Our growing practices...
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To create ongoing improvement on our farm, we are at the start of a multi-year project to remineralize our soil. By replacing some minerals that have been depleted by a century or more of farming, we hope to bring our vegetable plants into balance, making them more resistant to pests, and healthier to eat!
Our inputs are natural materials, things like composted manure, hay, rock powders, and kelp. We never use chemical fertilizer or pesticides.
We buy organic seeds, because conventional seed production is one of the most chemically intensive types of agriculture.
We are committed to using scale appropriate technology. We plant, weed, and harvest all with hand tools.
In the past few years, we have worked to reduce the amount of soil disturbance that we do in general. Why? Because it destroys the delicate structure of the soil, upsetting the beneficial fungi and microbes that help get the plants the nutrients that they need to thrive. Additionally each time you till the soil, carbon is released into the air, and once the soil is loosened it can be washed away in the rain.
The thing is, it's tricky for tiny vegetable seeds to thrive if other plants are already growing. And it's hard to transplant into soil that isn't loose... Tilling is an easy way to loosen the soil and clear it of other plants. Organic farms also use tilling as a method of weed control. Until pretty recently, it was a given that vegetable farmers HAD to till because they couldn't use chemicals to kill weeds. But this is an exciting and innovative time for small scale vegetable growers! Farmers like us have been experimenting, and there are a bunch of cool methods and tools that are allowing us to use the power of nature to till the soil. I like to think of it as "worm-till". In the photo of our farm above, you can see the veggie field has swaths of black landscape fabric covering it in places. We use these pieces of landscape fabric to smother weeds and spent crops so that we don't have to till. We also use landscape fabric between widely spaced crops to accomplish the same thing, but still be able to grow a crop at the same time- winter squash is a prime example of this: You plant a row of seeds every four feet. that's a lot of bare soil between rows, so we covered the bare soil with fabric right after seeding. The squash plants grew so big, that you can't even see the fabric from this photo (it's the right-most top swath of field- next to the road). While the soil was covered, worms were under there working like it was night time 24 hours a day. We never had to water our winter squash, because the soil was shaded from the sun, and protected from the wind, so the rain we got last year was plenty... and it was a really dry year! We harvested the squash in the fall, but left the fabric in place over the winter. In the spring we raked off the dried squash vines, and peeled back the fabric to reveal soil that we could transplant right into with our bare hands.
Our inputs are natural materials, things like composted manure, hay, rock powders, and kelp. We never use chemical fertilizer or pesticides.
We buy organic seeds, because conventional seed production is one of the most chemically intensive types of agriculture.
We are committed to using scale appropriate technology. We plant, weed, and harvest all with hand tools.
In the past few years, we have worked to reduce the amount of soil disturbance that we do in general. Why? Because it destroys the delicate structure of the soil, upsetting the beneficial fungi and microbes that help get the plants the nutrients that they need to thrive. Additionally each time you till the soil, carbon is released into the air, and once the soil is loosened it can be washed away in the rain.
The thing is, it's tricky for tiny vegetable seeds to thrive if other plants are already growing. And it's hard to transplant into soil that isn't loose... Tilling is an easy way to loosen the soil and clear it of other plants. Organic farms also use tilling as a method of weed control. Until pretty recently, it was a given that vegetable farmers HAD to till because they couldn't use chemicals to kill weeds. But this is an exciting and innovative time for small scale vegetable growers! Farmers like us have been experimenting, and there are a bunch of cool methods and tools that are allowing us to use the power of nature to till the soil. I like to think of it as "worm-till". In the photo of our farm above, you can see the veggie field has swaths of black landscape fabric covering it in places. We use these pieces of landscape fabric to smother weeds and spent crops so that we don't have to till. We also use landscape fabric between widely spaced crops to accomplish the same thing, but still be able to grow a crop at the same time- winter squash is a prime example of this: You plant a row of seeds every four feet. that's a lot of bare soil between rows, so we covered the bare soil with fabric right after seeding. The squash plants grew so big, that you can't even see the fabric from this photo (it's the right-most top swath of field- next to the road). While the soil was covered, worms were under there working like it was night time 24 hours a day. We never had to water our winter squash, because the soil was shaded from the sun, and protected from the wind, so the rain we got last year was plenty... and it was a really dry year! We harvested the squash in the fall, but left the fabric in place over the winter. In the spring we raked off the dried squash vines, and peeled back the fabric to reveal soil that we could transplant right into with our bare hands.
For those looking to try no-till in your garden or farm, here is a list of resources we've put together.