I am so excited to be starting our garden tours this season, and glad to be kicking it off with this grand garden & farm from Upstate New York! Corinne so generously shares her story, tales and advice with us here on lifelong and family gardening in a way that is sure to inspire. I hope you enjoy this stroll through her family farm as much I did!
Welcome to Corinne's Garden!
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Gardener (your name): Corinne Hansch
Garden Location and Zone: Upstate NY (Amsterdam), Zone 4/5
Garden Size: 1/2 acre
How long have you been gardening?
I've been gardening since I was a babe. There are old photos of me as a baby in the harvest basket next to lettuces, zucchinis, carrots, and zinnias in my parents foggy Watsonville, CA garden. As a girl I helped my mom plant seeds, pull weeds, and harvest. She was so generous with me as I'm sure I made mistakes and slowed her down. Nevertheless, I learned all the basics as a kid. In my teenage years I helped prep beds, use a wheel barrow and shovel (I was always proud of how strong I was...girls can use a mattock!), and work with my dad in his little nursery, dividing plants and keeping them watered in the all-encompassing dry heat of Northern CA. I also apprenticed with my mother in her flower farmer business, and then went on to become the lead designer at a nearby flower farm. After college, I was magnetically drawn to gardening, and I worked at a variety of farms until I finally started my own with my husband in 2010.
(pea shoots)
Why do you garden?
I garden for myself! I don't know how to live without gardening. Despite watching the same miracle year after year, I can't get over the giddy excitement of seeing freshly planted seeds sprout, harvesting basketfuls of abundance, cooking with the freshest of fresh ingredients, creating a mosaic of interplanted rows, trailing through seed catalogs and websites to hunt down interesting new varieties. Gardening keeps me outside, connected to the rhythms of the seasons, to the earth and the sky, and to the wild animals sharing space with me.
Now that I farm for a living, I garden for my community. I've just taken my passion for gardening to the next level of sharing my bounty with my community. I'm totally hooked on growing nutrient dense, super fresh produce for my farmers market and wholesale customers. Knowing that they are enjoying meals like we are at home with divine butter head lettuce, candy sweet cherry tomatoes, and our pasture raised eggs still gives me chills every time I think about it!
I garden for my kids. They can ID strange crops like fennel, borage, and parsley, basically since they learned to talk. They've grown up in the garden and the farm, and they have a deep understanding of where food comes from and natural farming and ecology.
I garden for the earth. We recently switched over to no-till farming, and I am so excited for the positive impacts our little garden can make on climate change, Agriculture is responsible for about 25% of carbon emissions, everything from diesel fuel used in tractors to carbon and nitrogen being released into the atmosphere through tillage. We are broad forking our beds and topdressing with compost. Keeping beds constantly planted or covered with mulch or silage tarp. The high organic matter (i.e. carbon) in the soil is capable of sequestering huge amounts of atmospheric carbon! Plus no-till creates habitat for native ground burrowing pollinators (lots of native bees make nests in the ground).
(icelandic poppies)
How would you describe your garden?
My garden is a combination of production, art palette, kids play ground, scientific laboratory, and wildlife sanctuary. We interplant like crazy, my current favorite being mini romaines planted either in between brassicas, or along the edges of tomatoes or squashes. The lettuce heads up in about 4 weeks, giving plenty of time for the slower growing brassicas or tomatoes to size up and take over the bed after the romaine has been harvested. Multi-cropping is so useful, and fulfills two of my objectives for production and art palette! The kids play so many games running up and down the 100' pathways, delighting in the abundance in the beds on either side of them. They almost always get a yes when asking if they can pick something (I'm sometimes possessive of my specialty flowers, like Icelandic poppies and ranunculus!). We currently have a young killdeer family living in the onions. There are three long legged babies at the moment, and we think there might be another nest somewhere, they are super camouflage. We also found a gorgeous luna moth in the rye cover crop when taking a walk today. Being homeschooled, the kids do a lot of their science projects in the garden. Watching the sky is another favorite past time when spending lots of time in the garden, and we sing our hellos to Canada Geese, Red Tail Hawks, the occasional Osprey or Eagle, and of course the moon and stars and sunset.
Where do you go for gardening inspiration?
Floret's blog has been a huge inspiration. Erin is so generous and successful and inspiring! Also, my husband and I try to make it to at least one farming conference a year. I was really impressed by the NOFA -MASS conference in Worcester, MA this winter. They had tons of resources for farmers, gardeners, and homesteaders alike. Not only are the workshops full of information, it is so fun to chit chat with other farmers and gardeners.
What are your favorite gardening books or resources?
Eliot Coleman, JM Fortier, Singing Frog Farms have inspired our current growing methods more than any others. Eliot Coleman's Winter Harvest Handbook is essential for winter hoop house growing, and J.M. Fortier's The Market Gardener lays out really clear tools for small-scale farming, which can be easily adapted to a smaller scale garden. We started using his recommended silage tarp for keeping the ground covered and smothering weeds before planting, and it has been a wonder! You can order custom sizes online. His website www.themarketgardener.com is full of resources. Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm in Sonoma County, CA haven't written a book yet (fingers crossed), but you can find some of Paul's talks on YouTube. They are so inspiring as farmers saving the world! Plus their production is breaking records for small farms. Curtis Stone is another inspiration. He has lots of YouTube videos about his urban farm in B.C., Canada. I found him when I was researching micro-green production. His how-to videos are quick and to the point and packed full of info.
What’s your biggest gardening challenge?
For most of my adult life, the biggest challenge has been land security. I've started so many gardens in rented houses or community gardens that I've had to say goodbye to. The most heartbreaking was our 5-acre farm in Mendocino County, CA. We put so much of our hearts into this piece of land, our first real production farm, and fed so many folks out of this garden. When our landlord pulled the plug on our lease after 5 years of market gardening on the property, we made the big decision to come back east to farm my husband's family land here in Upstate NY. We knew we couldn't take the heart break of leaving another farm behind. This land is so green and lush in the summer, so harshly cold in the winter, so different from all my West Coast gardens. I am slowly transitioning, slowly falling in love with this land. And the peonies! The lilacs! oh my, flower farming here is going to be so much fun.
(kids in their living classroom)
What’s your biggest garden accomplishment?
Finding crops that picky children will eat. I feel so much pride, joy, and a sense of accomplishment when my children and nieces and nephews wander out to the greenhouse or garden and start nibbling. The micro greens have been a surprise discovery. Pea shoots and sunflower shoots are so easy to grow in a sunny window sill or a greenhouse if you are lucky enough to have one. Just soak the seeds overnight, sprout them for a day or two until little root hairs appear, then spread thickly into trays of organic potting soil. Keep the trays stacked or weighted down until green leaves begin to appear. The plants are so strong they will lift a 5 lb weight up! Then put them in a sunny location (outdoors is fine in the summer) and grow until pea shoots are 3" to 4" tall and sunflowers have big fat cotelydons with their first true leaves showing. Such a fun project to do with kids, and they love pinching off the shoots and nibbling them straight out of the trays. My kids also adore homegrown carrots (they're called "candy carrots", and they have made many a market sale by telling other kids this), butter head lettuce, sunflower shoots, pumpkins, potatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and sunflower seeds from the garden. I'm planning a patch of sweet corn this year just for the kids, and we always make sure to have berries around to keep the kids happy.
What do you most love to grow?
Though I will always grow a huge variety of fruits and veggies because I am a total foodie and hoarder of homegrown canned and dried garden bounty, flowers are my true love. I rather guiltily ordered 200 varieties of flower seed this year, and I don't have near enough space for them all. Flowers have been my love since I was a teen, and I am so excited by the emerging local flower scene and the wild, natural style of arrangements. In hot and dry Northern CA sunflowers, zinnias, marigolds, amaranth and celosia thrived. Here in my new Northeast climate, I think I'll be pleasantly pleased by perennials like peonies, delphinium, rudbeckia, monarda, scabiosa, and veronica, and annuals like sweat peas, larkspur, queen anne's lace and purple carrot, snapdragons, bachelor buttons, nigella, and all the cool season flowers. Dreaming of a hoop house for the dahlias, celosia, zinnias, and over wintered Icelandic poppies, ranunculus, and anemones. I already have 50 peonies in the ground (they take three years till first harvest) and 30 lilacs. Perennials are so wonderful because you just put them in, keep them well mulched against the weeds, and then let them be.
(kids hanging out with broiler chickens before harvest)
If you have children, what role do they play in your gardening?
Since I do garden for a living as well as a passion, I'm very conscious of how I involve my children in the garden. They are never forced to do garden chores (besides closing and opening the chickens), and we usually inspire the older two to help with promise on an hourly rate, and this usually gets a solid hour or more our of my 11 year old, and maybe twenty minutes out of my 9 year old. They really love any jobs involving sharp tools or pocket knives (yes, they are both boys.) My five year old follows me around and jumps on top of me whenever she can, and also plucks a weed or two, but mostly plays make believe games and harvests flowers and the occasional veg. They all love hanging out in the greenhouse in early spring, the older boys sometimes bring Magic or Pokemon to play while I work, and the younger one to plant beans and peas and sunflowers alongside me. We had our baby chicks in the greenhouse this spring, so that definitely kept them entertained for hours while I worked. I've heard lots of stories from elders who had no choice in helping on the family farm as children, and as a result resent farming and never want to farm again. I definitely don't want that for my kids...but I do want them to grow up understanding about where their food comes from (and how much work it is), natural farming, ecology and wildlife, botany, and environmental issues. And since they are homeschooled, the garden is really a living classroom, and we base a lot of our "curriculum" around this. I put curriculum in quotes because so much of the learning just happens naturally, and then we journal and have discussions.
(peonies and sheet mulch)
Can you share one or two of your favorite gardening tips?
No-till and sheet mulching! We recently made the switch to no-till gardening, and it is amazing! We did break ground last fall on our 40 year fallow field by mold board plowing and then rototilling. Now we are building permanent beds. Here is our method: 1. Broadfork. 2. Top dress with organic fertilizer and amendments deemed necessary by soil test (we are adding rock phosphate since our phosphorus was real low) and 3" - 4" of finished compost. We are using compost from our local conservation district compost facility until we get some cows, goats, and sheep of our own. 3. Plant big healthy transplants, packing them in pretty intensively (check out J.M. Fortier's book for spacing info by crop) and interplanting fast growing crops like lettuce and radishes with slower growing crops like broccoli or tomatoes. Make sure to plant flowers and herbs on the ends of the beds for beneficial insect habitat. 4. When the crop is finished, cut with a sharp knife just under the soil, leaving the roots intact. 5. Broadfork, amend with fertilizer and compost, and replant ASAP with big healthy transplants. Over time there will be no weeds, crazy production, and soft fluffy beds thanks to the living soil web.
Sheet mulching comes in very handy for perennial plantings...from peonies to fruit trees. Here's my method: 1. Make sure there are no weeds 2. top dress the tree, shrub, or bed with a thick, 4" layer of finished compost. 3. lay a double layer of cardboard in the pathways (in cases of spreading perennials like flowers, asparagus and raspberries, just sheet mulch in the pathways) and right up to the edge of the tree or shrub. Make sure the edges of the cardboard overlap, you really want to suppress those weeds. 4. Lay down a thick, 4" or so layer of wood chips. Repeat every year!
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your garden?
Now that I live on a multigenerational family property, I have access to the family garden that has been around for almost 40 years. Last year, while we made our transition year from Northern CA to here in Upstate NY and started setting up infrastructure for our new farm, but weren't yet farming, I helped out my in-laws in their homestead garden. I had no idea how restorative this would be after the past 5 years of market gardening. I spent lots of time slowly weeding, pruning, and hand seeding, rather than using the tools and the speed I usually would for production scale. We had a pumpkin patch where all the grandkids planted their own pumpkin, watched it grow throughout the season, and then harvested in time for Halloween. We grew lots of carrots, beets, onions, celeriac, and winter squash for winter storage in the cellar, and tomatoes galore for sauce, salsa, sun drieds, paste, and ketchup. This year, with the big field going into production (still super small at 1/2 an acre), I wasn't sure if I would have the time or interest for the small homestead garden. But I find myself wandering through after work, first thing in the morning, or when I need a breath of fresh air after being on kid duty or doing lots of office work. I've planted a few of our left overs from the big field, and I really enjoy have just a few summer squash to baby along, a sprinkling of lettuces right out the front door, and the chives that are so abundant right now. I think I will thoroughly enjoy having a small space that has now become a multigenerational, shared family plot.
(planting in our homemade hoop house last summer)
About the Gardener:
Corinne Hansch owns and operates Lovin' Mama Farm (Lovin' Mama Farm on Facebook) with her husband Matthew. She is a full-time market gardener and homeschooling mama of three. She lives and works in upstate New York on 120 acres of multigenerational family land that recently opened its doors as a nature preserve. She is totally hooked on growing nutrient-dense, organic food for her family and community while using natural farming methods.
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Thank you, Corinne, for sharing your garden with us!
(If you'd like to share your farm or garden with us this season, send me an email for more details. We'd love to visit!)
