A Winter Farm Visit

We drove out to the Farm School this morning to chat with our friend Nate, the head vegetable grower there. It was a gorgeous, sunny morning, cold and clear, and the patches of snow thickened as we drove up the ridge top to Maggie’s Farm. I’ve decided that one of the best things about winter is sitting down with other farmers to talk shop. There is enough time to spend a couple hours talking over the details of soil amendments and varietal differences, time that is impossible to find in the summer.

We sat in the sunny library on the second floor of the farmhouse. Nate is a self-proclaimed “soil-stalker”, and had spent some time checking out our soil type. We looked at the soil map and description from NCRS and talked about the details. Our soil is a class 5W. Soils are rated in 9 classes;  classes 1-3 are considered prime agricultural soils. Beyond that, soils are marginal or difficult, getting worse for crop production the higher the rating. I’d guess a glass 9 soil would be a swamp! Class 5 means simply that we are not growing on prime land, which we already knew, and 5W means the soil is wet, which we also knew.

Growing on marginal land does not mean the land will not produce a bountiful harvest. Some of the land at Maggie’s Farm is also class 5, and Nate has been growing gorgeous vegetables there for a while now. But it does mean that time and care are required to build up the soil – which is what all farming is really about, anyway. So we talked about compost application, and micro nutrient levels, and what kinds of soil amendments will boost our macro nutrient levels. We talked about fertilizers, how much and what kind to apply, and about using lime to bring up the pH, and about various tillage techniques to improve drainage and water circulation. It’s a large, complex, fasinationg, puzzle, and we’re thinking of it in terms of a three year time frame, since that’s how long we plan to be on the land. Three years, however, is not very long in the life of a piece of land, in the life of soil.

Compost is at the center of our fertility plan. The NPK (Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium) ratio of compost is 1-1-1. We’re hoping to apply about 40,000 pounds (25 cubic yards) of compost on our 1.25 acres this year. That compost alone will give us 400 pounds each of N-P-K, as well as boost our organic matter and help increase our pH. To give our plants a sure source of readily-available nitrogen, we’ll incorporate a moderate, well-balanced natural fertilizer just before planting. To bring up our pH, we’ll incorporate lime in the spring. We’ll probably spread a few soil amendments to help raise the nutrients in our soil over the long-term. We’re also looking into spraying our plants with fish emulsion and compost tea to give them an added boost thorughout the season.

We’re just starting to work out the details of our fertility plan. In the next few weeks we’ll be putting together a solid 3-year plan, ordering fertilizer, and (gasp) starting seeds!

It is always such a pleasure to sit down with farmer friends and go over these hard questions, again and again. A big thank-you to Nate for all his support and enthusiasm for First Root! Everything would be a lot harder, and a lot less fun, if we didn’t have such fabulous mentors to answer our questions and calm our fears, to give us sound advice and cheer us on, to assure us, that yes, our seeds will grow.

Before heading to the Greenfield Farmers Cooperative Exchange to pick up some chick feed, we got a chance to visit with the cows and sheep – the lambs and calves are all grown up, and the ewes are looking pregnant.

In the car on the way home: four 50-pound bags of chick starter, five bags of wood shavings for bedding, a box of turnips, beets, rutabega and parsnips from the Maggie’s root cellar, a couple pounds of gorgeous yellow onions, a few heads of garlic, four bags of wool, and four dozen eggs.

Thank you, Maggie’s Farm!

Laura

Chicken Coop Plans

This weekend we will begin construction of our chicken coop. We’ve spent the past month hashing out a design – many, many thanks to our friend Kael (this drawing is his), who has been a vital part of the process. Between his carpentry expertise, and our knowledge of chickens, we’ve manged to come up with a design for a coop that we think will work really well for our 50 birds. It’s small, because our birds will spend most of their time out on pasture. We’re hoping to be able to build it on some kind of trailer/set of wheels, so that we can easily move it. The construction is simple: a frame of 2×4’s, plywood sides, and  a sloped roof weatherproofed with tar paper. It’ll have 8-10 nesting boxes with an access door from the outside, so we can easily collect eggs without going into the coop proper.

Depending on how this coop comes turns out, we may build another structure for roosting, something similar, but smaller, and built to be moved easily. But we might decide that this one coop is plenty big enough for our chickens, and simply add some roosts to the inside. Farming is all about trial and error.

While we’re still collecting materials to build this coop, we’ll be building a chick brooder on our back porch tomorrow morning. This brooder is where our chicks will spend the first 4-8 weeks of their lives. We’re going to block off a section of our porch, line the floor with plywood, and layer cardboard on top. Into this cozy home we’ll deposit some wood shavings, two heat lamps, and fifty fluffy chicks.

Need I say it again? Spreadsheets and solid, basic math, seed varieties, creative building projects with friends, zine-making, recipe-writing, fertility research. Being a farmer is pretty great!

Laura

Scarboro Mucky Fine Sandy Loam

That’s the name of our official soil type.

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service publishes a comprehensive soil survey (The National Cooperative Soil Survey) for the entire US. It is an unbelievable document, a book of soil maps for every county in the state. Using the soil survey, you can determine exactly what kind of soil type you have on your farm. Often there will be two or three different kinds, and you using the maps, you can see where on your fields one soil type ends and another begins. The survey also describes in detail the characteristics of each soil – its physical properties, depth to bedrock, height of water table, drainage properties, proportions of clay-sand-silt, etc.

Here’s the soil survey map of the land along Lexington Road where our First Root is located. Our field is the tiny opening on the left side of the road, near the bottom of the map, marked by the 6A soil type, and surrounded by forest.

Here are some of the major properties of Scarboro mucky fine sandy loam:

• Slope: 0-1%. In other words, flat.
• Depth to restrictive feature: More than 80 inches. We’d have to plow down six feet before hitting rock of some kind. I think we can handle that.
• Drainage class: Very poorly drained. Indeed. Hence, “mucky”.
• Depth to water table: About 0 to 6 inches. In other words, not very deep at all.
• Frequency of flooding: None. Fantastic!
• Frequency of ponding: Frequent. Oh, right. Verification of what I already knew. I pass ice-covered ponds forming on the field every time i drive by.
• Available water capacity: Moderate (about 6.9 inches).

There are lots of ways of looking at soils. This morning I got an email from Pete at Codman Farm, who’s been growing on our field for the last few seasons. “Start your plantings in the middle of the field and work your way out,” he said. “That is why I always planted the garlic in the middle of the field were you have it. You can get a good crop as things dry on the sides, then turn under the middle and get a second planting.  The land tends to get dry in the middle, but the outside holds the perfect amount of water in August.”

We’re going to be growing a bounty of vegetables on Scarboro mucky fine sandy loam. It’s important to know about our soil profile, about its structure and drainage qualities, to study neighboring soil types. It’s comforting to know the official lingo….even if it does involve the word “mucky”. Pete’s advice comes from several years of observing the land. Yup, its mucky, he’s telling us, so this is what you do, this is how you work with the land, this is the how you get the most and the best out of what you have. Farming is a process of translation and observation: we start with the raw data, we try something out, it doesn’t work, we do it again. We learn that even a mucky field, when treated right, is dry enough in the middle for spring planting, and on its edges, holds the perfect amount of water in August.

Check out the NRCS web soil survey. It’s pretty neat.

Laura

Winter Work

Do you wonder what farmers do in the winter? As you might have gathered by now, winter is slow..but not that slow. Maybe it’s because we’re starting from scratch, and so there is a lot more for us to do than there would be on a farm that is already up and running – but I’m starting to wonder how folks’ take so much time off in the winter!

To give you an idea, here’s our February/March to-do list.

1. Build a chick brooder and chicken coop.

2. Make a fertility plan – this includes determining what (if any) bagged fertilizers we’ll use, how much compost we’ll spread on our field, and when, and working cover crops into our crop plan. What cover crops do we want to plan? Will we undersow (seed cover crops while the main crop is still in the ground, so that the cover has more time to grow up)? How much of our field will get covered and what will we leave fallow?

3. Inventory recipes and work on our zine-style CSA newsletter. We won’t have time to put this together in the spring, so we’re working on it now, so that it’ll be ready come June. CSA members can look forward to the most beautiful, information-packed, creative newsletter ever!

4. Build a dibbler. A dibbler is a rolling device with small markers spaced evenly around it. You pull it across the bed before you transplant in order to get good, even spacing.

5. Finailize our budget and order tools and supplies – this is everything from garden forks and hoes to seed trays and potting soil. It involves inventorying, sorting, and assesing the quality of everything we have in the barn, determing what we need, finding the best deals, and ordering.

6. Build wooden boxes to display our vegetables at our CSA pickups.

7. Build cold frames.

8. Make signs for our CSA and PYO.

9. Clear the hedgerows and do some chainsaw work moving piles of old woods and stumps off our field.

It is all interesting, satisfying work, and there’s a lot of it. I’m glad I don’t live somewhere where I could grow year-round. The space that opens up in the blue days of winter seems vital to the life of a farm – without these few cold months, when would we have time to repair tools, construct new projects, and spend a few lovely hours writing recipes? In some ways, there is just as much work right now as there is at the heart of the season – it is just a different kind of work, executed at a different pace.

I’m glad I live in New England. I’m glad for the snow and the white moon and the lengthening days, and that there is more than enough work to fill them with.

Laura