Complimentary Blueberry Juice

In the last update the cover crop was alive and looking really pretty (previous posts are here). A lot has happened since then! We have finalized our treatment strategy and we’ve now completed it, so that’s what this post is about.

A late rain helped the cover crop go strong into September, and the thick growth helped shade all that moisture. Even now, after almost no rain for the past two months, the ground underneath this cover crop is soft and damp, and you can easily put a shovel into it. It does not at all feel like rock-hard clay in the fields next door.

A few days after the first real frost and the warm-season plants in the mix died off, with the hardier plants in the mix staying green in the understory. It was quite pretty in this stage too. It was really nice walking through the field, and seeing all the birds that had come to call the field home. We even had a well-worn deer path right through the field.

This photo is from mid-September, so the next step for us was to shred this field. We waited and waited to shred as so many plants in the understory were still alive and functioning, it seemed like a waste to kill off that active plant and allow all its hard work to oxidize.

A bunch more frosts later and about a few days ago on October 25th we shredded it right down to the stalk, leaving the roots intact in the ground.

It left behind a really nice blanket of shredded plant matter over the soil.

For our strategic purposes now, we can only use a lane about 50 feet wide right down the centre of the field. This is due to the issues caused by the Poplars and Aspens on the north side sending runners. Some of them were even popping up in the middle of the field. We noticed this as the cover crop started growing in back in August. This is a big limitation for our trial, but we still have a lane in which to conduct a good trial, as well as highlighting a much-needed job of cutting the tree roots for good.

We will do a Potato trial here next season.

To prep for that, we need to address a couple big issues facing our soil.

Generally speaking across the entire farm, we have high Magnesium clay-based soil. We’ve been having issues with things like thistles, compaction, tight soils, and crusts on our unprotected soil surfaces which in the worst case scenario, prevent seeds from germinating. In simplistic terms, this high Magnesium binds up any Calcium lying around. This isn’t ideal as Calcium is incredibly important for plant cell development and structure. In other trials we’ve run this season to confirm our suspicions about what is causing poor early growth and a host of other issues, where we have supplied Calcium and Sulfur it has worked almost like magic. The great thing about an element like Calcium is that it is relatively easy to obtain and these things are not synthetically produced, ie it is not a chemical fertilizer. Adding Calcium to our clay soils should boost plant productivity by a noticeable margin.

The other issues facing our soil are more on the biological side: lacking the organic building blocks that will help microbial soil life. In theory, we have begun a good population of microbes in this cover crop, which was one of the reasons for installing the cover crop. But we can always add more.

We put together a mix of Calcium and Humates with the help of a new farm advisor we are working with, as well as a high-quality compost extract from a friend of the farm’s helping out with this trial.

Today, we made the application.

I’ve gotta say, making a compost-extract-with-Calcium application like this was really, really fun.

Adding to nature feels very different than limiting nature.

As humans we always have a choice: to fight and control nature through brute force, machines and chemicals. There is an alternative: to provide nature with more, to add to nature, to seek to pull the many levers nature has, and to help nature succeed at a higher level. We have the tools and the knowledge, and nothing is lost by trying something new.

We will be excited to see the results next season.

Graham

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