zero till
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Our First Cover Crop
Today was the day we installed our first-ever cover crop. We’ve been talking about it for years but today was the day. It is likely to rain soon, and as such we were able to prepare an unused field for seeding. After numerous seasons of drought (and as farmers who largely farm without irrigation ), Continue reading
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Re-Designing Our Zero Till Bed System
One of the infrastructure projects for this season is an on-the-fly re-design of our no-till experimental area. It’s a ton of work and it’s adding a lot of hours tot he weekly schedule, but on the whole so far it has been very rewarding and we’ve been able to keep up. For several years we Continue reading
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Lots of Ground to Cover
This season will be our first year implementing and experimenting with the use of cover crops. We aren’t really sure what to expect or how they will work with our system, but there’s only one way to find out. The idea behind cover crops is simple enough: farmers go to great lengths to maintain empty Continue reading
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Minimum Crop Space
One of the challenges of implementing cover crops in a zero-till system for our farm is that we still need to grow a lot of produce and keep the farm running! We need to figure out exactly what absolutely needs to stay inside a zero-till system. The rest, at least for one season, we can Continue reading
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Adding Cover Crops to our No-Till System
After admitting a little bit of defeat and looking at the positives of our system, we need to find a way to both be able to continue within the system while we work on a solution to the problem. The most obvious solution is to start over. If the weeds continue to return regardless of Continue reading
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Shortfalls of Our Zero-Till
For a few years now we have, at the end of each season, applied a large amount of compost to our zero-till beds. Through the years we experimented with different sorts of combinations of leaves, mulch and broadforking, all in attempt to loosen up our hard clay. In general it worked. We accomplished our goals: Continue reading
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 