This is "the farm". Its an acre that we are renting from a friend. Last year, it was filled with sunflowers for the summer, then planted into hard winter wheat in the late fall. That is the green that you see.
The big inspiration for fencing and irrigating and farming an entire acre was the idea of growing cabbage for making live sauerkraut. But that is only taking up 1/5 of the acre. Another 1/5 will be mixed veggies, another 1/5 will be grains, and the other 2/5 will be cover cropped.
The tilled area in this picture is the 1/5 acre cabbage patch. I would like to develop a long-term, no-till rotation that includes cabbage production, but for this spring planting, we used a walk-behind tractor. We got the tractor from Earth Tools, which let us borrow it for the weekend. They also let Sellus borrow it to till another community garden in south Frankfort. I heard he was up til 2 am tilling that community garden. Now that's just simply legendary, if you ask me.
I mentioned the desire to get away from tillage. Tillage is destructive. I compare it to surgery. The earth is opened up, and all kinds of micro organisms are killed. Tens of thousands in each tiny teaspoon. Its a micro genocide. As farms move away from artificial fertilizers, we need to take care of microbes, because they are nature's way of releasing nutrients so that plants can use them. To be honest, I really dislike it. But I'm still doing it. We live in a crazy age, don't we?
Anyway, I am trying to develop a farming system that reduces or eliminates tillage altogether. I really like the idea of permanent rows and permanent beds. In the beds, crops will be rotated by family (Cruciferous crops, Cucurbits, Solanaceous, Grasses, Allims, Legumes, etc), while the rows will remain in some kind of mowable mixture (I'll be experimenting with a few mixes for this). Permanent rows allow us to keep some soil undisturbed for long periods of time. I think of it as a microbe safe haven.
For the cabbage patch, I'm trying a mixture that a seed distributor in southern Ohio made for me. It contains "Green Spirit" rye grass and "Alice" white clover.
We spread it by hand, at a rate that looks like this:
Then we raked over it, so that the seeds get better soil contact and have an easier time holding water during germination. This is my dad, raking it all in. I convinced him to take a day off of construction work to come help with my cabbage plants. So it really is becoming a family affair (at least for the weekend) which is totally the dream. We had a very good time.
Then came the cabbage plants. Luckily, I got the support of the farmers at Elmwood Stock Farm, a nice, large organic farm in Georgetown, Kentucky. They are a family farm that has transitioned from conventional tobacco to organic vegetables (30+ acres!), organic tobacco, fruits, herbs, and animals. The farm is an impressive work that has obviously been lovingly tended to for more than a generation. They took my seeds and started these plants for me, then sold them back to me at an affordable price. We got about 1,400 plants!
And finally, the transplanting.
Want to know how to get a truly insane leg workout? Transplant a thousand plants into the soil. You will melt into sweet soreness for two days.
We got this planting done just before a nice rain, and with some good weather, we should have a LOT of sauerkraut to make...and EAT!
The big inspiration for fencing and irrigating and farming an entire acre was the idea of growing cabbage for making live sauerkraut. But that is only taking up 1/5 of the acre. Another 1/5 will be mixed veggies, another 1/5 will be grains, and the other 2/5 will be cover cropped.
The tilled area in this picture is the 1/5 acre cabbage patch. I would like to develop a long-term, no-till rotation that includes cabbage production, but for this spring planting, we used a walk-behind tractor. We got the tractor from Earth Tools, which let us borrow it for the weekend. They also let Sellus borrow it to till another community garden in south Frankfort. I heard he was up til 2 am tilling that community garden. Now that's just simply legendary, if you ask me.
I mentioned the desire to get away from tillage. Tillage is destructive. I compare it to surgery. The earth is opened up, and all kinds of micro organisms are killed. Tens of thousands in each tiny teaspoon. Its a micro genocide. As farms move away from artificial fertilizers, we need to take care of microbes, because they are nature's way of releasing nutrients so that plants can use them. To be honest, I really dislike it. But I'm still doing it. We live in a crazy age, don't we?
Anyway, I am trying to develop a farming system that reduces or eliminates tillage altogether. I really like the idea of permanent rows and permanent beds. In the beds, crops will be rotated by family (Cruciferous crops, Cucurbits, Solanaceous, Grasses, Allims, Legumes, etc), while the rows will remain in some kind of mowable mixture (I'll be experimenting with a few mixes for this). Permanent rows allow us to keep some soil undisturbed for long periods of time. I think of it as a microbe safe haven.
For the cabbage patch, I'm trying a mixture that a seed distributor in southern Ohio made for me. It contains "Green Spirit" rye grass and "Alice" white clover.
We spread it by hand, at a rate that looks like this:
Then we raked over it, so that the seeds get better soil contact and have an easier time holding water during germination. This is my dad, raking it all in. I convinced him to take a day off of construction work to come help with my cabbage plants. So it really is becoming a family affair (at least for the weekend) which is totally the dream. We had a very good time.
Then came the cabbage plants. Luckily, I got the support of the farmers at Elmwood Stock Farm, a nice, large organic farm in Georgetown, Kentucky. They are a family farm that has transitioned from conventional tobacco to organic vegetables (30+ acres!), organic tobacco, fruits, herbs, and animals. The farm is an impressive work that has obviously been lovingly tended to for more than a generation. They took my seeds and started these plants for me, then sold them back to me at an affordable price. We got about 1,400 plants!
And finally, the transplanting.
Want to know how to get a truly insane leg workout? Transplant a thousand plants into the soil. You will melt into sweet soreness for two days.
We got this planting done just before a nice rain, and with some good weather, we should have a LOT of sauerkraut to make...and EAT!
