Complimentary Blueberry Juice

After each season over the past few years I reach the same conclusion: that the farm area is too large and we need to be more efficient with our space usage. Why manage a 20 acre area when you could manage 10? When a new season starts fresh this conclusion seems to be forgotten. Maybe it just needed repeated attempts, but it seems like at long last we will be able to start the 2025 season with much less than the previous year and take a lot of stress off our shoulders.

Within the next week or two, we will have our no-till beds completed: all 60 of them.

We have been running the no-till experimental area for several years but have never been able to utilize the field to its full potential for many reasons…either we didn’t know what we were doing and making learning curve mistakes, or biting off more than we could chew, not understanding what was happening with soil or plant nutrition, learning how to grow unfamiliar crops, or outright failing and having large areas that were unproductive and overrun with weeds. What we would do is move things out into the field, where they would suffer other fates of negligence.

This growing management strategy of expanding whack-a-mole (or…whack-a-thistle) leads to a lot of headaches between lost resources, failed crops, and a lot of wasted time trying to save a crop that has a slim chance of success. If we had a better strategy and were more prepared, we wouldn’t be spending time trying to be crop heroes, instead we would be harvesting the fruits of our labour.

We’ve learned enough lessons and came a long enough way that we will finally, for the first time, attempt a 60-bed field. That’s about 1500 square metres of growing area, fit into a deer fence that surrounds 1 acre. We’re ready to try going at full capacity. The conversion to 100 foot beds was a great decision and it was worth the growing pain this year (more on that in a future post). The crops we kicked out to the field will be back where they belong, and we’ve gotten super good at rotating and replanting beds with fast growing times of 30-50 days.

But the reward isn’t just in running no-till beds at full capacity, this also greatly helps our field management. We can consolidate field crops as well and between the two, save some 30% or 40 % of field space. Without whack-a-mole, we can keep empty areas clean and tidy until we are prepared for (and the timing is right) to plant a cover crop.

This all means we can improve our plant nutrition and soil biology strategies across the board. Each bed can be addressed separately for what it needs, and all field spaces can be addressed for what they need as well. In beds, it might mean we need to broadfork some compaction or put down a new layer of mulch. In the field it might mean applying Calcium to balance our high Magnesium, getting ready to plant a cover crop, or taking a thistle-infested acre out of production to deal with it.

Nothing on the farm is uniform. Every chunk of a field or a bed is in various states of improving or declining, and it’s much easier to address things in small areas for their specific needs than a general strategy that applies to everything.

What I’m most looking forward to is enjoying working on a project where less done better leads to phenomenal results. Mentally I think, it will be a lot lighter and more positive. The opposite of this is grinding for months on end, and burning out.

Long-term planning and short-term goal setting works.

It might have taken us a few years, but we’re getting there.

Graham

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