Solstice Week
Happy Solstice Week!
We’ve been hard at work this week, continuing our focus on crop maintenance following the extensive rains we’ve experienced recently. Everything is growing quickly and we’re harvesting an abundance of blooms and produce. We’ve had extra hands on deck this week to help us achieve all that we need to finish. Our tomatoes are trellised, we’ve begun to dig this spring’s ranunculus corms, and we’re making headway on the rest of the staking and trellising we need to do. We’re hoping to get some cover crops seeded this week, too.
We’re preparing to say goodbye to Brood X, and we have to say, we’ll miss them a lot!
In our high tunnels, our primary focus is season extension, and so there’s always a period of time in the summer during which we’re not really maximizing that space. As a result, we like to try to squeeze in a quick buckwheat cover crop between our spring and fall plantings. Buckwheat is fast-growing, a great pollinator attractant, suppresses weeds, and works great as a green manure. It’s perfect for those times when you’ll plant something in the relative near future, but you don’t want to leave the ground bare during the in-between time.
Meanwhile, in the field that we’re keeping in cover crop all year, we’ll be seeding “Ray’s Crazy Summer Mix,” which is a cover crop blend we used for the first time last year. It contains sorghum-sudangrass, sunflowers, millet, cowpeas, daikon radishes, and a brassica. Cover crop cocktails like this one foster soil health using a diversity of plants with different strengths and functions. The sorghum-sudangrass and millet produce an enormous amount of biomass that will return to the soil when the crop is terminated. The sunflowers have an aggressive taproot, and they’ll also encourage the presence of birds and insects in our fields. Cowpeas fix nitrogen, brassicas have strong taproots that mine the soil for moisture and nutrients, and daikon radishes fight soil compaction. Combined, they’ll keep our soil covered for the season and maximize biomass and organic matter in the soil. And, a bonus for us, the grasses look amazing in our wreaths!
Cover crops don’t necessarily make us money in the immediate future, but we believe that growing them certainly pays off in the long run. We don’t want our work as farmers to lead to soil degradation and a focus on extracting everything we can from the earth. We’d much prefer to build soil health and work with the environment around us, doing whatever we can to make sure the land will sustain life for generations to come.
This is cover crop we mowed down in early Spring. We’re resting this field all year, and so now that the winter cover crop has broken down, we’ll be sowing Ray’s Crazy Mix in its place.
Sunday, June 20th, 8:00 am - 11:00 am: Johnny’s
We’ll be at market with arugula, beets, sprouting broccoli, carrots , celery, edible flowers, garlic scapes, radishes, spring mix, and hakurei turnips.
We’ll have loads of bouquets, in addition to bunches of larkspur, nigella, and snapdragons.
Take care,
Amelia and the rest of the Two Boots Farm crew
