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Beautiful Rhizosheaths
After quadrupling our cover crop area this year and changing a few operating procedures, it was super exciting to leave those cover crops digesting in the last weeks of fall (more on the cover crops and treatment this season here).
However the cover crop story for this season didn’t stop there. Yes they were shredded and incorporated with compost extract, calcium and a biological stimulant. But the weather remained mild through September and October, and wouldn’t you know, at least some species of the cover crop….started growing back.
This was super wonderful as it meant those fields were still actively cycling nutrients, and there was still some small amount photosynthetic energy being directed into the ground. It also meant that we maintained a good ground cover.
I don’t know why I didn’t get a better photo of this, at least till we got the first snow of the season in early November. That’s the re-growing cover under the white stuff.
So it would seem we got the best of both worlds here. We got what was intended: a micriobiolgy-driven decomposition in the top layer of soil following incorporation, breaking down that nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium and etc and holding it in the soil.
The bonus was that we also had some low amount of photosynthesis still happening, living plants putting some amount of carbon into the soil, and hopefully developing symbiotic relationships with the aforementioned microbiology.
Well, I did get photo evidence of that on October 25th on what I think is an Italian Rye.
This is a rhizosheath.
A rhizosheath is a zone of microbial activity around the plant…what appears to be dirt clinging to the roots here, which cannot be shaken off, is conglomerations of soil and microorganisms growing on the fine root hairs of the plant, which are secreting carbon-based goodies into the ground in what is known as “mucilage.” In this way, the plant can cultivate an interface with the life of the soil directly surrounding the roots.
I wasn’t expecting to find this when I yanked it up, but there it was. A healthy plant doing healthy plant things, right under my feet.
To be clear, I have pulled many a weed and many a plant over the years that do not have this feature. It was exciting to see.
I’d like to think that it was the cover crop process and biological amendments that lead me to this point, but the real proof will be next spring when we plant here. This was the goal: to create a biologically rich soil for next year’s crops to plug into and receive the benefits from.
Cool stuff.
Graham
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All The Life In The Compost Bin
Last year I was able to successfully harvest 600L of worm compost and repeat that this season. It worked pretty well, and if you want to read about why we’re running our waste ProMix through a worm bin you can read that post here, and on the second go-round I tried to make some improvements with what was added to the bin, and had some surprises along the way (…snails?!)
The main protagonist here is worms, which are the only intentional organisms in the bin, but the goal with the worm bin is to foster as much life as possible in the decomposition process. That should give us the widest possible array of life, and result in the widest possible array of both macro and trace elements in a biological form ready for uptake and integration by our seedlings via the invaluable decomposition process.
To accomplish this, I take it upon myself to add random extra stuff as habitat, using the “if you build it they will come” strategy. In an ecological framework, there are unknowable amounts of life happening to break things down, and recycle organic material. This means that strategically, we can add different groupings of things to the bin to target general groups of decomposers.
Some examples here are:
1. Leaves: which act as carbon-rich bedding substrate for the worms and are chock full of all sorts of trace elements wise old trees procure with their extensive symbiotic relationships. Leaves last a fairly long time in the bin and attract various molds.
2. Sticks/Branches: Being made of cellulose and lignin, these complex carbon-based polymers give wood their strength and as such take a long time to decay. They can provide a house for various fungi that slowly release this carbon into our finished soil mix. They last years and years in the bin and also retain moisture, which means we can always maintain a good fungal population, and who knows what else is slowly eating that wood.
3. Vegetable waste. These are going to break down quickly as they are mostly made of water, and attract a range of bacterias, and need to be continuously added through the season.
Those are our invisible allies in this game, but the worm bin supports an enormous tree of life. There are all sorts of arthropods and insects scurrying about the bin, consuming things and cycling nutrients. The most visible of this macro group of decomposers in the bin are isopods, our friends the sow bugs. But there are tons more if you look closely, the substrate in the bin comes alive. These bugs secrete their own enzymes that break down plant material.
There is an interesting paper on the often-overlooked effects of invertebrate decomposers on plants and soil here.
Also in the bin is a predator class, spiders and centipedes. All these insects additionally molt their shells as they grow from instar to instar, chitin being another complex carbon polymer that gets broken down in the bin, and additionally they all harbour their own nutrient packages, full of stuff that gets further recycled when these insects themselves die.
It’s really satisfying to see the amount of life in the bin at this point, and that this rich substrate that is getting broken down over and over is of enormous benefit to our future greenhouse seedlings. So…mission accomplished.
And now for a bunch of photos on what this all looks like in practice, though maybe in the future I will be patient enough with my macro lens to capture all the tiny life.
First, the glamorous bin itself, 8 feet by two feet, situated between our two greenhouses where it stays out of direct sun and is easy to access. Now to get enough of this stuff out to fill the 600L overwintering bin, which will stay at about 5C for the winter.
Next was a big surprise…snails! I guess I threw some kale stems in there at some point (I don’t remember, I do a lot of this on a whim when odd materials become available). After all, who knows what decomposition benefits or habitats various materials will provide.
I noticed they were hollow inside when I picked them up. When I broke them apart, I expected to find sow bugs (I did) and had my mind blown. They were full of snails. How did they get there? What species are they? I have absolutely no clue. I don’t live in a place known for snails that do not live in water. All I know is they are eating away at that kale stem and turning it into good stuff. Their shells will also be full of calcium, which is also always my #1 priority nutrient.
Every kale stalk I broke apart had dozens of them. Fascinating!
This year, I didn’t do so great on my overwintering worm husbandry. I actually ended up purchasing worm reinforcements by midsummer. They overwintered well enough, but I didn’t do my job after that part.
Here’s the 600L bin filling up, but I didn’t pre-sift it this year, opting to leave more intact chunks of stuff in there as continued food sources. I’ll sift it next spring as I go.
So to further that end and keep it going, I layer-caked some lettuce and leaves into the 600L bin, hoping to have more worms and keep it more biologically active. I think I made about 5 layers throughout the process.
And then more leaves:
….and then more finished compost.
I don’t expect this all to break down over the winter, but it should be easy to sift out. Or…well, what do I know? Maybe it’ll all disappear by March. We’ll see what happens with this next spring.
Until then, we’ll let this process play out. Decomposition is a process that is fundamental to ecosystems around the world, and it needs time. There is no replacement or way to speed this process up. Biological process work as they work…and this one has been working for billions of years, taking organic material and reconfiguring it for new uses.
We can use that process as ecologically-minded or biologically-minded agriculturalists or horticulturalists to supplement our plant’s symbiotic relationships, health and immune system responses.
If you’re nerdy enough to have reached this point and you want more decomposition knowledge, and you don’t yet know about Whale Falls, there you go.
Graham
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The Way The Weather Goes
This short blog hiatus was unplanned. Fall was mentally difficult and I think I just checked out of agriculture a bit early this season. Even though there was a lot of positive things going on, the farm received over 120mm of rain in October, effectively shutting down our season.
The one thing we have (until now) always been able to get done is re-mulching our no-till beds. However this was not an easy task with 120mm of rain. It just is not worth it to make a big mess with the compact tractor, ruts and mud. In the end we did have a one-day window where we decided to go for it, and managed to get 13/58 beds re-mulched for the season (but even that made quite the mess).
With this one task left to do I was in a sort of obsessive loop, just thinking about getting this task done, waiting and waiting for the moment it would stop raining long enough to go and do it. But that moment didn’t come.
In the meantime other tasks were completed, but it was pretty anticlimactic. Finally the idea of finishing 58 beds, ready to go for next season, was within reach. It’s been several-years-journey to get here, and the prospect of starting 2026 on that foot was exciting and enticing.
Instead, we’ll have a new challenge for 2026: starting with 13 beds, and figuring out how to do the rest on the fly. Effectively this means we won’t be able to mulch the rest before early seeding and transplanting season begins. It’s not the worst thing, but it will force us to think differently about how we approach seeding and transplanting in April and May.
Other than that, the fall time was full of great stuff: the cover crops performed wonderfully right to hard frost, the hoop house produced lettuce right up to the end of November, we harvested 600L of worm compost, we are overwintering 3 beehives, and we are expanding the CSA program to include the shoulder seasons.
Most importantly, we continue to improve year after year, and even though we ended the 2025 season on a note I’d rather not have ended on, I’m 100% confident that 2026 will continue the trend of rapid and meaningful improvement on our ability to grow consistently high-quality produce, week in and week out.
Graham
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No-Till Soil Demo: Let Plants Do The Work
Wow, did I ever get a nice big surprise this week when shredding all the beds. Finally, winter is coming, so down goes all the above-ground plant mass. We take our compact tractor and flail mower and shred all the plants down to the surface.
This methodology allows all the below-ground plant mass to stay intact. We need to remember that what we see above ground (green plants) is only a representation of what is invisible to us: the structures plants create beneath our feet, the crevices and cracks that the roots make, the micro-biome of habitats for tiny organisms that together weave a functioning ecosystem, all built by the plant.
So this season we tried something new, which was moving our Eggplants and Peppers into the no-till system (to decrease the number of plants we have to take care of, to have the ability to irrigate, and to pay closer attention to plant nutritional needs). To do this we decided to use landscape fabric with holes punched in them at the proper spacing for the plants. Last fall we built the beds, put on a layer of compost, and for the full 2025 growing season, it had landscape fabric over it filled with plants. The primary reason for the landscape fabric was to decrease weeding time, the secondary reason was to cover the soil.
It’s worth noting that this was a double soil cover: first the compost mulch, and then landscape fabric: a cover on the soil cover. So I was excited to see what would happen with this.
Taking the landscape fabric off these beds after 4 months of growing was like farmer-biologist christmas. So…here’s a list of what we noticed:
1) The beds are remarkably intact. You can even see where our pathways are, and the compost mulch does not at all look like it has been through a full season. Protection from the elements really preserved the mulch. This is great as we won’t have to apply much compost in this section which will save both time and money.
2) You cannot brush away the surface of the compost mulch because it is fully colonized to the surface with roots. I have noticed this amazing phenomenon in multiple contexts but it was amazing to see it over 8(!) beds. If you cover the soil, plant roots will literally grow on the surface. I see this in my Apples (covered with wood chips), Radishes (a thick canopy will keep the surface cool and moist), Celery (same as Radishes), and Tomatoes (when applying straw as mulch for dry-farmed field Tomatoes).
I love this concept because it really visibly proves a lot of the foundational principles going on with respect to how plants modify their environment. It’s the farmer’s job, I think, to create the conditions that the plant can fully utilize as much of the resources surrounding the plant as possible. It’s an easy win to give the plant an extra 1-2 inches of operating space by covering your soil.
3) Then I dug a hole and I’ve just never experienced this level of awesomeness before.
In my hand is an 8″ deep sample (you can go 10″ +) of what plants are doing where we aren’t able to look.
You can see the roots fully occupying the space frost he surface down to where I’m holding it, and other than the top inch, that’s red river valley clay. The shovel sinks in with barely a push. You can feel the shovel cutting…not clay…but actually having to cut the root mass. These macro-aggregate structures crumble apart with a light touch.
I dug several samples at random through the 8 beds, and no matter where I stuck my shovel, this was the result every time.
4 ) I want to stress that the plants did this. Photosynthesis did this. Plants build the soil. Plants engineer the environment, so that other things can live there. Plants move things from a less complicated system to a more complicated one. It’s hard to remember we live on a planet governed by natural laws, when we are scrolling through garbage and AI slop on the internet every day. No matter what nonsense is going on social platforms right now, the facts remain about our existence: we are on a planet, orbiting a star, that happens to have an atmosphere and liquid water, and that happens to have an intelligent form of life that has been successful for over 2 billion years, and that form of life enables other life through the splitting of Carbon Dioxide into its component parts using photons from the star we orbit.
I just think that’s fucking amazing, and every time I step out onto the field, that’s what goes through my mind.
For winter, I will leave all these structures intact, and next year, this is where this section of beds will start. So, in this sort of system and methodology, you can build on your successes from one year to the next. There is no starting from zero. All those things that plants built, they are there for the next generation of plants.
Graham
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No-Till Bed System Fall Prep 2025 Version
Next year will be our 9th attempt at this…can we finally utilize the entire system? We’ve never maxed it out. (For a quick recap about where we were last season, and two seasons when we converted to 100 feet), and for this season, we had the capacity for a 58-bed system, but in practice we only used I think 52 or 53 (there were just some beds on the fringes that weren’t worth dealing with for this season).
Now that it’s time to clean everything up and put it to rest for winter, I realized at this point I have had enough experience that I could likely tailor the preparations for specific crops. The end result of this being that we wouldn’t need to move as much compost.
So some goals will be good. But before I get to goals I should list a few of the biggest improvements and observations from this season.
1. Moving Peppers, Eggplants, Onions and Tomatoes from the open field to the bed system. It’s been a goal for a few years now, but this year we did it, and the results were phenomenal. The biggest reason being we could water them regularly. Moreover, we realized we didn’t need so many pepper plants, tomato plants, or onions, that we could grow these things at a high level, and get big yields.
2. All of #1 can be put into one section on drip tape. We have yet to do it, but this means that we can build one single section-wide drip manifold and run it on 20 beds if we have to. Needing less plants means we can rotate within one section and be fine, and it means we can avoid watering tomato leaves and eggplant leaves and pepper leaves. It also means we can, in the future, hook up a fertigation system and be able to deliver nutrition through the summer to keep these plants pumping.
3. The Tomato Trellis. This was fantastic, post about it is here, but we had it in a section with overhead wobbler irrigation. This can be moved to the middle section.4. Not everything likes compost. Nope. Which also means we don’t have to spread as much, and this is the main point driving this fall season’s prep considerations.
* * * * * * *At this point I think I’ll have to do a few draft ideas of what next year’s field might look like, and move things around enough that I can get a broad-strokes idea of what needs to go where, leaving myself plenty of room to manoeuvre in the spring.
More importantly, I really want to be able to get my calcium and amendments down underneath the compost before winter. I want to be able to begin the season not having to worry about nutrition. So whatever doesn’t need it, or doesn’t need compost, needs to be considered.
It’s been a long journey with this “experimental field” and not only does it look like next season will be actually fully at capacity, but that it continues to evolve, and will continue to evolve, to meet the needs of our farm and our community. Removing crops from a dry-farming system to this biologically rich one has made all the difference in product availability and quality over the last few years.
I expect that as our knowledge of how to utilize this system, how to address nutritional issues on the fly, and having an arena in which to solve problems quickly (instead of hoping for rain) will lead to another jump in availability and quality.
Graham
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Problems With Parsnips
After trying for 4 years or so, I think I’m finally giving up on this one.
The general problem with the Parsnips is that they anchor themselves into our clay soil and are nearly impossible to dig. I’ve also noticed they send out enormous side shoots, which I thought anchored them even further. Luckily I was growing the open-pollinated Hollow Crown, and many were short and stumpy, the broad fork would pull up enough that I could say “I grew Parsnips successfully.”
But truthfully they took enormous amounts of time and frustration, broken broad fork handles and pitchforks. The Parsnips would break or be damaged by the fork.
Parsnips are very much unlike Carrots. With Carrots, there are fine root hairs that colonize all parts of the soil, breaking it apart and creating amazing aggregates that crumble when you fork them out. And more importantly the tools go under and below the carrot, lifting them up. With Parsnips, there are no such fine root hairs creating aggregates and the forks intersect with the main root, which anchors itself in as if the Parsnip is planning to stay forever.
Actually I think maybe the Parsnips do want to stay forever.
So for this year, I thought I would give it one more go, the main problems to address being: 1) making sure it was in a good fluffy well-developed bed, and 2) changing the variety to an F1, Albion.
The good news is that Albion is amazing and the Parsnips are absolutely perfect. They are a great size, consistent, uniform and most importantly for me, they do not have the side anchor roots like the Hollow Crown.
The bad news is we dug about 8 of them before we gave up, broke a broad fork, decided to escalate matters and get the under cutter on the compact tractor and….yes, the Parsnips stopped the tractor.
We did manage to pull one out and it measured a whopping 17″.
That’s 17″ down into Red River gumbo clay, these things are not going anywhere. It is easier to visualize how the forks bring up blocky, bricks of clay and the Parsnip doesn’t budge.
So I’ve got 300 feet of Parsnips anchored down like piles for a house, all ready to sprout up next year and go to seed. How I’m going to deal with that I haven’t decided yet…
…one more Hail Mary for this season, to hope it dries up a lot, and that the dry clay will be easier to fracture and extract the Parsnips.
Not holding my breath on that one and, for now, unless I can come up with a better idea of how to grow these, I’m going to have to take the L on Parsnips and move on. They’re an extremely tough crop in this area and I’m just not willing to spend a week digging them (only to break half of them in the process), which is obviously bad enough for economic reasons, but mostly to preserve my sanity.
If anyone has techniques for extracting these out of clay without a back hoe, let me know.
Graham
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Exciting Cover Crop Results, Second Attempt
I had a pretty exciting week with this project, so lots of pictures today. Suddenly it was time to do a big job: deal with the first set of cover crops we planted. I went from feeling a bit down from reaching the “apex” of the season to being over the moon at the success of this cover crop.
Since this is our second year trialling cover crops, we made some adjustments, and seeing the results of those adjustments was what was so exciting. If you want to read more about our first cover crop installation from last season, I’ve included the links to those at the bottom of this post.
First, let’s admire how amazing this cover crop is.
This is incredible to me, because for most of the season I was a bit despondent that we might be able to install cover crops at all. We had drought and high temps through June and July, and getting into the beginning of August without rain, well, we need rain for the cover crop to germinate.
It was a struggle the whole way through. We thought rain might be coming, so we seeded the first two acres. Rain didn’t come, the fields sat there barren for ten days. Then we thought rain might be coming again, so we seeded another 2 acres. Then rain didn’t come. Despondency! It was almost the middle of August, how much could a cover crop really grow, if we were even able to germinate it?
The rain came, the cover crop germinated, followed by high temps and warm overnights. In four weeks, at the end of the season, despite decreasing light availability, the Sorghum and Sunflowers shot up to 3 or 4 feet high, and the peas trellised themselves, as they do.
Amazing.
So what did we change for this season?
First, we planted the same ten-way mix as we did last year:
Black Oil Sunflower
Sorghum Sudan
German Millet
Italian Rye Grass
Hairy Vetch
Forage Peas
Daikon Radish
Purple Top Turnip
Flax
Berseem Clover
Second, we decreased the seeding rate. Last year we were just figuring out how to use our new seeding implement we invested in just for this purpose. This year, we metered out maybe as much as half of the seed we did last year. This allowed the plants a lot more space to establish, and the resulting green biomass was lush and thick.
Third, we had extra alfalfa fertilizer that had Calcium and Sulphur included in it, and so we decided it was best to make sure all cover crops included this fertilizer. This way we can get our Ca and S in, and it can be cycled by the plants and microbiology in this season, which means we can have it all biologically available for our crops next season. It would also help keep our cover crop in a healthy state, instead of having all those plants fight for any available Ca and S.
Fourth, we got a recommendation from the Soil Extension that instead of taking action to shred and incorporate the field after it has died, to instead shred the cover crop while it is still green. The thinking here being twofold: one that the soil is still warm and the microbiology is still active instead of reaching dormancy so it still has time to work magic, two that green material from the cover crop would more readily break down, just as if you were adding greens to a compost pile, and likewise, if you are adding browns to a compost pile, you will be slowing it down.
Fifth: When applying compost extracts and amendments, I need to add or include a food source for the microbiology. So I got a product to try mixing into the tank for this year’s application.
That all made perfect sense to me, so we made all those changes and wow:
I had maybe one of the most enjoyable experiences of the whole summer shredding this cover crop down. It was a beautiful evening to begin with, but also there was an immediate feedback loop telling me this is absolutely the right way to go. The intuition was there.
The scent and sight of the shredded plant material spoke as much. It was very obvious that, if we were to now mix this into the top layer of the soil, we would be encouraging the breaking down of this material, instead of letting it oxidize and carbonize.
After a couple snafus with the sprayer, we got it up and going, and applying the compost extract, soy hydrolysate, and additional Calcium was next. We also opted instead of “spraying” to remove the nozzles entirely and just let it dump out, at a rate of about 350L/acre. I tried to get a photo but it was hard, this was the best I could do.
The only last thing was to mix it all in, and you can see in this next photo just how fast things change. The morning after the cover crop was shredded, it was already losing that green vibrancy. Just as if you cut a lawn, that “fresh cut lawn” state does not last for very long, and by the next day, the grass clippings will be oxidizing…within 48 hours, it will turn brown. So these steps to shred and incorporate cover crops as one single action is an important time-sensitive consideration.
It feels really, really good to be taking these positive steps to improving our soil health, not letting land lie fallow, and allowing plants to do what they are evolved to do. Plants are ecosystem engineers that harness the power of the sun to split Carbon from Oxygen, in order to build their structures, and to foment symbiotic relationships with underground micro-organisms that collect more building materials for the plants. These building materials will be broken down again by more micro-organisms, and if we get all the timing right, it means we can really boost our farm’s overall health, our planning, and shrink the footprint of the farm. I am very happy we were able to quadruple our # of acres under cover crop this season.
Living ecological systems are intelligent, and we as humans need to realize this fact not just for our agriculture, but to protect the intelligent systems that stabilize our planet’s climate.
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juiceOur First Cover Crop Installation (June 26, 2024)
First Cover Crop Update (August 7, 2024)
60-Day Update (Sept 11, 2024)
Fall Treatment (October 30, 2024)
Spring Update (May 14, 2025) -
State of the Garden, September 4th, 2025
The “apex” of the season is always a tough one I find, psychologically. It’s a point in the season when there’s nothing you can do, no action you can take, to get things to turn around or do a little better. It’s all baked into the cake. On top of that is the accrued mess of the season, as the busyness of the harvest season dominates unpicked weeds and unkempt areas become the work for the next month. The apex is a time that shifts from what is this year, to what is next year. It’s time to look forward to improvements for next year, and to work towards that goal.
1. Early Frost. The chill from the arctic blast arriving last night was enough to turn in all our open-field dry farming crops: cucumbers, field tomatoes, squashes. Not super great, especially this early into September.
The good news is that the frost-sensitive crops in the no-till beds seem to be entirely unaffected. Did the patchy frost just not hit the field? No it seems, there was ice on the bee feeding buckets, and the neighbour’s squashes also say that it did get cold enough to do damage.
I believe more and more that we have achieved a higher level of plant health and biological resilience in the no-till. I have witnessed many examples of insect pest resistance, and now this morning, that tomatoes and peppers are still vibrantly green showing no signs of frost damage. This is a stark contrast to the open field, with pest pressures about and widespread frost damage.
This early frost will push me further into the no-till. It isn’t just the ability to take care of soil more intentionally in a smaller area, but also the ability to irrigate, and to continuously take care of plants through their life cycles, as opposed to hoping for good weather.
Biological resilience is not 100%. I still have insect pests, but they are not decimating the crops, so the plants can respond. There is still frost damage locally, but that 0.3C or 0.5C buffer zone – whatever the biological resilience is worth – was enough to stave off last night’s frost and keep fighting for another day.
2. The new hoophouse, turned over for fall production.
Update to the recent post about going in the wrong direction in the greenhouse, all the beds have been turned over, broadforked, amended and capped with compost. We were also able to take advantage of the rain a couple weeks ago and switch over from well water temporarily.
Already the clay under the compost is now consistently moist, and will not dry out with the compost mulch layer. The lettuces are off to a great start, and a full bed of radishes that is growing as if it’s not September.
Even with the frost last night, the greenhouse stayed at a comfortable 4C.
3. Great success with the tomato trial.
Two trellises of tomatoes in the beds have shown us a great way forward, and what the potential is. We didn’t get the harvests that would’ve been nice, but we learned what is possible with this system.
While I’ll have to move the trellis to a better location without overhead irrigation, the proof of concept worked beautifully. I really can’t be disappointed with this big leap forward. I’ve already started selecting varieties for next season, which may feature as many as 10 specialty varieties, and moving the entire tomato crop to the bed system.
Above is a Buffalo Sun F1 AAS winner (winner for a reason!) and below is Sonnenhertz F1, a beautiful and delicious Oxheart type that has won me over and is now my favourite specialty tomato.
4. Fantastic Cover Crops.
We got the cover crops in late, but then we got the rain, and then we got the heat, and they exploded. All 4 acres of them…up from just our 1 acre trial plot last season. Also worth noting the Sorghum, which is very frost intolerant, also survived last night’s little frost.
In the next week or two expect a bunch more updates on this. We applied calcium and sulphur in a biological form, and just letting the biology on this 10-way mix go nuts.
Shortly we will shred it, add more calcium, compost extract and soy hydrolysate. The results from last year’s cover crop was great, and we look to improve on our methods for this season, which is primarily shredding and incorporating it much earlier before the cold weather sets in. The goal now is to mix this all into the top layer of soil and allow the microbiology present to decompose and make available a lot of nutrients for next year’s crop, as well as developing our soil structure.
Graham
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Soil Principles Are Soil Principles: Doing a 180 on Greenhouse Management
It’s been an amazing first year in the new greenhouse and while we’ve been blown away by what we’ve been able to achieve in our first season, it’s come to the time when we need to think about turning it all over for fall production. And it’s necessary to go through this process so that we can see for ourselves, again, what is possible, and where we can improve for next season.
But as soon as I started working on getting it all ready for fall, a major issue showed up. The soil in the greenhouse, if it were left as is, and we continued growing in it in this manner, would face major problems in the future.
It was time to put the brakes on and stop immediately what we’ve been doing all summer.
We got one half-season worth of trial and to see how it goes, and it’s obvious we need to stop.
This is where our cherry tomatoes were until yesterday, but all of the beds are in a similar state.
There are two major issues here that need addressing ASAP:
1: The clay is exposed, which is to say, the soil is not covered. Being exposed means it dries out quickly, and in the greenhouse, that means we are responsible for watering it, but also that the water doesn’t go very far, as the moist soil evaporates, dries out, and compacts. It also means the soil is devoid of obvious life. Lastly, it makes it difficult to add amendments or fertilizers to help the plants continue cranking out fruit.
2: We must stop using our well water as irrigable water in the greenhouse immediately. The well water is leaving rings of calcium and magnesium salts all over the place. And we know this…our groundwater is over 1000 TDS, which, if you don’t speak units of water hardness, means our water is extremely hard. These minerals are not helpful for the soil or the plants, and over time it will cause major issues.
So…how to solve?
Moving forward, I decided the best course was to set up the greenhouse in a similar way that we set up our no-till bed system: to prioritize soil biology, and soil health, and to re-orient all of our efforts towards that goal.
For the greenhouse it means:
1. Broadforking each bed to alleviate compaction.
2. Spreading liberal amounts of alfalfa/gypsum.
3. Soil drenching with compost extract and AEA Rejuvenate.
4. A thick layer of mushroom compost mulch on top.
5. Watering with rainwater or RO water only.
This is what it looks like as of time of publishing.
The difference is already noticeable…the spinach, on the far wall, about a week in, the clay under the compost mulch cap has softened and I can stick my fingers in and pull some nice, moist, soft clay up. That is a far cry from the salt-stained open clay bed on the left.
I am thinking now till next season: keep living roots in the ground in these beds as long as I possibly can. This will allow photosynthetic root exudates to continue populating the soil column, and with it, hopefully bringing some life, earthworms, and all sorts of stuff along with it. It will be an experiment to see how long we can keep greens in the greenhouse anyway!
When those crops are done, I plan to apply compost extract and Rejuvenate a second time, and to cover the mulch with a layer of leaves.
Right now I am really thinking about tomatoes and cucumbers next season. I want to be able to apply fertilizer easily, so I may even keep a layer of leaf mulch intact all summer, to cover the soil, and cover the mulch. I know from experience roots of plants will actually grow on the surface of the soil provided it is covered. This means the plant’s roots are able to respire and spread over a much wider range to obtain nutrients and plug into soil life symbiotically.
It would also mean, if we were to run drip tape under the leaves, that our rainwater or RO water would go a very long way. Not only would we conserve more water, but it would be more available to the plants.
Lastly, it would mean an application of fertilizer on a bi-weekly basis would be easy….move some mulch out of the way, and sprinkle on top. The soil life will bring the fertilizer down and the plants will be able to absorb it. No wondering how to get plants to uptake dry fertilizer on top of rock-hard baked clay.
The greenhouse has been an amazing addition to the farm and for us to achieve high-level results, we need to work toward developing and taking care of our soil in the greenhouse, so it takes care of our plants. In an environment that relies 100% on human input and action to sustain plants in a controlled environment, soil health is even more crucial.
Graham
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The Tomato Journey
There are few crops in my farming career that I’ve learned more from, and made as many mistakes with, as tomatoes. To put it simply, I never respected this crop, how beautiful it could be, and I didn’t understand the “tomato people.” I thought that a tomato is a tomato.
Furthermore, I thought that staking tomatoes was too time-consuming compared to the short window which tomatoes are in season in Zone 4. To that end I simply grew bush field tomatoes.
All the while I also thought that the flavour differences between tomatoes was not enough to warrant my attention. It’s a tomato-flavoured tomato, I would say.
Several years ago we were growing some 2000 tomato plants. We threw them all in the field and waited. Bush tomatoes were good some years and not others, some cracked or were eaten but when you grow 2000 plants, who cares what gets wasted? Heirlooms never ripened and experiments with varieties were always concluded with nothing beats the bush tomato.
One year we did the math and found out we were making less than $2.00 per tomato plant.
That’s what got me to consider that everything I knew about the tomato was most likely very wrong.
And now here I sit in complete wonder at the tomato plant and am really wondering what took me so long
This season I decided to go all-in and change everything.
The first thing undoubtedly is respecting the crop.
I finally decided I would take care of them: I made sure they were perfect out of the greenhouse, I made sure they were planted into good soil with good foundational nutrition and calcium, and they were all trellised.
To do that I was also going to take advantage of our new hoop house, with drip irrigation, to prevent fruit from cracking.
And to test how many tomato plants I would actually need…I also would try growing the same field bush tomatoes inside the hoophouse.
That’s them sprawling all over the ground (next year…stake them!).
By next week we will have pulled over 1000 lbs of tomatoes from these few bush tomatoes in the greenhouse…making for more than $20 per plant, more than a 10x increase.
I have another set of bush tomatoes in the permanent beds which I am also expecting to yield at least several hundred pounds, and yet another set in the field (as per tradition). This means that we will have achieved more, with a higher quality and higher yield, with 400-500 plants instead of 2000.
My cherry tomatoes have a similar story.
Like bush tomatoes, we were planting some 400 cherries. This year I have been able to out-yield, out-flavour and out-everything with only about 150 plants.
It took time to make sure they were growing up the trellis properly (and still have improvements to make there too) and trim them, but the cherries exploded! I have never seen sets like this in the field. It’s incredible! It has also cut harvest time down from 1-2 hours of climbing and searching through plants, to 20-30 minutes.
Moreover, I no longer throw half of what I picked away as graded-out defects. Almost all the cherries are perfect, and the varieties I’ve been able to try are also really wonderful and tasty.
Next season I am certain that I can produce enough cherries with only a double-row in the hoop house, and get cherry tomatoes from June strait through September in Zone 4. That’s a big change from just waiting for August to roll around and hope for the best.
But surely there’s more to this than beefsteaks and cherries?
Yes, for the first time ever I have set aside an entire bed exclusively for heirlooms and seeing what I can do with the thousands of varieties out there. Surely there’s ones that will blow us all away!
Not only did I save a bed for this, but I also trellised all of them. I’ve had enough heirloom failures in the field, and even if I was still short on a few growing points, I would at least be able to taste them.
This has worked mostly well, with some tomatoes performing better than others, but my favourites so far are these little blush tigers, which have a fruity flavour when fully ripe. The bonus is that they set fruit like a cherry tomato…so at most I might need 20 plants? (Certainly not 2000!)
These specialty tomatoes all have their own nuanced flavour profile and I look forward to trying more of these in the future, improving the variety selection and seeing what works for us.
Above all, consistent watering in biologically active soil, combined with baseline calcium nutrition and a foliar stimulant for continuous flower production, has put these tomatoes over the moon.
There’s another whole bunch of things I will change for next season regarding tomatoes, to improve them even further. The higher the level at which one grows plants, the more and more nuances in how they grow, and how to best assist them in growing, becomes more clear.
And more fun.
Graham
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About Graham
Graham is an ecologist-farmer from Canada working on educating about the wonders and beauty of the natural world, and how we can design biodiverse food production systems.
Complimentary Blueberry Juice 