Market Farming

["Lynn Wigglesworth" <lynnw1366 AT hotmail.com>]

From: "JOHN A HENDRICKSON"
> And the catch is that while it may be possible to till more than an acre
> and get some crops planted, it is staying on top of the weeds and, even
> more significantly, being able to harvest everything that might be even
> more of a challenge.

Exactly! My market garden is just under a half acre this year, and I'm
finding it difficult to get everything planted. I'm still building up the
soil, so in some beds I have elaborate soil preparation to do.

This year the weather went from cold to 90 degrees in like two weeks at
the end of May. There aren't enough hours in a day when everything should
have been in the ground yesterday. I FINALLY got all my tomatoes in and
FINALLY got the second wave of lettuce planted...the lettuce was so late I
could have just harvested it from the flats! I was so busy planting that
the weeds got ahead of me; I just spent an intense week weeding, and
finally everything is almost under control again.

My garden is biointensive. My goal is to eventually make deep, double dug,
raised beds, planted intensively. So far I have maybe 1/4  of the beds
double dug with tons of organic matter added, and those beds are SO much
easier to work and more productive.  I want to eliminate the rototiller
(or just use it for surface cultivation) and use a broadfork to loosen the
soil every year. It's going to take a few years to get there, but will
improve the soil structure.

This year I'm converting a section of pasture into market garden. It would
have been difficult to till; the soil is rocky clay and the grass forms a
root mass that the tiller (old Troy-Bilt Horse) has trouble breaking up.
The grass comes back no matter how many times it's tilled. I have
livestock and fed the animals their hay on that area last winter, so there
was a good layer of waste hay on the ground by spring. I have large
amounts of manure/hay compost, so I dumped piles of it all over that
pasture area right on top of the waste hay. I went back and planted winter
squash in the compost piles. My thinking is that the waste hay all over
the ground will keep the weeds down. I've grown squash in compost piles
before, so I know they will thrive. Hopefully I won't have to do anything
more but harvest. In a year or two the hay will kill the grass under it; I
can then spread the compost piles and till. That will add another 1/4 acre
to my garden. There's another 1/4 acre next to that I'd like to add after
that. That will make my market garden almost an acre and, as a solo
gardener, I think that's about all I can handle.

Lynn Wigglesworth
Peasant Farmer
Tioga County, PA