Cover Crops

Cover crops help us begin to replace the tons (literally!) of organic matter taken from the fields during the growing season. Tons (again, literally!) of compost will also need to be spread before the next growing season if we are to even approach replenishing the soil. As you may be able to tell from this old photo of me spreading compost with CY at Vanguarden CSA, I like this winter work!

Oats were undersowed in the cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale and collards at Brookwood around the first of September. They are coming up nicely. The oats will continue grow amidst these 'cash crops' until the first hard frost which will kill them. In the spring, the oats will be tilled in and the first crops of 2010 planted in their place. Undersowing is a useful cover crop technique on a small farm like Brookwood. It allows us to protect and replenish the soil at the same time we're using it to grow late fall crops. In hindsight, I wish the oats had been applied a bit earlier, when the crops were a foot in height rather than two. It would also have been lovely to use the Cub for the final cultivation/mixing soil and seeds.

I'd hoped to undersow our winter squash planting with hairy vetch, but we missed the planting window because we didn't have the seed on hand. (Note to self, order cover crops in the spring!) It's best to undersow vetch just as the squash vines are reaching across the tire tracks, into neighboring beds. (It's handy to sow it just before a rain, too.) Vetch is a legume; it pulls nitrogen from the air and brings it into the soil where it's available for next season's crops. I think we'll be able to make good use of the vetch next week, mixing it with oats and applying to the beds where the melons grew this season.

Spreading lime

The last two weeks have been busy.

Yesterday I finished spreading two tons of pelletized lime on the field. The process of spreading lime on this suburban farm is a bit different than in farm country where 10 ton lime-filled trucks drop lime directly onto frozen fields during the coldest time of year. Here's what lime spreading looks like on my one acre.

Ken, from the Agway in Waltham, delivered 100 forty-pound plastic bags of lime to the farm last week. (His 5-ton truck almost got stuck in the thawed soil in front of the hoop house. You'll see the evidence if you join me for the farm tour this Thursday.) I'd wanted the lime delivered earlier, in February when the ground was still frozen. Since there's really no demand for lime in suburbia until homeowners start thinking of creating the perfect lawn, there was no lime available until last week.

I borrowed a large, conical-shaped spreader from CY (Vanguarden CSA) and hooked it up to the tractor with the help of WD40 and a big mallet. Then, I filled the spreader to capactiy with 320 pounds of lime and made one pass in the field. Repeated that 12+ times. With the help of more WD40, my trusty mallet and my dear husband's muscle, the spreader was then detached from the tractor, loaded onto the truck and returned.

The recommendations from the UMass soil lab were for six tons of lime to correct a soil ph of 5.6. I plan to spread more lime throughout the growing season and another two tons in the fall.

My mother is visiting this week. I rushed from my liming duties to the airport to pick her up. I don't think she recognized me. I waved wildly, jumped up and down, and yelled her name before I got her attention. Admittedly, I didn't look like myself. I was a bit disheveled, clothed in my favorite tattered farm wear (from the floor of a second hand store in Cambridge), a layer of white lime dust all over me, boots caked in mud. At first I thought she was trying to ignore me, but she says she was just trying to get a little exercise by jogging around the baggage claim area.