August 14, 2007
This week at Chubby Bunny we’ll
be direct seeding fall spinach, arugula and daikon. It’s also time to
harvest all the onions. We’ll be giving out sweet onions in the
share and the storage onions will be brought into the barn and
cure a little bit before distribution. It looks like a terrific onion
year! Now that the two eldest pigs have been sent to the butcher, we’ve
brought out the four piglets to fresh grass. Go on behind the big
greenhouse if you want to see them experiencing the good life. The
chicken are on new pasture as well, directly behind the barn.
Harvesting is taking up more & more time nowadays. Here’s this
week’s: onions, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash,
kale, fennel, melons.
Dan has sent off the soil tests for our new field. As I mentioned
last week, we’ll get a fairly detailed profile of the nutrients in the
soil. Depending on how it looks we’ll apply a number of
amendments. On other fields we’ve applied our own compost made
from a mixture of sheep manure & bedding, chicken bedding, horse
manure and cow manure. We only have so much of this so we also
use composted chicken manure. This adds organic matter and
crucial nutrients like carbon and nitrogen. Here are a few of the other
biologically sound amendments we use on our land and a bit on what they
do:
Azomite (volcanic rock dust for trace nutrients)
Residuce and Bio-Aid (basically like yogurt culture for soils)
Ocean water (for foliar feeding trace nutrients for BRIX increase and better shelf life)
Neptune’s Harvest Fish Emulsion (for foliar feeding and soil application)
Menafee Humates (organic carbon source for soil tilth and nutrient conservation)
Organic Pro-Grow (a blend of plants, rock dusts, etc. for boosting NPK soil nutrients close to the plants)
Dehydrated Layer Manure (applied in bulk to feed microbes, increase N,P,K levels as well as Calcium.)
Soft Rock Phosphate (trace nutrients and phosphorus in “colloidal” form)
Potassium Sulphate (a rack based source of Potassium and sulphur)
High Calcium Lime (for calcium and pH adjustment)
Gypsum (for calcium when pH is already high)
In a perfect world, one might think that all we’d put on the land is
compost made from our own animal manure and their bedding.
However, we are dealing with a hungry soil. It is no small feat
to correct nutritional imbalances. It happens gradually overt
time and by adding not just what the plants need to grow but what the
soil needs to be a healthy ecosystem. Yes, there is a whole
hidden microcosm in the soil that we rarely think of when we are
tucking in to that first bite of juicy, ripe tomato. You can’t
have one without the other. If the soil isn’t healthy, neither is
that tomato. We consider ourselves caretakers of the soil and
strive not only for tasty, nutrient dense vegetables, but for a
diverse, well mineralized, well balanced soil ecosystem.
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