All the best farms or gardens have a story. So what’s the story behind Grandpa’s Pasture Garden? Though Grandpa’s Pasture Garden as a market garden is just beginning, its story really started when Grandpa and Grandma Anliker bought an 80-acre parcel between Tumalo and Sisters in the late 1940s. He built the house my family now lives in — out of railroad iron and concrete blocks, finishing in the early 1950s. They raised their daughters and son there, and before they passed away, played a huge role in their grandchildren and great grandchildren’s lives. He was an amazing man who deeply impacted his family for the good, as his grandchildren will tell you. Grandpa wasn’t my grandpa, but from all I’ve learned about him, I wish I could claim him, too.
Anyway, the field I adopted the summer of 2021 was Grandpa’s pasture from the very beginning. As I understand it, the fields around my house were planted to potatoes for many years, eventually being planted to pasture grass and hay, and more recently, cbd hemp. But Grandpa’s Pasture was pasture from the 1940’s until about five years ago. That’s over 60 years of the soil being fed by cattle and protected by grass, which makes it ideal soil for market gardening! The soil is a bit rocky, but I’ve found some small treasures as a result….
Even though most of the property is now leased out for crop production, Grandpa’s Pasture hadn’t been farmed for two years, and the soil had turned to 6 inches of dust through attempts to keep the weeds from taking over. Imagine the dust when the wind blew…. The field is not a convenient size or shape for large farm equipment, and it’s got a rather awkward irrigation setup as well. All things that count against it for conventional agriculture, but all things that make it perfectly suited for my market garden dreams.
For at least 16 years and probably more, I have dreamed of growing a market garden. I’ve wanted to have enough space to grow all the strange and delicious crops I’d like to eat, enough for my family and enough to share. I’ve dreamed of working from (or near) home doing what feeds my soul. The opportunity to “play” with Grandpa’s Pasture with hopes of making it a real market garden in the next few years has been a dream come true.
I’ve been recording the progress of Grandpa’s Pasture Garden from dust (like you can see in the scrolling photo below) to green. By September 7 of 2021, I had a few potatoes (over a hundred), borage, feverfew, khorasan wheat, Dietrich’s Wild Broccoli Raab, dill and a few assorted flower seeds planted in a very small section of the field. All were rescued from my kitchen, transplanted from the garden over at my house, or planted from seeds saved from plants grown in my home garden. You can learn more about the specific plants I’ve successfully grown in Central Oregon or my compulsive seed saving in the blog, “The (not so) Secret Life of Plants“.
July 30, 2022 update. Grandpa’s Pasture hasn’t been irrigated yet this year thanks to late spring showers and the time-consumingness of setting up a course I’m teaching this summer for the first time since we switched to a new system. I would much rather have been outside setting up the irrigation system for the rest of the summer. The field has been green despite no water for around a month, but it’s all weeds– redroot pigweed, lambsquarters, common mallow “pigweed”, and a few others. I only found 4 Russian thistle plants on the whole 2 acres. That was a thrill!
Today I moved pipe to clear the field for the gentleman who offered to disc it to eliminate the weeds that are the only things growing out there at the moment. While I was out there dragging around 40-ish lengths of pipe, I discovered that the Dietrich’s Wild broccoli raab and bachelor buttons managed at set seeds. It was 99 degrees F by the time I finished moving pipe so there were many breaks in the shade. It was fun to use that time to start processing the seed in preparation for saving it for next year.
The focus of this blog will be large-scale life in Grandpa’s Pasture — irrigation, greening, planning, measuring and creating permanent beds, crop protection, tree chips and manure collection, overall crop growth and progress — the day-to-day experiences of creating a successful market garden. I have a backlog of blog posts to write to get you up to date since my youngest son and I laid out irrigation pipe a little over a month ago — as I catch up, I hope you enjoy seeing Grandpa’s Pasture come to life as much as I have!
—The Midnight Gardener
Grandpa's Pasture Garden 