Much as it may look and feel as though things are just getting started, Ambler Farm's “farming” has actually been underway for quite some time. Here’s a brief account of what’s been happening since early January, when Ambler’s Farm Manager Ben Saunders completed his growing plan and placed his seed orders.
It takes about 36,000 seeds to produce the 18,000 or so seedlings that Ambler Farm sells and also plants in both the farm plot and educational gardens. This year, Ben is growing about 60 different vegetables and flowers. Although he orders most of the seeds from outside suppliers, he has also saved some from “gladiator” plants, as he calls them, that did particularly well last year, like the butternut squash that survived all the rain and blight and is actually still good enough to eat.
Getting from germinating seeds to seedlings in the ground is a complex logistical operation that calls for careful planning, many seed trays and a whole lot of organic potting soil – not to mention a flair for making a lot happen in a small space. Most seeds start in 10x20-inch trays with 128 cells. They’ll spend about three weeks there before Ben moves them, one sprout at a time, to trays with fewer cells. The Ambler Farm greenhouse, which is actually an extension of Farmer Ben’s house, is where all these seedlings spend the first 6 to 8 weeks. Starting in mid to late April, Ben begins to move them into an unheated hoop house for “hardening off” so that they’re accustomed to being outside before they go into the ground.
The farm plot itself contains 50 planting beds, each about 30 inches wide and 140 feet long. If you walk down to have a look, you’ll see that some beds have two rows, some have three and some even have four rows of plants growing, depending on the spacing requirements: only 100 plants in a row, for instance, for land-hungry tomatoes, versus 300 in a row for the more crowd-loving broccoli.
Every variety grown at Ambler Farm has a defined harvest window – from 60 days in some cases to nearly 100 in others. For some vegetables – carrots and cabbage, to name just two of many – Ben will plant varieties that ripen at different rates so that as one fades, a new one is coming up. In other cases, Ben will continue to plant seedlings as the season progresses. There’s a good lesson here: you don’t need a lot of land to grow a lot of food (as long as you're willing to do the hard work). Thanks to “intensive" organic farming, Ambler’s relatively small production field -- it’s less than an acre – is able to produce a relatively large amount of delicious produce all season long.
