An index of essays by area farmers can be found at the bottom of this page.
The Newton Farmer Newsletter, Greg Maslowe, November 2010
As I walked around the farm on this cold, blustery morning, the leaves falling from the sky recalled a ticker-tape parade: nature celebrating its own bounty. We too had much to celebrate this season. A bumper crop of tomatoes fueled record sales at the farm stand. A new contract with the city. A Community Preservation Act grant to renovate the barn into a four-season educational and community facility. It was truly a year to celebrate.
Spring and fall are, to me, liminal times marking the transition between cold and dark, and light and heat. Just as the weather changes at these times, so too does the farm. There is a distinctly different feel to the farm when the field has been mostly plowed down and planted with cover crops. It feels small. I look out and think, wow, that’s all there is. It remains that way until the following spring when we begin to plant. As we turn the field and begin to plant, the farm seems to grow (despite our eternal crunch for more planting space). By August the farm is a much larger place. I have this same psychological experience when I walk through familiar woods at different times of year. As the leaves fall from the trees, woods that seemed to go on and on are suddenly bare. You can see through them, and they seem only a fraction of their summertime size. This is one of the reasons I find New England so alluring: the landscape changes so significantly with the seasons.
I love farming and working outdoors year-round because I get to enjoy these changes. Farming provides an interesting juxtaposition. It ties you to one place, creating a strong sense of fixedness, almost permanence (I rarely go anywhere between March and November). Yet at the same time it forces you, relentlessly, to make peace with change. Nothing ever remains the same. Nature is always in motion. Sometimes the change is predictable, like the arrival of autumn. Other times it is jarring and unexpected as when one of our great old apple trees came crashing down in the middle of the night a few days ago. But always the changes make you adapt and hopefully find some way of making the best of the situation.
Last month I wrote about cover cropping and hinted at some new methods we’re trying out at Newton Community Farm to deal with winter rye. The problem with rye, as you may recall, is that it is not killed by New England winters. So when spring arrives, the rye begins growing again and can make it difficult to prepare beds for planting. Typically farmers deal with rye by plowing it under, which buries the rye upside down a good 12 inches underground. This can work pretty well but is not the best thing for your soil, and while it can be replicated by a home gardener with a shovel, it is pretty labor-intensive.
If you don’t need to plant a bed until mid-May, however, there might be an alternative. Winter rye flowers around mid-May. Once an annual (as opposed to perennial) plant flowers, it switches from vegetative growth (stems and leaves) to reproductive growth (the flowers). If you cut, or even just break, the stem at this point, the plant can’t repair the damage to its vascular system, and it dies. That’s the theory. So with rye, if you mow it (or just break the stems by stomping all over it, although I find mowing/cutting more successful) in mid-May when it’s in full flower, you can kill it quite easily.
We tried this for tomatoes in 2010. We mowed our rye and let it sit for two weeks to see whether it really was dead. We discovered that we had to re-mow it, most likely because not every stem was in flower at the same time, but then after the second mowing we were able to plant our tomatoes right into the mowed rye without ever tilling the soil. The cut rye provided some mulch (though we added more), and the decomposing roots did not inhibit the growth of the tomatoes at all.
While the labor to plant into the cut rye was greater than planting into a nicely tilled bed, this no-till approach was much better for the soil. In 2010 we planted 1/10 of our tomatoes this way. We’ll expand that percentage for 2011 and keep more careful records of just how much time was involved in this no-till tomato system versus our normal practice of tilling beds to prepare for tomatoes. It has been a fun experiment, and I’m looking forward to learning more about the pros and cons next year.
As I sign off for the winter I want to encourage all of you to snuggle up on a couch or comfy chair this winter with a seed catalog and join me in dreaming about all the great things just waiting to burst forth from our gardens next spring. Try growing something next year, no matter how big or small, that will help nourish and sustain you. It’s empowering, fun, and the very best way to know where your food comes from.
More essays …..
A Moral Continuum of Exchange in CSA, Signe Porteshawver, 2011
Newton Farmer Newsletter on Late Blight, G. Maslowe, August 2009
Why Our Farm Is Not Certified Organic, A. Cather, August 2005
Hail, A. Cather, July 2008
Not a big fan of pesticides, even organic pesticide, A. Cather, June 2005
Can I afford this stuff? CY, May 2010
Why Farm? CY, 2003