In response to my last essay about cover cropping, I received a note that said, “This is going to sound strange, but do you till in your cover crop? If not, how do you get all that green manure into the soil? If you do till, isn’t that bad for the soil community? Help my tiny brain please.

I have planted cover crops at April Joy Farm since the beginning of my farm tenure. In fact, the first thing I ever planted here was a rye grain- vetch mix to restore the soil from years of constant tillage between raspberry rows.

Today, we use grains like barley, oats, and rye that grow fast, protecting the exposed soil from drying, hot sun and minimizing compaction and erosion from strong fall rains. Legumes like clovers, vetch and peas work in tandem with symbiotic bacteria to pull atmospheric nitrogen from the sky and store this critical fertilizer on plant root nodules.

The great wave of harvest season is upon us.

Sweet onions are racked and curing in the drying shed.  Garlic is being trimmed and sorted and bagged and moved to storage to make room for red and yellow onions and rosy plump shallots.  Yesterday the first two varieties of potatoes came out of the field; five more are to come.

On Sunday we methodically walk our fields, identifying work tasks we must tackle in the next seven days. At this time, we also inventory every crop to get a sense of quantity, health, and harvest timing. Usually, this is a restful pause in our frenetic work week- time to take stock and take a deep breath before the next round of activity. But during bouts of extreme weather, our Sunday walks become a sprint. Heat is an entirely different animal than rain - things don’t slow down, they speed up.

How I Know Our Work Matters

This card we received on Monday was signed, “Love: Your secret admirer!”

We’re in the swing of summer now, with hay cut and drying nicely in the summer sun.  After a worrisome spring, Brad and I are quite relieved that for the most part, our crops are holding their own.  The onion seedlings survived the multiple weeks of cold, dreary weather post-transplant, and we survived the multiple arduous weedings necessary to keep the grass from choking the plants out.  Unlike most of our vegetables, grass loves 50 F and rainy, so in a wet cool spring, a race none of us farmers ever want to run begins the minute the first transplants are tucked in the ground.