Complimentary Blueberry Juice

It’s now been two months since we installed our first cover crop and the sunflowers started blooming. What a pretty sight!

The previous posts are here if you want to recap.

It has grown in quite thick and there’s lots of things going on in the understory, the sorghum is easily over a meter tall and every step taken in this field reveals a flurry of sparrows and birds feeding amongst the plants. It’s quite the exciting space!

We are pretty sure at this point that we will not be using this field for bed expansion…it’s just too much for us this fall to deal with expanding the irrigation and installing what would be a much-needed deer fence.

Instead, we will likely run a potato trial next year. That will involve shredding this field, applying a microbial inoculant to the above-ground plant material, and shallow roto-tilling this in to the top few inches. This will hopefully create a rich topsoil layer that the potatoes can take full advantage of next season.

We have wanted to move to cover cropping prior to potatoes for a long time now, and while we didn’t get as many cover crops installed as we wanted, this does seem like the best opportunity to run a small scale trial while we plan out our field usage for next season (and include cover crops in said plan).

We will also likely wait till the first frost prior to shredding, as we want to take advantage of all the sunlight capture that we can.

As for what the exact application will be, we’ll have to finalize that, and probably by the next update on this ongoing trial we will be able to share more, and follow this trial into next year to see what the results are.

New things ahead are always exciting!

Stay curious.

Graham

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