Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Knee-High by the Fourth of July

Hey everyone!

A lot has happened over the past few days, so I wanted to share all of it with you today!

First off, we got a lot of rain at the farm over the weekend, and it really helped our plants!  The contrast between Monday morning and the end of last week was very striking.  Last week, the soil surface was dry and cracked and the plants were looking shrunken.  After the rain, however, they are looking healthy and luscious!  Here are some before and after pictures:

Lettuce, before rain

Radishes, before rain

Mesculin mix, before rain

From left to right: radishes, lettuce, and mesculin mix after the rain

As you can see, the plants really benefited from the water.  It's not often that you see the appearance of plants change so quickly!  The rain also probably helped ease the transplant shock for the tomatoes, peppers, and broccoli that Jodie and I transplanted into our community garden plot last week, which is good news as well.  

Speaking of our community garden plot, Jodie and I continued putting in more crops on Monday.  We planted one bed with three rows of carrots, and another bed with two rows of bush beans.  We also put in some cages to provide support for our tomatoes.  As of now, we are mostly done planting most of our summer crops.  We might add a little bit of dill and basil in the coming days.  

Carrot bed (on the left) and bush bean bed (on the right)

Our improved community garden plot

We also got to participate in our first workshop for the farmers on Monday.  An employee of the Garden Project, another program of the Greater Lansing Food Bank, came out to demonstrate how to use a tiller.  Most of our farmers haven't used much mechanized equipment before, so it was fun to see them try it out.  Tillers like these are nice tools for small-scale growing operations.  This tiller is one of the few pieces of mechanized equipment that we have used out at the farm, as most of our work is done by hand. In addition to the tiller, we have used a trench-digging machine to lay our header pipe for our drip irrigation.  A local farmer was also kind enough to use his tractor to till our entire field at the beginning of the season.  Minimal use of mechanized equipment contributes to the sustainability of our program, as it keeps our greenhouse gas emissions low.  

Instructor demonstrating use of the tiller

Bhutanese farmers trying out the tiller

Another exciting piece of news is that we conducted our first harvest of the season on Monday!  Some of our radishes were ready to harvest, so we went ahead and pulled them up.  We won't be taking any produce to market for a few more days, but if we allowed the radishes to get bigger they might have become too bitter to eat.  So we decided to enjoy some for ourselves and take the rest to the food bank!

Harvested radish

Yum!

Another radish

Our loot!  
One other cool task that we took care of at the end of the week was trellising our cucumbers.  Cucumbers are a vine plant by nature, but we want them to grow vertically.  To get them to do that, we hung twine from the rafters of the hoophouse.  We then looped that twine around a few of the leaves of each plant.  The plants send out little chutes called "runners," which will grab onto the string and help the plant to climb upward.  

Cucumber trellises 

Cucumber plants with trellises, close-up

We also began trellising our pole beans on Monday as well.  We did that by running twine horizontally between metal t-posts.

Pole bean bed

Another cool thing I wanted to show you all is how the whole farm is looking.  It looks a lot different from the beginning of the season when it was all brown soil!  There is a lot more green now, as most of our farmers have put in all of their plants.  

Field at beginning of season

Field now:  A farmer's plot on the left and cover crop down the middle.  Cover crop is used to prevent soil erosion, among other things.  Ours is a mix of rye and clover.
Farmers at work in their plots

A farmer's plot

Another plot

While out at the farm, I snapped another photo that outlines a major difference between small-scale growing operations and conventional farming:


In the picture, you can see a few of our beds in the demo farm in the foreground.  In the background, you can see the cornfield that surrounds our plot (for those who have heard the saying, the corn is most definitely "knee-high by the Fourth of July").  The major visible difference is that the cornfield is an example of a monoculture, while our field is an example of intercropping.  Monocultures can be quite susceptible to diseases and pests, so they often require heavy use of pesticides and other chemicals, which can be harmful to the surrounding ecosystem.  More diverse plots, like ours, tend to be less susceptible to pests and disease and therefore don't require such heavy use of chemicals.  That is a major benefit of small-scale farming and gardening.

Thanks for reading!  There are some exciting things coming up for Roots, including the beginning of market season.  I will update you on those soon!  Until then, happy Independence Day!  See you next time!

No comments:

Post a Comment