By Russ Cerocke, Farm Manager
I’ve heard it said that if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards. At Green Earth Harvest, it is essential to keep moving forward. Many people believe that organic production means sustainable production, but this is not necessarily the case. To grow organically, we are required to rotate our crops and use only approved organic inputs for fertility, pest, and disease control. However, one of the most unsustainable practices in farming, tilling, is commonplace in organic production. The use of plastic mulches is also commonplace. In order to move beyond the requirements of organic certification, it is essential that we look for unique ways to integrate practices that can help us along on the road to true sustainability.
As we spend our winter hours working on plans for the year to come, and trying to stay warm, it is a good time to reflect and share some of the work that we do that generally goes unseen by our shareholders and members. In 2023, we began to formalize a system of experimental growing here at McDonald Farm. In a small corner of our fields, an area known as A6 Boot (because it’s shaped like a boot) we have installed the first beds of our experimental field. Our plan was loose, but focused on ideas that could help us save time and energy while reducing our impact on the soils that we steward. Today, I’d like to tell you about some of these trials, as well as our other plans for moving forward.
Many of the tests we ran last year focused on using a combination of cover crops and successional planting to better utilize our space, protect and feed the biology of our soils, and reduce the soil compaction that disking seeding with a tractor can cause and the time it takes to ready our beds for planting. In the fall of 2022 we spread some of our first trials of winter cover crops. Then, in 2023 we were able to see the results of their establishment. It was clear that the coverage was generally sparse, however, we had seeded these all by broadcasting only, whereas in our large fields we would have used the disc harrow to incorporate the seeds into the soil.
With our lessons having been learned, in 2023 we reseeded some of those beds into a summer cover crop, but this time we tried different ways to rake seed into the soil. We found we have much better germination with a light working than with either broadcasting or heavy raking (similar to using the disc). In 2024, we will use light raking to seed in cover crop immediately after a bed is finished, with the hopes of being able to keep our beds covered with living plants at all times, and not weeds.
We also looked at the possibility of planting crops directly into terminated cover crops. Last fall, we planted a bed of soft neck garlic into the cover crop residue from buckwheat and sorghum, a summer cover that winter-kills. If the mulch is adequate to protect the garlic through winter, we will harvest it this summer to begin saving it for seed to use in 2025. Soft neck garlic stores longer and can be braided together for storage which is a lovely bonus!
Another fun trial of ours was to try seeding fall crops a little earlier, well, way earlier, in the winter of 2022. In spring of 2023, we found that we had good germination of both spinach and cilantro, proving the concept that this practice could be used in our climate. Even though the spinach and cilantro germinated successfully, so did the weeds! This year, we are waiting on the results of a new trial we seeded last fall, in which we covered the spinach and cilantro with a layer of leaf mulch, which should help control sprouting weeds. We also included some shallot bulbs to see how well they over winter (because garlic does so well) and see if we have a spring shallot harvest. We will see what happens!
Finally, we also like to trial new crops and varieties, and we look to do more of this as we shore up our growing practices. That being said, we will be looking at a few new things to try out in 2024. First, we want to try planting our leeks into leaf mulch, rather than using heavy plastic ground cloth. We reuse the cloth for several years, but it still needs to be replaced and discarded regularly. If we can transition to leaf mulch, we would feel better about the system. We will also be trialing a plant native to eastern North America, known as strawberry spinach (Chenopodium capitatum). This is a summer grown green that has been cultivated in Europe for centuries. Strawberry spinach provides leafy greens during a season when leafy greens tend to prefer flowering over vegetative growth. The berries on this annual are also edible, which is why we felt that we absolutely had to try this out.
We are always looking for better ways to grow our food, that still allows us to provide our nutritious, local food to as many people in our community as we can. We appreciate the feedback we get from our shareholders every year to help us find ideas that will not only benefit our farm, but also satisfy those whom we grow the food for.
Thank you for joining us on our journey to a better tomorrow.
~Farmer Russ
