If you are planting a basketry willow patch, you’ll want to include these cultivars!
All of the following cultivars tend to produce many long, slender rods each year with little to no branching, perfect for side weavers on your baskets!
-Salix purpurea ‘Dicky Meadows’
-Salix purpurea ‘Green Dicks’
-Salix purpurea ‘Jagiellonka’
-Salix purpurea ‘Dark Dicks’
-Salix purpurea x daphnoides (Tends to produce a greater variety of thickness of rods than the other cultivars listed. Good for stakes and weavers)
-Salix purpurea ‘Polish Purple’
-Salix purpurea ‘Brittany Green’
-Salix purpurea ‘Packing twine’
The following cultivars tend to produce fewer usable rods that aren’t perfectly straight, and may have variation in thickness and some branching, but their color is vibrant and will add interest to your baskets:
-Salix myrsinfolia ‘Blackskin’
-Salix x fragilis ‘Fransgeel Rood’
-Salix x fragilis f. Vitellina ‘Yellow Flame’
-Salix x fragilis ‘Natural Red’
How much willow do you need to plant for your basketry patch? Good question! Generally, basketry willow is harvested each year, so you’ll want to think about how many baskets you hope to make each year.
In general, a rule of thumb we’ve heard is you need about 150 rods (or dried sticks) of willow to weave a basket about 12” in diameter. Think a medium-sized garden harvest basket or a mini backpack basket.
After planting, willow takes a year to get established, so you won’t get many usable weaving rods until its second year. The first year’s growth tends to be shorter and branchy, but after a few years in the ground, you can expect each plant to produce around 30 rods per year. Some cultivars produce far fewer rods, like Continental Purple or Winter Green, which are good for woven fences or sub-structures of larger woven willow projects. Our favorite varieties listed above should produce about 30 rods each year. The colorful varieties listed above tend to produce fewer rods per plant, so you’ll need to plant more, Not every rod is perfect, often you won’t be able to use ones that are branchy, too thick, or too thin, so you’ll want to plan for extra plants so you can be sure to have your 150 perfect rods per basket. So, if you need 150 rods, with 30 rods per plant, that is about 5 plants per basket, but to make sure you really have enough to weave with, we recommend planting at least two extra plants per basket, so say you need 7 plants per basket, on average, for a 12” diameter basket. If you plan to weave larger baskets, you’ll need to plant more plants per basket. If you plan to weave very small baskets, you’ll need fewer plants per basket.
Willow is highly adaptable, and will tolerate a range of soil types and microclimates. You can stick the cuttings along a stream bank to prevent erosion, in your perennial garden for a pop of winter color, plant your own living structure or decorative/privacy fence, or plant them in rows in your garden or on your farm to harvest for basket weaving like we do. If you have a seasonal wet spot in your yard where not much else will grow, willow will likely thrive!
Storing your cuttings until planting:
It is best to keep your willow cuttings in your refrigerator until you plant them. This will help keep them dormant, and will encourage them to callous. After a while in your refrigerator, the cuttings may appear to crack open and look whitish all along the stem. If this happens, don’t worry, this is a good sign! This just means the willow is ready to grow roots.
Choosing a spot:
Considerations when choosing a spot to plant your willow include: plentiful sunshine, little to no weed competition , and access to irrigation water the first year when the cuttings are being established. It is acceptable to plant your willow in a location that is seasonably wet (i.e., in the spring or winter), but it is not recommended to plant your willow in a location that is always submerged in water.
It is important to plant your willow far away from your septic system. Willow’s deep roots will travel to search for water, and can easily clog your leach field, necessitating a costly repair.
Planting:
The most important thing to remember when you are planting your cuttings is to plant them with the triangular-shaped buds pointed upwards to the sky. If you accidentally plant them upside down, your cuttings will not grow.
Before planting each cutting, pay attention to which direction the buds are facing, and make sure to orient the buds upwards.
It is best to plant your cuttings in the spring after the danger of a hard freeze. If you plant them and then it is forecast to get very cold at night a few nights, you can cover them (very carefully so as to not rub off buds or shoots) with a piece of row cover or even a bedsheet.
To plant our cuttings outdoors, we use a scrap piece of rebar to poke a hole into the soil, then insert the cuttings (with triangular buds pointed upwards!) into the soil, leaving about 3-4 buds above the soil line. You can also dig a small hole with a trowel and backfill the soil once your cutting is in the ground. If you have loose soil with few rocks, you may even be able to just carefully stick the cutting into the ground without any tools. Once the cutting is in the ground, it is important to make sure it has good soil contact for the roots to grow properly. Use your hands or feet to press very firmly on the soil on all sides of the cutting.
Alternatively, if you have a greenhouse or a very sunny windowsill indoors, you can jumpstart the season by planting your cuttings into pots, and growing them indoors until planting them outside. We like to use 4.5” deep square plastic pots we get from our local farm supply store to grow out our willow in the greenhouse for our local plant sale in May. It is important to provide greenhouse-grown cuttings with fertilization until planting, either by feeding weekly with a water-soluble fertilizer, or by using a potting mix that includes time-release fertilizer. After about 2 ½ months in pots, the willow will have grown about a foot tall, and its roots will be eager to grow out of the bottom of the pot. If you start your willow indoors, as with any transplanted plant, it is important to first harden plants off before planting them outside, or they may experience transplant shock.
Plant spacing
Planting and management instructions vary based on how you plan to use your willow. In general, if you are planning on growing willow for basket weaving, it is best to crowd plants close together to promote thin, straight rods. If you just want a few decorative willows in your perennial garden, you can plant them a few feet apart and let them grow bushier.
We grow our willow for basketry purposes in rows spaced 4 feet on center, with plants 8-10” apart within rows. We like this spacing because it allows the willow to compete with each other while still allowing us to walk down the rows midsummer (just barely). You can put your rows closer together, but it makes it much more difficult to walk through the patch to monitor for insects and disease.
We also have willow planted as accent bushes in our perennial garden. For decorative purposes, we space them about 4’ apart.
If you are planting a living fence or structure, you can plant your willow cuttings close together in your desired shape, then weave the shoots together after the first year. Alternatively, you can plant a patch of willow elsewhere, then in winter, harvest the long rods and plant the entire rods come spring, tying or weaving them to adjacent rods to create a living woven willow fence.
Establishing your new willow patch:
It is important that your willow has little-to-no weed competition while getting established. You can accomplish this by hand weeding and mulching with wood chips or straw to prevent annual weeds from germinating, or sticking your cuttings into plastic landscape fabric or even cardboard boxes.
Our willow is planted in rows 4’ apart, and we use 3’ landscape fabric for the walkways between the willow, with a 1’ wide strip of wood chip mulch around the plants. (See diagram on the left.) We have found this to be an excellent way to manage weeds in our willow patch.
We’ve found that the most pesky weeds in our willow patch are perennial weeds that are difficult to get rid of, like quackgrass and wild brambles. With vigilance and hand weeding, we keep perennial weeds at bay. Once your willow is established, it can tolerate some weed pressure, and will grow quickly each spring and will shade out annual weeds in the understory.
We provide our newly-planted willow cuttings with ample water the first year, especially when the cuttings are first breaking bud and leafing out. Pay attention to how much rainfall you get after planting, and provide additional water to your plants if needed.
It is important to pay close attention to insect pests, especially when establishing your willow patch.
Insect pests:
We have found spongy moth caterpillars, potato leafhoppers, aphids, and especially Japanese beetles, to be our most common willow pests. Usually, the Japanese beetles and spongy moth caterpillars do the most damage, and sometimes need to be picked off by hand and squished if the infestation is bad enough. Spongy moth caterpillars can be easily controlled by the organic spray, bacillus thuringiensis (BT), a soil bacterium that will kill caterpillars. Spongy moths especially love tender young willows, and tend to descend on the willow right as they begin to grow in the springtime, munching the leaves. They can wreak havoc on young plants! We had a terrible spongy moth infestation in our area the year we planted our willow patch, and had to diligently monitor and spray BT and squish caterpillars for weeks.
Japanese beetles show up in full force in midsummer in our area, and also can do a lot of damage on willow plants! They take gigantic bites out of the willow leaves and growing tips of the rods, usually causing the willow rods to branch at every spot where they take a bite. Their feeding is highly dependent on cultivar: we’ve found that the beetles especially love Salix Americana. There is not much you can do organically other than remove them by hand. If the infestation is bad enough, you may decide to use a conventional spray to control the beetles!
Disease:
Since our willow planting is relatively young, we have not yet had personal experience with willow diseases, but there are various fungal and bacterial diseases you may have to contend with. Here is an informative publication from The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station https://portal.ct.gov/CAES/Plant-Pest-Handbook/pphW/Willow-Salix
Pruning:
We manage our willow patch by coppicing, or cutting all of the year's growth to the ground each winter when the plants are dormant. This promotes a flush of thin, straight shoots every year, perfect for weaving willow baskets! It is important to only prune your willow plants when they are dormant, or you will significantly reduce the vigor of your plants. We use this method for our willow in our basketry patch, and the willow we planted in our perennial flower garden.
You can also manage your willows by pollarding them, or letting them grow a permanent trunk higher off the ground, then pruning back to a certain height every year.
If you plant a living willow fence or structure, the general concept is you create a permanent framework of willow, then prune back to that framework every winter, letting the willow resprout every spring from the same place.
You can also just plant your willow and let it grow wild! It is really up to you.
Willow for weaving:
If you are planning to weave with your willow, you must first dry the willow out completely, then soak it in a tub of water to make it flexible again before weaving. You can weave with freshly harvested “green” willow, but as your basket/woven creation dries, the willow will shrink significantly, and your weave will become loose. Drying the willow and then soaking leads to less shrinkage in your weaving.
Troubleshooting/questions:
We are happy to help answer any questions you may have about growing willow. Don’t hesitate to reach out! We hope your willow plants bring you joy!
Happy planting,
Crystal & Scott Van Gaasbeck
Under the Tree Farm
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You'll also find two downloadable PDF guides, one about how to design and build your own underground/earth-bermed greenhouse, the other about how to weave a willow wreath.
]]>For the first time ever, we are offering Primo's garlic for sale. Primo Calabrese was Crystal's grandfather, and he grew his garlic for decades. We don't exactly know the variety, so we just call it, "Primo's Garlic". It's delicious and stores really well. It tends to be smaller, on average, than our German White Garlic, and has more cloves. The plants are much shorter than the German White plants, and have broad, succulent leaves. They emerge from the soil about a week later in the spring, and we harvest the heads about a week after our German White.
Here is a link to purchase 1 lb of either German White or Primo's Garlic:
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Under the Tree Farm’s Garlic Growing Tips
Plant your garlic in fall, just like a tulip or daffodil bulb! In the Finger Lakes Region of NY (we’re in Zone 5b), we plant our garlic the second week of October.
Garlic loves fertile soil and sun! Plant it in the most productive spot in your garden and you will be rewarded with a bountiful harvest. If you have access to compost or composted cow/horse manure, amend your soil before planting. Break up your garlic heads into individual cloves for planting. Each fall-planted garlic clove will grow into an entire head of garlic!
We plant our garlic cloves 10 inches apart with rows spaced 1 foot apart. Each clove is planted about 3 inches deep into the soil with the pointy side facing upwards. Once our garlic is planted, we mulch our beds with a thick layer of oat straw. You can use hay (dried cut grass), straw (dried stems of grain crops like wheat, rye, or oats), or even dry leaves, to mulch your garlic. When we put down the straw, it is quite fluffy (between 4-6” thick), but the snow over the winter compresses the straw into a thinner, more dense layer that provides weed control and soil moisture retention throughout the growing season.
An important step to growing sizable heads of garlic is fertilizing it in the spring when it is 6-8” tall. On our farm, this is usually early-mid May. We sprinkle our fertilizer on top of the mulch before a rain event. You can use an all purpose 10-10-10 conventional garden fertilizer, or an organic garlic fertilizer blend from Fruition Seeds found by following the links below. If it is a very rainy year, we will give the garlic an additional boost with a foliar feed in June. https://www.fruitionseeds.com/shop/gardening-tools-supplies/organic-fertilizer-amendments/organic-gar lic-and-shallot-fertilizer/
Our garlic is a hardneck variety, which means it makes scapes! In our region, garlic begins to scape in early-mid June. Scapes are edible flower stems that grow from the center of the garlic plant and should be removed to encourage the garlic plant to focus its energy on sizing up the bulb. If you leave the scapes on the plant, they will eventually form bulbils (mini garlic cloves!) and flowers. It is best to snap off the garlic scapes near where they come out of the plant and use them for pesto, stir fry, and more.
For fresh green garlic, you can harvest your garlic before the plant has started to dry down. We begin to harvest our garlic around the first week in July for fresh green (uncured) garlic. Green garlic is absolutely delicious and very juicy! If you’ve never tried it, we recommend pulling a couple of heads early to try it. We let the rest of our garlic size up and cure down for a few more weeks, and usually begin our main harvest the third week in July. When the lower leaves of the plant start to dry down, first turning yellow and then brown, you’ll know it’s time to harvest. You may be able to just pull your garlic plants out of the ground, or you may need to use a digging fork to dig them out, depending on how hard and moist your soil is. We like to bundle our garlic in groups of 15, tie them tightly with a string about 6” up the stem from the bulbs, and hang them in a shed with good air circulation to dry. ****If it is a very wet summer, you may want to cure your garden in a high tunnel or greenhouse. Important: If you use this method, you must make sure the temperature stays below ~100°F to prevent damage to the bulbs. We use shade cloth over the garlic itself, or over the entire greenhouse, to keep the temperature down
Good luck, and happy gardening!
Crystal & Scott Van Gaasbeck
Under the Tree Farm
We, along with many other farmers in New York State, lost our entire apple crop this spring due to a freeze event after the apples had set fruit. It was the biggest crop loss in every farmer's memory.
Since then, we have thought of a creative way to share our farm offerings with our community in a year without much fruit: tintype photographs of our farm! Shop farm tintypes
Crystal learned tintype, or ferrotype, photography this summer from John Coffer in Dundee, NY, and has set off on her own making photographs.
She has been enthusiastically making tintype photographs around our farm. We are excited to now offer her original farm tintypes on our online shop!
When you purchase a farm tintype, you are supporting our farm, and purchasing a unique, one-of-a-kind piece of artwork that is a direct representation of the scenes of our farm. Each tintype is made by hand, and is a unique record of the techniques and chemistry used to produce it. This makes them so special!
Ferrotype photography was invented in the 1850s, and involves a large format camera and portable darkroom setup. It is a form of alternative process photography that produces unique, truly handmade, one-of-a-kind photographs.
Tintypes are taken on blackened metal plates. Crystal has been working with aluminum, but is starting to blacken her own steel plates. The entire process requires the photograph to be wet with chemistry, referred to as “wet plate”. Crystal pours the collodion onto a blackened sheet of metal, soaks it in a silver nitrate bath for 3 minutes to make it light-sensitive, exposes the plate to the image, and finally develops, rinses, fixes, and rinses the image some more. All of these steps happen before the chemistry on the plate dries.
Once the plate is fully rinsed, it is air dried, then varnished to prevent damage or tarnishing of the image and to make it archival. Tintypes can be matted and framed like any other photograph.
Crystal is also offering outdoor, natural light tintype portraits, either on our farm, or at your home. She will work with you to create the perfect family heirloom! Email Crystal now to schedule a natural light tintype portrait session: amethystcrystal0214@gmail.com
]]>Every year, Primo's garlic emerges from the soil later in the spring and scapes later than our German White. This year, we're trying something a little different with Primo's Garlic. We are letting it grow for another week or two before harvesting to allow the heads to size up a bit more. The leaves have just started dying down and turning yellow; the plants are still mostly green.
We have found that the last couple of weeks of growing make all the difference in the size of the garlic heads when they come out of the ground. We begin to harvest our garlic for "green", or fresh, garlic, for market the first weekend in July. Each week, the green garlic grows *significantly* larger. We have found that even one week can make a huge difference in the size of the garlic heads!
Usually, we harvest both varieties at once, even though Primo's garlic usually hasn't dried down completely. Primo's garlic has consistently produced smaller heads than our German White, but it stores longer into the winter, and is delicious! We are excited to see if our experiment of leaving it in the ground for another week or two will allow the heads to grow larger this year. We'll report back with our results.
Last year, we only offered our German White garlic for sale online, but this year, we grew enough of Primo's Garlic to offer it online in limited quantities. We must first dry (cure) the garlic for about a month before selling it online. We expect our garlic to be available in our online shop at the end of August/beginning of September. We can't wait to share it with you!
]]>About a week after the deep freeze damaged our apple crop, the baby apples swiftly began to abort and fall off the trees. This photo is of hundreds of aborted baby apples that were killed by the freeze.
The good news is, if we can keep the birds and other critters out, we are expecting a partial blueberry crop this year. Our blueberry bushes were also hit hard by the deep freeze. All the flowers that were open were killed, but the flowers that had not yet opened mostly survived. We suspect that the wild fruit will be scarce this year, however, and there will be a lot of animal pressure on any blueberries we may have. Keeping our fingers crossed!
To make this spring even more challenging, the Finger Lakes Region slipped into a drought, with no rainfall for 6 weeks between the end of April and mid-June. We are thankful to have a productive, deep well, and have been irrigating our crops 24/7. Even though our apple trees do not have fruit, drought stress can be harmful to the health and vitality of our trees and other crops. It has been especially important to irrigate our garlic crop, since it is looking very good, and we want the bulbs to size up nicely!
On top of it all, our area was blanketed in thick, orange smoke during the week of June 5 from the hundreds of wildfires raging in Canada. The first day of thick smoke, the air smelled strongly of burning plastic, which was very strange. Successive days, the air smelled like normal wood smoke. The AQI, or "Air Quality Index", was 391 one day, which means it was dangerous to be outside. We still had to work on the farm, so Crystal wore a respirator, and Scott wore a face mask, and we carried on. It felt surreal, though, and truly apocalyptic.
Thankfully, the smoke cleared after a few days, and rain came the week of June 12. We'll have to wait and see what else this season has in store for us!
To follow along with real-time farm updates, follow us on Instagram @underthetreefarms.
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After speaking with growers from across the region, it is clear that there was widespread damage to the 2023 fruit crop. We heard from a few growers that it was the worst late-season damage they'd ever seen in their decades-long careers.
Damage was severe because temperatures were abnormally low for mid-May. There is speculation that the high-altitude smoke from the Canadian wildfires may have contributed to the low temperatures, but this has not been confirmed. Fruit trees, berry bushes, strawberries, and grapevines were at sensitive developmental stages, and could easily suffer damage. Grapes were nearly at bloom, blueberries were in full bloom, apples were at the end of bloom with fruit set, pears were post-bloom with fruit set, stone fruit were post-bloom with fruit set, and strawberries were in full bloom.
Just a few degrees in temperature can lead to total cross loss. Microclimates and fruit variety played a significant role in whether a farm's crops were spared. Some farmers lost a block of grapes in one location, but grapes planted in a nearby location suffered minimal damage. Others saw severe damage to one variety of grape, while more cold-hardy varieties were spared.
Some farmers employed wind machines, row cover, overhead irrigation, or burned wet round bales of hay in between rows to blanket their farms in a layer of smoke in an attempt to save their crop. In some places, their efforts were successful. Elsewhere, attempts proved futile.
How does a farmer prepare for a once-in-a-career freeze event?
We wonder if it's possible to be truly prepared.
On our own farm in Willseyville, we experienced devastating damage to our apple, raspberry, and blueberry crops across the orchard, regardless of variety. We cut open hundreds of baby apples to find dead, brown centers and damaged tissue in every single one (see photo, above). It's not yet clear whether our trees will abort their entire crop, or we will be left with an entire orchard of damaged, unsaleable fruit. Either outcome is bad news for our small farm, especially since we are still transitioning to our new location in Willseyville, and had planned on this being our first real crop on our young trees.
Not only were cultivated fruit crops damaged by the freeze; wild trees were also hit hard. The oaks had recently leafed out. Now, their leaves are crispy and brown. The hickory and butternut trees- toasted. To make matters worse, the Spongy Moth Caterpillars have recently hatched, and will soon feast on tree leaves. We anticipate widespread strain on our forests this year, and predict that the freeze will cause widespread shortage of wild nut crops that wildlife depend on to survive.
While a year without a crop sounds like smooth sailing and a good year to take a mid-summer vacation, it can actually mean more work for farmers, especially those of us with younger orchards. Next year's crop is entirely dependent on this year's management of our trees and berry bushes. Regardless of whether our trees have fruit this year, we still need to manage weeds, disease, and insect pests all season long.
Without a crop, our young apple trees will be triggered to put on immense vegetative growth this summer, which is leafy and succulent and not fruit-bearing. We will have to carefully manage our orchard by summer pruning and training branches (tying branches down) to reduce the vigor of our trees and promote flower bud formation. Rapidly growing apples and pears are more susceptible to fireblight, which was prevalent in our area last season, and can quickly kill young trees. When apple trees have fruit on them, the fruit naturally weighs down the branches, making them more fruitful the next year, and minimizing the need for summer pruning and training.
Farmers are still assessing damage to their crops, but early predictions look like it will be slim picking this season. We feel fortunate to experience camaraderie in our farming community as we all mourn this season's loss. Undoubtedly, it will cost our local economy millions of dollars, and come with layoffs to farmworkers. Larger farms likely have crop insurance, but small farms like us just have to absorb the losses and carry on. We are thankful for all of the messages we have received of consolation and support!
For more information:
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After a few years of taking care of two orchards (one in Brooktondale and one in Willseyville), we are finally settled into our new place, and have only one orchard to tend. We haven't started pruning yet, but will in a few short weeks. Our trees here are younger, so pruning this year shouldn't take us very much time.
Winter 2022-2023 has been quite mild, and we have had bare ground for a good part of the winter. Crystal is almost done harvesting her first-year willow patch. She coppices the willow to the ground when it's dormant, and dries the willow out for basket weaving. Once the willow rods are dry, they will be soaked in a stock tank, and then woven into baskets. Stay tuned for willow baskets in a few months!
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Under the Tree Farm’s Garlic Planting Tips:
Plant your garlic in fall, just like a tulip or daffodil bulb! In the Finger Lakes Region of NY (we’re in Zone 5b), we plant our garlic the second week of October.
Garlic loves fertile soil and sun! Plant it in the most productive spot in your garden and you will be rewarded with a bountiful harvest. If you have access to compost or composted cow/horse manure, amend your soil before planting. Break up your garlic heads into individual cloves for planting. Each fall-planted garlic clove will grow into an entire head of garlic!
We plant our garlic cloves 10 inches apart with rows spaced 1 foot apart. Each clove is planted about 3 inches deep into the soil. Once our garlic is planted, we mulch our beds with a thick layer of oat straw. You can use hay (dried cut grass), straw (dried stems of cereal crops like wheat, rye, or oats), or even dry leaves, to mulch your garlic. When we put down the straw, it is quite fluffy (between 4-6” thick), but the snow over the winter compresses the straw into a thinner, more dense layer that provides weed control and soil moisture retention throughout the growing season.
An important step to growing good garlic is fertilizing it in the spring when it is 6-8” tall. We sprinkle our fertilizer on top of the mulch before a rain event. We recommend using this organic garlic fertilizer blend from Fruition Seeds: https://www.fruitionseeds.com/shop/gardening-tools-supplies/organic-fertilizer-amendments/organic-garlic-and-shallot-fertilizer/
Our garlic is a hardneck variety, which means it makes scapes! In our region, garlic begins to scape in early-mid June. Scapes are edible stems that grow from the center of the garlic plant and should be removed to encourage the garlic plant to focus its energy on sizing up the bulb. If you leave the scapes on the plant, they will eventually form bulbils (mini garlic cloves!) and flowers. It is best to snap off the garlic scapes near where they come out of the plant and use them for pesto, stir fry, and more.
For fresh green garlic, you can harvest your garlic before the plant has started to dry down. We begin to harvest our garlic around the first week in July for fresh green (uncured) garlic. Green garlic is absolutely delicious and juicy. If you’ve never tried it, we recommend pulling a couple of heads early to try it. We let the rest of our garlic size up and cure down for a few more weeks, and usually begin our main harvest the third week in July. When the lower leaves of the plant will start to dry and turn yellow and then brown, you’ll know it’s time to harvest. You may be able to just pull your garlic plants out of the ground, or you may need to use a digging fork to dig them out, depending on how hard and moist your soil is. We like to bundle our garlic in groups of 15, tie them with a string about 6” up the stem from the bulbs, and hang them in a shed with good air circulation to dry.
Good luck, and happy gardening!
Crystal & Scott Van Gaasbeck
Under the Tree Farm
]]>We just listed our farm-grown garlic, delivered to your door! You can purchase one pound or two pounds.
This variety of this garlic is "German Extra Hardy", often referred to as "Music", or "German White".
Perfect for eating OR planting! 4-6 gigantic cloves per head with a delicious, spicy flavor. If you are planting the garlic, one pound is enough seed to grow roughly 25-30 plants. 2 pounds is enough seed to grow roughly 50-60 plants.
Crystal has been growing our garlic for 11 years now. It is a beautiful porcelain type hardneck garlic. When partially cured, the garlic has beautiful purple stripes that fade to white as it dries completely.
]]>It's mid-June, which means it's garlic scape season and will soon be time to pull in our garlic harvest!
The garlic scapes are a curly stalk the plant sends up right before the summer solstice in our area. If you let them grow, they get quite tall and will have miniature little garlic cloves (bulbils) in them when they open up. We remove the scapes so the plants focus their energy on growing the garlic bulb underground.
I love eating the garlic scapes freshly pulverized into a spicy pesto, cooked like green beans, or thrown into a veggie stir fry.
We're excited because we grew enough garlic this year to finally offer it for sale here on our website. We will sell fresh green garlic at the Ithaca Farmers Market in a few short weeks, and will have cured garlic for sale here online later this summer.
Follow our farm instagram for garlic updates @underthetreefarms
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Here is this year's progression of spring aerials:
We're currently in the in-between period of time when we are done selling plant starts, and waiting for our crops to ripen. There is plenty to do on the farm, training trees, mulching with wood chips and straw, planting annuals (like 1/4 acre of winter squash and PUMPKINS for our farm stand!), mowing, and so, so much more.
Here are our early peas in the high tunnel. They are flowering now, and it won't be too long before we have peas at the Ithaca Farmers Market!
Here is a photo of our new willow planting! We planted about 1/4 acre of basketry willow this spring. Stay tuned- we plan on selling dried willow for basket weaving in years to come on our website.
As always, stay up to date with our farm work by following us on Instagram and visiting us in person each weekend at the Ithaca Farmers Market. instagram.com/underthetreefarms
]]>Only after becoming fascinated with willow basketry on Instagram did I realize how useful the willow could be from an artistic perspective. Photos of beautiful hand woven willow baskets made lovingly by people across America and around the world found their way into my explore feed. I longed to learn how to weave some myself.
Scott in the willows mid-summer
Crystal in the willows in late fall
In winter of 2019-2020, I ordered cuttings of basketry willow from Dunbar Gardens. Willow grows like a weed; just firm a stick in the ground and unless you have very bad luck, a dry spring with no irrigation, too much shade, or intense weed pressure, like magic, it will grow 3-4 feet tall by the end of the season.
We mulched the willow with our usual heavy wood chip mulch, kept it weeded and watered, and watched it flourish. For us, the willow was left alone by most pests, except for Japanese Beetles and Potato Leafhoppers, which didn't do too much damage.
Willow is harvested in the winter, when the stalks are a vibrant rainbow of colors and the leaves are gone. I quickly learned that much of basketry is sorting willow. Sorting rods by length, thickness, color, variety/species, etc. The principle of sorting is crucial to weaving a good basket. You must start with sorted willow, then carefully choose willow of the correct length and diameter for the base, stakes, and weavers.
Our first small crop was harvested in late winter/early spring of 2021, and sorted, bundled, and dried. It was not until December 2021 that I had time to explore actually weaving with the willow. When I did, I was instantly hooked! Taking advantage of a warm spell in December (30 and 40 degree days), I filled a metal stock tank with water, put in a stock tank de-icer to help keep the water warm (spoiler alert: it didn't make the water warm at all but it did keep it from freezing over), and put my entire year's crop into the tank to soak. In ideal conditions of water around 80 degrees F, willow should take a few days to a week, or even 2 at max for really fat rods, to soak. Because the water was so cold, my willow was in the tank for an entire month. I checked on the bundles every day, bending the rods near the base to see if they would bend to a 90 degree angle without breaking. When they would, I took the bundle out of the tank to mellow before weaving.
I was able to weave three baskets with our first crop of willow, and Scott tried his hand at weaving by making a really cool tray using the fattest rods that I couldn't use for my baskets.
We are both very excited about the prospect of growing willow, and plan to plant a 1/4 acre plot this spring. After doing much internet research, I realized how difficult it is to actually purchase dried willow for weaving, and many people don't have the space to grow it themselves. Our plan is to try our hand at growing basketry willow to sell dried on our online shop, so willow weavers across the country can easily purchase it and have it shipped to them. We purchased about 25 new varieties of willow to plant this spring, and have taken hundreds of cuttings from our own willow patch too. All in all, we plan on planting 9, 200' rows at 4 foot centers, with plants 1 foot apart in each row. This means we will be planting 1,800 willow cuttings this spring. We can't wait!
Here are a few photos of my first baskets. I loved every second of weaving them, even though I was left with sore shoulders and blistered fingers. I can't wait to learn more and grow more willow! We are currently working on harvesting the 2021 crop (the willow's second crop), and we can't wait to get it dried so we can both weave more baskets.
Here is my first basket. I was aiming for a small garbage can, but it's so pretty I don't know if I want to use it for its intended purpose!
This pack basket was the second basket I wove. Scott suggested trying to weave a backpack, and I just went for it.
Here is an asymmetrical willow basket. This is the third basket I wove. With each basket, I learned new weaves/techniques.
Stay tuned for more! Be sure to follow us on Instagram @underthetreefarms for updates on our willow patch and weaving adventures.
~Crystal
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And that's a wrap! Just like that, it's mid-November, and we have finished harvesting our fruit for the year. We just closed our farm stand, and are grateful for everyone who has supported our farm this season!
We had the best pear crop ever this year, especially our Bosc and Asian Pears. It has been a challenging year due to excess rain, but we made it to the end and can't wait for next season. Follow us on Instagram @underthetreefarms to keep up with our farm work over the winter, and @underthetreeithaca to keep up with our leather/pottery work.
Scott harvesting Olympic Asian Pears this fall on the farm
We had a wonderful crop of Crimson Crisp apples this season!
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Another apple season at Under the Tree Farm is underway. We are opening our fruit stand very soon (stay tuned!) and we have apples for sale each weekend at the Ithaca Farmers Market. Right now, we are picking Akane apples, which are a gorgeous and delicious Japanese apple. The Akane is a cross between a Jonathan (American apple) and a Worcester Permain (English apple). They are the perfect mix of sweet/tart and are firm and crunchy.
If you were lucky enough to swing by the Ithaca Farmers Market this season, you probably saw that we had stone fruit this year! Peaches, cherries, plums. It has been a rough season with so much rain that our August peaches are succumbing to brown rot, but our earlier stone fruits were delicious and prolific.
Check out these Lavina Plums. They were out-of-this-world delicious!
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It's been a while since we've posted on here since it's been a busy year! It is already garlic season, and we harvested about 3,000 heads of garlic yesterday and hung them up to dry. We will be selling garlic all season at the Ithaca Farmers Market, in our farm stand this fall, and possibly online!
]]>2020 has been a year of challenges on the farm. We had no stone fruit. We had a hard freeze during apple and pear bloom, and many flowers were killed. The freeze also killed most of our outdoor strawberry blooms, even though they hadn't opened yet. We had a summer-long drought. Foxes, yes, foxes, ate a good deal of our remaining strawberry crop. Cucumber beetles and squash bugs destroyed our multiple successions of cucumber plants, despite our best efforts to keep them at bay. Turkeys ate our grapes. Potato leafhoppers killed our potato plants.
Despite its challenges, 2020 has also been a wonderful year. We are farming new land! We cleared honeysuckle and fenced 8 acres in the sweltering July sun. We built a 1/2 mile long farm road. We are building a barn. We cut our own firewood to heat our home this winter. The blueberry bushes we planted in 2019 are growing well! We planted 16 varieties of basket willow with hopes of learning to weave willow baskets. Our apples were delicious and extra sweet from the drought, and we sold them all. Our pears were the best we've ever grown. The winter squash grew so well, and all went to good homes. Our ~900 fruit trees we grafted this spring grew quickly, and are healthy and ready to transplant in Spring 2021. We sold vegetable plants to happy people in the midst of a pandemic, and you grew your own gardens! We had the best customer support at the Ithaca Farmers Market and our fruit stand, and we are so thankful!
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While challenging is an understatement for the season, we have made it to apple season and we are overjoyed! Our fruit stand is NOW OPEN!
After a mild winter, our fruit trees began to break bud this spring, and suffered damage from repeated nights in the mid-20s, damaging or killing many of the blossoms. For our apple crop, it meant that some varieties we have a light crop this year, and other varieties we didn't have to thin. Throughout the summer, it became drier and drier. We irrigated constantly, sending water to crops that needed it most, like our shallow-rooted young blueberry plants, young apple trees, and vegetable crops. It's still quite dry on the farm, and we are giving the apples as much water as we can to size up the crop. It was an extremely hot summer, and the apples this year are very sweet and flavorful!
Come see us at the Ithaca Farmers Market on Saturdays, or stop by our fruit stand!
]]>Hello everyone! We're so glad you're here, and we hope you are safe and well. We've missed everyone since we were unable to attend the start of the season at the Ithaca Farmers Market due to Covid-19 restrictions. As you may know, this is a very challenging time for small business owners everywhere. We are doing our best to adapt to the new normal and offer more farm goods this season. We are growing more annual vegetables this year such as potatoes, greens, peas, tomatoes, melons, summer squash/zucchini, and winter squash. We will try to open our fruit stand prior to apple season with summer vegetables.
Now that we have farm produce and edible plant starts to sell, we will be at market each week unless we specifically announce on our Instagram account (@underthetreefarms) that we will not be there.
We will also be selling our edible plants (tomatoes, peppers, basil, apple trees, kale, sage, cilantro, dill, marjoram, chard, and more) at the Spring Garden Fair & Plant Sale on Sunday, May 16 at the Ithaca Farmers Market. It will be scaled back this year to allow for social distancing, and only edible plants are allowed. Mark your calendars!
We're very excited to announce that we are selling apple trees this spring for local pickup! You can pre-order them on our website, and pick them up at our farm, at the Ithaca Farmers Market, or at the Spring Garden Fair & Plant Sale on May 16. Sorry, we aren't shipping apple trees at this time. Find them here: https://underthetreeithaca.com/collections/farm
]]>The first blooming strawberry of the year.
Strawberries growing in our new Rimol Nor'Easter High Tunnel. We erected this high tunnel in fall 2019 after we received a NRCS EQIP grant. Thank you, NRCS and Rimol!
Shortly after taking this photo, I noticed that the nice oat straw I lovingly mulched the strawberries with is starting to germinate in spots. Oh no! Looks like we'll have to hand pull some oats!
We just finished pruning blueberries + rubbing flower buds off all 2000 of the young blueberry plants we put in last spring. If you look very closely in the above photo, you can see young blueberry plants in those rows.
Golden Russet buds, opening up!
Spring reflections on our farm pond never get old
A wee spring bouquet
Our two faithful cats help us scout the orchard. These are pear trees which still need to be pruned.
Apple trees: pruned and ready for the season, with prunings chopped up by the flail mower in the path between the rows of apples.
]]>https://www.pinterest.com/underthetreefarm/
It's hard to believe that in just about 3 months, our farm will go from looking like this:
to this:
...but it's true!
We can't wait until the world is green again and the apples are blooming. If you're longing for spring too, take a look at our new farm Pinterest account! We are in the process of uploading lots of photos of our farm in all seasons, for inspiration on these dreary dark winter days.
https://www.pinterest.com/underthetreefarm/
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The youngest apple trees on our farm
Williams' Pride apples on the right, grapes on the left
Older apple trees
Blueberry bushes
Goldrush apple trees
Pear trees
]]>We only have a few varieties of apples left to pick for the year (Goldrush, Golden Russet, Enterprise, Winecrisp, Black Oxford, and a few others here and there) along with Olympic Asian pears.
We have a great variety of delicious apples ripe now in our fruit stand and at the Ithaca Farmers Market, including:
Northern Spy- (arguably the best pie apple, just ask your grandma! Also great for eating, with a crisp texture, good flavor, and the perfect amount of tartness)
Jonagold- a cross between Jonathan and Golden Delicious. Crisp, juicy, and sweet, with some acidity and white flesh
Winecrisp- Beautiful deep purple skin, firm, crisp, fruity
Spigold- A cross between Northern Spy and Golden Delicious, these apples are usually quite large, crisp, with yellow flesh, and tend to be similar to a Northern Spy but sweeter. In our home apple crisp tasting tests, Spigold was one of the top performers. Try it in your pie or crisp!
Florina- tasty apple that is a beautiful purple with the bloom (natural wax an apple produces on its skin), and a beautiful red when polished on your shirt, with some nice white speckles. Medium firm flesh, sweet and tart.
Chieftain- Think Red Delicious. Gorgeous and tasty dark red apple with white speckles.
Fortune- Tasty yellow-fleshed apple, spicy flavor.
Keepsake- A galactic-looking red apple with green streaks and white flecks. Delicious, very sweet, firm, juicy, light yellow flesh. We will definitely be planting more of this variety!
Liberty Apples on the farm.
We received our second NRCS EQIP high tunnel grant, and we are making great progress on it. If you look closely, you can see it behind our barn in the photo above, and on the left-hand side of the photo below.
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Find Akane + mixed bags available in our stand on Middaugh Road in Brooktondale.
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Our farm stand is open a week early!
Find Akane + mixed bags available in our stand on Middaugh Road in Brooktondale.
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