Fall came in with rain and it has continued up right up until yesterday with nearly daily deluges. There never was drought at Creekside Farm this year. Nearly as I can tell there has been no water shortages here ever. But the world at large has been complaining of drought and the rains this Fall have brought a lot of that to a halt. The rains have made the grounds here horribly wet and when we drive the tractor around the muddy ruts can get pretty horrible. Normally we buy ten, or so, bales of straw from a farmer nearby and put the stuff out on the tractor paths, but this year we are doing something completely different. Sometimes the simple things we are doing take a lot of explaining. This past few weeks was a simple idea, but really very large and complex in the doing of it.
Following on Ann attending a group class on cover cropping at a neighboring farm, one of the things she took away was a book on soil building and maintenance. This book sat on the dining table and I read it at meals, or while waiting for meals, and got through quite a lot of it in rapid fashion. The information became immediately useful, but the whole affair has led us in a different direction.
We have committed to a new path to soils health based upon a film called "Back to Eden" (see it on YouTube). In this a the author noticed that Nature, as such, is generally very messy and not well controlled and tidy like most farms. The forest floor, being for him nature in its basic form, is usually very deeply covered in debris which is decaying over time. He noticed that this debris slowly feeds the soil while protecting the soils from damage. Each year's layer of Fall debris adds new materials that nature slowly breaks down into the nutrients the trees use to make new growth, while sheltering the microbes and other crawly things from rain, snow, and sun damage. A perfect system.
This man brought this insight out of the forest and onto his farm. He began importing large amounts of leaf debris (usually waste) and spreading it out in thick layers on his planting beds. After a few years and false starts he found that he no longer needed to weed his beds because the sun could not reach the weed seeds; he no longer needed to till the soils because the soils never compacted; and he no longer needed to water the garden because all that organic material held the water down where the plants could get it (even in the heat of Summer). As an example of this in action: the man has an apple orchard which has so much debris laid down that the apples are always perfect, He has no insect damage to deal with using pesticides because the microbes and things in the leafy debris eat pests, the trees need no fertilizers of treatments, and as time goes by the ground rises to meet the tree growth in equal proportions (so no ladder work as time goes on). He never needs to replace old trees which have grown out of a useful size at all. But he still has to prune to keep things even.
Once the biology (of the many sorts of creatures which feed on leaf debris) does it's thing, the nutrients locked up in the debris itself is converted into the stuff which garden plants use to grow plants. So no fertilizing needed unless a soils test tells of some nutrient deficiency.
This "no-till" farming practice has caught on in the Organic farming community in many forms. If you have a lot of straw, you use straw, have access to yard debris, it works even better. So we have begun bringing in hundreds of yards of leaf debris, grass clippings, and the like. But there have been a few false starts of our own to deal with.
One is that the company we sought free debris deliveries from gave us a first batch of stuff which contained what we wanted, but also a whole lot of tree trimmings and larger branches that made everything more difficult. We had to sort the whole load out and it took nearly a week. Eventually we found there was a large pile of roots and branches we could not use and it took two days to burn it down to nothing. The first five or six truck loads of debris are better suited to composting into loom (stuff put down onto new beds to give plants the lighter stuff they need to put roots down. As we go forward through the Fall we will be receiving much "cleaner" loads of mostly hardwood leaf (the stuff put on top of the beds to protect the soils and slowly be converted into plant food). I put the first truck loads into long composting piles to begin breaking it down into a usable form. The piles were so large I am having to move them to bigger places to cook down. Since we have a hundred foot driveway, and two loads of debris is sixty feet long, it takes a while to move it all into their appropriate places before more can arrive.
Part of our Farming philosophy is to re-use and re-cycle. If we had to pay for the compost we are creating right now the hundreds of yards of compost would cost many thousands of dollars we do not have. But processing of yard waste will give us a great many healthy new planting beds in the Spring with very little cash outlay except diesel for the tractor. I will continue to make compost for at least a few more truck loads, but as the debris becomes more of the cleaner and lighter Fall leaves I will begin covering the existing beds with leaf and then pile it up for later use. We are also covering all of our tractor path s with the pure leaf debris as well, saving of the cost of straw and the need to pick it all back up in late Spring for composting.
Another part of this new soil building plan is returning the unused portions of garden plants directly to the soil. So this Fall, as we break down the gardens, we are mulching the tops of the plants, and leaving the roots in the ground, to rot where they are. In past years we have been composting all of the plants and roots in a pile and this has been the stuff we used to make the good soils we have today. But composting removes some of the nutrients which could have been useful for growing things and that are lost in the heat of composting. Cutting the plants off at the ground and leaving them to break down where they fall will return the leafy nutrients. And the root systems will rot where they are to return nutrients and provide water channels for next Spring's plantings to use. We will move the tops of the plants to new beds so that they don't infect the soils with longer termed problems, but the whole thing becomes a circular system; a system which increased soils vitality, while decreasing costs, and greatly reduces the labor of weeding, fertilizing, tilling, and watering.
The best potential outcome of all this of this is the weeding. Composting creates a heat which destroys plant diseases and weed seeds. So the compost we will make for use at the bottom of the plants will no longer have so many weeds to deal with in Spring. Another benefits is that, since we are covering the native soils entirely, the hundreds of years of thistle and grass seed already in the ground will be denied sunshine to sprout themselves in Spring. Perhaps the best part of this best part is that the newly made soils will no longer be so easily compacted after tilling lightens it up, allowing any weeds that do develop to be taken out with far less effort. The only weeding problem remaining will be the longer termed problems of deep thistle and blackberry roots. These bigger roots will have to be individually dug out, but the lack of pulling new weeds ought to show us where to dig and the new beds will soften the native clay and allow us deeper digging with less effort.
That's pretty much the tale of the past two weeks in action. Our new soils plan is now being implemented and might give us the Farm we need.
There are still many other things going on. We moved the shop as planned, making it taller and narrower to try to keep the snows of Winter from breaking it once more. And we still have the five of Bit O'Honey's pups, which are mostly slated to go to their new homes beginning Thursday. The Farmhouse build hasn't seen much action in the past two weeks, but I have been doing the finish work in the Bath room and we have many projects ready to go now that we have the leaf debris sorted out.
Things are going forward every day. But the days themselves are becoming much shorter too and many things have to be done to get us ready for the Winter freezing that will eventually come to our little Creekside Farm.
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