Complimentary Blueberry Juice

There’s a lot of aspects of the farm I’d rather not show, at least the image one wants to project is that the farm is clean, awesome and everything is going well.

But I think I’ll take January to exorcise our Grower Error demons. Perhaps by posting them I’ll be far more risk averse in 2025 and beyond. Today’s is probably the worst offender from last season: our onion field.

The issue we were most fearful of was being able to water them early in the season. 2023 and 2022 had both been dry, hot seasons, and putting them out in our big field without irrigation (or what is known as “dry farming”) had not been kind to our onions (though we did harvest below-average crops). So for 2024 we decided hey, we’ll plant them in an area where we will have the ability to water them if we need to.

Hey how about that one field where we know there are probably some Canada Thistle problems lurking below the surface? Oh no worries, it won’t be that bad, we’ll just weed them when they come up.

This is what over 20 000 onions look like in a field of Canada Thistle:

Of course, 2024 was not the hot, dry spring that occurred previously, it was a cold, wet spring. And of course, cool and wet conditions are going to aid the Canada Thistle. And of course, “weeding” the Canada Thistle means chopping stems at the surface which proliferates the Thistle (and does nothing to address the structural biological problem, so the problem continues for at least another season).

Miraculously we scraped by on this field, but at best we broke even, and we are lucky we didn’t break any tools trying to weed them (four times!). Far too many of the onions were not even the size of golf balls after 100 days following the transplanting date.

What to take away from this?

First, the weather: because it was “dry” last year doesn’t mean it will be “dry” this year. That might be obvious, but Farmer Anxiety is well-known to override the obvious and make a more desperate play to soothe. Sure we felt better when it was cool and wet, thinking this would give our onions an advantage (it should have) but what we didn’t realize was we had already made the grave and irreversible choice on transplanting day.

Second, we are not treating the biological problem of Canada Thistle with the respect and careful considerations it deserves. These are far more than just weeds, and had our senses been more finely tuned we likely would have noticed the impending issue two, three, or four years ago, and would have been able to take steps to address it.

We are now in the process of addressing this field (and several other locations on our farm) for Canada Thistle and healing the soil. I will likely publish more about these journeys as we go through the year.

Third, we are not doing enough to give our transplants an advantage at transplanting time. We need to implement more biologically-based strategies to encourage root development at the time of transplanting, to get the plants established early and investing in soil connectivity, so they are ready for any adversity thrown at them during the season.

Fourth, I think the most important and probably biggest take away from this example is that the Grower Error occurred because we took no steps to prepare in advance. We still struggle with throwing out the “this is the best solution right now” strategy and adopting a “we are going to take a year to prep this area for X, Y, and Z crops for the following season.” We might be able to avoid these basic issues if we can see the problems arise in advance, or see that our treatments aren’t working out as planned.

We have enough experience at our farm of planting in great, high-quality locations to know what it should look and feel like during the previous year. It removes a large part of the Farmer Anxiety. Moving towards making that the default farm strategy is the ultimate goal.

Graham

thanks for reading Complimentary Blueberry Juice