Farming in the shade

Over the past few weeks we have been working the field that we weren’t able to plant with corn due to spring rains. A lot of fields in our area were not planted this spring and are now full of weeds. It is the nature of soil to produce plants. And if we don’t cultivate and intentionally plant certain plants, others will come and fill in. One of the things we can do for the soil on a year like this is to plant different species as cover crops. This both keeps the weeds at bay and allows us to experiment with crops and combinations of crops we haven’t grown before. This field was a pasture/hay field for many years, but next year it is slated to have beans planted. In an effort to get ready for that, we plowed and disced the field. We worked it several times, because established pasture does not go quietly. Once we were satisfied with the seedbed, we planted sorghum and peas in part of the field. The rest is planted with oats, peas, clover and turnips. This will hopefull...

We are always looking for ways that we can do things better on the farm. The Farmer is often reading. He reads magazines like Acres and older farming books--some that predate the post-WWII boom in chemical use in agriculture, some that are written by people from other countries, and some by those who approach farming from an organic angle. One thing that comes up again and again is the need for cover crops , both to suppress weeds, and to fertilize the soil for the next crop.   We are glad to hear many more conventional farmers talking about cover crops these days. It's a new-old idea that is catching on more and more among farmers of all types.  We obtained a grant from Project Clarity  to purchase clover seed to interseed in our corn crop. Often interseeding is done with a plane or helicopter, at significant expense. We wondered what would happen if we just seeded using our trusty Cyclone just after the last culivation pass. The corn was becoming t...

Spring tillage has begun at Shady Side Farm. Tilling the soil has gotten a bad rap lately, with many farmers moving to minimum-tillage and no-till practices. This is a response to poor tillage practices used in the past that led to erosion.  Unfortunately, many minimum-tillage and no-till farms rely heavily on herbicides to get the job done. In my limited understanding of How Things Work, I can't see how organic farming and no-till farming can coincide. Perhaps someone will enlighten me, as I'm always learning. In the meantime, we till.  This is a field in which we grew corn last year. You can see the corn stalk debris left over. But you'll also see a fall-planted rye stand. Rye does not die over the winter, and can be either left to grow and harvested in mid-summer, or tilled into the soil as a green manure crop. Green manure crops return important nutrients to the soil. They also increase the organic matter levels in the soil, suppress weeds, and prevent soil ero...

As we learn more and more about farming organically and biologically, we start to realize the importance of cover crops. A cover crop is something you plant with no intention to harvest. This crop is tilled under before the next crop is planted. The natural state of the earth is to be covered with some form of vegetation. It is unnatural to have bare earth, and it takes a lot of work to keep it bare until it's time to plant something. While you are waiting for winter to end, or for dry enough fields to drive on, the weeds come. Cover crops can help suppress the weeds. Besides weed control, cover crops help make nutrients in the soil available to the plants (the crop planted later), and build much-needed organic matter. Recently, I volunteered to frost seed last year's lost corn field. We planted our corn late, due to an extremely wet spring, and didn't have the summer heat to make up for lost time. A wet, busy fall kept us from harvesting the corn, and a generous snow...

About a month ago, we were able to work a couple of fields to prepare them to be planted with a cover crop. Cover crops serve several purposes. They keep weeds from taking over in a field, and they add nutrients and increase the organic matter in the soil. Cover crops are typically left to grow for a while and then plowed down. It might be tempting to consider that a waste, but the reasons listed above make it a smart move. We seeded two fields--the part of the corn field that drowned out and was plowed down earlier this summer, and a field that was left fallow due to the extremely wet spring. Here's The Farmer filling the grain drill with two kinds of seed--oats and radishes. The oats are the longer, light colored seeds. The radishes are the round, red seeds. Just yesterday I took a walk out to the field with a camera. Despite the lack of rain, the planting is well established. We are hopeful that we can get one grazing off the back field. Pasture is in sho...