Market Farming

[Allan Balliett <igg AT igg.com>]

Seriously, Matt, food plants should NEVER be around old truck tires. 
Cadmium and other heavy metals are available in the soil around the 
tires (and to your hands) and it gets in the food and it is NOT GOOD 
for anyone. I sense that you may need to buy some newer gardening 
books. The tire idea came into vogue in the 70's but by at  the 
mid-90s it was fairly well known in community gardening circles that 
tires are very dangerous around food.

The 2nd thing I wanted to say to you is that it is very easy to get 
broadacre farming confused with market farming when you are starting 
out. There are many techniques of economy of labor and equipment and 
materials that are necessary when you are farming acres of something 
that are not pertinent when you are only doing a few 100ft beds of 
it. I have come to think of my 100ft beds as containers rather than 
as fields. DOing it this way, I don't feel bad about MAKING SOIL to 
fill that bed. If you do that, you can use peat or community leaf 
mold or ? to get the texture you want fast and you can do that 12inch 
nutrient balancing that you are apparently interested in doing 
easily, if you board your beds (30ft white oak 12inch fence boards 
can be fairly cheap from a sawmill. Maybe not in your area. You can 
even do this "Chineese Style" and just make mounded beds). I still 
advise you to work from soil tests. We built several hundred feet of 
boarded salad beds mid-season this year. I have to admit that I'm 
fairly disappointed with how they have performed, but I'm getting 
them re-tested and will work to balance nutrients better before this 
season begins. My point: it is NOT too much work to build soil - just 
like a landscaper would do - for beds. Texturizing with a cover crop 
is going to take you a lot of months to accomplish.