix and and and spinach, baby spinach leaves. So we were already doing that in our marketplace. And we said, you know, we know how to put things in bags and we've got these herbs here that we're under utilizing for our CSA. And we told, we're like, hey, we could do that. Why are you buying that stuff from California? And that's how we kind of slid into it. And then of course, you know, typical of farmers, right,

I mean, we very much had the cart before the horse. We're like, oh, yeah, we can do that, and then we went home and had to figure out the labels and the bags and then how to actually grow the herbs, and so we really kind of ramped up our production all at once at the same time that we were kind of trying to figure out how you how in the world do you do herb production in any in any meaningful way and it seems like it seems chris like one thing that that you realized early on is that if you're gonna if you're gonna focus

on herbs and have a productive profitable herb business it's a long-haul commitment in terms of how you manage the crop yeah and one of the great things about it for getting into herbs is that it also means it's a long-haul commitment, but that means that there's a high barrier to entry. One of the challenges with being a successful vegetable farmer is that it's really easy for people to get into the business. What does it take to get into the vegetable farming business? You plant some radishes and you're in business. You know, there's not, you don't need a lot of infrastructure. You don't need a whole lot of land.

But with the herbs, especially because if you want to get into a packaged herb liner, you want to be, if you want to be the herb person, the herb guy or the herb gal, you're going to have to have a whole selection of herbs, annuals and perennials. And the perennials need to be established about a year in advance of when you plan to start harvesting them. So you really want to be ahead of the curve on that. And once you've got that stuff established, it's going to anybody else that wants to get

into that marketplace or wants to have a similar niche to what you've got is going to have they got a year of growing before they can catch up with you. And so yeah, I mean, it takes some commitment. But but that commitment also turns around, it's actually a marketing advantage. Right. And in that sense, I mean, herbs aren't normally classified as a value added type of agricultural good, but they have a lot, they share, they share a lot in common with value added products is in terms of they're creating more of a barrier to entry. And as you alluded to before, people, the perceived value is high of, of, of a lot of herbs. Yeah. And like with a lot of your value added products, there's a big difference between, between doing it in your backyard and doing it

commercially, you know, you know, it's, I know, I think the same thing is true with raspberry jam, right? You know, you make six pints of raspberry jam, there's not a whole lot to it. But you want to start producing cases of raspberry jam, and now you're in a completely different ballgame. And the things that you could get away with before, you can't get away with now. Now, I do think on a small farm, you know, I'm a systems guy. I'm all about systems for operating. So having a way to get things done. And I think even on like a CSA farm, having a more conscious approach to how you manage the herbs

is going to make that into a part of a part of your operation that has, uh, this, that's really adding value, not just for your CSA shareholders, but is also working well for your employees. And it's something that's not just a, Oh God, we got to get, we got to do the herbs. So the end of the day on Thursday, before we pack boxes on Friday, we got, we said we were going to get some herbs and now let's go try to scrounge up 50 bunches a time. You know, I think if you have a system for management, then it's really going to be much more of a joy to work with that crop. Because herbs are fun. You talk about that fragrance people get out of the boxes.

I mean, there's nothing like, you know, going and picking 100 bunches a time. I mean, you've got that fragrance all over you. It's just fantastic. a hundred bunches a time and you just, I mean, you've got that fragrance all over you. Um, it's, it's, it's just, it's fantastic. Okay. Well, well with that, let's, let's talk about some herbs. Let's talk about herb production. Uh, but, uh, but, but at this point I am going to, I am just going to tell you what my goal is for the rest of our conversation. Um, in your, in these three articles, you kind of lay out, uh, you lay out a lot of your system for someone who wants to go in this direction and make herbs a big part of their business. And we're going to talk about that. But I'm hoping to also just come up with a bunch of tips for those who are still going to keep herbs

as just a casual part or an afterthought of their business, but just some tips to do it better. Because I certainly gleaned a lot from what I read in your articles. How does that sound? That sounds great. Great. So, Chris, let's start here. One thing you realized very early on in this, in this transformation is that you had to think about growing different varieties of the same herbs you were growing. You had to change up or at least take, take your varieties more seriously.

Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah. There were a couple of key traits that we ended up going after. I mean, I think the most important is going to be getting something that's a lot slower to go to flower. That becomes a major management point because once a plant goes into flower, it moves from being in vegetative production to being in reproductive mode. And once it starts flowering, it's going to be putting all of its energy into flowering until it thinks that it's done having that opportunity to reproduce. So we want things that are going to be really slow to get to that point. We thought at first that we really wanted to be doing herbs with a high essential oil content,

We really wanted to be doing herbs with a high essential oil content. But we actually found that the extra 10% of essential oils that make something high essential oil content just wasn't that important to us. I mean, 10% more rosemary smell just doesn't amount to a whole lot when you're putting something in a CSA box or packaging it in a clamshell to sell in the grocery store. So we really found that that was something we went away from. The other big one is to have the right kind of spacing for the internodes. A lot of people grow, and we started off with this German wintertime. It's a seed-propagated variety. We bought our seeds from Johnny's. No problem with it, except that it's really short. All of the leaves are packed, you know, maybe a quarter inch or a half inch apart

from each other. I'm trying to think of quarter inch. Yeah, you know, quarter inch, half a centimeter, you know, really not a lot of space. You end up with a stubby little plant. But if you really want to feel like there's a sense of abundance, whether you're putting it in a clamshell, putting a twist tie around it, whatever that is, that sense of abundance is really important. So we found that we wanted things that had a little bit longer inner nodes and then also had kind of a, of a bushy, that the, that the leaves had some bushiness to them, you know, or the stems had some, had some bushiness and, and kind of a full feeling, you know, you don't want things that are super stretched out,

but you want to have them stretched out enough. So those were kind of the, that's what we really ended up going after with the herb varieties. And Chris, can you just quickly clarify, what was the issue with too high of essential oil content? Was there a trade-off? You were losing some other characteristic? No, but we weren't losing other characteristics,

but we found that these other traits, the slow to flower and then having the right plant shape, the right form to those stems was far more important than having something that had a little bit more essential oils in it. Okay. And in terms of finding the right varieties, was it pretty much just trial and error or did you find it easy enough to ask around was it simply that you just you just looked for the right traits in in descriptions and seed catalogs or or how did it it was total trying trial and error on our part you know there aren't a whole lot of commercial herb producers in in this country so it's not like you can just you can just go out and say oh i want I want the commercial variety of time. But we would do some reading in the catalogs. We actually talked to other herb growers. It's kind of funny. Jacob's Farm out in California, who have been supplying to the co-ops in the Twin Cities,

we actually called them and got a lot of assistance from them. We were right up front that we were planning on going into their market, but they were very helpful with that. Um, sometimes we even took stuff that we bought and, and just, uh, propagated it. You know, you can, you can get time at the grocery store and you can stick that time and start growing it. And that's, that's, that's actually provides a good segue then. Let's just talk a bit now about, about propagation because another thing you did as earlier on before you were serious about herbs is you did a lot of growing herbs from seed. And it sounded like almost maybe each year or quite often, you know, each year you'd be planting a lot of herbs from seed, but you realize you had to move for a lot of the

herbs, the more woody herbs towards propagation from cuttings. Yeah. And even for the non-woody herbs, most, okay, if you're dealing with perennial herbs or herbs that are perennial in their native habitat, don't tend to reproduce true from seed. So if you're growing carrots, you're going to grow carrots from seed. It's an annual crop or a biennial crop if you want to get technical about it, but it's got a 12-month life cycle to it, and nobody grows carrots from vegetative propagation, and they produce a lot of seeds. A lot of these herb crops don't produce an abundant amount of seeds, and because they're perennials, it actually takes a lot longer to do the seed

production with them. So they don't tend to be stabilized. You know, if you have an open pollinated carrot, you plant the seeds from the open pollinated carrot, you're going to get something that's pretty similar to what you had last year. That's not going to be true with a lot of herb. If you want to have plants that have stable traits, you're going to want to propagate those vegetatively so that you're not having that, that sexual recombination of the, of the genes. Okay. So I need to clarify something. I think, I think you're making a reasonable assumption in, in this, in this conversation that, because I guess you wouldn't advocate starting your, let's just talk about

time each year's time crop from seed that year, that doesn't make sense. So you're picturing the gardener who is just letting their time go to seed over winter or whenever, and then that seed sprouts the next year with new time. And you're arguing that the problem with that is you don't get stable, predictable offspring. Yeah, I actually, so let's rewind all that, Jordan. Actually, what I'm getting at is that if you buy time seed, if you're going to get time from seed, you're not going to get the kinds of varieties that you want to grow commercially. There's not that many varieties of time available from seed because it's hard to breed time. from seed because it's hard to breed time. So you're going all the way back just to the people producing the seed. It's just it's not easy to do, and you often don't get a lot of choice of good varieties for that reason. That's right.

It's just, I mean, think of it like an apple tree, right? You don't grow apples from, I mean, you can grow apples from seed, but you don't. If you're going to be a serious apple producer, or even if you're going to be a backyard apple producer, you're going to buy an apple tree, and you're going to plant the tree. And when it's time to propagate that tree, when it's time to make more apple trees, you're going to take cuttings from the tree instead of taking seeds from the fruit, because the seeds from the fruit aren't going to reproduce what was that tree's same trait. Okay, that's a great analogy. Thank you for that. Yeah.

And then this is complicated because we're also talking about doing annual production versus perennial production. annual production versus perennial production. So you've got, you've got, um, I mean, there are some, some of the, some of the herbs that we handled as vegetables. So, uh, you know, things like parsley and dill, uh, cilantro, um, even things like marjoram and, and savory that weren't hardy in our environment, we would start those from seed every year. And then we'd either till them in at the end of the year or they would die from the frost by the end of the year. We would have a succession plantings on a lot of those. So like for a crop like dill, we seeded dill every week so that we had fresh, good-looking leaf dill coming off our farm every week. Easy to harvest and make a lot of money on that way. Cilantro, we did the same thing.

Now, something like basil, we would grow the basil as transplants every year. So, again, we're seeding the basil. So we're taking basil seeds because basil is an annual, so it's pretty easy to get good seed production off of that. So we're buying seeds in and we're planting those seeds in the cells, in the transplant trays, making basil plants that way, planting those out in our field. Crops like basil, savory, marjoram, we would have about a four-week succession on those. So we were planting a new crop every four weeks on that to make sure that we had always a fresh supply coming. And then we also had the perennial herbs. So perennial herbs in my climate are things like chives, oregano, the mints, your peppermint,

your spearmint, sage, and thyme. We manage those all in what we called, as we thought of them, simple perennials. So we had a, we had, I thought of it as a four-year rotation that was happening with those with those herbs to where we would we would plant the herbs we'd propagate the herbs in the early spring and we would plant them so we'd have and then we'd end up with a nice we used a two-inch pot for that and we ended so we had a nice big plant that we were planting in the field on August 1st. And that gave it enough time to get established before things froze up around the middle of October. And then that plant would survive over the winter. And it would come back in the spring and start growing. And then we would actually, for that first year, we would just grow

that plant. We wouldn't even harvest off of it if we could avoid it. So that plant was able to get nice and established. And usually in the first year, it wasn't very interested in flowering. Now the next year, then we would start harvesting off of that plant. We'd harvest off of it in year two, in year three, in year four, in the spring of year four. Now by this time, we're starting to get some weed pressure because, year four, in the spring of year four. Now, by this time, we're starting to get some weed pressure because, you know, it's a perennial, it's a perennial herb. It's out there, you know, the plant's out there for a long time. There's plenty of weed seeds blowing in from other

places. We're starting to have, the plants are not looking so great. So now we're going to, we're going to harvest off of them in the spring and then we're going to just rototill them in. we're going to harvest off of them in the spring, and then we're going to just rototill them in. And so every year, we're planting new, and I'm going to use time as an example. So every year, we're propagating time, but it's in a succession. So I might have, say, four beds or five beds a time going, but one's a first-year bed a time, one's a second-year bed a time, one's a first year bed a time one's a second year bed a time one's a third year bed a time one's a fourth year bed a time and about to get rototilt right i'm really i was we were i was i wanted to get to that simple perennial system so i'm really glad you just outlined it that's great uh now i i'd like to i'd like to move on to harvesting but i i did want to

ask you about propagating from cuttings. I just, it's something that, uh, frankly intimidates me a little bit. So is it really difficult to get good at, at doing that well and succeeding in, in, you know, you're taking cuttings each year from your, from your current stock and propagating them? Is it, should I be intimidated or is it, is it easier than I think? It's easier than you think. The trick is you want to get good new growth, but you don't want it to be super lush.

So what we found is that the best time for us was in about late March in our greenhouse. So we would actually bring in plants that we wanted to propagate. We'd bring those into the greenhouse. So we would actually bring in plants that we wanted to propagate. We'd bring those into the greenhouse. And then as they started to grow in the spring, so late March, we had about enough sunlight that they were really starting to push up, but they hadn't gotten leggy yet. You know, you don't want this really, you don't want super lush, wimpy growth. You want good stocky new growth. and you're going to cut about a four inch piece off, um, and then strip about the bottom half of the leaves. And then we just stick it in. We just put it in, uh, either trays filled with vermiculite or trays filled with straight

perlite. And then we would put a, we put a tent over it. So we were keeping it, we were protecting it from any, any air movement and keeping it a little bit warmer. So we were keeping it, we were protecting it from any air movement and keeping it a little bit warmer. And if you really want to up your success rate, you put a little bottom heat on there too. So don't let it get too hot, but you want to keep it in a nice moist environment. The folks at Johnny's, I think Johnny's sells these, but if they don't, you can find them elsewhere. It's called a fogget nozzle. It's a really nice way to water those because it puts out this very fine mist. And you can, so you do this mist maybe three, four, five times a day over your plants and over these cuttings that are stuck in the vermiculite. And that's going to get a lot of

moisture on and around all of the leaves. And if you keep a high humidity around the leaves, then the plant's not trying to pump water because it can't. That's how a plant pumps water when it's got low humidity around it. That's when it starts to move the water through its system. So this keeps it from trying to pump water, which keeps it from using up its energy reserves. So that misting is a really important piece of it. And then again, having some sort of a tent or some sort of a cover that kind of keeps that humidity a little bit higher in it. And you still want it in the light. It's not that hard. And you know, if you're really intimidated about propagating from cuttings, layering is a great technique. So layering is when you actually encourage the plant to set roots on stems that are still attached to the plant. So now mint's a really good example of this because mint has those nice rhizomes that are running just to the plant. So now mints are really good example of this because

mint has those, has those nice rhizomes that are running just underneath the surface. And, and so typically, typically a mint plant, you can dig up a mint plant and you can make a hundred mint plants out of it. They've all got little rootlets on it. So you can just, you can just plant those in, you know, in a 72 or a 50 cell tray and, and there you've got cuttings and they're already rooted and they're already, everything's going to work and you 100% success rate all the time on that. Um, if you're doing something like, like rosemary, you know, you might not get, you might not get such a great success rate on it, but again, so what, you know, if you, if you take cuttings off of your own plants,

that's pretty cheap to do. And then you stick them. So you stick a you if you take cuttings off of your own plants that's pretty cheap to do and then you stick them so you stick 100 and you get 50 big deal right you know and can you can you just finish your thought on layering then so like oh yeah i'm layering sorry sorry that's okay no no pick pick pick pick one pick a pick a nerve to to to explain well so let's let's take time for example so time has a it's it's got tends have lateral growth, so growth that's kind of going along the top of the soil. And then as those stems are going out sideways, it starts to shoot up stems as well that are growing vertically. So it's got a horizontal growth pattern, and then it's got a vertical growth pattern. horizontal growth pattern and then it's got a vertical growth pattern so if you if you get that that horizontal growing stem and get it down in the dirt and or down in the soil you can do this in a pot or you can do this right out in the field um then then that horizontal portion will actually

start to root out and if you've got time in your in your garden jordan you you've seen this how it's you know it's kind of a big mounding plant and that's because it's got that, it's got that horizontal growth and then the vertical growth. That's what kind of a mounding plant like that does. And so then you could take one of those horizontal branches. Now it's all good. It's going to be rooted all along the branch. It's going to have, it's going to have hundreds of roots growing down. And so you could take that, that, you know, maybe you've got a three-inch piece, but it's got 12 vertical pieces coming, vertical stems coming off of that horizontal piece, and you could snip it.

So each vertical piece has a little bit of root on it coming out. And now you've got your starter. You can take each piece, and now you've got, you know, 5, 10, 12 seedlings. Yeah, and you don't have to worry about trying to root it because the roots are already started. Cool. So now you just got to stick that thing in the, you got to stick it in a pot and it'll start growing. And so we did, so with that layering technique, we did that with oregano, with thyme, and then with the mints. We did that with oregano, with thyme, and then with the mints. We also had some good luck doing it with, we experimented with taking like thyme or mint, having it growing in a pot, and then actually just inch you could just add some potting soil over it that puts those those now you've got stems that are in the dark and once

a stem's in the dark the plant goes oh i think i have a root now and it starts sending out roots off okay so all right so look we're time's moving and i so i want to move on to harvest and post harvest but just really quickly if if you can, can you talk like a little bit about, um, so that, so let's just focus on your, on your simple perennials that are on like a three or four year rotation that you mentioned. Can you just talk about in the middle of the season with the beds that are planted out, whether they're the second or third year or whatever, watering and feeding, like feeding in terms of compost or, or amendments. Can you just, it was, are much like, can you, is there any considerations for watering and feeding, like feeding in terms of compost or amendments. Can you just, it was there much you, like, can you,

is there any considerations for watering and feeding? Well, we did. Now we want to keep watering them all season long. So we want to be, you know, you want to keep the drip irrigation on. Plants are made of water. And so you want to keep watering them to keep them in that good vegetative growth. If you let them get stressed. Here's when a plant gets stressed, because, right because the whole reason the plant exists is to make babies.

It wants to make seed. So when the plant gets stressed out, it goes, oh, my God, I'm going to die. I better make babies now before I die because this is the last chance I got. And then it makes flowers. So you don't want to let it get to that point. So keeping the water on it, made sure that that happened. We don't want to put a lot of water on the leaves because then you're going to be promoting plant disease. So we use drip irrigation to do that. As far as fertility, we usually put on the fertility in the fall, adding compost at that time. And then we tried to get enough on there that that we had enough to last

us all year because you know we're harvesting these fresh herbs i never felt really good about about putting down compost on something that i was going to be harvesting the next especially because they're so low to the ground yeah because i mean you're just you're not you're not going to avoid getting stuff on the leaves it just didn't it leaves. And we don't wash the herbs. When we harvest the herbs, they're not coming in and getting dunked in water, which can reduce your bacterial load. They're not getting hosed off. We're certainly not putting them in a wash water sanitizer.

So any contamination that comes in on those plants, we're going to be delivering to the customer. And I don't want to do that. Right. Thank you. Okay. That's it for part one of my conversation with herb grower Chris Blanchard. going to be delivering to the customer and i don't want to do that right thank you okay that's it for part one of my conversation with herb grower chris blanchard i hope you enjoyed it and you can check out part two in a week's time so until then everybody and one thing i should say is chris has uh graciously made available a fact sheet on our production for ruminant listeners and you can

find that at the website of his brand new podcast so you can check that out at farmer to farmer podcast.com and that too is to so farmer to farmer podcast.com slash ruminant when you go to that page you'll find a request from him to join his mailing list to receive all kinds of useful information. But just below that, you'll also find a link to the herb fact sheet that he put together for ruminant listeners. So check that out and check out the ruminant at theruminant.ca or tweet at me at ruminantblog. Thanks again, folks. Have a great week. us dry we could be happy with life in the country with salt on our skin

and the dirt on our hands I've been doing a lot of thinking some real soul searching and here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some fancy car.