March is here! It’s time to kick into gear, planting and prepping for the busy season. We are planning to proceed with the same system as last year – online store opening in May for pre-orders, as little or as much as you like, for pick up at the farm Fridays and at Covent Garden Market on Saturdays. We will also have a regular market stand at Covent, 8am-1pm, starting in May.

We will have seedlings for sale again this year – edible flowers and herbs, tough to find natural dye plants like Japanese Indigo, madder root and weld, as well as hybrid tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes and peppers.

I feel grateful for the slow season changes on the farm – I’m not quite ready for full speed ahead (my body or my mind), but I’m ready to start the engine. Jess started back at the farm this week, a couple days a week. We will seed quick crops in the unheated hoop houses, work in the cosy greenhouse, and do some construction projects. I try to improve a system each year on the farm – this year we are upgrading the wash area with a new salad washing tub and machine for spin-drying.

It’s also childcare juggling season – figuring out a new way to snatch a moment to sit at the computer (it’s 5:30am), finish the weaving project (exciting in the beginning but now a chore), and fetch all the jars and bags and boxes we need for the season.

Buttons and Suzy were both scheduled to foal this fall, but now we are waiting on just one…Buttons lost her foal in February, a little early, born in its intact sac. It was sad but we are grateful we have another little one to look forward to. Sonny, a gelding that worked here for many years has come back to Orchard Hill. He will be working with Buttons and with the young stallion, Joey in the spring. This will be the first year that Joey is out in the fields, and he’s doing really well in training.

Ken is proceeding with more research trials with EFAO (Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario) and Living Labs, looking at the techniques and benefits related to larger scale organic no-till. If you drive by the farm, you can see some of the cover crop demonstrations labelled.

I hope you’re all healthy and warm, and you have someone to hug.

Drilling Soybeans into Crimped Winter Rye

Organic farmers have been criticized for using too much tillage. We use tillage to terminate one crop and prepare the soil for planting the next crop and then we use more tillage in row crops to control weeds during the growing season.

To develop no-till planting strategies for organic farmers it requires a lot of management skills and experience to figure out what cover crops or combinations thereof to create a good planting situation and season long weed control.

To do it with horse power requires another whole level of adaptation and creativity to evolve the machinery necessary to do the job of planting into heavy residues – getting the seed through the residue and into the soil and not exposing too much bare soil which is an invitation for weeds to grow.

There are 2 basic strategies that I have used: planting into winter killed cover crops like daikon radish or sorghum-sudan grass: or planting into mowed or roller/crimped growing covers like oats/barley/peas or winter rye or buckwheat.

Interestingly the 2 pieces of equipment that I use for terminating growing covers are both built by I&J an Amish equipment company in Pennsylvania. The I &J mower[7ft.] I use has a double reciprocating design which enables it to cut through any standing crop without plugging and does a nice job of laying it down evenly. The other tool, the roller/crimper was also designed by I&J and I was fortunate to find one they had built with wheels to be trailed behind a forecart. The drum can be filled with water to make it more effective and the wheels can be lifted right off the ground to transfer even more weight to the roller. It is 8 feet wide and can be pulled by 2 horses or 3 if it is a bigger field.

No-till Drill

The more challenging piece of equipment is the no-till planter/drill. Listening to the advice of a long time no-till conventional farmer [ who is also my nephew] I avoided a system which is common on no-till drills which is a row of coulters ahead of the openers. These coulters effectively loosen the soil to allow the use of a lighter opener system. The problem is they absorb a lot of horsepower. There is an Amish company that builds such a drill of various sizes, ESCH in Pennsylvania. The design I went with involves a heavy double disc opener on parallel-o-gram arms with one disc leading the other by ¾”. Then there is a press wheel at the rear to control the depth of seeding and also functions to close the seed trench. These units were off a salvaged tractor no-till drill built by Crust-Buster in the USA. There 8 units spaced 8” apart. I usually pull this drill with 3 horses. It is raised and lowered with a battery driven hydraulic system. I intentionally built the drill quite heavy but I still added more weight because very heavy residue of firm soil can cause an end wheel to lift off the ground. That is why the drive wheel for the seeding mechanism is on a third wheel. The down pressure on the openers is easily changed by moving a spring on the opener unit but of course is limited by the total weight of the machine.

We have successfully no-tilled spring cereals into winter killed daikon radish, oats/barley/peas and sorghum-sudan grass, soybeans into roller/crimped winter rye and winter cereals into roller/crimped buckwheat and mown millet.

No-till Drilling Oat/Barley Mixture Into Different Winter Killed Cover Crops, April 6, 2019