March 10th, 2024 Thinking About Soil Science

 In the weeks coming up to early Spring, most of our plans are made and in place. We know pretty much what we are going to grow and where it will all go, before actually starting to put stuff into the ground. And, as we have in all previous years, we fail in enacting a large part of our plans for many reasons. Weather is the ecstatic part of our plan. Nature will do what it does and nothing we plan can change things. Planning is a static thing. We spend time learning new things, looking for pieces of a puzzle aimed at making the Farm produce stuff people will buy. Every year brings a new opportunity to do what we came to do when we bought this place and took up the work. The Farm has it's own schedule, if we fought this idea we'd lose. Despite all of this, every year I try to come up with ideas on how to get the job done. The New Year's Resolution habit has been something I've done for decades. I would pick one thing to learn, one thing to do, and learn to do it; the list of stuff I've learned is pretty overwhelming (you'd think one of them might have made money). Two years ago I spent my spare time looking at Compost stuff. Last year it was all about Pest Control. This year I'm hip deep in soil science. My focus is on improving the soil below the surface, without actually going down into the dirt to get there.

Last year's no-till effort was all about attracting the right sort of animals, worms, and discouraging the wrong sort, beetles. My brother remarked that he had left a straw bail on our soil for a week and when he opened it there were literally hundreds of Compost Worms trying to eat an entire Straw Bail,this  tells me the Compost Worms are abundant and happy. The questions of improving worms is the Earthworm population that actually lives in the soil, not Compost Worms  live in stuff above the soil surface, like piles of leaves and this prepares the compost for being made into Soil Organic Matter (SOM).  But Earthworms take in the clay, sand, and Soil Organic Matter and pass the mix through their digestive system. It comes out behind the worms in clumps which are covered over in digestive microbes.

These microbes release the nutrients they find pre-digested in these clumps. The microbes eat the clumps, they accumulate nutrients in their little bodies, and when they die the nutrition is released into the soil ready for plants to use. Clumping soil is also better because it has space for roots to grow where they will find water and ready nutrients ready for plants to use. But there's one more peice of the puzzle to think about and it takes a bit of learning.

Fungus is among us.  For our purposes I won't go into how fungi are everywhere, on everything, in the air we breath . . . The truth is Fungus is everywhere. But this is about garden soil fungus and there are a few basic types. The first are the Mushroomy sort of fungi that live on rotting wood. This sort of fungus s helpful to farming because it breaks down large wood that worms cannot eat. Permaculture farming is often based on putting logs under the dirt and eventually this leads into some really nutrient heavy soils which don't require much water. There are fungus that break down animal and vegetable matter and these are the things I am writing about today. Fungus processes dead things so once the microbes I wrote of earlier die off this makes room for fungus to come and break their little bodies into their useful parts. Once particular sort of fungi, the mycorrhizal  (literally "fungal root") type,  live on the surface of living root systems.  There are two basic types of mycorrhizal fungi I am spending time learning this year.  Both do basically the same job so I'll treat them the same.

Endo and Ecto Mycorrhizae live on plant roots and connect the roots to the soil in a broad web. The fungi finds loose bits of nutrition and water, carries it to the surface of plant root systems, and trades it for stuff the plants make, like sugars.  These fungi extend the effective size of a plant's roots, so less root is needed to support more plant, more fruiting. Endo Mycorrhizae does this best for annual plants, like Summer vegetables and flowers that live through the Winter in seeds. Ecto Mycorrhizae does this too, but with perennial plants that live through the Winter in the roots of plants.  Both of these types of fungi do much the same job, and just like other fungi they are literally everywhere, but the difference between a good garden and a really great garden is in making the conditions right for these two types of fungi to thrive in the soil all of the time. There's competition to think about.

There are a lot of fungal types, most do something of the same job, breaking down the dead into parts that life can use. These two types specialize in carrying this stuff down to plants in a symbiotic relationship, but the size of the fungal colony waxes and wains, depending on what is being grown. The right conditions are not always present to maintain a huge colony of Endo or Ecto types the whole year around, so colonies have to be re-established and those colonies have to re-grow into a useful size to support great plant growth. So the question becomes: If the soils is right, the worms are there, the microbes are dying in their millions . . .  How do we encourage the right sorts of fungi so that our plants can develop into living their best lives? So my experiment this year is to do a few things and see what happens. 

The first thing I will do has already started. The first things we did were to build a great soil mix so that the worms would come. part of this is to be really aware of soil compaction so that our worms weren't driving around harder soils, part of this was to establish a no-till system that didn't chew our worms up.  The worms brought the right sorts of microbes. Not mixing air into the soil encourages the right sorts of microbes and discourages the wrong sorts. Too much air encourages microbes that eat plant matter very quickly, so it isn't there to hold water or clump behind worms. Too little air ar the microbes we get work very slowly and give off methane gasses. The right sort carefully breaks down plant matter. These steps are already working today.

The second thing we need to do, the part of this year's plan where we make the change, is to put a bit of these Mycorrhizae type into the soil when we plant starts and seeds. Then maintain the soil with an eye toward encouraging the fungi to remain alive and healthy all the year around, so when we plant our veggies and flowers, there is already a thriving fungal community in place with stuff to offer the plants. This ought to encourage rapid plant development and make our short -bottom of a narrow valley- growing season to produce more and produce it more quickly. 

Our no-till system puts worm food on top, keeping our worms happy. Keeping our feet off the planting spaces and using soil watering systems keep our worm habitat happy. The worms spread the microbes, making the microbes happy. Feeding the worms and protecting the soil makes the microbial growth environment happy. If we put some of the Endo and Ecto Mycorrhizae directly on the roots of plants, or in places where seeds will sprout roots, our fungal colonies won't need to find roots to work with, making the fungi happy. And, finally, if the fungi become well entrenched in soils where things grow all of the time, the environment for plants will be completely happy.  Then we might be happy with the increase in produce that we can sell and spend the money on stuff that will make our farm happier.

November 12th, 2023 Late Fall in Effect

Not too surprisingly, Fall landed on Creekside Farm on time and completely within one week's time. The rains started about mid-October, just as the leaves began falling , and it hasn't stopped since. We've had three days of relative dryness, but even those three days had rain in the darkness of late night.  And about ten days ago, just as October ended, the trees all turned Golden-red as leaves began raining down and covering everything like snow. So while the place is a real mess, it's a beautiful mess. 

Our Pirate Organic Flag
So far nobody has noticed it

Occasionally the sun peaks out from behind the clouds for a moment and you have to stop and appreciate the colors. The small windows of sky are bright blue and the sun reflects off of the recently fallen leave, washing everything in the bright yellows and reds of the recently fallen leaves that haven't had time to turn brown and grey. It is really quite beautiful. But the bad weather has us staying indoors quite a lot more than usual. The gardens look like hell. Decaying plants are everywhere, covered in leaves or not. We had a hard frost for three consecutive days at the beginning of November which killed off nearly all of the plants in our Garden rows and the stuff remains where it fell. 

Part of our farm plan is to do something called "Chop and Drop". This is where we use the plants to feed the soil by composting in place. The idea is to chop the plants off at ground level and leave the roots in place. Any of the nutrients not used in making fruit is recycled back into the soil. We haven't been out in the muddy gardens to do much of the chopping, but the frost did quite a lot of making the stuff lay down so it will rake up nicely when we do get out there to work. Following the chopping, our plan is to layer on a few inches of leaf compost to protect the soil from rain and ice erosion. Something we still need to do. 

We have taken in four or five truck loads of leaf debris this year, about a hundred yards. Last year we took in four hundred yards and used most of it to build garden rows and we don't need as much. But even if we needed a lot more we wouldn't really have room for it. After we moved the tiny home to behind the Farmhouse we don't have much room for piles of compost back there. So we are putting the leaf piles out front of the house this year and there isn't nearly as much space.  It makes it much easier to bring the truckloads in, and much easier to take the stuff into the gardens too. 

Moving the tiny home into the back and splitting it into two parts has really improved how they are being used. After the move we sealed up the eight foot hole which served as a pass-through between the two halves with a sliding glass door making it a nice, but tiny, apartment where our son is living. We put another sliding door in the similar hole in the second half and now it has become the "Dog House". After the move I built stairs onto both halves and we painted the exteriors before the rains started last month. 

The New Dog Bed
in the new Dog House

The Dog House is rough, but after we built a ten foot by three foot raised platform inside for a dog bed, and put a heater under it, our hounds are very happy to sleep there. We go out every evening after dinner and spend an hour or so cuddling them. We also put a wireless web cam in there and a small wireless television for entertainment. It's cozy and looks great from the outside, but we still need to re-do the interior with drywall and new flooring.  So we're on hold for money. But the bad weather and lack of capitol haven't completely stopped progress.

We are still harvesting potatoes. On one slightly less wet day a few weeks ago we pulled two hundred pounds from four rows. A month or so back we took another hundred pounds. Now there are five rows remaining and we are running out of space to store spuds. But the quality and size of our potato crop is very good. No-till gardening is high in micro-nutrients and so our potatoes have excellent flavor and texture. They are a delight. 

In between rain storms, we have finally begun pouring concrete steps and decking under the porch surrounding the Farmhouse. So far we have two steps and about eight linear feet of decking. Pouring concrete is hard work, but we ought to have a full set of entry steps in a week or two. What there is now is so much nicer than the ad hoc wooden sets we built to satisfy the building inspector last year. We had bought a large amount of bagged concrete then, but hadn't found the time to mix and form the stuff until now.  I'll put up a picture when the thing is finished, until then it is sort of a mess. 

The New DIY Rocketdog Coat Kit

In other news we thought our girl hound Laffee Taffee was having a litter of pups near Halloween, but it turned out to be a dud. Only one puppy took, and it did not thrive, so Taffee and Clarke will get another try in Spring. Our Rocketdog Winter Coat has sold relatively well this year. Our hounds love theirs and orders for the coats are up quite a bit from last year. We are adding a sew-it-yourself kit to the line-up this as we work to increase sales without increasing labor. We are using a pretty good set of marketing tools that Square.com offers and will even have gift cards for sale there this year. Time will tell, but gifts and other products are a part of our longer termed growth plans.

We fully expect a drying trend to happen some time soon. Last year was pretty wet, but there were times when we could go out and clean stuff up. We still need to get the Greenhouse up and running. The heating system we have in there needs a bit of work, but the Greenhouse doesn't get much planted until late February, so there's time still. Despite the weather, things are going along pretty well here and we're looking forward to next Spring.

December 3rd, 2022 Winter Sets In

A bit of snow on Tuesday morning.

 Winter in northwestern Oregon is a weather grab bag. In the past few weeks we have had torrential rains, sunny days, ice, snow, hail, and everything in between. The one thing we don't get it plant growth. So, as in years past, we work projects and plan for the future. This year seems different because the potential for impending doom. But so far nothing has changed and our future, though not settled, may well turn out much as we had planned it. So we are working projects.

We began remodeling the tiny home a while back. It was fairly worn out from living too long in something that was only built to last a year or so. Our son Jack is living in it and helping out, so we are having to work around him just a bit as we re-do what was a difficult job in the first place. 

Part of our Thanksgiving decor.

I built half of our tiny home Cabin in the driveway of our home in town. When we built it there was plenty of time and the space was empty. We built the walls from 2x3 lumber, not the 2x4 or 2x6 one would expect, so we had to find work arounds to put in electricity and plumbing and this is still the case. When we built the thing we intended to build a second half of the Cabin as needed, but hoped not to find the need if we could get away with living in 220 square feet of house. We built the bathroom at one end, a living space at the other, and a kitchen in the middle. But the remodeled Cabin is not going to be used for the same purpose in the end. So the remodel moves the bathroom to the middle of the thing and puts two 8x8 rooms at either ends. We are also separating the bathroom into two separate rooms, one for showering, the other for the water closet. Eventually we will separate the two sides of the Cabin behind the Farmhouse and into one two bedroom, shared bath, side and a dog kennel. When Jack moves off the Farm we will use the two bedroom as a guest house or even put it up on AirBnB. The remodel is taking up much of my time, but we are doing quite a bit more.

Leaf mountains.

Part of next year's farm planning is to use the knowledge we found last year and go BIG on planting in the Spring. We found a great thing in a relatively new farm practice called No-till, and I have described this quite a bit in the last year. So we have been bringing in about a forty yards of mixed landscape debris in every few days.

We have to move the leaves physically to clear the driveway before more can come in. Right now we have about 240 yards of leaf piled behind the Farmhouse, most of it sorted to get woody debris out.  Some of the "sticky stuff", which has some small sticks and branches in it, is piled separately in a few smaller piles. The big clean piles will compost and be used to prepare new planting beds in early Spring. The "sticky" piles will will be left along until next Summer before we screen the results and use it to top dress the beds. We have another eighty yards in the driveway right now which will be spread very think on the raw ground we will till in late Winter, Composting this raw leaf in place will protect the soils and feed the worms. We will cover every foot of farming space we can before  they run out of leaves to bring us. 

Our Tin Tree

Christmas is coming. This year we'll have four people living on the Farm, so Christmas will be a bit bigger deal than before the Farmhouse was finished. We put up some of our house lights today. There's a bigger plan for holiday lighting, but this year there's no time or money for it. Ann has decorated the house and stuffed every available space with as many little Santas, reindeers, Christmas bears, and snow-folk she has saved up for the thirty plus years we have been married. Snow villages and nutcrackers are everywhere. We also have a special little tin tree which we bought the first Christmas on the Farm when we had no space for a real Christmas tree.  The tin tree has become something of a tradition. We light it the day after Thanksgiving and let the batteries run out. It takes until New Years to run the batteries out. 

We'll go out and find a real Christmas tree next weekend. Last year we were lucky to find one because we moved into the Farmhouse late. We took what we could find on Christmas Eve last year. This year will be different.

Farming experiment update: We put thirty-six pepper plants from last season under individual covers in later September to see if we can Winter-over them into next Spring. Pepper plants are supposed to be perennial, but above the forty-fifth parallel this is debatable. Some uproot their plants and bring them inside their homes or into heated greenhouses and then put them back into their gardens. We tried such a thing last Winter but that experiment failed for a few good reasons. We might have heated the space, it got pretty cold in the greenhouse when it snowed; we might have been a bit more regular in watering, in the cold of Winter getting out to the greenhouse seems a bit of a slog. These failings of ours prompted me to thinking about the thing and, as always, I spent entirely too much time on it. We decided to try over-Wintering the plants in the ground. The soils temperatures never go below fifty-two degrees, water is always available, the soils don't get disturbed, etcetera.  So I decided to steal an idea, something I read about in a book about French market gardens, so we cut the plants down to one leaf, we cut the bottom off of some two-liter plastic bottles, and we covered the plants with the bottles before burying the whole thing in a foot or so of compost. The upshot of this is that, as far into Winter as we have come, including the snows and freezing rains, we find the plants still seem to be alive, though dormant.  We found this out by accident. Never wanting to disturb the process in place we didn't plan to open anything up. But one of our hounds (Abba Zabba) decided the bottle looked like fun and pulled one of them off. But so far the plant we did see was in pretty good shape. We put the bottle back and hope for the best.

Legal stuff update: We're still waiting out the probate stuff and hoping for the best. We talked to their lawyer the other day and she was rude, combative, and generally horrible. So we're talking to lawyers again. We don't intend to do anything differently than we have been, but we do want to exercise a bit of care so we'll spend a few dollars against the possibility of an unforeseen circumstance.  This is our home after all.  Post script: We talked to a few other lawyers in the past few days. This morning we met with one very good lawyer, who we did not hire outright because he didn't need assurances. This was the right guy. So we will sleep better knowing he is there if needed. 

May 28th, 2022 Spring Finally Arrives

 About two weeks ago the rains of Winter finally stopped, ending one of longest wet spells the Pacific Northwest has seen in many years. Our last truly dry day was in September of last year. Prior to that day, the days of endless rains began, we had the hottest Summer on record. The Summer included about four days of one-hundred-fifteen degrees. Another new record. While the Winter rains ended, the Spring rains arrived a few days later.  The difference between Winter and Spring rains is easy to tell if you know what to look for. Winter rains are cold and sharp when they hit your skin. Spring rains come through warm air and is usually a smaller drop which is softer on the skin. You get wet either way, but Spring rains are wonderful. The difference in the rain gave us good reason to begin preparing the farm for planting. The Spring rains are usually spaced apart too, giving us a few days of sunshine in between rainy days and allowing the ground to dry out a bit. Dry ground is what we need to begin planting. 

This is the new Strawberry
and Potato beds.

In the past few years we began preparing the Farm for planting in mid-April, so we're getting started pretty late in the year. Previous year's preparation were about physically breaking up the rain damaged soil on the surface of our planting beds and bringing in loads of horse manure. The horse manure is usually composted and ready by late April so we add it to the beds and till it in while dragging a row making tool behind our tractor. The result has been an increasing amount of good soil. But building up good soils has been a one step forward, one step back sort of thing and we decided to try another method. I wrote a long article about how we planned to change our Farm practices last October. You can read it by clicking here if you'd like. But here are the highlights.

No till gardening uses massive amounts of garden debris laid out in a thick layer over the native soils and left to rot. Worms come up and eat the debris, converting it into worm tailings which garden microbes digest leaving nearly pure nutrient rich soil for plants to grown in. Besides this great soil the leaves break down, leaving the veins and twigs behind to form a "matrix" which breaks down more slowly, leaving water channels which carry water deep into the dirt. 

A finished no till bed.
This is cucumber and squash.

Last fall we had about four hundred yards of leaf debris brought in by gardening companies to get us started. We also began tearing into our gigantic compost piles and sorting this out too. The whole process takes a lot of time and effort, but we really needed to get going on the new plan. 

We decided to help Nature along a bit by tilling in the well broken down debris on the beds, laying out the final rows where they would be for the coming years, and then covering the new rows with another thick layer of leaf compost. 

The whole system works to contain weed seeds and allow any weeds that do sprout to be pulled from the soft soils without much effort. The vermiculture eats the leaf debris which feeds the fungus, but other animals enter to the soil to eat the worms and these also eat the larvae of harmful insects too. All in all it sounds like a good deal. Time will tell if this works, but we are committed to it at this point.  So far we have about a third of our planting done. But there's much more happening here.

This is one of Bit O'Honey's
pups with her new bigger brother.

We birthed three litters of puppies in late March and have been delivering them to their new families for the past few weeks. Right now we have only one puppy left and she will go to Washington next weekend. This will allow us to put the Pantry back together and finish one or two more Farmhouse projects that have been on hold for space, time, and money. The puppies provide the cash, their leaving provides the space and time. 

The Farmhouse build is still moving, albeit slowly. We have been working on smaller projects as time permits. A few weeks ago I finished the closet shelving. The pandemic caused supply disruptions, especially in building materials, so buying the twelve foot long cheap shelf boards became impossible and I had to get creative. We found some forty inch long pine shelving on Craig's List and stitched it together into lengths long and strong enough. This is the sort of little project that we have been doing since finishing the Porch roof framing a few weeks ago. Last week I wrapped the water heater and earthquake strapped it to the wall . . . we have a long list of little stuff. The only major thing to do is painting the exterior of the house and we've been waiting for weather for months. I'll begin painting this coming week.  We are also approaching the point where we can begin the porch floor concrete and parameter drain. It's all about time and money. 

One of our tree and debris projects is a
mushroom patch. This is a permaculture
project involving tree trunks and leaf compost.
The trees will rot under the compost and give us
some good ground for mushrooms in the future.

Aside from these things we have begun taking down the large and dangerous trees that were always slated for removal. The fruit trees along the front fence have to be  removed, but these are small and relatively easy to take down. We cut them up and burn the debris, but the bigger trees are a problem to solve. Some of the pines, though healthy, are eighty to one-hundred feet tall and either near the power lines, the fence, or some other thing we don't need to drop a tree on. We have four more pine trees to cut down but it might be we have to wait until next Spring for these. The bigger tree cutting project is two  hardwood trees nearby the Farmhouse. These are diseased and rooting out so simply sawing through them does not guarantee they will fall in the right direction. We'll have to take these bad trees down in stages; the top and side branches first until all that is left is the main trunk. Then we can cut the trunk down without worrying that it will damage the house. This is going to take some time, but we've been wanting to get these things done for five years.

I have been a bit slow in writing all of this stuff down. So much is going on and it all seems pretty small. But when it finally does hit the page it seems much more is being done than there is time to write. Certainly more than there is time to read. 

November 26th, 2021 Thanksgiving

 Thanksgiving at Creekside Farm is a simple thing. We sit for dinner, as most do, and contemplate our good fortunes. This post will be a retrospective on our year and not a recounting of the month as is usual. Occasionally I like to recount an entire history of the Farm and this is a possibility as I begin to write, but I will try to be brief and keep things relatively on point. To this end I must say the generally this year has been very good to us, but not without a some spill over of drama from outside, both good and bad. We began the year with our world in a pandemic lockdown, a newly elected President, a horrific  revolt against the government.

Our world seemed in turmoil and I wondered how far Trump, the traitorous ex-president, would take it. I wondered how much war I make at my age. But things never went that far. Political things have slackened off, but not without qualifications, which I will not go into since it really is not Farm related. 

The year has been a financial success even though Farm production was not really involved. We had two litters of Basset pups, both litters sold within days of birth and all of the new parents are ecstatic with their new fur babies. The financial gains from these two litters allowed bills to be paid, but there was other income as well. We decided to take our Social Security retirement at sixty-two because the numbers were right and full retirement had been raised to sixty-seven. And there were a number of large chunks of cash, doled out by the government, intended to stimulate the economy and assuage the negatives of the pandemic. We had a barrel of cash when moving to the Farm three years ago, but our long ranged planning included income to keep things level. The year brought us good fortune and we became self sufficient this year. But our long ranged planning requires farm production income to succeed and we made some large moves in that direction this year.

Since we are not yet settled on the sort of farming we will do in order to be successful farmers, but not knowing what this means in action, we continued to experiment with the sorts of plans and practices that might make our farm work successfully. As this past year began we continued to work withing the bounds conventional organic farm practices. Tilling the soil,  making compost, bringing compost in, and pushing the dirt into rows before planting seeds and starts, all seemed the right way to do things. And we had some success, but it was our crop of peppers that proved the only worthwhile thing we did. Once more we didn't reach the point where we could open a roadside produce stand or take things to a Farmer's Market, so we took what we did grow to local food banks.  In July we decided to get some outside advice to move things forward.

A nice woman from the USDA came out to survey our farm and discuss USDA subsidies to build infrastructure. She gave us some wonderful advice and described how we might go about things, but none of this advice seemed right for the level of development we have. One of the things that came of this visit was an invitation for Ann to go to a class on cover cropping in the off season. I had been spending some time learning how to make good compost, but reading a book Ann received at this class opened some new possibilities to explore. In the end we decided to begin building a "no-till" farm and this led into procuring hundreds of yards of hardwood leaves to make into leaf compost, leaf mulch, and leaf mold. The Farm looks a bit of a mess today because hauling the leaves around is a messy and muddy affair. And I won't go into how these things work together to make soil until it works, or does not, but the system sounds about right and we look forward to our attempt at farming in the coming year. Farming is the second business we had planned, the first being our dog breeding business as described above. So, while we are able to stay on the Farm even without farm income, production of sellable farm produce is our chief concern, second only to finishing the farmhouse in immediate importance.

We have nearly finished the Farmhouse we began to build two years ago. At the beginning of the year we had raised the frame, put a temporary roof and siding on, and wrapped the whole place in a weather resistant layer. During the year we wired, insulated, and finished the interior walls. We also put the exterior siding and finished the roof. There is still the exterior porch to build and the exterior of the house still needs painted, but plans are in place and we hope to get all but the painting done in Winter. We will move from our tiny home to the new Farmhouse in the next few weeks and celebrate Christmas in warmth there. One thing we are very thankful for is a long hot shower, but there was much more that happened, and did not happen, this past year. Things are generally going forward fairly well. Objects will come up to block our plans, but as in the past we will find a way around whatever we find. The Farm has a schedule which our careful plans fit into, but only in a general way. 

In the coming year we will attempt once more to make a profit on farm produce, finish the house, birth two more litters, move our new kennel into place, and begin producing things to sell in service of our long termed goals. All of these plans will be guided by the weather and the world's need for what we can make of the gifts we have and we look forward to finding out how we did when Thanksgiving comes around once more. But this past year showed us much and gave us much more than we expected, even if less than we hoped for. The thanks we give is for the help we received in making our plans work and not to plans that failed. We have had, now have, and will have, much to be thankful for as time marched forward.

October 31, 2021 Fall is in Full Effect

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.