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How We Grow Your Food | ||||||||||||
We grow our fruits and vegetables on five and one half acres using organic methods and materials though we are not certified organic. Our focus is on building soil through the use of cover crops (legumes and cereal grains), compost, local horse stable bedding, mulching with natural materials, and crop rotation. We choose varieties for flavor but also need to take into consideration what will grow best for us at our present location and microclimate (zone 4b). We grow heirloom varieties as well as newer hybrids. Where possible, we use organic or sustainably produced seed. We use only untreated seed. We have given up the use of dark plastic mulches for a number of reasons and rely on natural mulching materials, cultivation (mechanical and hand), and flaming for weed control. As a result, some of our heat loving crops ripen a bit later than when we used plastic but we still get them none the less without a sacrifice in quality. All of our transplanting is done by hand (nearly 20,000 seedlings per year with a crew of three to eight people. We mark rows with a dibble and divide the labor into throwing the transplants into or near the holes and pushing or planting them in. Most harvesting is by hand also. We use a mechanical potato digger for most of our potatoes. We irrigate mainly with drip tape. Many of our crops never need to be supplied with additional water other than what nature provides. We have become very consistant in producing high quality crops. Still, in any given year, something is inevitably going to fail for one reason or another. Since we grow such a wide variety of crops, the failure of one or two crops in any given year is of little significance in the overall scheme of things. The situation is better described in our statement of intent . | ||||||||||||
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Looking over the garden around late June, our 400 caged tomato plants take plenty of straw to mulch | ||||||||||||
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Most of our greens are grown in the "upper garden" | ||
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fall crops | |||||||||||||||
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transplant dibbler | |||||||||||||||
pushing in a young lettuce plant | |||||||||||||||
transplant crew | |||||||||||||||
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