The racy subject lines always get attention. Since I (Casey) have not posted yet, there’s a lot of pressure to be flashy. Instead, I’ll just be nerdy. We’ve been working on tilling and prepping our beds for planting this season (finally, after all of March and April’s rains), and we are super-excited about a method of tilling called “strip tillage.” It is a method of planting generally used for minimizing the amount of ground disturbance in erosion-prone areas. The Natural Resources Conservation Service likes it.
In the picture below, you can see what this looks like for a market garden:
We alternate 42” sod paths with 42”, four-row, intensively-planted beds. This way, we only amend and till half the square footage. And we can mow and disc and till either the beds or paths. Establishing the bed-path-bed pattern is a little time-consuming at first, but once you get everything established, you know exactly how many beds you’ll have all season, you mow the paths rather than tiling them for weed control, half the ground is undisturbed and thus a haven for predatory insects and builds organic matter levels, you don’t have to walk in mud late into the season, and it is easy to stay out of the beds when walking and planting. Whew. “In theory,” as Mike Paine says. And in theory, we’ll disc most paths in the fall, sow a cover crop over everything we can and then in spring, work up the paths to be next year’s planting beds.
Gender roles: Katie is a woman. And here she is mowing the middle field in preparation for tilling the ground and planting in a month or so!
That was Friday. On Saturday and Tuesday, she disked the bed portions of the field! We are both stoked about this. Traditionally, men run the tractors and women do most everything else. Even on organic, progressively-run farms, men often dominate the field tillage and bed prep tasks while women coordinate CSA details or marketing or flowers. It is strange, really. I realize that on farms where women are the primary farmers, tillage is done by women, but this generally not the case on farms run by women and men together. We’re doing things a little differently around here primarily because it makes so much sense for both of us to run the tractors. Why should one of us have to mow, disc and till when we are both capable of the task? Yep, a revolution in progress.
We got our “last” frost Monday night (May 8th), a light one that totally took us by surprise. Unfortunately, the frost killed three flats of popcorn and one of dry beans that we left out, hoping to plant them Tuesday. Fortunately, the winter squash, pumpkins and summer squash that we planted Monday were studiously hooped and row-covered, so they remained safe. Now the weather is warm and dry, too dry. I feel silly wishing for rain, now that we have the dry weather I was wished for in April. But rain would be nice, all the same. I guess we’re farmers now: “If only the weather was _____ (not the way it is), everything would be better.” I have noticed, however, that Bellingham’s daily high temperatures have been 6-10 degrees lower than recorded for McMinnville—very nice!
