View previous posts What is Companion Planting? Biointensive farming expert, John Jeavons, defines companion planting as “the placing together of plants having complementary physical demands.” He broadens the definition even further, saying it is “the growing together of all those elements and beings that encourage life and growth: the creation of a microcosm that includes vegetables, fruits...
View previous posts “If you get the soil biology right, there’s absolutely no reason to rotate to a different crop. Our understanding of agriculture is flawed. As human beings, when we start paying attention to how nature manages things, we start changing our agriculture to work the way nature works. Nature has been managing to do this process for the last three and a half to four billion years...
View previous posts Crop rotation is the practice of changing the crop each year on the same piece of ground, in an effort to confuse pests, reduce weed pressure, and ensure the soil does not get depleted of certain nutrients. Eliot Coleman, considered to be one of the godfathers of market gardening, says that crop rotation “is the single most important process in a multi-cropping program” (The...
Having an efficient wash/pack station on your farm is one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure to have in place when you first design your farm. When the first harvest starts, you don’t want to be scrambling around piecing something together last minute. You need to be able to wash, package and cool your product. Otherwise, all your hard work to finally reach the point of the harvest...
Over the last 10 years or so, the use of black silage tarps on small farms has become more and more common. This growing popularity of using tarps can largely be attributed to Jean-Martin Fortier from his book, The Market Gardener. JM was, and is, a huge proponent of the benefits of tarping when it comes to weed management and no-till soil preparation for new plots. Occultation is the term for...
A 30” wide bed is the most common standardized width in the world of market gardening today. It’s an easy width to straddle for most body types, doesn’t hyperextend the back when reaching into the center of the bed from the pathway, and most tools and supplies are built to accommodate this size. If such is the case, it would seem that it would be counterintuitive for a grower to deviate...
For those of you who have worked with a BCS walk-behind tractor, you have learned that the heavier your implement is, the harder it is to turn the machine around at the end of a bed. The Power Harrow, for example, is an extremely heavy implement. In order to turn the tractor at the end of the bed, the operator will typically disengage the PTO for safety, lower the handles for leverage, and then...
In the market gardening world, permanent raised beds generally refer to beds that are raised 4-6” above the pathways, creating a mound. The mound is then leveled off to create a nice “tabletop” surface for planting crops, typically 30” wide. Pathways are often 18” wide. The 18” width is not only for the convenience of allowing a comfortable space for harvest totes and wheelbarrows, but it also...
Recent Comments