DOCUMENTATION- Keep yourself and your farm organized.
This is a large scale zoomed out master-plan for the 'Orchard' farm plot this summer. Our efforts in preparing all directed in A/B Block.
The block map for the orchard this season. A block map is a master planning tool for the farmer, it allows you to organize and visualize your crop plantings into common vegetable families on a similar planting and harvest schedule. It is an essential component of documentation. Documentation when done properly is vital for proving to an auditor that you are adhering to organic standards, as we are trying to do at the Gilbert Road Orchard site. This year we are keeping both physical paper records and digital records using an app for Android phones called Memento .
The old stand by are paper records stored in the orchard binder. These will likely be phased out almost entirely over the coming years by nifty apps such as Memento, that can be synced with personal laptops. With paper records, you have to constantly worry about rainfall and errant coffee spills making your notes practically eligible. Notice how everything is defined and divided into applicable columns; of particular interest is how certain rows are organized by family into certain planting blocks. This is an important consideration when doing crop-planning for the 2017 growing season, you do not want to plant the same crop in the same spot twice. Doing this increases crop susceptibility to soil-borne disease that has overwintered in the soil.
Cathy (my classmate) is separating the mold potatoes from the healthy looking ones. At this point in the season it is a bit of a gambit, most seed potatoes have already gone in by now. Some as early as the 2nd week in March, so keep your eyes open for those juicy nugget sized potatoes at your farmer's market this week.
THE CHALLENGE OF DIRECT SEEDING:
Even after making multiple passes through the field using the threshing mower attached to the Kubota tractor, it wasn't enough to completely subdue the rye cover crop from the fall. You can see proof of this while looking over the last blog entry, some pictures show that it was almost shoulder high!
Planting through the resulting thatch layer; thick in some places and spartan in others, became a real exercise in patience while trying to operate the EarthWay Precision Garden Seeder as it would continually get jammed. Jean-Martin Fortier, small farming guru from the Eastern Townships area of Quebec has a great explanation about how this planting tool works in his book The Market Gardener:
[the] push-type seeder which drills the seeds into a furrow created by an adjustable opening shoe located at the bottom of the seed hopper. It's driven by a belt attached to the front wheel, which turns a disc called the seed plate. When pushed the seed plate separates and scoops up the seed before dropping it into the ground. The seeds are then covered by a dragging chain, and the soil is pressed down by the rear wheel. A handy built-in adjustable marker helps you achieve parallel rows when seeding. (Fortier, 65)
While Fortier's description leads you to believe that the seeding process is mechanically flawless, it isn't without problems as we discovered. The EarthWay seeder becomes unreliable when using the machine on-top of uneven or disturbed surfaces such as we have in the orchard plots; the dragging chain becomes overladen with straw debris and jams easily. This causes the wheel to inadequately press down and cover up the seeded furrow. Today [May 17th] we as a class saw evidence of this glitch; at the end of a bush bean row, there were about a half-dozen seeds sitting exposed at the surface. To troubleshoot, we walked up and down the rows prior to seeding and lightly raked away large clods of straw debris and additionally we would have to stop every few feet and remove debris collecting behind the chain.
Tractors!
Getting to ride the Kubota tractor and spread manure was thrilling, but it was the brief discussion given on the BCS walk-behind tractor that really captivated my attention. The BCS tool tutorial given was given by Anna Rallings [pictured above- the educational farm site coordinator for the Sustainable Agriculture Program] this tractor is designed to be of particular benefit to the small-medium scale market gardener (operating on less than 5 acres of land).
The tractor is self-driving and thanks to the PTO unit, located at the rear of the machine, it takes power from the engine and reallocates it to drive whatever attachment is connected through the PTO. Such attachments include flail mowers, power harrows, hay-bailers and rotary plows. It's the cost that is so alluring to me, whereas you may pay upwards of $35,000 (Canadian) for a brand new full-sized ride on Holland Work-master tractor you are looking at a fraction of that cost with the BCS at between $5,000-$6,000 brand-new. Additional attachment tools can be purchased starting at only a few hundred dollars through online retailers like Earthtools.
The other blessing about the European made BCS tractor is lack of weight, it won't contribute to soil compaction.
Potato Planting
Cathy (my classmate) is separating the mold potatoes from the healthy looking ones. At this point in the season it is a bit of a gambit, most seed potatoes have already gone in by now. Some as early as the 2nd week in March, so keep your eyes open for those juicy nugget sized potatoes at your farmer's market this week.
We were trying to cull the especially moldy potatoes so as not to spread disease in the field.
Stay tuned for my musings on the wonders of soil and also my classmate Johanna's observations on Summer work week # 3 at the Orchard and at the Terrace Gardens.
* Fortier, J.M. The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2014.
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