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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: market-farming Tillers
  • Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 13:32:47 -0500


Good morning!

I've had great success with my walk-behind Simplicity with its 8-horse Briggs & Stratton engine. Too bad the tenant-caretaker ran it without oil last October and seized the engine. It's with the repair guy now to see if it can be saved -- I really love that old machine, which I bought through a Pennysaver ad ten years ago. It's almost as old as I am (which is getting up there). I wasn't real happy to see that he's got it sitting out in his yard instead of in the barn, but maybe that's all right and I just pampered it here at home.

We're moving forward on our goal of becoming free from petro-power. The raised beds are doing better and better with their mulch-and-compost system, and I've got two baby gilts (pigs) on order to start an experiment using them in portable pens to open new beds.

I'm now working about six acres part-time with a DR trimmer and scythe for weed control, liberal applications of mulch and compost, garden claw when soil must be worked, and lots of worms and other soil life -- a result of not over-working the soil. I hope to get another two acres opened with the pigs.

The plan is to put the two pigs on a confined 10 x 12 area, half of it roofed by a tarp for shade and rain protection. This traveling pen will be moved forward by pony power whenever the pigs have rooted it up well, and a crop of buckwheat will be planted. When the buckwheat is about 3" tall, a portable chicken pen will follow, then a planting of field peas to add nitrogen and biomass (and to give the chicken droppings a few weeks to break down before any crops are planted in the beds). These new beds will then be used for fall plantings of garlic and flower bulbs.

Hopefully the pigs will live here forever as pets and ambassadors and living rototillers. If they develop personality disorders (i.e., "get mean"), we will sadly call the custom butcher and they will move into the freezer. However, we'll work with them from babyhood to avoid that alternative. We'd like to use them to demonstrate an effective small-scale alternative to factory confinement pork production -- and an alternative to dinner tables.

I do borrow a mid-sized rototiller once in a while from a neighbor, but usually it's just if I've gotten way behind on cleaning out the run-in sheds and there's an accumulation of "pack". There's always at least six inches of clean wood shavings and hay on top and the vet has confirmed that as long as the animals are dry and clean this isn't a problem -- but every once in a while the old German Farmer in me insists on having everything clean down to the gravel base. The pigs might replace that petro-tool, too.

Dorene, you and I have more and more in common -- my mother's family was South Carolina Deutsch (a variant of Pennsylvania Dutch). I guess this farming thing is in our blood even if it sometimes skips a generation or two.

Dori Green, Crazy Rescue Woman & Facilitator
Ash Grove Community Farm & Center for Sustainable Living
Corning, NY

http://www.ic.org/agrove/index.htm


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  • Re: market-farming Tillers, Dori Green, 03/20/2001

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