Barefoot Gardener Advice
Barefoot Gardener Advice:
In April we plant onion, potato, lettuce, carrot, beet, and swiss chard.
In May we plant beans, corn, squash, and cucumbers. Later in May we plant tomato, pepper, sweet potato, melon, and okra.
In June we’ll replant the early May vegetables for later harvest.
By the end of July, as potatoes and onions come out, we plant fall veggies. These include cabbage, broccoli, bok choy, and then in August as other stuff comes out we plant kale, turnips, mustard, etc.
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Our farm has a ban on spring Brassicas, so there are no early broccoli, kale, or cabbage here. They don’t like hot weather and get buggy by June. I can break the insects’ cycle by not having any in the garden in spring and early summer. The cabbage moths fly around trying to find a Brassica, then become quite frustrated and leave. This leaves the garden free and clear for the fall greens, which grow luxuriously as the season cools down.
Great ground guarantees the growing and gathering of gourmet garden greens galore. We get the soil in good shape by adding lime and generous amounts of biodynamic compost in the spring and growing a garden all summer. By mid-August, the spring and early summer crops have petered out, and we are ready for fall Brassicas.
On July 10, and again on July 26, I planted a few rows of Chinese cabbages so I’d have plants ready in August for transplanting. The Napa head variety we grow is Rubicon, and we also grow a leafy one called Michihili.
About a month later, we dig them up and put them 18″ apart in a 4′ wide bed. They can get huge, up to 5 pounds each. Chinese cabbages don’t get cabbage loopers as bad as the standard European cabbages do.
This is a Calabrese sprouting broccoli, and you can see that it is more susceptible to these pesky worms. A covering of Reemay will physically keep the cabbage moths from laying their eggs. There is a bacteria, bacillus thuringiensis, that you can spray on the plants. It makes worms sick and die, but is safe and non-toxic to other animals.
The baby Bok choy variety is Mei Qing, and it is a lighter green color than the full-sized Jo choy. Both of these are easy to grow and are used in Kimchi, which is a Korean version of sauerkraut.
We chop it up, add salt, cayenne, garlic, and ginger, and then squeeze it with our hands to make liquid come out. It naturally ferments if kept submerged in its own juice for a few weeks, then stores well for several months if kept cool.
Before august 15, it is too early to sow the other fall Brassicas, but on August 17, I was sprinkling seeds. This row of Arugula will add a whang to your salads. It is full of vitamins and must be good for you because it tastes really strong. I’m not too crazy about it myself.
Kale is the queen of the tall greens, and we grow a lot of it. Besides feeding us all fall and winter, kale sends up a small broccoli-like shoot in the spring that we love. I call it “brockali”. We’ve been saving this flat-leaf variety for over 30 years, simply letting a little go to seed, drying it, and threshing it out.
There are many reasons to grow a fall garden and cover crops, poetic as well as practical. “Don’t ever let a weed grow up and go to seed”, “your garden won’t harden with plenty of carbon”, “give back to the land and you’ll have plenty on hand”, “keep the garden growing by cover crop sowing”.
The onions are out, the potatoes have petered, the corn is cashed, the beans are burnt and the squash is squished. Say goodbye to the early summer garden, and hello to fall, my favorite gardening season.
I start broccoli, cabbage and lettuce in mid-July. Well, I try to, but the lettuce won’t sprout when the soil temperature is over 75 degrees. Sowing after a cooling rainstorm in mid-August did get some lettuce to come up, finally.
“Don’t plant turnips until mid-August” I was told a long time ago, and it is sage advice. The winter squash patch was mown and the soil rebroken and then harrowed. On this field I seeded a mixture of crimson clover, a little buckwheat, turnip seed and some lime was tossed out and harrowed in.
Sometimes I use sand instead of lime. Turnip seeds are so little that it is hard to get them spread out over the patch. By mixing the seed real well in a bucket of sand, or lime, you can toss it out and get a more even stand.
The same procedure was used nearby for mustard. The variety is Southern Giant Curled. For this turnip patch I planted the traditional Purple Top White Globe.
In the old bean, summer squash and sweet corn field I also mowed, rebroke and harrowed. I plowed furrows through the whole acre and really started having fun. Fourteen rows of kale may be enough for now.
Arugula is a very pungent green that many people love, proving once again that there is no accounting for taste. It is too strong for me. I planted the milder Georgia Collards and then a lettucey chinese cabbage green called Tokyo Bekena. A new one for us is Koji, a hybrid fall green. Mizzuna is a frilly mustard green we always grow, too.
Red Meat looks like a turnip, but it’s a daikon radish. Inside a pale green, baseball-sized globe is a bright red starburst that is delicious right in the field. The specialty turnips we grow include Girl Feather, the White Hakurei and Oasis, the red Scarlet Queen Red Stems and a yellow one called Amber Globe.
It might be a little early for spinach, but I have to try. We love the old heirloom Bloomsdale Long Standing, and are trying a taller one called Viroflay. Later I’ll plant Flamingo Spinach, another of the new, taller varieties.
When I tried to pay for my October bean seed, Lawrence wouldn’t let me because the seed was two years old. It came up fine. He gave me the rest of the sack a few days later as I had a plan.
The potatoes were fantastic this yera, yielding around 500 bushels. The field was mown, reborn and harrowed, and then soon filled with furrows. A rainstorm threatened. Up and down the 700 foot rows I trotted, dropping beans, and covering them up. I finished at little dark and was on the porch when the rain fell.
A month later they are knee high and about to bloom. A mixture of crimson clover, daikons, chinese cabbage and bok choy was tossed over this acre, and then I laid the field by with the last pass of the cultivator. I have about a month to figure out what to do with an acre of October beans.
Other fall covers for the garden will be mixtures of grains and legumes, such as rye and vetch or wheat and peas. These can be sown later than crimson clover and turnips, who need to be in the soil by mid September. Early November sowings of grains and legumes have done well for me.
In gardening, planting takes planning. There are so many factors to consider. Luckily I have 40 years of mistakes behind me, so here we go.
First, where were the crops over the last few years? Crop rotation keeps the ground growing a different crop each year. Most crops can come back to the same land after three years, but peas and melons would rather wait for seven years.
Next, how long will the crop be there? We grow celery, swiss chard and parsley together every year, because they stay in the ground until December. Beans, cucumbers and summer squash each last about 90 days, so they are planted together. Sweet potatoes and peppers go until frost, so they are together too.
But a sweet potato row will devour a early pepper row. We have had to take a machete into the battle between them to save the peppers from the viney mass that sweet potatoes can be in September. You wouldn’t think these spindly slips could ever sprawl eight feet away, but just wait. We plant a row of October beans between them, and they get harvested about the time the sweet potato cines reach their row.
Melons are also viney, so they also get a row of shelly beans next to them. This year its Vermont Cranberry bean, a pretty red and white variety. Okra gets tall, so it needs a row of Shelly beans between it and the tomato patch.
Six rows of tomatoes will make a jungle, so I have a plan. Two beds of lettuce divide the tomato patch in half. The lettuce will be harvested b the time the tomatoes ripen. I’ll mow the bolting lettuce and weeds to create a path through the tomato patch, making harvesting easier and more pleasant.
We also have to think about timing and quantities. If you are going to can pickles, green beans and tomatoes, and freeze sweet corn, you don’t want them all to ripen the same week. By staggering the planting dates, we can have them come in at different times.
How much of each crop you plant doesn’t determine what youll harvest, because every year is so different. We plant lots of everything, but there is only so much land plowed and ready, so decisions have to be made. Four rows of melons became six when we started picturing sweet juicy ones. More than one row of okra would mean way too much time picking it.
Over the winter, I fill up notebooks with my garden plans. I never follow them. A cover crop may need to stay in longer, or a spot may be ready sooner than another. Varmints, like deer, ground hogs and raccoons are an issue too.
Plans make plans make plans. It is endless, watching the mind. Eventually we just have to plant. Knowing we’ll get something wrong is somehow comforting. The beauty of gardening is its temporal nature, it will grow, get crowded, over-produce, and eventually be plowed back in for another year of thinking about it.
Storage crops have always been an important source of income for the farm. Living far from markets, I’d rather go less and carry more. Fresh vegetables are great, but need to be moved quickly. When I go to market, I like to be able to grab bushels from the storage areas that are already harvested and ready to go.
Potatoes are number one on the list. We planted 2,500 pounds of seed potatoes this spring. Some drowned in an area by the cave that gets flooded routinely. When they built the chicken house above my old home, they changed where the water drained, so now it all goes one way instead of two. This increase on the northside fills up the lower half of the organic garden there by the cave. It will have to be planted in grass for hay, I guess.
So I decided to try and grow fall potatoes, something I’d never tried before. Feed and seed stores gave me or sold cheaply their leftover bags of sprouting seed spuds. We composted and plowed up the old pumpkin patch, which had a rank growth of wheat and Austrian peas almost head high by June. I laid off furrows and we planted most of them whole. I thought cutting these wrinkled masses of sprout might increase their chances of rotting. It will be interesting to see what happens to a potato field planted on the first day of summer, rather than the normal planting on the first day of spring.
Sweet potatoes are another great storage crop. By placing horse manure under the bed where we started the slips, the plants were being pulled a full month earlier. So we plated ¾ of an acre all in one planting, and they look great. They are laid by, except for a bit of hand pulling of weeds we missed.
The third storage crop we’ve been selling for 30 years is butternuts. All winter squash store well, but none beats butternuts. A butternut grown in 2007 stayed on my mantle through 2008 and was still hard and edible in 2009. I’m going to plant a late crop of these in the first week of July, following a garlic crop. This requires 90 days, so I think I still have time. If not, another failure is a success in that I learn again what not go do.
Speaking of garlic, this is another traditional Long Hungry Creek Farm specialty. People know us for our garlic, again from over 30 years of selling it if stores well until late winter.
Our onions have done well the last few seasons. I’m finally learning their secrets. Fall plowing is essential, but compost is not. They can use the leftover fertility from the heavy composting of a previous potato or corn patch.
Onions go in around March 15, and need lots of hoeing. It gives us great practice to hoe onions in April, so that by May we are used to long days with long rows to hoe. Getting them out requires a dry spell in July, as wet weather at harvest can cause many to suffer from rotting.
I’m going to learn how to store beets. A second planting in early May caught up with the mid April sowing, and needed way less weeding. Whenever we can stir the ground a few times before planting, many sprouting weeds are destroyed and it makes for an easier time growing the crop.
We planted beets a third time with the late potatoes. I don’t know if they’ll survive summer, as they, like potatoes, are known a cool weather crop. But you never know until you try.
The cellar will store the potatoes and beets, and the winter turnips. Above it is the warm, dry area for the sweets and butts, and we affectionately call them. Onions and garlic will hang from the rafters.
This winter, when Nashville’s local food supply is limited, I hope to be able to offer up some goodies. Along with kale under row covers, these storage crops will make a lot of people happy next February.
Diligent hoeing takes up a lot of our time. The young plants need assurance that no weeds will bother them. But more importantly, we hoe to conserve soil moisture. By keeping the soil surface loose, the moisture underneath does not leave. If the soil is tight, capillary action evaporates and dries out the soil, wicking away the previous water the same way a candle wick draws up wax.
Irrigation is not necessary here. We get plenty of rain. By building a live soil humus, winter and spring rains soak in and supply water to the crops during summer. Compost, cover crops and tillage are more efficient than an irrigation system.
I can’t find any potato beetles. The plants must have a high sugar content, because if they didn’t there would be little red Colorado beetle larvae devouring the leaves. Bugs do not have a pancreas, so they cannot digest sugar.
If you want bugs, use commercial fertilizer. The nitrate nitrogen will use up the sugar in the plants so that bugs can eat them. Then you use the poisons on the plants. These are the recommendations from the fertilizer/pesticide industry which funds the land grand colleges and the USDA extension service.
Old time farmers don’t have extra money from subsidy and crop insurance, so they rely on composted manures. It’s the cheaper way to go.
May/June — The season begins with bright colors and crisp tastes: lettuce, green onions, parsley, carrots, peas, swiss chard, beets, garlic, summer squashes, and new potatoes.
July — It’s too hot for lettuce or peas now, but the diversity increases with green beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, corn, melons, flowers, and fresh herbs like sweet basil, dill and oregano, in addition to the other June crops.
August — This is the peak diversity of the season! A few crops like cukes, chard, summer squash, and carrots finish their season, but acorn and spaghetti squash, watermelons, peppers, leeks, mustard, and celery embellish the already abundant weekly boxes.
September/October — Cool weather brings tender mustard greens, lettuces, kale, collards, chinese cabbage, bok choy, tat soi, arugula, mizuna, parsley, kohlrlbi, turnips, and daikon radishes. We will be harvesting these hardy veggies through December. Enjoy the last of the tomatoes, melons and other summer crops, and get ready for sweet potatoes!
November/December — Abundant potatoes, butternut squash, sweet potatoes and garlic will continue to compliment your greens the remainder of the season. Expect Autumn treats such as gourds and pumpkins or a sprig of mistletoe to keep the season full of love and light.
Around April 1st the seeds are sown in a cold frame, or a tray on the windowsill. Six weeks later they are ready to set. Holes are dug four feet apart and a quart of water is poured in them. The roots are set in the mud and covered with dry soil. If the vine is long I lean them over, cover with earth, and only leave the top few leaves above ground.
Tomatoes love a loose, well-rained soil with plenty of organic matter. We use biodynamic compost to enrich the gardens and build a live soil humus full of beneficial microbes, which keep the plants healthy. Too much nitrogen will give you all vine and no fruit, but that’s not a problem if you don’t use artificial fertilizer.
Another way to add organic matter is mulching, and tomatoes love it. Old hay laid down thickly keeps the moisture in and the weeds out. It also keeps the fruit off the soil.
A tomato touching the ground is a rotten one, so we stake them up. A row if tobacco sticks and twine on each side props them up. Indeterminate varieties continue to grow and bear fruit all summer long and definitely require staking. Determinate varieties bear all at once and then fade out but we stake then anyway. You’ll get more and better fruit by keeping them up from touching the soil.
Diseases are a problem, but the wide spacing allows for air flow between the vines, and this helps. A black spot on the blossom end indicates a lack of calcium. Lime is the remedy, either ground limestone or crushed egg shells will work. A fermented tea made from horsetail (equisitun arsense) helps prevent diseases because of its high silica content. The beautiful sphinx moth has a giant caterpillar called the tomato hornworm. Ours are killed by a wasp that lays her eggs on the back of the worm; so it’s not an issue in organic gardens. Stick bugs mar the fruit, which is one reason to harvest early.
The term vine-ripe tomato is a marketing ploy. The stores I used to sell at when Nashville had locally owned health food stores, refused vine-ripe tomatoes. They insisted the tomatoes were picked green with a slight blush, so they could ripen up inside, away from bugs and diseases. Tomatoes ripen perfectly well off the vine, but we like to harvest them about a day or two before dead ripe.
Hybrids, like Early Girl and Park’s Whopper, offer disease resistance and large yields. When grown organically they taste superb. We grow lots of heirloom varieties, too, like the dark Black Trifele from Russia, the Golden Jubilee and the pink Mortgage Lifter. This last one used to be called Radiator Charlie until the farmer paid off his mortgage with its huge crops.
Tomatoes and sweet basil not only go well together on a plate, they are companion plants in the garden. We can a lot and like to use paste tomatoes, like San Marzano for sauce. The home gardener grows the best thing money can’t buy, or at least the second best.
Successively sowing summer squash seeds surely secures a supply of squash and a successful season. We start in May and two months later planted the last three rows. Little ones are sprouting up as the old ones bite the dust.
There are many kinds of summer squash, but none as early and prolific as Early Prolific Straightneck. I wonder where it gets it name? A crookneck is similar but has the more traditional curvy look. We call them yellow squash and fry them with oil and onions in butter, another squash we grow is Zepher, but half of it is light green.
Garlic
A great crop of garlic graces the garden shed. Tied in bunches and hung from nails in the rafters, it creates quit a sensation. Although the sight is on to behold, especially for garlic lovers, the aroma really stands out.
Each clove of garlic, sown in the fall, makes a bulb. They are planted six inches apart in rows 18 inches wide. A thick hay mulch is laid on over them immediately.
It was October when we planted the garlic patch, but I usually get them in during September. The beds received a healthy dose of compost and the soil was well pulverized. Only the biggest cloves from the best bulbs are used for seed, which insures the biggest and best harvest.
The small green shoots emerge through the hay in about a month, then winter comes and plant life comes to a seeming standstill. But underground the roots are still active, until the dead of winter. When the weather warms, new green growth appears.
By April it’s a foot tall and thriving. We pull weeds and shift the mulch around to smother small ones. Having plenty of hay between the beds makes this easier.
At the end of May flower stalks shoot up and curl. The distinctive pigtails or racombole garlic are called scapes. They are a culinary delicassy and we snap them off to send to our customers. By relieving the plant of it’s flower and seed, more energy is put into the making of the bulb.
Towards the end of June the tops wither and it’s time to harvest. I run through the beds with the subsoiler to loosen the soil so we can pull them up. They are laid in shallow piles to sun dry for a couple of days.
I treat them like eggs, being gentle and careful. A little of the hay mulch is put on the truck bed so they don’t get bruised when loading. Baling twine is used to tie bunches of 15 to 20 together.
Each bulb has about eight cloves, so it will take on eighth of the harvest to replant a similar sized field. We got through the crop and set aside the biggest and best ones for seed. Any bulbs that are damaged or not fully covered by their sheath are also set aside to be used first, as they won’t store well.
Up in the rafters we look for wasps, which need to be knocked down. Then the bundles are passed up and hung from nails that are about a foot apart. Here they hang and finish curing.
Hanging garlic gives the shed the look of cornucopia, but the smell is what overcomes you. Dreams of Italian dishes will have to suffice until the tomatoes come in. Until then it’s roasted garlic on baked potatoes, sauted garlic in omelets, and raw garlic for the hardy garlic lovers.
Mulching
By July, we try to hang up the hoes and make much use of mulch. The benefits of mulching are similar to hoeing; it controls weeds and conserves moisture. But mulch has the added asset of bringing carbon into the garden.
In June, I like to see clean rows of vegetables. The summer crops like warm soil, so we don’t mulch right away. Constantly stirring the soil releases nutrients and makes it easier for the roots to penetrate.
Once our crops are established, many won’t need any more attention until harvest. Potatoes and sweet corn are laid by, and the winter squash and sweet potatoes will just need a bit of weed pulling. Bats and other spring crops have already made and will be out soon.
So we turn our focus to tomatoes, cucumbers and summer squash. Big rolls of old hay are set at various spots around the garden and a fork starts peeling off the layers. This is a dusty job.
In between the plants and in between the rows, hay is laid down at least a foot thick. Pile it on deeply is the mulching motto. Rain and footsteps will pack it down a whole lot, so mulching is not a time to be stingy.
Farmers have cut hay by mid-summer, and often have some left over from last year, which they sell cheap. Expect to pay enough to cover their expenses in making the hay. Square bales are much easier to deal with, but will be more experience.
Weeds are an issue. I try to avoid Johnson grass, but it finds its way in sometimes. We spot it’s corn-like sprouts and pull them immediately. A thick layer of hay won’t sprout, but the seeds may stay viable. An advantage we have is that we make our own hay, although I’m not adverse to using my neighbor’s old hay.
Underneath the mulch the soil stays moist. The vegetables love this, and prove accordingly. Having hay between the fruits, and soil also prevents rotten spots on the vegetables. And after a few months of hoeing, a mulched garden is a blessing.
But the real blessing is still to come. When we farm without bagged fertilizer, our fertilizer comes from the life in the soil. As the hay slowly decays it becomes incorporated into the organic matter of the soil. With compost and it’s myriad of microbes, the old hay increases next year’s fertility.
So we mulch to help our soils, besides helping our crops. It’s a beautiful sight to see nothing but vegetable plants poking up through the hay. With the mulching done and the hoes hung up, our backs feel better too.
Hoeing
There has been a lot of hoeing going on around here. Miles of rows have been planted, and the inevitable weeds are sprouting along with the crops. It is important to loosen up the earth next to the emerging seedlings so they can breathe.
Short chipping motions cut the soil up and a quick pull though the chipped soil shatters the small clumps. I like it a little moist so the penetration is easier, but it can’t be wet because it will form clods rather than break apart.
We want our crop to be able to send their roots wherever they want to go. That’s why I love to plow deeply, sticking the shanks in as far as I can get them in. the chisel plow can till a foot deep but does not invert the soil like a mold board plow does. This keeps the subsoil down where it belongs, but opens it up for the roots to get in.
Hoeing is just a tickling of the soil surface, like a light massage. The first time though we pull the dirt away from the little plants. We have to get all of the green out; the small grass really wants to recover the newly bared earth. Nature abhors a vacuum and tries to hide her nakedness with a green dress. We will give her one, but it will be one of our own choice.
Crops like beets grow thickly in the row and we can only hoe the sides. But most of the crops like a bit of elbow room, so we stroke the hoe between them in the row. Leaving the soil surface uneven is helpful, because the hoe goes in easier than if it’s perfectly flat. The undulations create more movement, as gravity rolls the dirt, so more weeds get disturbed. The tiny hills and valleys also allow more soil surface to have access to the air.
Air is composed of nitrogen, oxygen and small percentage of carbon dioxide and water vapor. Plants turn these into sugar, starches, carbohydrates and protein. We want the crops to have all the air they need. So after every rain, which seals and flattens the soil surface, we rough it up again.
I try to keep my back straight and shift my weight around, using both sides of my body. Alternating long and short strokes releases tension which can build up at the sky, and sitting down with the plants also break up the monotony of being a hoeing machine.
Stepping on hoed ground defeats the purpose. Every step plants weeds because it firms the soil, so then the weeds sprout, and also compacts it, hindering the air flows. Not walking in the garden is a hard lesson to learn. The word “garden” implies a place to walk, but that would on a path in a more formal flower garden. Our gardens are actually cropland and once they are hoed and fluffed up we stay off. We’re usually pretty tired by then anyway.
Plowing and Harrowing
Plowing and harrowing leaves the soil fully pulverized, soft and fluffy. Even after a rainstorm the tilthe will remain loose and mellow. If it gets hard, the organic matter is too low and there is nothing to fluff up. If the percentage of organic matter is high (4 to %%), a lack of biological activity is indicated.
The last two conditions are remedied by good quality compost. We ferment manure with bedding, soil, and garden refuse for a year, and apply it liberally on the crop land. 50 tons to the acre figures out to be about a third of an inch thick, spread over the whole field. A few years of this, along with cover crops, builds up a live soil humus with plenty of organic matter and beneficial micro organisms.
I need to walk in a field and sink down a few inches into the soft soil. Silky, velvety, satiny to the feel, the garden is like a down pillow, impressionable and responsive. Now I can start to picture a crop growing here.
The farmall tractor has shoes behind the back tires that lay off rows about 45 inches apart. After the first pass, I turn the tractor around and put one tire in the outside row, replowing it and making the next row with the other tire and shoe.
The soil must be dry enough to fall apart when a handful is squeezed and dropped, otherwise it will form clods. If soil is coming up on the tractor tire, it is probably too damp to be out there. One of the hardest jobs for a vegetable grower is simply that waiting for the ground to dry. The calendar says it’s time to plant, and the seeds are still in the house.
Instead of working moist soil and planting, we find other jobs to do. I’d much rather plant in dry soil with a few dry days ahead, so I can rake or harrow over the tops of the rows. A prolonged wet spell in the spring means lots more weeds. If the garden is unplanted, I can take care of them with a tractor. Late gardens do great here in Tennessee anyway, so I try not to rush it.
Once the rows are laid out, we drop the seed by hand and step on it. This firms it into the soft soil, insuring good seed to soil contact. The seeds absorb moisture from the soil even if it doesn’t rain, if they are compressed with the earth. I straddle the rows with the cultivators down to cover up the rows with loose soil.
In a few days I harrow over the whole field, being careful not to put the tires on top of the rows. I can follow the tracks left by the shoes behind the tires on the previous pass which covered up the rows. Sometimes it rains and I don’t get to do this, and we’ll have to get in there with the hoes sooner than if I so get to harrow.
When the crop emerges, I like to leave it alone until the second set f leaves appear. The first leaves are called seed leaves, or cotyledons. These leaves nourish the elementary, emerging plant, as the roots are not yet well formed. In a few days the true leaves appear, indicating lateral roots and a good connection to the earth. Now it’s time to aerate and check evaporation by cultivation, to again leave the soil soft and fluffy.
Plowing and harrowing leaves the ground the way I like it. Bigger clods below and only fine soil on the surface. Rototilling leaves the soil fine too deeply, and our heavy rains then pack it. Harrowed land breaks up easier after a rain. In a small garden, a rake does the job of a harrow. The less we work the soil, the better, as long as it is pulverized and loose.
Nature’s Mysteries
Plowing is one of nature’s mysteries. I plow to fluff up the soil in the springs, but plowing destroys soil structure. This irony is hard to explain but easy to experience. I’ll try to explain my experience. Over the winter the ground gets packed down. A cover crop of crimson clover and turnips, or rye and watch, or wheat and peas, helps to alleviate the affect of heavy rainfall. But it needs to be turned under so we can plant garden crops. The root growth of the cover crop is what actually builds soil structure, not the plowing it in. a grass and clover sad is the best cover crop, and is best plowed in the fall with a moldboard plow. The mystery is moderation. Like many things in life, tillage is necessary but too much is detrimental. I want to pulverize the soil just to the extent that what’s growing there dies and decays, but still leaves the soil structure, created by the cover crop roots, intact. I started farming with my dad’s equipment, a plow and a disc. After plowing I disced the field. It still had clods. So I disced again and it looked a little better. Another few passes with the disc and the ground was powder. I thought this was good soil structure. Then it rained. The clay powder and water formed a big brick the size of my garden. I was starting to learn something. I’d seen the same phenomenon after rototilling; a fine seed bed turned into cement after a hard rain. An old timer gave me the clue.
“Plow, and then lightly harrow, but don’t over work the soil”. I threw the disc and tiller away, and got a chisel plow and harrow. My dad’s land was a sandy loan where the disc and tiller aren’t destructive like they are on a clay loam. I learned a little tillage goes a long way. The soil has a life of its own, and when we run over it with equipment and through it with iron, this life suffers. We need to plow gently, slowly, and as little as possible. And we must take care to reinvest in the soil biology. Time is on our side. After I mow the cover crop, I run the chisel plow, also called a re breaker, length wise through the field. The shanks are a foot up ant and dig in about a foot deep. This tillage disturbs the cover crop, but certainly doesn’t kill it. My next chore is spreading compost, which has the life in it. Microbes in the compost feed on the decaying organic matter from the cover crop and in the soil. Then I’m back over the field with the chisel plow, but this time I go crosswise, so now the soil is cut two ways and the cover crop gives up trying to re grow. At this point I have a desire to go over the soil several times, completely pulverizing it and making a fine seed bed. But I have learned not to do this, because I want a garden and not a cement sidewalk. I will be cultivating the soil during summer, and this subsequent tillage will remove grass clumps and clods while the garden crop is growing. It doesn’t need to be done all at once before planting. The third and final pass with the chisel plow happens in a week or two, with a section harrow chained behind. The ground still looks rough afterward, but the cover crop is gone, the compost is incorporated, and it’s ready to make rows and plant. The finer the seed bed, the more of a crust will form, so I try to keep it rough. The life in the soil will soften it up in a way the tractor and tillage equipment can never do. We do make finer seed beds for crops with, tine seeds, such as carrots, lettuce and beets. But these crops get extra compost and much more intensive hoeing and tending. We are constantly breaking up the crust around them. Nature teaches us give and take, moderation, and tender loving care. We have to plow and loosen the soil, but not so much as to lose the precious structure that holds it together. Life in the soil gives us good tilthe, that nice crumbly structure. We can learn nature’s mysterious ways, I just wish sometimes that it didn’t take so long.
Spring Garden
April is the month of planting the spring garden. Onions go in first, and then potatoes. These are the two crops that the king’s deer don’t eat, so we don’t have to plant them inside the deer fence. All other vegetables and fruits can be destroyed if unprotected.
Once the ground loses its winter chill, the rest of the early garden goes in. we sow head lettuce’s in long rows now for transplanting into beds in about a month. This years varieties include Avenue, Nevada, Magenta, Mottistone and Michelle, which are all Batavian or Summer Crisp lettuces. Crispins and Summertime are iceberg types, and Red Sails and Tropicana are Grand Rapid varieties. Buttercrunch is Bibb type lettuce and Winter Destiny and Jericho are Romaines.
French Breakfast is a long radish, and we are trying s new one called Purple Plum. For an experiment, I mixed radish and lettuce seed together, thinking I’ll pull the radish in a month and let the lettuce grow out.
We grow a lot of Parsley. Forest Green and Italian Giant are the curly and flat leaf varieties, respectively. French Swiss Chard is our favorite, chard, although we are getting colorful with Ruby Red and Golden Sunrise.
The leeks are King Richard and the celery is Utah Tall. Arugula is a pungent herb, Sorrel a lemon-flavored leaf, and chives are like tiny green onions. Valerian and Chamomile are medicinal herbs sprouting in a cold frame.
I like the old timey carrots and beets. Scarlet Nantes is a sweet carrot, and Danver’s Half long gets a little bigger. Both require a lot of hand work.
Detroit Dark Red is the standard beet, but we are also growing three other ones. Chioggia is a pretty, Italian heirloom with alternating red and white concentric circles when sliced crosswise. Crosby beets are flatter, their diameter is larger than their height. For a golden beet we are trying Touchstone. We plant the beets in a 5 inch wide row, and then thin out the baby beet, first.
The pea patch has Oregon Snow Peas, and two English shell peas. One is Little Marvel, and the other is Freezonia. We don’t have much luck with peas, I think mice and voles eat the seed and the stand is poor.
All of the summer vegetables will have to wait. A frost is still possible in early May, and they are not hardy. But all of the spring garden plants can take frost and thrive in cooler weather. The rest of April is for composting and plowing the soil so we will be ready to plant in May.
Composted Chicken Litter
“Composted” chicken litter is not compost or a fertilizer. It is a toxic waste product from a horrible industrial process known as commercial chicken houses. The small and poisons create ill feelings with neighbors and it pollutes the land and water, besides the air. The only place it should be spread is on the heads of those who profit from the broiler industry, but they live in other countries.
We’ve been making compost for the 2011 crop. The ground is still a little cold for planting most vegetables, so we are holding back. There will be plenty of time for gardening.
Setting the bucket perfectly level, I inch forward into a spot where cows have fed. Lifting it up, I break the hay apart. Once it’s down to ground level, I start to make the pile.
Usually there is some compost left over from last year. This is full of microbes that will help break down the new pile. I try to get black humus interspersed throughout the fresh manure and hay.
Fluffing it up with a front-end loader is not easy. It is packed in tightly from the cows. But as I work the hay feeding spot the pile soon forms. I want plenty of air so the microbes can breathe.
Anti-biotics, and the other medications, in the feed for commercial chicken houses kill the beneficial microbes. What’s left are the bad ones. You can tell by the odor. Evacuate your homes if this toxic waste is spread nearby, especially if you have children. It has long term detrimental health effects on lungs, and often causes headaches and nausea right away.
I make our piles about five feet tall, ten feet wide out the base, and as long as need be. Sprinkling soil in helps it to decompose properly. A slight indentation at the top allows rainwater to soak in, which is important for the microbes.
The pile will have a slight ammonia smell for a day or two , which an be avoided by a covering of leaf mold or rotten wood chips, which soak up the excess nitrogen. We don’t spread it on the fields until a full year, or more, has passed. By then it smells like rich, woodsy soil.
I was offered a manure pile, but I smelled something toxic. This time it was herbicides. I can hardly believe it is still legal in our country to spray herbicides, which contain some of the most deadly, cancer causing chemicals ever invented. Do not believe that herbicides are safe, they really hurt you and the land. I could not use this manure, it was poisoned by the herbicides, which are more chemical waste products.
Compost heals the earth. It needs to come from a healthy farm. Please be careful with toxic substances, they affect you, your health and your neighbor.
Potatoes
The potatoes are tucked into the soft ground up on the Purcell Hill. We use potatoes to build better soil. This year we planted 1700 pounds of seed potatoes.
The fields were well composted and turned last fall. The land was hard packed, it hadn’t been plowed in a generation or more. A typical ridge, the clay was yellow and the top soil thin; allowing plenty of room for improvement.
Early in the spring we rebroke it with the chisel plow, and I decided it needed more compost. Easter weekend found me spreading another 33 loads and plowing it in, finishing up by headlights.
Spud cutting had been going on, and by the afternoon of the next day we had those planted. A piece is dropped in a furrow, stepped on, and then another dropped a foot in front and on down the row we go. Back on the porch we cut up til 11:00 that night.
I take off the seed end first, and then find the stem on what’s left. I don’t want to mistake the stem for an eye. Each piece should be the same size of a hen’s egg and have an eye or two.
You can’t sleep late here with all the racket the birds make at first light. They are excited, too. By the end of this day all the rows are planted, stepped on and covered up.
I’ll harrow over the rows in about ten days, and then keep them cultivated. At the final cultivation, I’ll put disc hillers on the tractor and throw soil up around the vines. Hilling potatoes keeps them from having those green spots, which are not good to eat. It also helps me know where the row is when we dig them.
Once they’re out of the soil, I start planting cover crops. Buckwheat is a favorite, it loves to grow in the summertime. By mid August I want crimson clover and daikon radish planted, too. Depending on when the potatoes are harvested, the cover crops are planted separately or all at once. I prefer the latter, which I do by putting an once of daikon and a quart of crimson clover with four gallons of buckwheat and broadcasting it over about a quarter acre.
Because the land was in a healthy sod, despite its hardness clay and low fertility, a lot of fungal activity develops as the sod rots over winter. The compost really helps by bringing in more microbes. By keeping the soil loose, fluffy, and well composted, potato beetles aren’t interested. They are looking for potatoes growing where the soil lacks humus. We control them by insuring the soil is humus-rich.
The potatoes stored from last July are firm and perfectly edible. No wrinkles and ugly sprouts, but the eyes are white and lively. Potassium fertilizers makes potatoes grow but they don’t store near as well.. I don’t want water soluable fertilizers at all, they mess things up.
We’ll let the buckwheat mobilize potassium and calcium, the diakons and their unique microbes can help with phosphorus and sulfer, and the clover brings in nitrogen. The land will then be ready for more gardens.
Blueberries
Blueberries grow well in Tennessee. There is a big patch of Hwy 231 before the bridge over the Cumberland River, and one across from the winery in Macon County. We have a small patch for our own use, but just planted another row on the farm.
A friend in Summertown invited me over to dig some plugs from an old patch near where he lives. New shoots were coming up everywhere, and in a few hours we had about 50 of them in pots. A few dozen came up bare root with long roots on them, and I am trying to make root cuttings for plants later on. Agriculture is free. I want to learn how to propagate fruits and berries so folks don’t have to pay exorbitant prices to get an orchard started. The apple and pear trees I graft cost me less than a dollar each, but it often costs $10 or $20 for a fruit tree. I’m going to figure out how to start blueberry plants, too.
The soil for a successful blueberry patch cannot be limey. Unlike most crops, they require an acid soil. We added peat moss to the holes we dug, which were about five feet apart. We also gave each hole a half cup of elemental sulfur. Sulfur lowers the Ph of soil.
A five gallon bucket of compost was incorporated into each hole by mixing it all up with a digging fork. Then I emptied the pots and put the litter berry plants in the good looking soil and firmed them in with my feet. A splash of water from the nearby pond finishes the transplanting. Perennial weeds, particularly Bermuda grass, are the biggest problem for us in our present patch. We mulch them because the blueberries love to grow with high organic matter around their roots. But the wiry roots of the Bermuda grass invade the mulch and try to smother the bushes. Itís a battle trying to keep the invasive grasses out of the berry patch.
The new row of blueberries is in the onion field. Iíll be able to cultivate on either side of them. I hope to keep the grasses under control by growing a row of a cultivated crop, like onions, on either side of the berry row.
Grapes are propagated by taking cuttings from last yearís growth and burying them deeply, leaving one bud above ground level. Blackberries bend their long arching branches back into the soil and the tips make roots there. We clip them off and dig up the new plant. Raspberries sprout up new plants in the patch, and we thin them out by digging up plants where they are real thick.
Fruit is an important part of our diet. It has vitamin C and tastes so good. Excess can be made into jam or wine, and we often freeze some for blueberry pancakes or pies in the off season. Wild blueberries thrive in Tennessee, and this observation tells us that we live in a good place to grow other berries, too.
Biodynamics
Biodynamics has an organic farming method, born in 1924, which suggests that the use of artificial fertilizers will have a detrimental effect on our soils and eventually our human spiritual development. It appeals to me because it values old-time farming practices, such as using compost, cover crops and manure.
By giving back to the earth these farm-produced fertilizers, a rich humus soil is created and maintained with very little cost.
Food is carbohydrates, proteins and fats made up of mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Guess what? These four elements are given to every farm freely in the form of the rain and air above our soils. Add a little sunshine and ‘poof’ ‘ plants can’t help but grow, just like they’ve been doing for eons. They don’t need artificial fertilizers, which, although promoting quick growth, lead to an unhealthy, unbalanced plant that is more susceptible to insect and disease problems.
‘Farms need cattle’ my dad used to say, and old-timers knew the importance of keeping animals on the farm. Biodynamics echoes this by pointing out that with the right number of barnyard animals, the farm will become a self-sufficient individuality. This means their manure not only fertilizes enough land to grow all of their food, but food for the farmers and crops to sell, too.
Farm animals transform plant growth and can fertilize more land than is needed to feed them. By moving the cattle around the farm, and carefully making hay and compost, a farm becomes a self-contained entity, capable of exporting some of the free carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen which is in the air and rain above it. Biodynamics reminds us of the old-timers’ advice ‘make do with what you’ve got.’
Planting by the signs is another old-time farming practice biodynamic farmers and gardeners employ. The planets and stars are constantly changing position and probably affect plant growth more than we know. Seventy-five years of biodynamic research has proven its effectiveness.
Homeopathic doctors use very small quantities of specially prepared medicines to cure people of diseases. Modern scientists have discovered the affects of radiations. Before the mid-19th century, instinctual peasant wisdom suggested that, by certain practices, people could make themselves and the land more fit to grow crops. In biodynamics, we concentrate the forces of certain substances to make powerful remedies to heal the earth.
Cow manure has great plant growing potential in it, as any old-timer will tell you. We strengthen this by burying cow manure in cow horns over the winter months, to create a homeopathic fertilizer. We stir one-third of a cup of it into three gallons of water for an hour, alternating deep vortexes one way for a half a minute, and then the other way for a half a minute. The we sprinkle the water on an acre of land in the evening, in a seemingly ancient ritual, which inoculates the soil with life-promoting enzymes and beneficial forces, and helps turn the soil into a rich, dark brown humus.
To balance this powerful earth energizer, we need to work with the sun forces. So we grind pretty quartz crystals, mix the powder with water, and bury it in cow horns during the summer months. One half of a teaspoon is again stirred homeopathically for an hour, and sprayed on the plants in the morning to promote ripening and nutritional qualities.
Compost plays a key role on the biodynamic farm, and again we make use of healing homeopathic remedies. The herbs yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle, white oak bark, dandelion and valerian are sewn up in animal organs, or otherwise prepared, and buried in the earth for a year. Then they are inserted into our compost piles in small doses to give their enhanced qualities to the entire compost heap, and eventually the land it is applied on, and food grown there, and the people who eat it.
The most important thing is that food grown on live soils gives health to humanity.
In nature, everything is interrelated. Biodynamic farms keep hedgerows, wetlands, forests and meadows not only for their beauty and wildlife, but because they harbor forces beneficial to the cropland. We try to imagine the forces hidden behind what our senses perceive.
Biodynamics has fostered the development of a new marketing strategy, too. People used to be able to make a living selling garden produce, and now, through Community Sponsored Agriculture, they can again.
A group of thirty or forty customers cover the farmer’s annual budget, and they in turn receive weekly baskets of produce during the growing season. The farmer is thus salaried and guaranteed an outlet for the farm’s produce, which gets to the consumer without any extra costs for the middleman.
All in all, biodynamics offers a new way, or maybe an old way, of growing the most nutritious and health-promoting food available today, and getting it to the consumer as easily as can be arranged. The earth needs healing and biodynamic farmers are helping to do it.
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