When I was a kid, farmers were encouraged to stop cultivating due to soil erosion, fuel costs, wear and tear on equipment, etc. Instead they were being told to till less, use fertilizer and spray chemicals to manage their crops. I was young and naive and I bought into it as well. I did not know that in 1967 the Federal Government's Task Force on Agriculture released a paper that acknowledged the family farm as being the best and most efficient way to grow food but rejected it in favor of managing the food system through corporate farms.
Fast forward 30+ years and I find myself looking back at the way my dad used to farm. The vast majority of the land that we had under cultivation here has since been taken over by grass, trees and other beautiful plants. We don't till the land but instead let it go wild for grazing animals. But when it comes to our garden, we have struggled finding ways to grow food and reduce the labour to do it. We tried other permaculture techniques which may work for others but really did not fit in well with us.
Last year I remembered how my dad and grand father used to farm and decided to use those old techniques in the garden. Even though the scale is much smaller, the process works the same. We started it last year and are now seeing the benefits of it this year. It is working for us and we are very happy. What are we doing?
Adding Summer Fallow into our crop rotation
This is what our garden would normally look at this time of year. Completely over run by stinging nettle, grass, thistle and other weeds. We harvest the nettle and dry it for tea, so this is actually a good thing for us right now. But for a garden, dealing with weeds on this scale is over whelming. For years we were confronted with weeds like this and we could not keep up.
What we did was we decided to till 50% of our garden and keep in in Summer Fallow. Fallow means to not grow anything. We let the soil rest by not growing a crop. Tilling also kills off a lot of the weeds as well. We then dump a lot of compost on the garden to replenish the nutrients and reinvigorate the bacteria and other organisms in the soil. Around here, the grass is very invasive and this is about the only way I've found to get ride of it.
This is our summer fallow for this year. What you see here is grass roots. The grass here sends roots and shoots across the ground. They spread like wild fire and the only way to get ride of it is to pull up the roots or choke them out some how. By summer fallowing, we get a good kill on the grass roots and other weeds. By the fall, most of the weed seeds have sprouted and been wiped out mechanically rather then chemically.
As a result, the weeds really get set back. This picture is of weeds under neath our huge potato plants. I've been hand tilling the garden between the rows but the potatoes have grown so fast that it left the weeds in the dust. I've not weeded in between the potato plants since I put the potatoes in. The size of these weeds is a far cry smaller in comparison to the size of the weeds in the first picture above. All of these photos were taking this morning. You can see the peas on the right of the picture with beans, carrots and beats on the other side of the pea fence.
Our potato patch is not the only crop that looks this way. Our whole entire garden does. It is a dream this year and we are actually having fun gardening this year. We also make sure that our crops are not grown in the same spot each year. It has been 3-4 years since the potatoes were grown here. We make sure that all the crops are grown in different spots (crop rotation) as each crop contributes to the soil and also takes away from the soil. By rotating them we balance that out and find an equilibrium so that we don't deplete the soil. By adding lots of goat and chicken composted manure each year, we are actually building soil. This garden spot 10 years ago was very hard, full of clay and tough gardening in. Now the soil is soft, holds moisture, very lush, easy to grow food and the plants color is darker and more vibrant. Being a steward of the land, it is our responsibility to grow soil too, not just plants. We grow soil by adding to it each year rather than taking away.
The industrial system fails in this regard as their man made chemicals and fertilizer does not contribute in the same way and actually contaminates the soil, the food, air and water. While I keep my tilling to a minimum, I am finding that the old methods that my dad and grandfather used are working well. So when I reflect on the comments that the Federal Government made in their 1967 white paper, I agree; the family farm is the most efficient way of growing food. I disagree with all the rest of it though!
Time to return to some of those methods as the current industrial / commercial methods are not working. I look forward to sharing the harvest photos in a few months.
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