Hello,
I've been a member for just a year or two. I manage a small organic
vegetable farm in the Mid-Atlantic. Thank you for those links - thanks
especially for Steve Diver's ATTRA publication. I'm sorry that I missed
the original thread and so can't respond to the question as posed. I do
have a thought to consider re: no/reduced-till practices as practiced in these
two links (rather than at Foundation Farm) in a market garden: it's a great
idea and it can work, but so far not for all your crops. Particularly if
you practice succession planting/sowing.
I think the driver, if you're organic, is that you need to time your
rolldown with the flowering/pollen-to-milk stage of the cover crop so that it
dies and leaves the thickest mulch possible. I'm not sure that
undercutting a cover with less growth will give you the desired benefit - more
weeds later. That undermines no-till's use when you plant successive
crops. I can see it as a useful part of a rotation, which makes the
rotation a little more complicated then. And sometimes I just want a
simpler rotation not a more complicated one.
Take tomatoes. I usually start in an unheated tunnel and plant
around the equinox. I plant a new crop every month or so (field
conditions are pretty variable at my site) for four total plantings. So
rye and/or vetch flower mid-late May. I can live with that for planting
3 (second outside), but what about my first outside planting, or the fourth?
I'd need something that puts on a lot of biomass and matures mid-late
April. I can live with beginning of May, but 1) the early crops want
warm soil, too, and a thick cover will slow that spring warming and hold
moisture, and 2) I'm concerned the planting will bear too close to the next.
For the last crop, which I plant as late as July 1-4, I'd want something
that will be in flower/pollen that late, or that I've seeded in spring and
puts on 3-4 tons of biomass and flowers by then.
Am I looking at this wrong?
I'm considering if it's a matter of picking cover crops that mature at
different times - in some cases even breeding them or selecting varieties that
work for our systems and marketing needs. Reading Steve's ATTRA
document, perhaps a forage soybean will work for the late tomato plants, for
example, or field pea or sunn hemp. In theory at least. The
details have a way of making things a little less wieldy - soil temperature,
soil type, water management, variable conditions, weed control...
Another limiting factor for small farms is tooling. I'm working on
adapting an earthway and a planet jr seeder to do a better job in a bare,
untilled spring surface (after winter killed covers). The issue at my
farm is the soil surface can be "tight" and uneven - it's not light and fluffy
as after a tillage. Spring crops do well when seeded with something
heavier (like a Mater Mac dream machine), so the seed bed is really an issue
for light seeders like we might use on a small farm.
Does anyone here has any thoughts or ideas to the last?
Mike Snow, Maryland
----- Original Message -----
From: Rob
Wallbridge
To: 'Market Farming'
Sent: Thursday, December 16,
2010 8:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Market-farming] No-Till for Diversified
Vegetable Production?
Here's another good link on no-till vegetable
production:
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/choosing_the_best_cover_cropsAnd
I listened in on this interesting webinar last week:
http://www.extension.org/article/31013Cheers,
Rob
Rob
Wallbridge
Songberry Organic Farm
email:
rob AT songberry.caweb:
www.songberry.cafacebook:
"Songberry Organic Farm"
twitter:
@songberryfarm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From:
market-farming-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:market-farming-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]
On Behalf Of Steve Diver
Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2010 12:26 PM
To:
Market Farming
Subject: Re: [Market-farming] No-Till for Diversified
Vegetable Production?
John / Bill -
Here are two
more key links, in my experience.
Mechanical roller-crimper methods for
no-till cover crops via NCAT-ATTRA
http://attra.ncat.org/calendar/question.php/2006/05/08/where_can_i_find_information_about_the_mThe
roller-crimper method will give you a killed or dying cover crop
mulch
to transplant into.
Obviously this kind of system won't
work for directed seeding of small-seeded
carrots and lettuce, but
transplanting warm-season peppers, tomatoes, & melons
would match
that kind of system.
For the smaller scale market farm,
the methods that Patrice Gros is using
at Foundation Farm are worth knowing
about.
Pics of No-Till Bed System at Foundation
Farm, NW Arkansas
http://www.foundationfarm.com/farm_pics.htmOne
key angle to keep in mind is that he lives in Northwest Arkansas in the
Fescue
Belt. It won't work with Devil's Grass, aka Bermuda
Grass, and similar running
warm-season
grasses.
Actually, if you go back through Eliot Coleman's old
references and dig up
European farming books by Faber & Faber, the
system called "surface cultivation"
is a good description of the
no-till methods used at Foundation Farm.
When I visited Patrice's farm,
the level of fertility displayed in growing crops
suggested the soil
fungal network was still intact and functioning, plus the
heavy
mulching helps. They avoid scratching deeper than a few
inches
and the soil has never been ripped or turned.
Steve
Diver
Austin, TX
William H Shoemaker
wrote:
John
These links are a start, but probably
not as comprehensive as you'd like. Both authors are very practically minded.
They might point to other resources for you too.
http://attra.ncat.org/downloads/notill_veg.doc http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/organic_no-till_for_vegetable_production --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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