Market Farming

["Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>]

On my way out to the garden -- hoping that NWS is just late and not outright 
lying about their promise of rain.  Blown knee is bending again, so I'm off 
to plant another couple hundred eggplants.  But first, some coffee and 
contact!

I had great success with heavy hay mulch around potato plants, and the 
chicken I named "Dinner Bell" led the charge whenever I scouted too many 
beetles to tolerate -- pick her up and carry her over to the patch, turn her 
loose, she called the dinner bell for the rest of the free-range flock.  
They also kept slugs down.  After rain I hand-pick the slugs from their 
sunning seats at the tops of plants and carry them over to the barn.  Easy 
chemical-free bug control!

The problem with the heavy hay mulch was meadow voles.  They carve runs at 
the base of heavy lawn or pasture, or through loose hay mulch.  Almost every 
other potato had one tasting bite taken out of it.  I haven't used hay mulch 
for potatoes again.

Yes, mulch increases soil life.  This includes earthworms and other 
beneficial life as well as a few pests.  I do cover my raised beds with a 
heavy winter mulch of leaves.  In spring I just rake it over into the path, 
add some compost, sprinkle seeds, cover with more compost.  Preparation of 
this system has taken years and most of the beds are in their first sod 
rotation this year -- a risky experiment with lots of weeds I'm not happy to 
see -- but there's also a heavy clover population, experiment success, in 
many places it's even crowded out the galansoga (now there's a magic trick). 
 I'm now starting to solarize sections of the beds with clear plastic 
before applying mulch in preparation for next season's planting, and it's 
time to mow them all with the DR trimmer to arrest more weed seed 
production.  Ideally this would be done with scythes but sigh I fear this 
year I'm going to cheat and use the DR.  But so far this experiment in 
organic no-till has been working for me.  The whole pictorial history will 
be up at my site by the end of next week.

Leaves make great mulch and are usually free of herbicides.  If you arrange 
for delivery from a town, be sure to specify in writing that they have to be 
loose and not bagged -- or else have a LOT of committed volunteers or 
workers on hand to dump them immediately after arrival while they're dry and 
light and the plastic doesn't shatter because of UV exposure.  Ugh, some of 
the things that live under those bags after they've sat for a year....which 
some of them will if it's only you doing all of the work and the town brings 
ten truckloads of bagged leaves despite your specification.  Once out of the 
bags, they make great compost when layered with kitchen and restaurant 
scraps, goat and chicken and pony manure, some sawdust, wood ashes, and 
sprinklings from your old compost pile to innoculate the new one.  I let 
each new pile sit for three years before using on the garden, just to make 
sure that any pesticides or herbicides have been well broken down if they 
come in by accident.  When I'm able to rent a Bobcat or hire my neighbor 
with his front-end loader tractor for an hour or two, the pile gets turned 
-- otherwise it just sits.  I also use it for training goats and ponies for 
plowing since it's low-resistance to the shovel plow and the uneven soft 
footing encourages the animals to slow down.

Side notes -- two goats with a yoke can easily pull a small shovel plow 
through a compost pile or well-worked garden soil, but they aren't up to 
rocks or rough new fields.  For those I hire a tractor guy.

One willing pony with a shovel plow can do as much work as a full-sized 
draft horse, and the pony isn't as likely to step on seedlings already in 
place.  There's also a small Amish-made cultivator available for goats or 
ponies, available from Hoegger's or Caprine Supply for less than $200.  A 
breast strap harness can be used on a pony with a light plow or small 
cultivator; I'm still working to make the draft angle better for the shovel 
plow for the goat yoke.

And then it all comes down to the hand-planting of transplants.  Today it's 
the eggplants and okra and more perimeter squashes.  Then the tomatoes go 
onto red IRT mulch on the upper field.  Yes, they're way late.  Everything 
is way late this year.  But the things that are in, are doing very well so I 
have hope.

Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm
Corning, NY

http://www.ic.org/agrove

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