Annual Update Part 1: Vegetable Growing
Things are always changing on the farm as we strive for improvement. We hope to share a window into our world of farming with you in a 3-installment Annual Update. We will follow this post up with Annual Updates Part 2: Labor Systems and Part 3: Grazing and Conservation. For this installment, we are looking at Wobbler-Irrigation for Carrots,Improved Tillage Systems, High Tunnels, and Broad-Spectrum Mineralization!
New Wobbler Irrigation System for Carrots
For our CSA members last year, you know it wasn’t a great carrot year. But the year before was incredible! We grew the carrots on similar soil and fertilized them similarly, so what was the difference? Water!
For one, last year was a pretty intense drought, and even in the spring, it was really unseasonably dry. It’s not that Nat wasn’t watering them, but just that he was trying to water everything else, too! Carrots are particularly finicky germinators and even as baby plants, they can wither and die pretty easily when it dries out. With our Water Reel overhead watering system, it throws down water in between “light rain” and “thunderstorm” level. Sometimes, the rig jams and stops, and it’s more like “thunderstorm” in that spot. Then Nat has to move it to another field to water something else, like kale or lettuce . By the time it’s back to carrots, they’ve dried out.
Carrots are notoriously difficult to germinate and grow because they dry out quickly when they are small. We hope our new wobbler irrigation system takes the stress out of watering our baby carrots!
This season, Nat decided to invest in a new “wobbler” sprinkler system that delivers more of a steady mist. We also bought an extra pump or two so that we can run irrigation on multiple fields at a time. This wobbler system, which cost about $2000 total, will service JUST our carrots! Once installed it won’t be as portable as our water reel system, but will take a lot of pressure off irrigating during dry times. Quite an investment, but we should be able to keep this equipment for a long time to come. Here’s to a spring with moderate rains and maximum carrots!
Improved tillage systems and the power harrow
We’ve been hearing for a while now about alternative tillage systems of all scales. Tillage is a general term for plowing, cultivating, or otherwise disturbing the soil. Whenever we till, we release carbon and disrupt biological soil processes; these are processes humans still only understand a tiny fraction of. Some people hear this and immediately snap to judgments about tillage.
However, there are many different forms of tillage and even that word: tillage; means different things to different people. For instance, when people talk about no-till vegetable farming, they usually don’t mean absolutely no tilling ever happens. Only on the smallest of plots can you truly do no-till and even then, guess what? Any time you stick a pitchfork into the ground, you are doing a really low-impact form of tillage.
On a big scale, no-till growers use a combination of a no-till seed drill and a roller-crimper (a tool that bends and crimps crops over to create a mulch-like mat on the soil surface). Even here, in what I would call a true no-till system, there are still cutting coulters that stir the ground up just a little bit where the seeds go in. These sorts of true no-till systems are generally reserved for large scale grain operations; something like wheat or corn. Most large-scale no-till vegetable systems actually involve some form of true tillage in a previous year. And even then there are certain vegetables that when being grown on a large scale just can’t be done in a no-till system. Carrots and other root vegetables immediately come to mind.
All this just to say: tillage is a fact of farming! On an organic veggie operation, if you never tilled, you would be drowning in a mess of weeds and woody plants immediately! But we have to think about how we are using tillage and to what extent. Whenever we can “skip a pass” with the tractor, we are saving fuel and the tractor operator’s labor, reducing compaction, keeping nutrient loss to a minimum, and most importantly, preserving soil life and functions.
There are different levels of tillage that are more or less intense in terms of the effect on the soil. Primary tillage usually refers to the first pass that you’d do on a field to get it ready for planting. Chisel plows, disc harrows, and, more extreme, a subsoiler or mouldboard plow, would be considered primary tillage. Secondary tillage refers to a second step of preparing a seed bed. Rototillers and power harrows are examples of secondary tillage implements. A spader is an incredibly expensive, incredibly cool tool that does both primary and secondary tillage in one low-impact pass.
The way that these implements work is the key to the level of soil disturbance. For example, the mouldboard lifts and flips soil, which is more disruptive than a chisel plow, which rakes deep channels and leaves some crop residue near the top.
When we were seeding our fall field in August of 2021, our rototiller broke. At that time in the season, we are usually strapped for cash and generally feeling “over it.” We knew this was an opportunity to consider another option, but we also needed to get the seeds in the ground! What we ended up doing in the moment was put off the decision of repairing vs. replacing the rototiller and make do with what we had. Luckily, we were planting in a really nice sandy field and we were able to do a light pass with our disc-harrow and achieve a pretty fine seedbed!
Once we got through fall, we knew we needed to address this issue – and quickly, due to supply chain concerns. We needed something in time for the new season to start! Rototillers work by churning and flinging soil around at high velocity inside a contained box. They make a beautiful seedbed but can pulverize the soil to powder. A power harrow looks much the same on the outside, but on the inside, it has fingers that reach down vertically instead of an axle that turns horizontally. The result is that the soil is gently “stirred” instead of “blended,” if you will. What we liked about the power harrow option is that compared to a spader, it is an order of magnitude cheaper (though still about $1500 more than a rototiller of similar size). We also like that it neatly fits into our existing systems and we don’t need to change anything else about how we’re doing things.
We look forward to continuing to think about our tillage systems as a part of the whole farm and make improvements where we can. Our end goals are always to improve soil health while continuing to feed our wonderful customer base. We are continuing to see improvements in our soil, something that we monitor with yearly soil testing. It is clear that our cover cropping program and incorporating our laying flock on resting vegetable fields is moving us in the right direction. Our new high tunnels will be another adventure in nutrient dense food production, soil health, and reduced-tillage.!
High Tunnels!
Every year for about the last 5, Bellair has considered installing high-tunnels and then decided against it because of the cost and our reluctance to sign on to year-round growing. While we still have cost concerns, we’ve decided to commit and are planning the installation of two 30’ x 96’ gothic high tunnels sometime during this season!
If you don’t already know what a high tunnel (aka “hoop house” or sometimes “greenhouse”) is, it is essentially an arched semi-permanent building covered in transparent plastic. The difference between a high tunnel and a “regular” greenhouse is that in the high tunnel you’re usually growing crops to full maturity in the ground and in the greenhouse, you’re usually propagating transplants that you then plant out in the field (or in the high tunnel!). You can heat either type of building. For us, our greenhouse is heated in spring when we are just starting seeds, but the high tunnels won’t be heated other than by the sunlight.
Here’s a photo of our existing greenhouse from a previous season. Our new high tunnels will be a similar size and design but will feature crops grown in the ground instead of in trays on table tops.
We plan to use these tunnels exclusively for off-season growing and will have them either tarped or cover cropped during the summer season. They will be located between the current greenhouse and our solar array. We will be using a totally different growing system inside the hoop house, as our big primary tillage tractors will not fit inside. We will be using more of a small-scale method with broadforks to loosen soil, tarps to break down crop residues and rakes to create a fine seedbed.
This type of growing has always felt pretty new to us and that has contributed to our reluctance to jump in. But this winter, we partnered with a neighbor and friend to grow out a test plot of veggies in her 20’ x 50’ high tunnel. We knew this plot, since it was off-site, would never get the love it would need to thrive, but we wanted to just prove the point that we can grow food in a tunnel. Well, the results were as expected: we grew some awesome food, then forgot to water it, then harvested it with terrible timing right before a snow-storm, so it ended up being just crew fare. But we gained confidence and have a general idea about how to go about things in our own much easier-to-access tunnels. If all works well, we will have greens and radishes to sell in January and February of 2023!
Rising raw materials costs means these tunnels are NOT cheap. We’re looking at about $20,000 PER TUNNEL. However, we don’t think prices will be going down any time soon and we feel that even at this cost, we will pay the tunnels back over two seasons or less. The great news is that we were able to submit an application with the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) for grant-funding to cost-share these tunnels. We hope to get some funding to offset costs, but are prepared to bite the bullet and go for it either way!
Broad-Spectrum Mineralization Experimentation
If you’ve followed our farm story closely, you’ll know that Nat and I have been making big improvements to our soil fertility plan over the last couple years. We’ve done more cover cropping in the last two years than any time before and we also break down our fertility plan by field AND crop type to come up with very exact quantities of fertilizer for each planting. Both of these techniques take a bit more time and effort, but we are already seeing results. We hope to be entering a period of just maintaining our soil quality rather than trying to overhaul it.
The next step in our progression in being better at meeting the incredibly varied nutrient needs of our 50+ crops is looking into micronutrients, enhancing microbial activity, and thinking about the differing needs of certain long-season crops over the course of their season. What we’ve decided to try in literal terms is this:
We will be trying a mycorrhizal inoculant on our transplants. This is a mix of naturally occuring symbiotic root-dwelling fungi spores that grow and help plants take up or convert nutrients into the form that they need.
We’ve bought a big drum of Blackstrap Molasses, which is just what it sounds like, regular, plant-derived sugary syrup! This molasses has a huge variety of minerals in it that have different uses on the farm. We mixed some into our bantam chicks’ drinking water as a general health tonic, and can do so with our laying hens and pigs as well. Molasses also works like a fertilizer. It is a broad-spectrum natural food for plants with tons of different minerals and micronutrients. Additionally, it acts as a jump-start for beneficial bacteria in the soil; it gets them up and moving so they can start doing the work they need to do with the plant root system. We also bought another product, a soluble Seaweed Extract, that will have some of the same uses as molasses. We hope to use both this seaweed extract and our molasses on our baby transplants to help them recover from transplant shock.
Finally, we’ve purchased a system that hooks up to our drip lines so that we can deliver liquid nutrients late into the season for our summer crops like peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes. These crops require different ratios of N-P-K throughout their lifetimes: they want a lot of N up front to grow their leaves and stems and then after that, they want the ratio to shift, so that they are still getting plenty of P and especially K but without too much N for fruiting. Once the plants are planted and mulched, it’s hard to apply other fertilizer other than in liquid form, so that’s what we will be doing, using a fish and seaweed extract.