Denise and Tony Gaetz
Shedd, Oregon
Cut flowers
Occultation and compost application
ON THE DAY I VISITED BARE MOUNTAIN FARM IN Shedd, Oregon, it seemed like the state was trying to live up to its reputation for drizzly weather. It was mid-October, and Denise and Tony Gaetz invited me in for a cup of coffee while we waited to see if the rain would let up enough that we could go outside and look at the flowers.
When Megan and Jonathan Leiss of Spring Forth Farm in North Carolina (see profile p. 295) told me some of their systems were modeled after Bare Mountain’s, I wanted to make sure to get out and interview the Gaetzes. If you look them up on YouTube, Bare Mountain Farm has a bunch of videos where they talk about what they do, and give really great practical information on how to do it.
I visited Denise and Tony on the day of their potential first freeze, as the weather threatened to turn colder that night. They were pretty relaxed, though, ready to let some things go if they got zapped, knowing that other crops would make it through in their high tunnels.
The Gaetzes grow flowers on about two-and-a-half acres. Their field production uses permanent beds with grass pathways, covered with low tunnels when necessary. They also have several high tunnels, giving them about four thousand square feet of permanently protected cropping space.
The Gaetzes are in Linn County, self-described as “the grass seed capital of the world” due to the high concentration of grass seed farms there. Though they used to do farmers markets, they now sell exclusively to florist/designers in Portland and Eugene, Oregon.
As we sat down for coffee, Denise was on the phone, trying to market the last of the season’s bounty. “Our season’s winding down, and I’m trying to get the last bit of product out that I can,” she said.
“Normally we use an electronic store we have set up on our website. But since our availability now is so low, we’re just connecting with customers on a one-on-one basis,” said Tony.
“Our theory is that we’ll plant things very intensely and the plants will out-compete the weeds. Now, there will still be weeds in there. We don’t care about it too much. We do have some spots where we’re trying to eradicate some perennial weeds that got a head start on us. We have a peaty section that we’re trying to rehabilitate that has Canadian thistle in it,” said Tony.
“What we have found is, if you tarp those things down, you can start getting them under control. But, unfortunately, when you have a perennial weed like Canadian thistle it’s a lot more manual work; we’ve got to rogue it out. Keep coming at it and keep coming at it.
Late fall zinnias.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“But for our annual beds, we’ve removed Canadian thistle, bindweed, and stuff like that simply by tarping. For example, we’ll take a bed that we want to bring online that maybe has got a perennial weed problem or something like that. We’ll tarp the area for four weeks or so. That’ll knock it down; it may not kill it. Then, particularly if it’s the warm season, we’ll plant buckwheat, which grows fast. And then, even though the thistles start to sprout up, we’ll just tarp the buckwheat down again. We’ll do that about three [times]. By that point, most of the root reserves are pretty much wiped out.
“And there are people I know that have been trying to get a handle on perennial weeds that are out in a larger area, and use Sudan grass. It’s the same idea, except they won’t tarp it. It grows real fast. Then they’ll mow it down, leave the refuse on the field, irrigate it in, and it’s just like successive cycles; when you come in and mow it down you’re also mowing down the thistle. So you keep mowing it down, and Sudan grass will last the whole season, but then it usually winter kills. At least here in the north.
“And so, that’s the whole idea of exhausting the weeds. Our theory on perennial weeds is you’ve just got to exhaust the root reserves, and some things are more resistant to it than others. Bindweed’s probably the worst.”
“That’s a refrain I’ve heard from no-till growers, that perennial weeds are hard to deal with, since you can’t keep them from coming up by leaving them undisturbed, like you can by leaving weed seeds undisturbed in the soil,” I said.
“We recognize that all around us are grasses and weeds; this is grass country. As an example, we never had Dutch white clover on the place till a couple of grass seed farms decided to put it into their rotation. Next thing we know, because there are starlings and all kinds of birds, they’ll go eat the seeds, come flying back over our place and: Boom. We get the same thing with blackberries and other things of that nature. So to try to say that we’re going to take our weed seed bank down to the lowest possible level is a waste of time,” said Tony.
“We use a lot of tarps. Like, when we’re finished with a crop we’ll knock the crop down and drag a tarp over it. Depending on the time of the year, the biology will work real fast. It could be as fast as three weeks depending on when it is. In some cases it’s four to five weeks. And then we’ll rotate in either a cover crop or a cash crop. We use a lot of purchased-in compost too.
“We got a lot of these ideas from different people, like Singing Frogs Farm (see interview p. 275) and Patrice Gros of Foundation Farm in Arkansas. He’s got a different take on it; uses a lot of wheat straw. But it’s the same idea; that keeping the soil covered also inhibits the weeds. And it gets to a point where your organic matter is such that any weeds that do come along are real fast to dispatch with.”
“You mean they just pull out easily?” I asked.
“Just pull them fast, or you use your collinear hoe. It’s just like sweeping the beds, and it’s fairly fast,” said Tony.
“When you’re planting buckwheat, are you using a seeder?” I asked.
“I use an Earthway, or I’ll just broadcast it. Most of the time, I’ll broadcast it, and then I’ll use a rake and just scratch over it a couple of times. If I’m concerned about bird pressure, I’ll put a 30% shade cloth over it just to get it germinated.”
“To keep them from eating the seeds?” I asked.
“Yes, and it also retains moisture. So if you’re in a dry time of the year you can wet the bed really well with irrigation and put that shade cloth over it, and that will help retain moisture; at the same time, it prevents the birds from getting in there and pecking the seeds out,” said Tony.
“And that rotation is pretty fast. So if you’re taking out a bed of thistle, you can wipe it out; if you started in May, you could be ready to put fall or overwintering crops in. And by then that thistle’s pretty much gone.
“What we found is that just by using a silage tarp, that will retain enough moisture in there that the straw will rot down pretty fast. You can pretty much bank on about 80 percent of it being gone. And if you get to the point where the refuse hasn’t totally decomposed under that tarp, all the root systems are gone. It’s very fast just to come in and rake it off to the side.”
“Flowers in general give you a little more flexibility, because you’re not growing as many low-growing, fast-turnover crops. Where I can see if you’re doing something in fast turnover that weed suppression is going to be hugely important,” said Tony.
“I can see how if you grow some of the taller flower crops, once you get them ahead of the weeds, that they would smother and shade them,” I said.
“Yes, the canopy is such that it really slows down the weeds. They don’t get a chance to go to seed by the time I tarp the beds. So it keeps the weed bank down, even though it’ll never be zero,” said Tony.
“We grow sunflowers, which are interesting because they get a pretty thick stem on them. So, it’s the same thing as corn stover, or if you raise sorghum for an ornamental, or something like that [where there is a lot of debris left at the end of the crop]. The roots will go pretty fast, and even if they’re not totally absolutely gone, I don’t really care. I’m going to plant into it. Usually, I’ll try to target a crop that’s going to start out being a little taller, so if I do have refuse left on the bed even though the roots are gone, I’m looking at that as a mulch most of the time.
“The only reason I’d rake it off is if I’ve got to plant something that’s really a small plant. As an example would be dianthus, which when it goes into the field is typically a really little plant.
“So it depends on the context of what you’re doing, which technique you would use. I understand from a [direct-seeding] standpoint, if you’re using a Jang seeder or something like that, you want a clean seedbed. But a lot of our stuff is grown from transplants, and is a fairly good size by the time it’s ready to go in.
The Bare Mountain Farm house viewed from the field.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“The other difference with us, why we don’t sweat the weeds so much, is the concept that the turns on flowers are a lot longer. There aren’t any flowers that we know of that are going to have [a turnaround time] like radishes: gone in three weeks.
“We don’t flip the beds that fast. We get two good rotations through a bed in a season in the field. And then three in a tunnel. And not much in the winter. Because light levels, once you get past the middle of November, drop to a point where things will grow but they won’t bloom. So we look at our season as about ten months.
“We can prep ourselves ahead of time with some greens. That’ll get us a head start in a tunnel, but the flowering aspect of things for us doesn’t really start until mid-January up here, even in a tunnel. And then it stops around mid-November. Mums are pretty much the last thing. Sometimes they’ll go to Thanksgiving, but that’s about as far as we’ll get.”
“What are your frost-free months?” I asked.
“We’re expecting there might be one today. It’s hovering right around freezing. It might take out my zinnias in the field. We’re going to lower the tunnels this afternoon,” said Denise. “But our normal, first real frost is Halloween.”
“And the last one will usually be around the end of April,” said Tony.
“Typically though, the frost we get this time of year [in the fall], the first ones, they’ll come in and they’ll nip things or burn them back. And that ruins the quality, but it doesn’t necessarily kill the plant. But the plant doesn’t have enough time and daylight to actually do anything more. So once the blooms or buds are damaged it’s over.
“I think a lot of people, too, when they hear ‘no-till’ they think of the Rodale system where you’re growing rye, tamping it down and planting through that. And we’ve done that. It does work for larger items, like sunflowers. But there’s a whole variety of other systems: using tarps, using compost, using mulch, using quick-turn cover crops; those types of things. So it depends on what you’re going to be planting and what techniques you’re going to be using. And I don’t think that people understand the full breadth of the different tools that are out there.
“And even people who are no-till, can still use a Tilther or something like that, which technically isn’t really tilling; you’re just stirring up the surface maybe an inch deep or so. It doesn’t really disturb the biology that much. Anything that disturbs the biology to a deep level is something we want to stay away from.”
Bare Mountain uses a lot of low tunnels to extend their season. The blue strip down the middle of the bed is a sprinkler hose, which delivers sprinkler irrigation to one bed at a time, useful for getting seeds to germinate where there is no overhead irrigation (or rain).
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“We got started in the flower business back in 2003, with a tractor and tilling. And it worked okay for a couple of years. But then the quality of the plants began to decline. The insect pressure began to just go through the roof. We had a lot more plant diseases. We were getting things planted later and later, because we couldn’t get in to till because the water wasn’t draining correctly. The big tractor tiller and even the small rototiller created a super-hard pan under our beds,” said Tony.
“When we noticed this change, it didn’t take twenty years, it took three to four years. It just depends on where you are, and how deep that bank of fertility is, if you may be able to get away with abusing things for longer.
“If you have a good deep soil with great structure, high organic matter, and strong mineral content, tillage damage may take longer to greatly impact yields. However, mychorrizal and other fungi are destroyed very quickly. Increased air results in higher bacterial action, faster oxidizing organic materials, and quickly reducing soil carbon. Bottom line is it’s just a matter of time before one sees the need for application of more fertilizer, and higher disease and insect pressure as the biological balance of the soil is degraded.”
“We just watched things decline. It went fast,” said Denise. “The culmination of the frustration came when we had a field of dahlias that weren’t thriving. They weren’t really growing or blooming or anything, and we were fertilizing, trying to do everything. And I walked down and looked at them, and realized that we’re not even growing weeds out here. Weeds weren’t even growing!”
“Yes, that’s a bad sign,” I said.
“One of the weeds that was the worst when we were tilling was pigweed. We had tons of that. Now it’s hardly around the place. Now it’s like it doesn’t fit. People have got to start paying attention to the biology of [their systems]; if you start changing that biology on the top, it’ll start changing what weeds are going to be thriving. That’s another thing that we’ve noticed has changed dramatically, and just in a very few short years,” said Tony.
“The other thing is that the hard pan in our permanent beds, which are on the uphill side of our place, is gone. Totally. In some cases, we have eighteen to twenty-four inches in depth before we hit any compaction. That means all our topsoil is at least getting air and water to some degree down there.
“When we started this, we paid a lot of attention to the micronutrient analysis of the soil. And this soil was really deficient in a lot of minerals. Our calcium/magnesium ratio was way out of balance, which also creates other problems with availability of things like phosphorus.
“The other thing that is important to note, with the no till system, is it really impacts your irrigation. You don’t need to irrigate as much,” said Tony.
“I’ve heard that from a couple of other people too,” I said.
“Yes. You can really cut back. We use a drip system on the place. Some overhead with some things, but I’d say 90 percent of it is on drip. And during the heat of the summer, I think the plants are even more resilient to the heat because the soil is retaining moisture so much better, instead of drying out in the first inch or so. The increased canopy, that helps too. We plant everything really intensively,” said Tony.
“That’s the other aspect to this place, is we’re not blessed with great land.”
“If you can make your own soil by layering on organic matter, and building your own soil up on top of the existing poor soil, then it should work almost anywhere,” I said.
“That’s essentially what we’re doing here. I don’t know what our soil class is, other than ‘sucks in its natural state!’ I make fun of it, but in reality this soil has some very good building blocks. It’s not really virgin soil; it’d been farmed for grass seed for many years before we even showed up. I’d say the mineral bank and a lot of other things were exhausted on it. It’s very tired soil. It’s been mined, I guess maybe is a better way of saying it,” said Tony.
“But when you go and you look at a soil test, the amount of clay in it is actually a positive. A lot of people look at clay, and I used to look at it the same way, like, ‘Why don’t I have beautiful sandy loam?’ But in reality what I want is clay, and I want to bring the organic matter up tremendously. We had maybe 1 or 2 percent organic matter in the soil. And you couldn’t even really see it. When you get a test it just looks like dirt: lifeless, grayish-looking clay.
“What we’re attempting to do is bring that organic matter up to 6 to 8 percent, or maybe even better. And in some of our more permanent beds, where we’ve been doing this longer, organic matter now is up to 4 to 5 percent. And the tilth is radically changed. The other reason we like clay is because once you liberate it from that tendency to plate up and just become [rock], it has tremendous cation-exchange capacity, which is huge.”
“It holds a lot of nutrients,” I said.
A shot of just the bed of rosemary.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“It holds a lot of nutrients and a lot of water. And I think that is massively important for fertility. I’ve heard of other people that have sandy soil, and they’re actually applying bentonite clay or something like that, to get that same [nutrient and water holding] effect. That’s something we don’t have to worry about. The tilth of the soil has great potential of improving dramatically. It’s becoming incredibly fertile soil,” said Tony.
“We haven’t actually met any of these people who are doing no-till. Thank God for the internet and YouTube and people’s willingness to share. We’ve learned a lot and have been able to experiment with a lot too. What it comes down to is ‘keeping armor on the soil.’ That’s a term that Gabe Brown uses, who runs a big farm in North Dakota. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of his videos,” said Tony.
“Yes, I have,” I said. (Gabe Brown is well worth checking out if you’re interested in no-till row crops on a larger scale).
“Ray Archuleta has some great resources out there on soil health too. They’re ranchers, but basically it’s the same concepts. It’s keeping armor on the soil and building up that organic matter. If you keep that biology alive and going as long as you can during the course of the year, every year it just gets better and better. I think that people are kind of missing the boat on that,” said Tony.
“The other thing that we’re trying to get away with, with the two of us basically running this thing, we want to let nature do more things.”
“We call it our ground peeps. Let the ground peeps do the work,” said Denise.
“What we’re trying to do, too, is reduce complexity. The more complexity, the more it costs you because it’s going to cost you in time. Time is money. And you want some free time for yourself. The more complexity you have, the more steps you have to do, the more time it takes. That’s one aspect. When people look at our place, they go, ‘Wow, this does not look like a super well-run thing,’ but it’s amazing how much productivity you can get out of something that looks a little on the wild side,” said Tony.
“We get really good productivity out of the tunnels. If you calculate a dollar per square foot in the tunnels, we average probably over the course of the season, about twenty bucks a square foot,” said Tony.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s really good.”
“In the field, in the places where we’re planting this year, I’d say our average is about four-and-a-half dollars a square foot, which is actually really pretty good for being out in the field. The one thing about flowers, even though they take longer and you can’t get as many rotations, you tend to get a higher value per square foot. It’s kind of a trade-off. When you take the Curtis Stone [author of The Urban Farmer] model, he says, ‘It’s about rapid crop rotations.’” said Tony.
“The only two crops that are really fast are sunflowers and millets. Those are the only ones that you can kind of tuck in after other crops. Most everything else is ninety days or so,” said Denise.
“Yes. The [sunflowers and millet are] about sixty days. The other thing that we want to do that we haven’t done successfully, and I like this idea from Singing Frogs Farm, is their hedgerow idea. I think that adds a lot of diversity and habitat potential for predators that will take care of other nasties on the farm. I’ve got to hand it to Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser, they’ve created a really cool place that is biologically super-sustainable,” said Tony.
“We’ve got to come up with systems where nature does the heavy lifting around here. We’ll concentrate on the stuff like getting it harvested and getting it to a customer. The more things that take us away from spending hours on a piece of equipment, the better.”
“What you’ll notice is, when you get your no-till bed systems working, that it’s not going to matter if it’s raining or not,” said Tony.
“It’s whether you want to be out there or not,” said Denise.
“Because the ground will drain very well, it’s not going to be an issue, particularly if you’re using raised beds,” said Tony.
“That’s something people don’t realize; again, you’re taking complexity out of it. You go all the way back to The One-Straw Revolution. The whole point of [Masanobu] Fukuoka’s book was, he was trying to say when you look at what you’re doing, you’ve got to look at the context, and try to continually look at the process and take out steps that don’t make sense. Do only things that need to be done. Do them as efficiently as possible. His whole philosophy was continually removing things that didn’t need to be done. It’s the same idea as the Toyota manufacturing system. Eliminate muda. The two types of muda, those that you can’t get away from that you have to do, but you try to minimize those, and the muda that you can eliminate immediately. It’s just wasted steps,” said Tony.
“And load leveling calendars for efficient planning. That’s key. In April and May this place becomes an absolute zoo of planting, transplanting, seeding, cutting, harvesting, selling,” said Denise.
“So what we have to do is, we have to integrate more perennials, and that’s how you take the pressure off of trying to move in so many annuals. I guess from a veggie standpoint that doesn’t really work, but it does for us. There are more and more people doing no-till, so that means there’s more innovation out there.”
“This is a perception, but I think one of the resistances to no-till is that it’s not a quick fix. In that when you’re using this system your time frame is different. Now, I’m not talking about the individual crop, because your focus becomes less crop-centric as it becomes more soil-centric,” said Tony.
“That brings me to another question. Will you tell me what your method is for breaking new ground?” I asked.
The fall fields of Bare Mountain Farm, showing most of their hoophouses. As crops are picked out, they are covered for the winter.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“I’ll show you an area we’re going to be reclaiming. Right now, we just let the weeds grow on it. We didn’t really care if they went to seed, because the way we look at it the seeds don’t matter. The first step is, we’re going to get a big tarp. This area is going to be approximately four thousand square feet. Sixteen two-and-a-half-foot-wide beds on a four-foot center. We’re not going to do anything really fancy to it. The first thing we’ll do is kill all of the stuff on the top by bringing a tarp over it, like a silage tarp. Then we’ll let that sit there most of the winter,” said Tony.
“Then in February, we’ll start peeling it back as we want to get into things. We’re going to use a lot of compost and mineral top-dressing. Probably broadfork it at that point, and just let the ground work it. Once we put the minerals and compost on it, we’ll throw the tarp back over it. And we’ll keep that tarp on it until we’re ready to plant. We have a fairly high water table here in the winter, so there’ll be adequate moisture in there for worms et cetera to do their thing. The soil should be ready to put plants into probably by April of next year.
“Then, when we get ready to plant into it, we’ll roll the tarp back as needed, just keeping it mostly covered. The longer it’s covered, the more it tends to work that stuff in. To kill the [vegetation] off you just need to smother it for several months. And every time we finish with a bed, we’re going to apply a top-dressing of compost, probably about a half inch. We’ll keep track of where our minerals are with a soil test, and fork only as necessary. If it’s a small enough area we’ll even use a digging fork or something like that.”
“What we want to do is to be able to just lay [organic matter] in a bed, because there’s a huge amount of minerals in there, and let the rotting process take it back to the soil. Instead of hauling it to a new pile, turning the pile, bringing the pile back and spreading it out. It’s another one of those complexity things that we want to get rid of. For a new space we tarp it to kill that biomass off on the top. We don’t even bother breaking up the sod, it doesn’t matter at that point.
“If you don’t have to have raised beds, just mark out your beds. I wouldn’t go through the effort of making raised beds. If you have great drainage, don’t bother with it. As you rotate beds, you tarp them out. Because we have the luxury of time to be able to tarp it. Apply more compost and any other fertility that needs to be there by top-dressing. We don’t till it in. We just let that moisture drag the material down. Or even in the action of planting into it, we’ll disturb the soil just enough that it’ll push some of that stuff down there.
“You’d be surprised how fast worms and things like that, they grab minerals and they’re just pulling it down all the time. I’ll show you a bed when we’re out there that we’ve top-dressed with compost for the winter and all the minerals that we put down, you can’t see them. It’s been two or three weeks, and the stuff goes right into the soil. I think that’s probably the easiest way to do it.”
“Let the worms do that for you,” I said.
“Yes. I know a lot of people who think, ‘Oh, I want to get started, so I’ll till it first.’ That’s fine, but if you’ve got the luxury of time, why bother doing that?” said Tony.
“It does take some planning and logistics. That’s kind of tricky for us. I’m always trying to tell him my seeds are coming, and I need them to go into the ground. He’s always reminding me there’s four weeks of that tarp there,” said Denise.
“Well, you gotta look at a tarping as a rotation,” said Tony.
Denise needed to do some more sales to get the week’s flowers sold, so Tony and I walked out into the drizzle to look at the field.
“Here’s our peony bed. There’s a bit of weeds in there. Quite a few weeds, but what we’re going to do is, I use an Austrian scythe. I’ll come through this next month and I’ll just whack that stuff down. We’ll haul all the refuse off the top of it, because peonies can be subject to diseases. Just burn that off and then we’ll throw these landscape fabric tarps over it for a couple of months. They don’t start sprouting until March or so, so that would kill off any of the winter weeds and keep it pretty clean,” said Tony.
We look at their compost pile.
“Then in the spring, once we pull the tarps back, we’ll take this compost and put an inch or two down. This is really good stuff. We use a lot of this on the beds, to give us organic matter in combination with any cover crop we do. This gives us our big bang for the buck, and it’s relatively easy for us to do because it is from thirty miles away. So, he can bring a truck in here and just dump it, it’s reasonably priced. We get it for $22 a yard. So that’s pretty cheap, and it’s clean, which is amazing,” said Tony.
“Yeah, that’s great-looking compost. It’s so black, I’ve hardly ever seen compost that black,” I said.
“Yes, it’s made from urban waste and chipped wood, so it’s got a lot of wood in it, screenings that come off of flake board mills. Stuff like that they can’t use, they sell it to these urban composters. They used to burn that stuff. So they’ll pull the fines in. It’s got a wood base to it. Which I think really helps with the fungal level,” said Tony.
Bare Mountan Farm uses sandbags to hold landscape fabric down. Since they are often tarping beds with a lot of residue on them, they buy landscape fabric that is wider than the bed to allow for the “crown” that the residue creates in the cover.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“Here’s an example of intense planting,” said Tony. “There are little weeds on the outside of the bed, but really no weed pressure on the inside. Same thing with the marigolds up there, you don’t see any weeds growing. You don’t need to use plastic with holes burned in it, it’s just a waste of time from our perspective.
“Then down here, I’m going to end up pulling the tarp off of this and planting rye and vetch in here. This one has been tarped now for a couple of months. I’m just going to plant directly into it. See all the roots are gone, there’s just nothing left here.
“What I’ll do also is rye and hairy vetch into this. Then I’ll tarp it again probably around first part of February, and then I can plant in these beds in March. The tunnels on these beds,” said Tony, gesturing to some tall plastic hoop low tunnels spanning a single bed, “we keep these hoops going here. This allows us to put plastic over things, so we can protect it from hail. Or we’ve done hoops inside of hoops to overwinter. We’ll put row cover on the inside with the plastic on the outside. This is basically constructed caterpillar-style, so we tie down each individual hoop.
“See this stuff, it’s still got another couple more weeks to break down. It’s not quite gone yet,” said Tony, showing me how there was still some biomass and sprouted weeds on top of the bed. It was clear that the digestion process was still going here; the bed was not ready for planting yet.
“See the weeds? Even the weeds sprout in here and they’ll die too. So this one’s only about two weeks into [occultation] at this point. [The method is] not really super complicated, you just throw the tarp over the top. Hold it down with sandbags and let nature do its thing. I’ll give you an example. We just tarped that about a week ago,” said Tony, showing me a bed with a black tarp over it. “You see how much rain we got here in the last two days?”
“Yes, it was raining pretty hard when I drove up yesterday,” I said.
“Yes, this is a classic example. This bed was sunflowers, when we finish there’s refuse left on it. The moisture hasn’t gone all the way through, and this bed had some weeds. But the soil itself, you can dig down pretty well, it’s got good moisture in it, and the roots are disappearing. We just push the sunflowers down and let nature take its course,” said Tony.
“Yes, that looks pretty fluffy down there,” I said.
“This bed has a 20-inch depth before we get to any kind of resistance in the soil. This bed here is all finished up,” said Tony, gesturing a bed of marigolds that had been harvested. “See, what I’ll do is just come through with my scythe and knock it down, throw a tarp over it, it’s done. I don’t worry about it too much.
“The plants are healthy for this time of the year. I don’t know how much more we’ll get out of them. If you look around, yeah okay, you got weed pressure around the edge of the beds, but there’s nothing really in the bed itself. You don’t see weeds growing in the crop,” said Tony.
“Right, the crop is pretty clean,” I said.
“That’s what I think people are really afraid of, if they do no-till they’re going to have weeds everywhere. This is exactly the opposite. Now this is a perennial bed, and you can see I’ve got some rodents or something digging around in here. The whole idea here is the same thing, it’s got a top-dressing of compost, about an inch or two. When you go down and you get to the soil itself, there’s pretty good drainage. This will just stay here and just slowly rot over the wintertime, and we’ll have very few weeds. This has been like this for two weeks, so there are no winter weeds germinating in here. It will stay weed free,” said Tony.
“Because of the top-dressing of compost?” I asked.
“Yes, and the compost itself being pretty coarse material, is going to be able to take a pounding in the rain, it’s not going to matter. You’re not going to have a soil compaction problem or an erosion problem or anything like that,” said Tony.
“What is this blue strip?” I asked.
“That was from before the rains came, I just haven’t picked it up. That’s actually just a sprinkler; it’s a roll-out hose that has holes in it. I just did it to wet things down, get the top [of the bed wet], because I didn’t want to stand here with a hose,” said Tony.
“They do a good job of wetting things down in a small area. Every bed has its own irrigation system. You notice we don’t use drip tape out here, what we use are micro tubes. I’ve been using the same stuff since 2005. These stay permanently on the bed. I’ll even occultate over them.”
This is potentially another efficiency of no-till: if you don’t have to till up the bed, you can install more or less permanent irrigation, whether it be drip like Singing Frogs or Bare Mountain or sprinklers like Neversink.
A view inside the tunnel showing celosia in the middle. Some of the edge beds have already been harvested.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“By the time we get finished with this upper area, we’ll have somewhere around fourteen thousand square feet. So, if you figure $4 or $5 a square foot, that’s not bad for a small area.”
“Yes, that’s great,” I said.
“When we get finished, each tunnel has about 750 square feet of bed space in it, so we’re going to have five of these guys and one crate house. So that’s about four thousand square feet, something like that under plastic. And everything in these tunnels is no-till. We use drip irrigation when the crop is growing, but we’ll try to use that sprinkler to wet things down. The biggest struggle inside these tunnels is keeping enough moisture in the top to keep the biology going,” said Tony.
“From a no-till standpoint, how we’re going to run the fields is, it’s going to be a lot of tarps, rotation of cover crops, and a lot of compost. I don’t worry about these weeds. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. But when I work on a planted area, it’s just about keeping the compost level higher, the armor on the soil high,” said Tony.
“If I’m going to let something go for a while, and go fallow, I’m not going to waste my own cover crop seed. We got enough seed in the ground around here that’s going to grow. I know some people say, ‘Well, you’re just inviting weed problems.’ I don’t get weed problems. Once you go back into doing it, one rotation, occultation, pretty much takes the weeds out of the first couple inches of the soil. They’re still there and if left to their own devices and uncovered, they’re going to make their way back up.
“But mostly, what you’re going to end up with is an intense planting that’s going to cover the ground pretty fast, and there’d be very little weeding. Maybe initially, you might have to go through with the collinear hoe and just kind of scratch them out. But one pass usually is good enough. Then once the plants get to size, there are very little weeds,” said Tony.
“And over time what happens is the more you use a bed and the more you go through those rotations the weed pressure just goes down. The key to it, we found, is intense planting and getting that cash crop established pretty fast. Then that tends to just eliminate the weed problems.
“The more you till, I think, the worse it gets. Like I said, we used to have pigweed pretty bad around here. Now we can hardly find it. The biggest problems we have now are perennial thistle and bindweed. But even that, if we work at it we can get it under control pretty well,” said Tony.
“The other thing that happens if you’ve got perennial weeds, like bindweed and thistle, you’re going to chop up those roots and spread them around. At least doing it this way you can keep an infested area confined and a little more manageable,” said Tony.
“I don’t know how this scales up. Now if somebody’s running two, three, four acres, I suppose it’s just a matter of labor. Maybe some better techniques and bed-layout, and stuff like that. The concepts, I think, are the same.”
“We cut our tarps six feet [wide] because we found that it could have a little bit of a crown from [debris from the previous crop], as well as fit over a four and half foot bed, and still be fine.”
“Do you have any tips or advice for someone who’s thinking about either starting up or transitioning to no-till?” I asked.
“Yeah, test your soil, number one. You want to get that biology going in the soil. If your soil’s out of balance, and is missing key things, you may not be able to get that biology really rocking and rolling. Because that’s the key to getting rid of all the crop debris when you tarp it over, is having biologically active soil. If it’s sterile, after you’ve knocked that stuff over, it’s just going to sit there and dry out. You want to get a good fungal and bacterial balance in the soil. So having a good mineral content is key,” said Tony.
“The second thing is to get more carbon in the soil as much as you can: organic material, compost. Or just quick-growing succulent cover crops like buckwheat. It depends on your area. Recognize that in a transition from conventionally tilling, maybe the soil is worn out, that you may have to apply a lot more organic material than you would think.
“You may need to break up your hardpan. Don’t try to broadfork when it’s dry, because you’ll just be sitting there bouncing on that sucker. Let some moisture soak in. If I have a dry area that I’m working on and I want to broadfork it, I’ll wet it down for two or three days at a time, with that sprinkler hose, just really soak it, and let it sit. Usually by the third day, then I can come back, and the fork just slides right in. That broadforking will help bust hardpan up and gets some air in there. Then top-dress with your minerals and your compost.
“In a newer area it would probably benefit you to do some kind of subsoil work, whether using a tractor with a subsoiler on it, or Yeomans plow, or something like that. The idea is that you’re trying to bust things up and get some air in there to help with the biology.”
“The key to this whole thing, making it work, is the biology. You can use any kind of techniques you want. I mean, I use tarps, I use compost. Other people don’t even bother with that, they just use cover crops and roll and crimp them. Whatever it is, it’s the same idea; the concept is you’re keeping armor on the soil. You’re keeping it away from pounding rain and burning sun as much as you can,” said Tony.
“The relationship that the soil biology has with the plants growing in it is super important. Plant roots exude sugars and carbohydrates that bacteria and fungi use as food sources. Part of the soil armor concept is to keep a diversity of plants growing in the soil through the year.
“So my advice would be: Know your soil, and your objective is to build biology. With no-till, there’s strategy, and tactics. The tarps and all that stuff, that’s the tactical. The strategy, the long-term goal, is to build your soil biology. And that is going to drive the whole thing. You [want] a good fungal bacterial balance; depending on what you’re growing, if you’re growing more perennials, you’ll want it more fungal. If you’re growing more annuals, you maybe want to tilt the scale more to the bacterial side. But the whole point is you’re feeding that biology. Think of what you’re doing here as feeding the soil, feeding the biology.
“If you can, whenever possible, leave the roots in the ground. Don’t yank the plants out entirely. If you’ve got to take the top off, I understand that. As an example, with sunflowers, if I were to come back there and want to plant another crop in there, I would cut those things off as close to the ground as possible, and then I would apply some compost and I would just plant. Don’t worry about the roots, and the root balls, and all that stuff, because they disappear in a month or two.
“So in feeding the biology, you really get that biology revved up, it’s going to eat all this organic matter. If your biology is dead or lacking, it’s going to really look like this doesn’t work. I think people are missing that. It’s not just about, ‘Oh, I didn’t run a tiller.’ It’s letting the biology do the tilling. It’s all the interaction of increasing the arthropods and the worms and the beetles and all that kind of stuff. It all works together.
“The photosynthetic activity in plants produces sugars that are pushed out of the roots. They feed the soil. That is what’s feeding the bacteria and the fungi. So yanking those things out is not good.”
“What I always try to do is to go back to nature. I’ll spend some time looking at an area and think, ‘A lot of things are growing in there. Why are they growing the way they’re growing?’ If people spent a little more time looking at nature, they would begin to realize that nature has got redundant systems that are more complicated than people believe,” said Tony.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“There’s a reason why everything grows where it grows. What you’re trying to do is create an environment that’s optimal for the crops you want to grow. But, I think you could also do no-till wrong too. I think you could ignore the soil, continue to put chemical fertilizers in, and you’re going to get really bad results. A lot of people use the stale seed-bed technique now, where they pre-sprout the weeds. And then they come through and torch [the sprouted weeds with a flame weeder]. That works, but then you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘What is the system here?’” said Tony.
This comment made me think about how occultation is another form of stale seedbedding, where you sprout and kill the weeds with darkness instead of flame.
“The other thing I think people should think about when they are doing no-till,” said Tony, “ is the complexity of your systems. Don’t try to solve a problem by adding another layer of complexity or mechanics. Okay, I’ll spray this or that. Start thinking about why. What we always try to go back to is, Why? Why is this happening here? Pay attention to the biology, to the nature that’s going on around you, to your crops, and watch your minerals in your soil. The whole key to it is to stop focusing on your crops so much and focus on the biology. Just get that biology humming, stuff will grow. It’ll take care of itself.”
“That’s a really good point. Because I can see how some people, if their soil has been beaten up chemically and physically, it may have very little biological activity. They might do this for one season and be disappointed. It’s going to take time, if the soil is dead, for that biology to come back,” I said.
Polly and Jay Armour and Jenna Kincaid
Gardiner, New York
Mixed vegetables and flowers
Biodegradable mulch/compost
POLLY AND JAY ARMOUR OF FOUR WINDS FARM IN Gardiner, New York, have one of the oldest no-till systems I could find. They put away the rototiller more than twenty years ago and haven’t looked back. By not tilling, the Armours have gradually eliminated the reasons most people till. They have worked their weed seed bank down so low and gotten their soil so loose and high in organic matter, it would be a step backwards to till it.
“Four Winds Farm is twenty-four acres. Four acres are used to grow vegetables and the remainder of the land and some additional rented land is used to pasture a small herd of beef cattle. The manure from the cattle is collected during the winter months, combined with horse manure trucked in from a nearby farm, and composted using an innovative forced air system that doesn’t require any turning,” said Jay.
The day that I visited, Jay was away on a once-in-a-lifetime voyage on a tall ship his daughter was helping to crew. Since we weren’t able to meet in person, Jay and I talked about their farm over email. The passage he wrote me about the beginnings of their farm is particularly insightful.
First off, neither Polly nor I came from farming backgrounds. We did not inherit a farm that usually comes fully equipped with machinery. We were young. I had little savings. Polly still had student loan debt. In order to be able to buy the farm, we both needed to work off farm jobs. What money we made mostly went into paying off the mortgage. We used a loan to purchase our first tractor. I bought the rototiller at an auction for a really good price.
I got a couple of people to help me load it into my truck and one of them said to me, “You know that tiller is frozen?” Needless to say, I was probably the only person at that auction who didn’t know. When I got home, I put that tiller on the tractor, oiled it up really well, put a pipe wrench on it and it wouldn’t move at all. I kept at it day after day and eventually got it to move a little, then a little more, then more, then got the whole thing freed up.
Now I felt like I was a real farmer. We planted winter rye in the fall, spread sheep manure (we were raising sheep at the time) during the winter along with some cow manure from our neighbor, tilling it all in in the spring, and then planting, hoping to stay ahead of the weeds. Two things happened — the weeds grew more plentiful and the soil got harder later in the growing season, so hard that to pull larger pigweed was a back-breaking job. But we were doing what the “experts” told us we should be doing.
The soils are marginal on our farm, not good for vegetable farming, and they didn’t respond well to the traditional approach. After five years of struggling with this approach, thinking that we were gradually improving our soil, we met Lee Reich [author of Weedless Gardening] and learned about the surplus compost at Mohonk Mountain House and thought, why not give it a try. Keep in mind we were looking for a way to control weeds. In the first year we not only saw a reduction in weed pressure, but we also found the weeds we had pulled out a lot easier. We didn’t understand the “why” at the time, but realized we were on to something and continued with it.
Twenty-two years later, looking back on what we have accomplished, we have created soil on our farm incredibly high in organic matter. We see firsthand how that high organic matter soil performs, just like the textbooks say it will. It holds moisture during drought periods, meaning we have to water less. And it absorbs water during intense rain events.
Scientists tell us that one of the effects we will see from climate change is an increase in drought and intense rain events. There is information on how much water soil will hold with each percent increase of organic matter. We are only cultivating four acres. But if every farm in our watershed had soil organic matter numbers like ours, they would be a major contributor to reduced flooding in the low-lying areas of our watershed.
Polly and I both studied some form of environmental studies in college. We approached farming from an environmental position, which enabled us to be open to trying something different. If we had come from farming backgrounds, we may never have been open to trying something different.
This probably explains why tillage-based farmers are not willing to change. The people who are interested are the next wave of young farmers who are coming from non-farm backgrounds, who don’t have capital to invest into machinery, who see what we do and realize a decent farm income can be earned on two or three acres of garden space.
The entrance to Four Winds Farm.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
Four Winds Farm does three to four farmers markets a year, some wholesale, sells to restaurants, and has a big seedling sale in the spring. Polly and farm manager Jenna Kincaid showed me around the farm on a hot day in early August 2017.
The farm also supports a sixty-member CSA, which is managed separately. This is a great opportunity for journeyman growers to plug in to the Armours’ system and gain experience before starting a farm of their own, and for the Armours to have a CSA on the farm without having to run it.
“We started the CSA in 1993 because that was the only way we could market our vegetables. Gradually, area farmers markets became good marketing outlets and our increased success with our annual seedling sale gave us enough income that we didn’t need the income that the CSA generated anymore. In 2008, two employees came up with the idea of taking over the operation of the CSA,” said Jay.
“The CSA is a separate business. They use the space, they use our equipment, and they use our techniques and so forth. It’s a turnkey business. They have an assigned area each year. We put our potatoes together, just because it’s a similar block of management, but other than that, they have their land and we have our land,” said Polly. “This is a great way to both hand off some of the management and act as an incubator farm.”
The no-till system used on Four Winds Farm is so simple, the biggest challenge for many growers would be taking the leap of faith away from tillage. As Jay told me in an email, “Several people have told me I need to write a book about my methods, but I’m no writer and my approach is so simple I think the book would be five pages long!” That’s being modest but it’s also true — one of the beautiful things about the Armours’ system is its simplicity. It boils down to using a thick layer of compost as a mulch to block weeds from emerging.
As Polly pointed out, the toughest thing about this system might be getting started. The first year, you have as much weed pressure as you did when you were tilling, since your weed seed bank isn’t worked down yet, but you don’t have tillage as an option to get rid of the weeds anymore. “The key to making it work is to have a lot of compost on hand,” said Jay. The Armours are living proof that sticking with the system can have huge benefits, like low weed pressure, high organic matter, harvesting and replanting the same day, growing a lot of food on small acreage, and the efficiencies of not investing time and money in tillage.
“Another really important point is that a high soil organic matter is attainable, which leads to better moisture retention, less water (and nutrient) runoff, and carbon is staying in the soil instead of being released into the atmosphere,” said Jay.
A view of the beds on Four Winds Farm in summer.
Credit: Four Winds Farm
I asked Polly what led them to this method in the first place, over twenty years ago.
“Well, it sort of evolved over time. When I was in college in the ’80s, I went to Cook College, which was the New Jersey agriculture school at the time. I was an ecology major, because they didn’t have organic farming as a subject. My major professor was really keen on getting people to think in a systems sense,” said Polly.
“He explained how soil works with respect to weeds, and how most of the weeds that germinate are in the top couple inches of soil. So when you till, you’re constantly replenishing that seed bank, bringing deeper seeds up to the surface. If you could stop tilling, you could break that cycle, but the trick was, how?”
“A lot of people at that point were doing double-dug raised beds in their backyard garden. The question for us, once we started this farm, was, how could we scale that up to a farm-scale model? It’s one thing to do it in a 10-foot by 20-foot plot in your backyard. It’s something very different to do it on an acre. Then we started working with a working group that was starting up a CSA, Phillies Bridge, which is just to the north of here. We encountered some folks there that were doing interesting stuff. We met Lee Reich, who has written some interesting books like Weedless Gardening, where he talks about a similar method. We realized that, okay; maybe this could be scaled up. What we needed was a source of compost, because that’s the linchpin for this.
“Mohonk Mountain House at that point had just begun composting all their food waste, and they were producing this gourmet compost and giving it away by the truckload. We got a number of truckloads, and that enabled us to transition to permanent beds.”
Fall beets that were planted in the same beds that the onions in the previous photo were in.
Credit: Four Winds Farm
“At the time we were tilling our garden space with a tractor-mounted rototiller, so we tilled everything in the spring, formed the beds with a back blade mounted on an old Ford 8N [tractor], and spread the compost from a garden cart. We made a few piles of compost ahead of time, brought over in the back of a pickup truck. Two years later I sold the rototiller,” said Jay.
“Then, using the compost from Mohonk, we were able to put compost on top. We did this section first,” Polly said, gesturing to the plot in front of us, “and the results were really amazing. It cut down on the weeding incredibly. The plants were healthier. It cut down on the labor involved. The soil developed a long-term structure, and we were hooked. Then the issue became, how can we scale this up?
“If we didn’t get the compost down, weeds would come up. We were moving compost at that point with a garden cart, so the initial investment was pretty significant.”
“How large was that first experiment?” I asked.
“Just half an acre,” Polly said.
“And you didn’t put any weed barrier or anything down?” I asked.
“Nothing like that,” said Polly, “just a big layer of compost, after we had rototilled and so forth. The first year was difficult, because your weed pressure is the same [as before] that first year.”
“Do you think a biodegradable weed barrier, like planter’s paper or cardboard, applied underneath the compost would help to get started with this system, by suppressing some of the weeds that would tend to come through the compost? I’m just trying to think of any way to ease the first year’s weed pressure,” I said.
“The layer of compost is all you need. The weed seed germinates from exposure to light. Once you remove that light with the layer of compost, the weed seeds won’t germinate. If you weren’t tilling the soil first, the planter’s paper might be a good idea, but it isn’t needed with our approach,” said Jay.
“Another important detail in our system is that we are using unscreened compost. Shavings from the horse manure sit on the soil at least a year helping to block the light reaching the soil beneath. I have seen other farmers attempt to duplicate our system with screened compost and it breaks down in around two months, allowing the weeds to become a problem in early August.”
“That enabled us to realize that the system worked. Then we moved to the next field over there, and we converted that to raised beds. You see that field is a little bit lower than this one?” Polly said, gesturing to a field with a small pond on the edge.
Jay Armour hooked this blower up to the manifold of perforated pipes to aerate his compost pile without having to turn it.
Credit: Four Winds Farm
This old dog house protects the blower from the elements.
Credit: Four Winds Farm
“The water table is quite high in that area. And when we don’t have to rototill or wait for the soil to dry out to work it, you can get on the soil any time of the year. I have a picture from that era of Jay and I working in the field. You can see standing water where that pathway is. We’re working, and putting down compost, and preparing the soil for the growing season in March. That really woke us up to how much labor and time we save by not tilling.”
A close-up view of the onions that are being harvested from nearly weed-free beds, with the comfrey border in the foreground.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“That’s such a huge advantage. I can remember so many times on my own farm, having to wait for things to dry out, to be able to do that initial cultivation,” I said.
“That alone is enough reason to do it, in my mind, because you don’t have to constantly postpone. When you’ve got a rainy spring, and you are weeks behind,” said Polly. “And it works also in the latter end of the season, because we actually prepare a lot of our fields for the following year in the fall. So we can get on them even earlier,” said Polly.
“That’s brilliant,” I said.
“That’s a wonderful time saver. You say it’s a big investment to put the compost down and prepare the beds, and it is, but it’s so much less than all the other stuff you would have to do if you didn’t do that. It’s a time saver in an absolute sense, and that time saving persists over the seasons,” said Polly.
“I tell people I would much rather put the energy into putting compost or mulch down than to pulling weeds up, because when you put any kind of organic matter down as a mulch, you’re adding to the soil. You’re making it better, in addition to not having to weed. It’s an amendment, in a sense.”
Turning to another field, Polly said, “We did this field in ’93, so that’s more than twenty years ago, and then we did that field where you see the kale, that was the second. That was the second year, 1994. That revolutionized our ability to farm. We were only on this side of the farm at that point, only cultivating these two fields, and we thought there was no possible way we would ever get any bigger, because the two of us, we just couldn’t handle it. Why would we ever want to? We would have to hire people, and all that sort of thing. Then once we saw the major benefits and labor saving for this raised-bed permanent system, we started expanding to the other side, over there, which used to be a hay field.
“And now that garden over there is twice as big as what we have here. As we expanded the growing area, we hired our neighbor to come and plow with his big machine, and he rototilled, and then we built the beds using a blade that we put on our little tractor.
“This is a nice size for us now, because first off, hiring people is great because they’re spending their time picking things rather than just weeding. So their labor is so much more valuable, because it goes directly to a crop that earns money. It’s also allowed us to expand not just in the amount of ground that we’re growing, but also in the things that we do here. We have farmers markets that we sell at. We have a CSA. They now run independently of us, and it’s a great system, because we don’t have to run it anymore.”
“We have four acres of established beds, but we don’t need that much land to make a decent living. It makes sense to have the CSA here using some of the space,” said Jay.
“It’s also great for the farmer because it gives them a sort of journeyman farm opportunity, where they can try running a farm. It gives people a chance to hone their management skills, so we’ve done that for more than ten years now. Usually our interns from the previous year, or from a previous year, become the CSA farmers at some point. That’s worked really well,” said Polly.
No-till tomatoes mulched with oat straw to help reduce soil splash and the diesases that come with it. They are interplanted every other row with a low growing crop to increase airflow and so a tractor can drive through and spray Korean Natural Farming sprays to help suppress diseases.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“That’s great,” I said. “One of the things that appeals to me about no-till is that I know when we were trying to start a farm, we thought that we had to buy a tractor. I know a lot of people who have apprenticed around and wanted to farm. But the access to land, and then all the heavy equipment they have to buy, are big financial barriers.”
“Yes, the heavy metal. The capitalization costs are so intense if you are going the tractor method,” said Polly.
“Besides the fact that I’m a plant nerd. I’m not a machine guy. I see no-till as giving people a point of access to farm that might not otherwise have access to land or equipment,” I said.
“Yes, it definitely does that. There are some other advantages to it as well. One is the space savings. If you’re doing conventional row crops, you tend to have about two-thirds of the farm in uncultivated land, tractor pathways and so forth. This flips that. We have about two-thirds of the soil in crops, and only about a third of it just in tractor pathways. So we’re able to get double the production from the same amount of space. The pathways are permanent. When we put down fertilizer, in this case it’s compost or whatever other amendments we’re using, we put them in the area where the plants are growing. We’re not fertilizing the pathways. It makes irrigating a lot easier, too. The plants themselves shade the soil of a bed,” said Polly.
“Because the space between rows is smaller, there is less exposed soil and therefore less evaporation. Also, the high organic matter soil holds more moisture meaning that we don’t need to water as much. And with a high organic matter soil, when it does rain, the rain doesn’t run off, it gets absorbed by the soil, which in turn means less watering,” said Jay.
“Another thing; because we’re not plowing, we can have a perennial crop next to an annual crop in any way, shape, or form we want, because we don’t have to worry about ripping it up, or having to drive around it, or anything like that,” said Polly.
“And we can grow season-long crops like peppers next to half-season crops like peas,” said Jay.
“Potatoes are the disruptor. We move the potatoes around the farm on a three-year rotation program, and when we harvest the potatoes, because they’re a big tuber underground, it ends up disrupting the beds,” said Polly.
“Does that mean you get weeds that sprout up there?” I asked.
“We would get weeds if we didn’t cover the soil right away. A strategy that we discovered was to plant garlic in the fall and then put compost down on top of the garlic. This way we are both mulching the garlic and covering up bare ground,” said Jay.
“We do a mixed crop the year following potatoes of garlic and winter squash. As soon as these potatoes come out, the beds will be rebuilt with a potato hiller,” said Polly.
“The soil that has gotten dumped into the pathways is put back into the beds, and then we plant garlic in alternate beds, and we cover it with compost. We cover the other beds with the compost, as well, and that smothers any weeds that are going to come up. The garlic will stay there all winter. The following spring, we put winter squash in the empty beds. The garlic comes out in early summer, which is right when the winter squash wants to take over. We just let the winter squash take over, and that’s how we suppress the weeds [where the potatoes were], which is the only spot that really gets disrupted,” said Polly.
“That’s a great system,” I said.
“Yeah, it works really well,” said Polly.
The Armours use a tractor-drawn potato digger to speed up the potato harvest. It’s the kind with a moving conveyor that lifts the potatoes, lets the soil fall through and deposits the potatoes on top of the bed.
A small field at Four Winds Farm.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“Yeah, and our potato digger, it doesn’t really throw any dirt out. It’s just lifting the soil, and it drops the potatoes behind,” said Jenna.
“It doesn’t do a lot of inversion,” said Polly.
“It’s not turning the soil. It just lifts it and drops it back down,” said Jenna.
“There are some weed seeds that are brought up,” said Polly.
“This system is scale neutral for the most part. So if you do it in one area, you don’t have to do the whole farm. At a small scale like this, it’s a four-acre market garden, basically. If someone is intrigued by the system but isn’t really sure it would work for them, I would say the best advice is to pick the spot on the farm where you have the worst soil. Every farm has a spot that just doesn’t do well, for one reason or another: it was abused in the past, it’s really compacted, the soil is crummy, there’s a lot of rocks, it’s too wet, whatever,” said Polly.
“Pick that spot, and try it, because first off, you’ve got the least amount of risk there. If it doesn’t work for you, you’ve lost the production from the soil that doesn’t do that well anyway. But secondly, if it does do well for you, that’s the area that’s going to show it most because with this system, you’re not tilling, so you’re not digging up rocks. You don’t have to wait for the soil to dry out, so if it’s a wet spot, you’ll see the best benefit in that area, too.”
“That’s great advice. Would anybody need to know anything else? I was thinking, if I were going to do this, I might put down a tarp now. Exhaust the weed seed bank as much as possible, and then just lay out beds with a lot of compost in the spring on top of the ground that had been tarped,” I said.
“We have seen people do something similar using cardboard, where they just put cardboard down and put the compost on top of the cardboard, and plant into the compost that same year. That’s how they start. They don’t even bother with the plowing phase,” said Polly.
“We had a spot in one of our first years of doing this, where it just got away from us. We never got the compost down onto it, and it grew up in grass. Just a few beds grew up in really, really thick grass, crab-grass. Jay went in with the weedwhacker, and he just mowed it really close. Then we lay down newspaper, and then compost on top of the newspaper, and we planted carrots into the compost, and we walked away. We had beautiful carrots and nothing else. That really made it clear to us that this works well, and that was just newspaper.”
Kale behind the comfrey border.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“The comfrey does a great job of keeping the grass out,” said Jenna.
I had noticed that all the fields on Four Winds Farm were bordered by some kind of plant that was loaded with little flowers. Turns out it was comfrey.
“Yeah, this is a barrier here,” Polly gestured at the comfrey, “so that the rhizomes from the grass try and grow into the beautiful garden, which is lovely, loose, fertile soil. It loves it there, but it runs up against the massive comfrey roots. That’s like the Berlin Wall. And the bees like it. And it defines the edge of the garden. Theoretically you can put your irrigation risers, headers in there, and they’re not in the way where the vehicles are driving,” said Polly.
“Another thing the comfrey does is create great habitat for garter snakes. One thing garter snakes eat are slugs. Needless to say, we do not have a slug problem,” said Jay.
“It’s a lot nicer to look at than a strip of plastic or gravel,” I said.
“There you go. Other people like it besides us. Comfrey is great. Where you put it, that’s where it stays. It doesn’t migrate unless you were to try and rototill it, which is another reason not to rototill. We would have a comfrey farm if we rototilled at this point, and that would not end well,” said Polly.
“Have you bought a manure spreader? I know you said at first that you applied all the compost by hand,” I asked.
“A manure spreader is designed to throw manure all over the place which is not what we are looking to do. Plus the wheel base of a manure spreader is too wide for the bed size we have,” said Jay.
“Right now, it’s a tractor bucket and a couple of people. So, Jay or Jenna drives, fills up the bucket and then just backs up slowly, and the people scoop it off. And then tidy it a bit. That’s all they do,” said Polly.
“Yes. That way it’s just in the bed,” said Jenna.
“Is there any bed prep after that, after you put compost on? Just plant into it?” I asked.
Another view of the kale field.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“That’s pretty much it. The crew scuffle hoes, just to kill whatever small weed seedlings might be appearing. They scuffle just to break the surface a little bit, sometimes,” said Polly.
“After things have been planted, and weeds have a chance to spread a little bit?” I ask.
“There are always some weeds. You’re never 100% weed free, and so we use a variety of techniques,” said Polly.
“There is always some organic residue on the beds from previous compost applications and a flame weeder would burn up that residue,” said Jay.
“No, we don’t flame weed in the beds. It’s mostly just scuffling. We can pull a crop out, and just scuffle, and seed right into it. If it’s really clumpy compost, and I’m doing carrots, or a fine seeded crop like that, then I might rake it out. But that’s it,” said Jenna.
“Yes, harvest and replant the same day,” said Polly.
“Yes, that’s what I’ve been doing. We’ve been pulling our onions out,” said Jenna.
“Let’s go look,” said Polly.
“This was our onion block, and the same day, or the same hour that we’re pulling the onions out, I’m just scuffle hoeing and seeding our next crop of spinach and beets there,” said Jenna.
This is where the simplicity of the system really shines. Once the weed seed bank has been worked down enough and the tilth is good enough that there’s no reason to till between successions of crops, the efficiency of being able to harvest and replant the same day kicks in.
The advantage of little time spent weeding and no time spent tilling really comes into perspective when you consider what happens on most farms once the onions are done being harvested; more jobs go on the to-do list — tilling the former onion area and remaking beds — before replanting.
The gain here goes beyond the time savings of eliminating two jobs. I know on a busy farm in the summer, jobs like retilling the onion area and remaking beds before replanting might find themselves below other more pressing jobs like harvesting and delivering. If there is too much to do and retilling doesn’t happen in a timely manner, the vacant onion bed will sit and grow weeds until such time as it can be tilled, generating more weed seeds and perpetuating the weed problem. The no-till system saves the opportunity cost associated with retilling between crops, and simplifies the farming system down to just what has to happen to get paid — planting and harvesting — and eliminates most everything else. In lean terms, it gets rid of the muda of tilling and weeding.
Tomatoes early on showing the straw and posts they use for their basket weave system of trellising.
Credit: Four Winds Farm
“One of the great things about [the system] can be seen in how we grow parsnips and carrots. These are tiny little seeds that take forever to germinate, and the weeds almost always grow up first. Plus you have to plant really thickly, because you want to have a good stand. You don’t want to have too many gaps, so you end up having to thin. What we do is, we don’t do any of that stuff. We just plant the seeds, water them well, and walk away. This is what you get,” Polly says, gesturing to a beautiful stand of carrots.
“With the carrots, we can use a lighter seeding rate, and then we don’t have to go in and thin, which is another labor savings. And until you’ve thinned carrots all day long, you don’t know what boredom means.”
“Right now, with the height of the summer, we’re spending our time picking and harvesting. I haven’t weeded these carrots recently, and the last time I just took a scuffle hoe through. We just harvest them,” said Jenna. “I did it in, I don’t know, half an hour, 45 minutes.”
“So this is a half-acre bed,” said Polly.
“Some people are going to cry when they read that,” I said.
“They’re just not going to believe it. We know farmers who are very respected farmers, who insist that you have to till. Other than the potato digger, these fields, especially over there, have not been tilled in twenty-three years,” said Polly.
“Here, Josh was five when we did this field. Is this Sasha’s field?” Polly said, gesturing to the field behind us.
“Yes,” said Jenna.
“Josh was five, and he’s twenty now,” said Polly.
“And it hasn’t been tilled since?” I asked.
“No. After the first couple years of doing this, we sold our rototiller. The rototiller was great, but it was a crutch, because it’s basically a giant eraser. When you have something that doesn’t go right, or it gets away from you, you just come through with the rototiller and everything disappears. Until two weeks later, when it’s all back with a fury,” said Polly.
“Yes, rototilling is just such a paradigm. That’s what most people do, right? Because I’ve been talking to people, telling them I’m working on this project. That I’m interested in no-till. I’ve encountered all of this skepticism like, ‘Whatever they’re doing, it’s got to be more work than tilling.’ Or just, ‘Well, you’ve got to till at some point.’ That’s what really made me think, I’ve just got to go talk to people who are doing no-till, because seeing is believing,” I said.
“Yeah, we’ve stopped trying to argue the point with the unconvincible. We just say, ‘Hey, you want to see it? Come see it, we’ll show it to you.’ We’re really glad you’re here. Word has gotten out, in the last five years or so, suddenly there’s a lot more interest. Not just with the crackpot farmers who are looking for something different, but from agricultural extension people, and researchers, and folk like that. It’s the nuts like us who have been plugging along. Us, and Rodale, and so forth,” said Polly.
“Some of these beds, a lot of this down here,” Jenna says gesturing, “are full-season crops, like the carrots. But in the top section of this field, I’m getting three or four crops out of each bed in a season, by doing a lot of quick successions.”
We know farmers who are very respected farmers, who insist that you have to till. Other than the potato digger, these fields, especially over there, have not been tilled in twenty-three years.
—POLLY ARMOUR
“Another cool thing we do is direct seed all of our onions,” said Jenna. “We’re not dealing with them in the greenhouse really early in the season, and spending all the labor of planting in flats. We just prep all the beds in the fall. We apply the compost, and then as soon as we can get in, we just scuffle hoe. Sometimes, I cut that out and just direct seed. Because the weed pressure is so low, the onions are able to get a start.”
“Oh right, and you can get on the beds earlier because you don’t have to wait for them to dry out enough to drive a tractor on them,” I said. Most people in the northeast transplant onions for two reasons. For one, they need the plants to start growing before they can get on their fields with heavy equipment. And secondly, because onions are slow growers that don’t compete well with weeds, they get a head start in the greenhouse without competition. I realize that when you can eliminate tillage and weeds, it opens up possibilities that are not available in most tillage systems.
“So, how much weeding would you do? Onions like these are direct seeded in the spring here. Have there been weeding passes through here, once or twice?” I asked.
“When they’re really tiny, I do a quick hand weeding, just to grab any of the bigger things that are coming up, and then I did a quick scuffle hoe. Then we’ve done a couple hand weedings,” said Jenna. “But often, the weeding is like, ‘Oh, here is just one giant purslane plant.’ And it goes really fast because the weeds come out really, really easily.”
“Another thing you can do, you can mix different crops of different maturities in the same bed, because you don’t have to think about planting it or tilling it after the crop comes out,” said Polly.
Nearly weed-free beds of carrots and parsnips. Root crops like these can be planted tightly since they don’t need any mechanical cultivation.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
Daniel Mays
Scarborough, Maine
Mixed vegetables, flowers and herbs, poultry
Occultation and organic applied mulch/compost
FRITH FARM IS IN SCARBOROUGH ON THE COAST OF Maine, just under two hours away from my farm in the center of the state. Since anytime I want to go almost anywhere else in the United States I have to head south past Daniel Mays’ farm, I emailed him to see if I could invite myself by for a visit.
That’s how I found myself on his farm on a drizzly October 26, 2017, taking shelter in one of his hoophouses while we talked and waited to see if the weather would clear up enough for us to walk around the field. Daniel grows organic vegetables on three of the farm’s fourteen acres, and pasture-raises eggs, chicken, pork, and turkeys on the rest of the farm.
After starting the farm in 2010, Daniel developed his own no-till method similar to some of the occultation/compost mulch methods described elsewhere in this book. Some of what he has written on his website expresses the benefits and philosophy of no-till, and regenerative agriculture in general, very well. For instance, he “believes farmers should be stewards of the land, not miners of its resources, and that farms should be hubs of the community, not distant sources of its calories.” He also believes that “economic sustainability need not be sacrificed, but rather can come directly from the union of environmental stewardship and community involvement.”
Another thing I’ve heard echoed by a lot of other no-tillers is farming on a human scale: “The farm is sized for tools, practices and enterprises that celebrate the satisfaction and fulfillment of human work, and in return the work benefits from the increased care that this scale affords.”
Looking out on his field from the door of a hoophouse, Daniel told me about his approach.
“I have an engineering background, so the layout is modular. There are sixteen plots, each of which has twelve 100-foot beds. They all rotate, so at this point it’s basically the same crop plan each year rotated around the field,” said Daniel.
“That must be nice to not have to redo your rotation every year,” I said.
“Yes, it is. Of the three high tunnels, those two had tomatoes, but we just ripped them out and now one has chickens and the other, winter greens. This one here has ginger still, since it’s been such a warm fall. I’m eager to get the winter crops in, so we’re planting the beds as the ginger comes out.”
We look in a greenhouse where the residue from a tomato crop is still visible.
“Yep, so this had tomatoes in it until a couple days ago. We just pulled them out, raked off the leaf mulch, spread compost, and direct seeded into it. These greens will come online in mid-to-late February, and we’ll harvest them right into May,” said Daniel.
“So, the bed tops get a bunch of compost, and the pathways get leaves?” I asked.
“We mulch the whole tunnel with leaves before the tomatoes go in, and plant the tomato seedlings through the leaf mulch. When we pull the tomatoes out we rake the leaves into the paths and spread more compost on the beds. The raised beds give us extra space in the paths for the leaves,” said Daniel.
“How did you get interested in no-till and come up with your system?” I asked.
“I had very little experience when I started out. I had volunteered on a handful of farms, but I hadn’t spent more than half a season at a time farming. I read a handful of books on vegetable production and soil science, and all of them agreed that tillage is not good for the soil. So I thought, ‘Why don’t I not do this?’ Though I started with a BCS walking tractor and rotary plow to break pasture and form the raised beds, after that, I saw little point in tilling more,” said Daniel.
Farm owner Daniel Mays with partner Sarah Coburn.
Credit: Frith Farm
“The only reason I could see for it was to mix amendments and residues into the soil. But I rationalized that away: if you have enough organic matter, then the worms, soil critters, and plant roots do the mixing for you. It’s a slow-motion biological mixing instead of a destructive mechanical one. And the soil responded right away.
“I also have pretty sandy soil, and I started at 3 percent organic matter. There’s another farm down the road that has a similar soil type and I know they have had challenges keeping their organic matter up. I believe they till once or twice a season, or maybe even more, if you count cultivation. The soil can turn to beach pretty easily that way, whereas, you can’t even see my soil anymore. It’s so buried in organic matter from each year of mulching, composting, and cover cropping,” said Daniel.
“You’re making your own soil,” I said.
“Yes, it’s cool to see. Digging a profile now, you can kind of see back in time, how much soil has grown in the seven years I’ve been here,” said Daniel.
Spreading compost, using a tractor to get it to the field and wheelbarrows to get it on the beds.
Credit: Frith Farm
“I’m imagining you didn’t do this whole area in the first year,” I said. “No. I started with just under an acre and then added another plot or two each year. This year is the first year we didn’t add any plots. We’re at three acres total, including all the flower beds, perennial herbs, and high tunnels. This whole style of farming is not about starting with three acres. It’s about starting small and building your market as you grow your farm, in harmony with each other. Then you can figure out what you should even be growing, based on your customers,” said Daniel.
No-till outdoor cherry tomatoes.
Credit: Frith Farm
“So, that plot with the sprinklers in it right there, is that a cover crop?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s all cover crop. I’m experimenting with three different mixes, so there’s four beds of rye and crimson clover, four beds of rye and mammoth red clover, and then four beds of peas and oats that will winter kill pretty soon. Next year, that whole plot will be solanaceous crops. I’m experimenting with the overwintered cover crops, and killing them right before the tomatoes go in, to see how that does, relative to peas and oats. From a management perspective peas and oats are easier, because they die over the winter, but then you lose that biological activity in the spring when the bed just sits there with nothing growing in it,” said Daniel.
“So how are you going to kill the stuff that doesn’t winter kill?” I asked.
“With the flail mower on the BCS [walking tractor] and then tarp it. I use black tarps. I joke that those are my ‘organic Roundup.’ Ideally, you could time it so that you flail mow the cover crop when it starts to go to seed, but the rye and clover will do that too late since I want to get tomatoes in there late May. So I think I’ll be flail mowing them early May and then two or three weeks of tarping. Which I think will be enough to kill the rye and clover if it’s sunny out, because the tarps not only block the light, but heat up a lot too. It’s a nonaggressive solarization, as opposed to clear tarps. So, I think flail mowing and a few weeks of tarping will, hopefully, be enough, but it’ll be an experiment,” said Daniel.
“But that’s how I do peas and oats. I do two and a half plots [out of 16] of peas and oats in the spring and then flail mow those late May, before they’re really flowering, and that kills them pretty well and then I tarp them. It usually just takes about a week or week and a half of tarping.”
“Do you have to do any weeding? There must be some little weeds that pop up,” I asked.
“Yes, we have some weeds. Basically, whatever we missed the year before, if anything goes to seed, which, this year, we’ve done pretty well at preventing. In theory there shouldn’t be any other than that, but you always track some in with your feet from the pasture or some blow in. But we are able to maintain relatively weed-free beds. When we’re done harvesting a bed, it’s basically ready to go again. There might be a few bolted lettuce heads or something that we pull out by hand or flail mow if there are a lot of them, but otherwise we do no further bed prep,” said Daniel.
I noticed that there was a lot of bok choy in the adjacent section of field.
“There was a mix-up with the seeding and we really overplanted bok choy this fall. Those beds we’ll just flail mow and they’ll be ready for the next crop,” said Daniel.
“It’s a bok choy cover crop,” I said.
No-till beds after a thunderstorm on Frith Farm.
Credit: Frith Farm
“Yes. Exactly. What a cover crop,” said Daniel. “So, you take a crop out. And then, do you put more compost down and then seed a cover crop into that?” I asked.
“Yes, depending on the bed. I still treat the newer beds like that, building up the soil, but the older beds that have had that treatment for seven years are so fertile that they don’t need more compost. For those I just plant directly into them. I try to always have a crop or cover crop growing to catch the nutrients that are already there,” said Daniel.
“I am a firm believer in biology as the basis of soil health. I saw Will Brinton from Woods End Laboratories speak at MOFGA’s Spring Growth Conference this year. What I took away from his message is that it’s not the chemistry that we should worry about in the soil, it’s the biology. What matters is the diversity and the quantity of your biology. Woods End offers tests that measure more than chemistry in a variety of ways. For instance, they can quantify biological activity in the soil by measuring the CO2 released from the soil organisms in a sample,” said Daniel.
“The idea of shifting from chemistry to biology, and the biological differences between the different types of organic matter, got me thinking. Compost is great, it’s full of biology, but it’s mostly humus and lacks the diversity of living and fresh organic matter that a cover crop provides.
“When you add compost to the soil, its biology is probably becoming food for whatever life is in the soil already. Whereas, when you grow a cover crop, the native, living organic matter that’s being created is tailored specifically to your soil, and is alive and active, incorporated into the soil without tillage through root growth. If you’re thinking biologically, cover crops are the best kind of organic matter.
Occultation with tarps.
Credit: Frith Farm
“So that really got me thinking, because I’ve been a huge user of compost, as a mulch and slow-release fertilizer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a compost junky, but now I’m cover cropping more. I think a crop after a good cover crop might do even better than a crop planted in four inches of compost.”
“You can see a difference?” I asked.
“I’m pretty convinced there’s a difference, because there’s so much biology in the root system of that cover crop. When you kill that cover, all that biology is still active and looking for something to do. You plant your new crop in, and it’s all right there. Compost on the surface is great, but it’s not the same kind of active, grown-in-place biology that a cover crop provides,” said Daniel.
“On Singing Frogs Farm that I was just visiting, they’re really big on wanting to have roots in the soil all the time too. What they do is not dissimilar from what you’re doing, as far as, they try to harvest a crop and leave the root system in the ground, and potentially even replant the bed the same day,” I said.
“In fact, they have gotten to the same point that it sounds like you have, where they’ve got enough organic matter in their soil. They added a lot of compost early on and got to the point where their organic matter was high enough. So they stopped adding so much compost.”
“Exactly. Plus, a cover crop is not really much management. You just seed it and wait, and let the organic matter accumulate on its own. I love watching the cover crop, like that plot of peas and oats over there that’s thigh high. It gives me a lot of pleasure to look at it and imagine how well the next crop is going to do,” said Daniel.
“It’s hard to even tell that they’re permanent beds at this point, the cover crop has grown up so much,” I said.
CSA pick up on Frith Farm.
Credit: Frith Farm
“Yeah. It’s all kind of a jungle,” said Daniel.
“So you have these permanent beds, and you’re always walking in the pathways and always fertilizing the beds. And at the end of a season, when this bok choy cover crop comes out here, do you broadcast or do you drill a cover crop in?” I asked.
“We direct seed the cover crop with an Earthway seeder. It’s a lot of walking back and forth, but it gives a real good stand, great germination, no wasted seed. I’ve tried broadcasting, and it’s kind of hit or miss, based on how well you keep it irrigated,” said Daniel.
“Yes, I’ve had the same issues,” I said.
“I’ll get two people, one on peas, one on oats, and they just stagger the lines. And it takes fifteen or twenty minutes with two people to do a whole plot of twelve beds. That’s well worth the dense stands,” said Daniel.
The rain let up, so we started walking around, looking at Daniel’s fall crops. We walked by some dense, healthy stands of carrots and rutabagas.
“So, I’m guessing you direct seeded the carrots. Did you direct seed the rutabagas?” I asked.
“The rutabagas, we transplanted. We do them every foot. For direct seeding, we pretty much just do salad greens, carrots, and radishes. Everything else is transplanted. Even beets are transplanted. It’s a similar philosophy to direct seeding the cover crop. You just know you’re going to get a perfect stand when you transplant it,” said Daniel.
“This is where we had our garlic. Planting garlic and carrots back to back in a season is the most profitable plot on the farm. Those are both good return on the square foot.”
A small part of the carrot harvest.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“These carrots got planted sometime in July then, I’m guessing?” I asked.
“Yes, exactly, end of July. We harvest all the garlic, the next day come back and plant the carrots,” said Daniel.
“It’s nice to be able to flip them that quickly,” I said.
“Yes, I’ve spent a long time looking at all the crop timings, finding the pairs that maximize the season. I have a color-coded crop plan I keep in the barn that is both the plan and the record, since we follow it exactly. It’s helpful having that to go by, so the crew knows where everything is going. It takes the guesswork out of the busiest time of the year,” said Daniel.
“And the quackgrass [at the edge of the field], I heard the farmers of Four Winds Farm talk about their border edging of comfrey. I love that idea, and thought about doing it, but it feels like a big commitment. If you ever want to move your beds, that comfrey’s there forever.
“That made me nervous, so instead we do a thick swath of leaf mulch around each plot. Over here I experimented. This path between plots was sod, but I just scooped it off and replaced it with wood chips. That worked out pretty well, so I might do that between other plots too. We need a path between some plots for garden carts or driving the tractor. When we spread compost, we line up three wheelbarrows, fill them with one dump of the tractor bucket and then walk them down the beds. That way the tractor doesn’t ever drive in the fields.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“That means I need access paths, otherwise I’m driving in figure eights around the farm instead of straight lines,” said Daniel.
“How big are these beds? They look bigger than 30 inches,” I asked.
Freshly mulched beds.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“Yes. They’re 60 inches wide, on center,” said Daniel. “That makes the bed itself about 42 inches. I like the idea of the 30-inch width, because most of the implements on a BCS can cover that in a single pass. But if you do the math, you lose over a third of your growing space to paths. I have long legs, so I can still step over these beds easily enough. That’s why I went with 60 inches on center when I started. If I were starting from scratch, it would be a tough call, because the single pass is a pretty good selling point,” said Daniel.
“I buy two different types of compost. This pile is purely composted leaves, with no other nitrogen source. I use that on most of my beds, at this point, that don’t need any more nutrients. It’s basically stabilized organic matter without extra phosphorus and nitrogen. I use it as a mulch in the fall that we can just plant right into the next spring. We use the regular fertile compost for things that need more fertility. We’ll spread that before we plant garlic, then we don’t fertilize the garlic the whole next season,” said Daniel.
Cover cropped no-till beds.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“So I imagine your soil organic matter has come up, if you started out at 3 percent,” I said.
“Yes, it’s over 6 percent now, which for super sandy soil is pretty good. This style of farming doesn’t really fit into the paradigm of soil testing, because if I test the top four inches, it’s almost 100 percent organic matter. If I test the soil eight inches down, organic matter is probably still pretty low. So I guess I’m testing the average of the top ten inches, but based on how deep I plunge the sampler, it’s going to be a little different each time. Those tests are all based on the idea of tilled, homogenous soil. My soil profile is more like a forest floor,” said Daniel.
“Was it hard for you to establish this system? Did you have to fight weeds that first year to kind of get over the hump?” I asked.
The mobile chicken coop on Frith Farm.
Credit: Frith Farm
“Yes. I’ve definitely had to learn the hard way about weeds and not getting too big so fast that you can’t stay on top of them. I’ve let some weeds go to seed some years when I didn’t have adequate labor. You really pay the next couple years, because you don’t get to just till it under. It’s all right there on the surface. This year we’ve pretty much caught up with that and stayed on top of the weeds, so I’m hopeful for minimal weeding next year,” said Daniel.
“We spread a yard and a half of compost per bed. That’s well over a thousand pounds per bed. I go through a lot of compost. My solution for spreading it is a hybrid tractor-human model. The wheelbarrow is an amazing human-scale tool, easy to handle for extended periods except for the loading of it. That’s where all the work is. So the tractor does the loading right at the head of the bed,” said Daniel.
“Once loaded, the wheelbarrows get pushed down the bed by hand, and dumped precisely where it’s needed. It works pretty well. Four of us can spread a whole plot with fifteen cubic yards of compost in about twenty minutes. One on the tractor and three people pushing wheelbarrows. It’s actually rather fun. It’s a team effort, instead of just me loading a manure spreader, dragging it around and compacting the soil. It’s almost a festive thing. Everyone’s working together to keep up with the tractor,” said Daniel.
“I feel like there is the ideal system once it’s established, and then there are the systems of getting it there, which often involve tilling. But I’m looking at these beds that we just sheet mulched and planted right into. If you spread enough material that it smothers the crop, or lay down cardboard and then compost, you can avoid even the initial tillage to establish beds. It takes a lot of organic material, but ultimately it pays off as it feeds your soil for many future crops,” said Daniel.
Hedda Brorstrom
Sebastopol, California
Cut flowers and floral design
Compost mulch, occultation
HEDDA BRORSTROM GROWS A DENSELY-PLANTED acre of cut flowers at Full Bloom Flower Farm and Floral Design in Sebastopol, California. She was supposed to be the first of a few visits to no-till farms in and around Sebastopol in October 2017, which turned out to be really bad timing. The night before I was supposed to visit her farm, historically bad wildfires broke out in Sonoma County, which meant she was busy helping friends out for the next few days and I never made it by her farm.
So I was very glad to catch up with her over the phone early the following spring, and hear about how the biological activity on the former worm farm is helping to break down crop residues instead of tillage.
“How did you get started with no-till?” I asked.
“I started out as a gardener. I went to UC Berkeley and I studied agriculture, but more the politics of agriculture there. And I knew at that point that I wanted to become a garden teacher. So I was a garden teacher for six years in San Francisco, and managed an acre garden with 450 kids. And I didn’t have any machinery there, so tilling wasn’t even part of my thought process when it came to farming. And then when I decided that I wanted to learn more about farming I went to the UC Santa Cruz apprenticeship program and did that six-month training there. They have three different sites that you learn on. One is a twenty-acre tractor-scale farm, then there are two gardens,” said Hedda.
“Both of those gardens implement French intensive methods [for maintaining] everything. That seemed like more my speed, and I had already fallen in love with flowers, and realized that I could farm a lot less land and have a flower farm at my parents’ house in Sonoma County. So I leased land from them, about an acre, and figured I could do flowers, since not that many people were doing flowers in Sonoma County at that time, and make it a viable business. I’m going into my sixth season now. The first season, I had a tractor come and rototill the field. And half of the field I [tilled with] a walk-behind tractor the next year, but half of it I had already started no-till farming, without really calling it that.
“It was all annuals at that point. Then about the second season in with using a rototiller, I just didn’t want to anymore. My soil was really, really sandy, and it didn’t seem like I even needed to. And I had done so much sheet mulching in the past, that was what seemed instinctual to me. So I did that for about three seasons on half of the farm. And then for the last three years, the whole acre has been no-till. I could transition because the beds where I had been doing no-till had a lot less weeds.
“The whole in and out of flowers is a bit different than vegetables. Another part of my farm, and making it something manageable to be a one-woman show, is that it’s a couple of businesses. I grow cut flowers, a lot of them, but I also have design work; I’m a florist on the side, and there are a lot of weddings.
“So in order to have that many cut flowers and be selling to grocery stores and marts, and designing for eight restaurants in town, and all these different accounts, my game plan from the get-go was always to start investing in perennials. So slowly I’ve been adding more and more perennials to the field, which obviously are going to be in a no-till system.
Hedda Brorstrom in the densely planted, closely spaced beds of Full Bloom Flower Farm.
Credit: Dawn Heumann
“One part of my farm that’s unique is that my spacing is about the closest I think I’ve ever seen on any flower farm. I’m trying to squeeze as many plants into as little space as possible. About half of my bigger field at this point is all perennials. For a long time, I had been really attached to the idea that I needed to do a lot of cover cropping. I just happened to start farming in a drought, so it wasn’t until last year that I had really experienced what it was like to farm with rain. I just kept trying to grow cover crops, and it wasn’t working, because I don’t have anything but drip irrigation. I don’t have any way to water in the off-season, and the flowers go all the way until frost.”
“I have kind of given up on cover cropping. I don’t cover crop, and the way my system works is, I start plants in October. I have about five hundred bed feet of spring crops that really produce a lot. Right now it’s anemones and ranunculus. Those were uncovered in the past, this year I did low tunnels on them. So there are only five production rows through the wintertime,” said Hedda.
“And then in the rest of the beds I cut the plants, so I leave the roots in every year, and just cut the tops. Especially sunflowers and amaranths, things that have really big roots; I don’t make the effort to go through and pull any of them out, so I’m just chopping down material, and either laying it on top of the field or removing it if it seems like there is too much material.
“But most of the time I’m just throwing [the plant matter from the previous crop] down, and then for the winter pulling landscape fabric over sections. And then when spring comes, using one bed at a time and gradually pulling them off. So this week [beginning of April] we pulled all the landscape fabric off the small field.
Credit: Dawn Heumann
I’m consistently planting, I would say a month and a half before other flower farms, because of being a no-till farm, and being able to get into the ground extra early.
—HEDDA BRORSTROM
“We use a lot of compost. I think one of the problems that some of the other vegetable farmers are facing now that have been doing no-till, is that especially in Sonoma County, we don’t have great compost anymore. And people were adding a lot of compost with a lot of animal in it, cow manure, and the phosphorus levels were getting really high in some people’s fields. So I’m switching off a lot between different [composts]. And because I’m a flower farm, I’m not having to be as cautious with the application of manures. Last year I did it way too thick. I did this incredibly thick layer of duck compost, almost eight inches thick.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes. I was piling it on my beds, and I didn’t even broadfork anything. We used to be a worm farm, and nothing from last year exists anymore [it all decomposed]. The worms have just turned it. So that was pretty fun to see how much the biological activity is moving through the plants. There’s turnover from spring crops. I’ll do a plant-out right now of some early spring crops. And when I transition from those to late fall crops, I often will either just cut the plant out and remove it, and then direct seed in the hole, and add a little more compost or just transplant and add a little compost as I’m transitioning the plants and reusing the beds,” said Hedda.
“You mean you’re just taking the biomass, the top growth of the plant, off and just making a hole and sticking a seed in?” I asked.
“I meant, I’m probably harvesting a spring crop, and taking the biomass off and leaving the roots, and then just sticking a seed at that same spot that caused the drip; I’m often just planting by my drip lines,” said Hedda.
Some of Hedda’s design work.
Credit: Dawn Heumann
“Compost application this year is going on a little bit less thick. We still like four inches. I’m still doing this initial [application], because those beds haven’t been no-till for as long,” said Hedda.
“I was already no-till farming, and then when I found out about Singing Frogs Farm (see interview p. 275) I thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t even realize that [no-till is] a thing that other people are doing. That’s so cool to have them as my neighbor.’ And then I’ve had a lot of the crew members from Singing Frogs come to my farm just to check out my system too.
“And it seems like we do a lot of very similar things. This year was the first year that I had bought a silage tarp for one of the fields, and did silage tarp instead of landscape fabric. Which didn’t make me feel great. The plastic is pretty stinky. Part of me thinks, ‘I feel like this is really good to not be tilling.’ Another part of me feels like I own way too much plastic.
“So I’ve got this huge silage tarp that doesn’t let the water in, which is kind of a good thing. That part of the field was too wet anyhow. And I’m consistently planting, I would say a month and a half before other flower farms, because of being a no-till farm, and being able to get into the ground extra early.”
“That’s a big advantage,” I said.
“Woven landscape fabric, as the solution to small-scale farmers not having to weed as much, works well where it’s a little colder. Here we can’t grow as many types of crops in it because of the heat. Last year we got up to 112 [degrees Fahrenheit/44 Celsius] in my field on one of those days. But normally it’s more like 102 [degrees F/39 C],” said Hedda.
“As much as I can, I’ve been trying to use Weed Guard Plus [brown paper mulch], and then using straw on top of that, or organic alfalfa when I can find that as well. But it’s not as easy as rolling something out and then rolling it back up and moving it. I’ve been using the straw on those parts of the field that have been no-till for five years now. And I decided it just makes me feel better about that whole zone. If I had access to wood chips, that would be awesome too for all the perennials.
Dahlias being planted in crates to keep the gophers out.
Credit: Full Bloom Flower Farm
“Another huge thing that I found with no-till farming in our area that’s a big pain and a drawback, is the fact that the gopher population is harder to find. If you till a bed in the springtime, you can really go out there and trap pretty easily. But I’m planting plants so quickly and in succession, that it’s harder to find them. And then when the landscape fabric is down, they’re just building these amazing tunnels for months at a time. So that’s one of the other drawbacks: the plastic and the gopher issues.”
“But in general, it’s been amazing not to have to use any machinery. Have you ever heard of Bare Mountain Farm?”
“Yes, I visited them last October,” I said (see interview p. 123).
“They have really good explanations on practical farm things, with a great YouTube channel. And it seems like more people have discovered no-till in the flower community because of them,” said Hedda.
“And it just so happens that one of my best friends here owns Red H Farm, she’s a vegetable farmer. She does about an acre and a half or so. And she’s a no-till farmer too. So without having to try too hard to find other people to talk to about it, it was just part of this community. And that was even before we knew about Singing Frogs. Since then I think I’ve convinced at least four other little farms around here to at least try doing one of their fields in a silage tarp or landscape fabric.
“I started this group called the North Bay Flower Collective. There were five people originally, and now we’re up to fifty people, just in Sonoma County. The flower scene has really bloomed here. We have these monthly farm tours, we just go and check out each other’s farms and learn. I would say that most of the flower farms around here have at least one or two fields that they’re experimenting doing no-till.
Later in the planting process the tubers are covered with soil and straw.
Credit: Full Bloom Flower Farm
“It’s been interesting to see it kind of sweep into Sonoma County. This winter, all those people were buying silage tarps for no-till farming. And now it seems like a lot of the farms are adopting it, especially with finally having rain, and being able to start farming a good month before they used to.”
“When you said that you space things lot more tightly than most people do, did you mean in-row spacing, or you crowd the beds together, or both?” I asked.
“Both. I’m putting most of my plants at six to eight inches apart, and then doing either five or six rows per bed. So I’m fitting in a lot of plants. And with flowers, that makes them extra tall, which is always a goal within flower farming. I’ve added four hundred feet of roses, and they take up a lot of space and don’t produce as much, you’ve got to space them out so far apart. Everything else gets treated like every square inch is critical. So things are really, really tight,” said Hedda.
“When I started out originally, I wasn’t thinking I’d have a lot of helpers. Now I definitely have to have help on harvest days. Even now [early spring], when I only have five beds in production, it’s a six-hour harvest. So my rows are a little too narrow for some people to get down some of them. It’s almost a maze. But in a lot of ways, it really helps with the flowers, because I don’t use any netting.
The beds at Full Bloom Flower Farm.
Credit: Full Bloom Flower Farm
“And so they stay up, they stay more upright than other farms because there are just so many of them. There’s not a lot of space for wind. But that’s something not everybody could do. My field is really hot and dry in the summer, so I don’t often get any powdery mildew or anything on my zinnias. So I’m able to put my plants at this crazy tight spacing that other people couldn’t get away with. Some things go at nine inches, zinnias go at nine inches. But sunflowers are going in at six inches, so you can really put thousands of plants in a really small space.”
“I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s almost like approaching your field like a greenhouse. You know how everybody tries to crowd as many plants as possible into a greenhouse? So if you’re using that planter’s paper, you must have problems with weeds coming up through your beds?” I asked.
“I still have weed pressure and issues in my field. But the sections where I’ve been doing no-till the longest, they definitely have fewer weeds. I did one crazy experiment, that is no-till, but it’s not really any normal farming. I have a crazy plant-out of four hundred bed feet of dahlias on top of landscape fabric in crates. I did that because I was starting to get a grass that looks like crabgrass, and it was just driving me insane. So I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to cover this for two years and do my dahlias in crates because the gophers are such an issue [eating the dahlia tubers],’” said Hedda.
“Then storage has been an issue. And I’ve been able to save every tuber that way. Even leaving them out in the rain. It’s kind of a crazy system that a lot of people are copying now. And I tell them, ‘I don’t actually know about this, I’m just experimenting.’ Before that I was doing these trenches with gopher wire, but they rusted out. This is season three of doing the crates and the dahlias, and it’s crazy expensive. But that was probably my biggest weed issue, that grass, and now it hasn’t been too bad, but definitely not weed free. Especially since it is primarily just me on the farm, and I don’t really allocate much time to weeding.”
“When I did the crazy thick compost layer last season, I don’t think I weeded once. So that’s kind of my M.O. on doing the thick compost. But at the same time, it also killed a lot of plants because it had been just too thick and they weren’t getting water properly. It was rice hulls mixed with duck poop, and it would keep it dry,” said Hedda.
“Some people I’ve talked to who are doing no-till, they make a really high carbon compost, so they can apply a lot of it without, like you said, spiking their phosphorus or other nutrients,” I said.
“Which is funny, because one of the main facilities that I was using for compost for years, was really, really high [carbon], and it looks just like wood chips. So I switched from using that for years, into using the duck poop last year, and now I’m back to a different compost that’s municipal waste plus grape seed extract from the grape industry. And I also used cow this year too. So I’ve been doing 30 or 40 yards for a little bit less than an acre per year,” said Hedda.
“Yes, that’s a lot of compost,” I said.
“It’s a lot of compost, especially since I don’t have a tractor, to apply with a bucket. Because one of the neighboring farms, they’re doing no-till, but they still bought a tractor just so that they could use the tractor bucket to lay the compost out. So it’s not a tractorless system for some people. My field’s just so small, I can’t bring a tractor in anymore, because there are so many perennials,” said Hedda.
“So are you just wheelbarrowing all that compost around?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Hedda.
“Well that’s a workout,” I said.
“Yes. Spring is real,” said Hedda.
Flower beds with a bouquet.
Credit: Full Bloom Flower Farm
“You said you had a lot of perennials and the dahlias. Are there particular crops you specialize in, or are you pretty diversified in what you grow?” I asked.
“I’m pretty diversified, but I’ve gotten more specialized over the years, because my main moneymaker is weddings. The way I think about it now is, I have ranunculus and anemone season, then I have rose season; they’re all heirloom David Austin varieties, and then it’s dahlia season and lisianthus season. Those are the focal flowers, and the bigger sections are about five hundred feet of each one of those things. And then about two hundred other little things. Sometimes even just three feet of a special grass for boutonnieres or something,” said Hedda.
“So it’s really diversified, but I’m getting into larger plant-outs. And then I sell a lot to the fifty other florists that are in our group. So a big part of my sales goes to florists now. It used to be to the grocery stores, and I used to grow more market-style things, more sunflowers and zinnias, but I’m reducing all those numbers just because of the fact that we’re such a wedding destination, and that’s where the money is,” said Hedda.
“I’m also adding other things in that I used to grow, because I was a food grower before. So this year I’m doing strawberries again, because the florists love them green for arrangements. So we’re definitely Sonoma County. Sonoma County flower growers are specializing in unique and boutique varieties; plants like Stainless Steel roses, Distant Drum roses, sea oats, clematis, scoop scabiosas, and other wedding items. Santa Cruz farms tend to do high volume and brighter colors while we are more focused on main wedding focals and then the odds and ends that lend a rustic touch to design. Hops, lilacs, cherry tomatoes, and anything odd or unusual like mushrooms gets bought up very quickly at our local flower mart.”
“A lot of no-till veggie growers are taking advantage of the fact that they don’t have to till from one crop to the next. They’re getting one crop out and then replanting the beds to another crop the same day, or at least very quickly. But that speed of succession doesn’t really exist in flowers. There’s not a salad mix of the flower world. How many times are you getting to use the beds over the course of the season?” I asked.
“A lot of the beds are just one crop per season, but some of them are two. Rarely I would say that it’s three. And because I’m trying to do more and more perennials, there’s a big portion that stay planted for years. But then, I went into my fifth year last year, and realized, ‘Oh yeah, there are a lot of things that have to be replaced after four years.’ And that was really apparent in the springtime. Just that I needed to dig things up and separate things out like irises, and these bigger plant-outs of Veronica and the perennials. It’s not like vegetables where you’re constantly planting all the time. I think my last seeding date is mid-July,” said Hedda.
Hedda in the field in the fifth year of the farm.
Credit: Full Bloom Flower Farm
“So it’s very different than with vegetables. I start seeding January 28th most years. So late January through July. A lot of the other spring stuff is fast. Like stock and forget-me-nots, larkspur, sweet peas. I’ll plant on top of those when they’re done, and do another vining crop like love in a puff or hyacinth bean on top of the sweet peas. So it’s mostly just the spring crops that get a second round on top of them. And some of the grasses too, I do a lot of different grasses, like ruby silk and frosted explosion. And some of the scabiosa too, like Scabiosa stellata, I try and get three rounds of that in. And as things end, I’m just going in and plugging in zinnia seeds, direct seeding, as the spring stuff is finishing, and I don’t have replacement plants.”
“Do you have any advice for people who want to get started with no-till?” I asked.
“My advice would just be to try a section out. It’s so satisfying to pull back whatever medium you’re using to cover, and have a bed pretty much ready to go, and see the biology that is so alive underneath it. Time and time again, that does not get old. And I think people inherently know, whether or not they’re soil scientists, that when they pull that back and there are all those worms and all the insects and all the microbes, and all the fungus, that it’s a really good starting point. And that they didn’t really have to do anything, and it was easy to just move something versus starting an engine up,” said Hedda.
“So that would be my advice, to try out a hundred feet and see how it goes. And don’t expect the promises of no weeds to be the motivator as much as seeing the worms as the fact that you’ve got these little guys underneath helping you out.”
“Yes, that’s great advice. Just try a bed. That’s another thing I like about no-till, it’s not like you have to invest in a whole lot of equipment,” I said.
“Yes, and it’s not complicated either. It comes instinctively to people once they’ve done it a couple of times. And just to go to each other’s farms, that’s always my biggest advice. It’s awesome what we can do and watch online, there’s so much information. But going to another farm, that’s priceless. Whether it’s a farm that’s been in operation for six months or sixty years, you’re always going to learn something by going to somebody’s farm. I’m a big advocate of, if you’re interested in no-till, go and visit a no-till farm and ask questions,” said Hedda.
Shanon and Michael Whamond
Lincoln and Auburn, California
Mixed vegetables
Occultation, compost mulch
IT WAS STILL SMOKY FROM WILDFIRES WHEN I DROVE out to Shanon and Michael Whamond’s Hillview Farms in Lincoln, California, northeast of Sacramento. On a clear day you could see Sacramento. Tucked in among ranch homes, I found Shanon and Michael’s beautiful new farm.
The farm is ten acres of sloping land surrounded with deer fencing, a walk-in cooler with a colorful mural on the side, and a barn. After outgrowing a nearby piece of land, they had only been farming here for just over a full season when I visited. Shanon and Michael embody one of the biggest potentials I can see for no-till: the ability to start a commercial farm with almost no land and very little equipment, get a business going, then scale it up as necessary.
When Michael and Shanon wanted to start a farm, they didn’t have any land. Michael’s dad suggested they use some of the land around his home in Auburn, also northeast of Sacramento, and rent the unused pasture next door to get started. So that’s what they did. Five seasons later, they needed more land to grow on, and were able to buy the new farm in Lincoln. Not only does the property already have the infrastructure for farming, but also they likely saved it from development.
“There was a CSA farm on this property for about four years before us. They put in immaculate infrastructure that only a farmer could truly appreciate — deer fencing, barn, walk-in coolers, pack station, and irrigation. We were grateful to maintain the farm’s integrity and continue to farm the property,” said Shanon.
“Right now we’re in transition. We started on a three-acre parcel. At first we thought, ‘This is so much land,’ but then we realized we needed more land. So we leased land from our neighbors out in Auburn and once we filled that space up, then we got this beautiful ten-acre parcel.”
“We have no intentions of farming the whole ten acres. We definitely want to do the intensive small-farm model. Maybe cultivating about two acres would be our max. When we first started farming, we were pretty naive. We were definitely swayed by the whole romantic aspect of it, thinking we would just frolic in fields all day, but we learned pretty fast how demanding farming is. We didn’t really know at what capacity we wanted to farm, so when we first started, we looked at probably ten different farms just trying to find a model that made sense for us,” said Shanon.
“We visited thirty to forty farms, because we had no agriculture experience. So we just jumped into the deep end of the pool. When we started farming on that three-acre parcel, it started off as a half-acre. I realized very quickly that we weren’t going to make enough money. Since it was an urban area, the plot sizes for our rows were about fifteen feet to two hundred and fifty feet, and everywhere in between,” said Michael.
“When we got a tractor we couldn’t really cultivate those areas, there aren’t any turnarounds in a space like that. And then we would go on farm tours. I would see these hundred-acre farms, and I thought, maybe we can’t do this,” said Michael. “This is not viable. And I started researching soil health and the one thing that kept on popping up was no-till. You know, tilling is destructive to all the organisms and everything in the ground. So we took a field trip out to Singing Frogs Farm and that —”
“That was just kind of a light for us,” said Shanon.
“Yeah, it was like holy smokes, and just Paul and Elizabeth in general, especially the way they talk, they’re very convincing,” said Michael.
Greens on Hillview Farms.
Credit: Hillview Farms
“One thing that really impressed me when I went there, it was early March. And I went to three other farms on the tour before I got to theirs. And all the other farms were just starting to mow down cover crop or starting to till and getting ready for the spring and summer plantings. And they had three acres of full production in the ground. The biggest thing we were concerned about was the profitability of small-scale farming. And when I saw that, I thought, we can do this on a different level and use less machinery to get where we want to be. So that was our intro to no-till. And then we came back.”
“And we tried to set up the system that Paul and Elizabeth have, but change it so it worked on our acreage, because we were in Auburn with heavy clay soil. We knew it wasn’t going to be a turnkey kind of thing so we tried out a little bit of everything. Some things worked, lots of things failed. And then we went from there. It’s an exciting time for small farmers right now because no-till is exciting, but there are also all these new tools that are coming out that are made just for small farmers. So we just jumped on the bandwagon and were like, ‘Let’s do this.’ It’s not like we’re like signed up for any one style of farming. We want to farm the way that makes sense on our land and at our capacity. So we’re no-till, but we don’t put ourselves in a box. For example we do use a Tilther to prep beds,” said Shanon.
“I don’t know where that falls in line,” said Michael.
“To my mind it’s still no-till. I think a big part of it is not inverting the soil layers, and that Tilther’s only working the top inch or so. It’s not much more soil disturbance than what you’d get scuffle hoeing,” I said.
“It just depends on who you talk to. Our introduction to no-till was Singing Frogs Farm and that is no-till. There is no machinery on there — ” said Michael.
A carrot pulled from the soil at Hillview Farms shows the worms that are proliferating under no-till.
Credit: Hillview Farms
“They’re awesome,” said Shanon. “Our first year we started actually farming, the no-till system really worked for us because it was a lot of hand labor, so we were able to manage things just by us two. So we started growing things and then we needed to sell it somewhere. That’s when we started our farm stand, which has been really awesome. Our original satellite location is right in the middle of a residential area, right off the main road. Hillview Acres is the name of the association that we’re a part of, so Hillview Farms is an ode to that. Which is funny because it’s not on a hill, it’s in a valley.”
“And our new place is on a hill so now we’re set,” said Michael.
“So we started the farm stand and it was really great. Started out with just our friends and family. We would convince them to come out and support us. And then from there it grew into this awesome community thing. And we just started small. We got into our local farmers market,” said Shanon.
“We actually didn’t get in at first, but we had planted all these starts. So we asked them if they needed nursery starts. And they said yes. So that was our foot in the door. And also, no-till allowed us to farm for four seasons. Not at a full capacity, but our off-season yields gave us a foot in the door in the farmers markets, which was really good.”
“When you’re talking about cash flow and things like that for the second year of farming, we actually wouldn’t have been farming if we didn’t switch most of our plots to no-till and keep on consistently planting in the ground through the winter. That gave us our cash flow for the springtime because we were farming during the wintertime,” said Michael.
“We wouldn’t have had the capital to start up and buy seeds again if we stopped farming. So we just said okay, good, we did six months. Let’s try again. And we chose not to do a CSA model just because of our knowledge. It was too daunting of a task. For people to give us that much money where we might fail. That was really key to get us started and to start small.
“We started off with just ten thousand square feet at the Auburn farm. Eventually it got to be one and a half acres. And we quickly realized that for us to be more efficient, we needed to systematize and do 100-foot rows. All in a line, all together, and then be able to grow from there instead of jumping around in people’s lots. Because in our second year, 75 percent of the farm was on leased land. And it was really scary to think about if we lost that land. So this property in Lincoln came up and we’ve been here for one full season.”
“It’s funny, coming from no-till, I just tilled that,” said Michael, gesturing to a freshly tilled area they’re going to start growing in next year. “That’s how we’re setting up beds.”
“To set up the initial plot, we’ll grow a cover crop. Mow it down, till it under, and set up permanent beds. Our first plot right here hasn’t been tilled since we started. So it’ll be about a year and a half,” said Michael.
“So, till, plant a cover crop, till the cover crop in, is that to get some organic matter in the soil to start with?” I asked.
“It’s to shape the beds. We want to do a raised permanent bed,” said Michael. “They don’t have to be super high. But the easiest and quickest way to make permanent beds for us, has to do with the type of machinery that we have. Especially with our heavy clay soil, once it’s in place you don’t really move it around. It’s very dense. What I see people doing, everyone is using a [walk-behind tractor] with a rotary plow to make raised beds. We got a [riding] tractor in the beginning, so we don’t have a [walking tractor].
“So we use a tractor to move compost around. We need that tractor. My first eight months of farming, we were doing heavy composted beds and I was doing wheelbarrows. Wheeling them around three acres. And holy smokes, I would not have farmed one more month. It’s just too labor intensive.”
Harvesting lettuce from beds that have been covered with landscape fabric to suppress Johnson grass and other perennial weeds.
Credit: Hillview Farms
“Yeah, that’ll age your back quickly,” I said.
“So we have a tiller, I just made this bed shaper. We did these [first beds] by hand, and it’s just not ideal. The one thing we found with no-till is that it requires a lot of labor. For us, starting off, we’re learning how to grow the vegetables, we’re finding markets to sell them. Now as a business, we’re just starting to get into the management of people. And that’s a whole different skill. That’s very tricky,” said Michael.
“So we would be working on the systems and implementing as we go. We’re trying to use some of the technology that bigger market growers are using. And the efficiencies that basically take out the labor, with small machinery. So that quick-cut greens harvester was a huge help.”
“I love that thing,” said Shanon.
The view on Hillview Farms the day the author visited. The amber hue of the light is from smoke due to wildfires burning in the region.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“The Tilther helps prep beds. Beforehand, we weren’t able to get very good seed-to-soil contact when we just laid compost down. Tilthing helps, and then using a Jang seeder helps. We used to do everything by hand transplants. So we did plugs. Like this arugula right here. We transplanted nursery plugs,” said Michael.
“We do it also to keep up with weed pressure so they’re established before they go into the beds,” said Michael. “It helps out. Now the biggest crunch on it is our labor. Though it goes pretty fast. I can do a whole hundred-foot row in about thirty-five minutes.
“And then we’re doing some carrot trials and root crop trials to expand our variety. We haven’t grown carrots in four years. We did it our first year. We never did it again because of the heavy clay soil at the other farm. There was no soil. When we did the soil analysis, it was a class seven soil. And I was like, ‘What the heck’s a class seven?’ We only thought there were four classes. We didn’t even know there was a class seven. So basically, when we first started off, the rototiller was bouncing off the ground because of the amount of rocks,” said Michael.
“It was so compacted,” said Shannon.
“So the amount of compost that we added to the soil to amend it was a lot. The soil [at the new site] is already [better], there’s about two feet of topsoil. And for us, this is a heavy clay that we’re in love with because we’re used to it. So it works for us and it works for our system.”
“It grows beautiful veggies,” said Shanon.
“But you can see we’re falling into that greens pattern. Marketing a lot of greens and things like that. We’re doing lots of tomatoes,” said Michael.
“We’re excited for the opportunity to really just settle in for the first time since we’ve started. And just fully saturate our markets and become as efficient as possible with what’s in front of us at this present moment. And then scale out from there,” said Shanon.
“So it is exciting. And the crops here are tremendously healthy,” said Michael.
“Everything looks great,” I said.
“This looked completely different two weeks ago. After the intensity of this summer and all those crazy hundred-degree days,” said Shanon. “We were so eager to pull our summer veggies out.”
“One of the biggest differences between us and Singing Frogs is weed management. And when you go to Paul and Elizabeth’s farm, one thing they say is they don’t weed. Did they say that?” asked Michael.
“Yes. In fact, I asked them about their weeding and they said to ask you guys about that,” I said.
“That’s funny,” said Shanon.
“So when we started the farm, over at the Auburn plot, it hadn’t been used in any agricultural setting. It was an urban area, with native grasses, and when we set up those no-till plots over there, we did absolutely zero weeding,” said Michael.
“Well the weed seed bank wasn’t that intense,” said Shanon. “I wouldn’t say we did zero weeding. We did some.”
“We just used compost to smother the weeds and we probably spent thirty minutes the whole year. I mean, we would be walking by and were like, oh okay, there’s a weed,” said Michael.
“So there did you rototill, drop compost, and just plant into the compost?” I asked.
“Yes. We used compost as a mulch. Basically what they suggested is about two to four inches of compost on top to establish the bed,” said Michael.
“Is that what you did here on the new farm?” I asked.
“Yes. Not as much compost here because the topsoil is so different. There’s already a really good amount of top soil,” Shanon said.
“Some of these beds, we did about two inches. We never went to four inches. We didn’t put that much compost on top because I felt like it didn’t need it. And the biggest difference between weed pressure at the Auburn farm and here in Lincoln is that we have rhizomatous weeds,” Michael said. “We have Johnson grass, bindweed, and Bermuda grass and holy smokes, when you lay the compost down as a mulch, they don’t care. That’s not a mulch for them. It’s a feeding source to sprout up.”
“And it comes up right through the compost?” I asked.
“No doubt. You can’t really tell, because we did heavy occultation and covering and just matting and tarps, matting it down for about a year,” said Michael. “And it works, but those weeds — ”
“Man, they’ll come up. If you don’t stay on top of it, Mr. Johnson’s gonna take over your farm real fast,” said Shanon.
I noticed they had some beds that were completely covered up. “Is that why the beds over here have landscape fabric on them? Is that to keep the Johnson grass down?” I asked.
“Definitely,” said Shanon.
“Our biggest Johnson grass plot was over here in the corner. It’s unbelievable. There’s Bermuda too. So you got Bermuda, Johnson, bindweed...” said Michael.
“When Michael said we did the occultation, the tarping, we used those big silage tarps. They’re white on one side, black on the other side. So we’ll take those and spread them over this whole bed section, put sandbags down, hope that the wind doesn’t pick up, and cover the whole bed,” Shanon said.
“So from here over, we had our early-season tomatoes. And in the fall of last year we tarped it. It was tarped from November to March. For three to four months,” said Michael. “We pulled off the tarps and there was already Johnson grass emerged under the tarps. It was yellow, but it was still sprouting up, and it was looking to photosynthesize. It was coming, so we tried digging it out. We think it helped. We’re not sure. We spent two hours trying to dig it out.”
Digging in.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“We decided to put our tomatoes here because we knew we were going to put them on landscape fabric. And so when we do a new plot, we want to do longer-season crops and try to put them into landscape fabric where the weeds are. To mat the rhizome weeds down so that it’s actually doing an occultation process through the season, and then they don’t grow through the wintertime,” Michael said.
“That’s a great idea. One way to break in some no-till beds would be with winter squash. I don’t know if that’s what you had in mind or something like that where you can put a silage tarp down, cut holes, plant the squash through the holes, and then you set it and forget it. You get a crop off the field and occultation at the same time,” I said.
“Yes, that’s a good idea. It just depends on your energy levels to put that much energy into burning holes for winter squash, because that’s a lot of holes. You can buy them now with holes already in them,” said Michael.
“Yes, we got these with the holes already in them,” said Shanon.
“We would not have done all those burns. It’s too meticulous to do that [with a flame weeder]. And it always seems to burn the plastic,” said Michael.
“So we’re trialing out the lettuce growing in there. The one thing that is difficult with the landscape fabric is that you have to pull it out. And so there is energy required to pull the landscape fabric back off.”
“It’s that compared to hours of weeding. What would you rather be doing?” said Shanon.
“It just depends. We have a lettuce crop over there. We weren’t used to weeding, and that was our problem. We never weeded. All of a sudden we came here and we looked out and it’s getting out of control. I didn’t even have a push hoe or anything. And now I’ve got this stash of weed-eating tools and we’re figuring out which we like best. It’s funny. You figure out your favorite weed-eating tool in year four,” said Michael.
“The Johnson grass has already gone down in a year. I think we can get it down in eight to ten years. I hope that there will be hardly any Johnson grass if we keep on matting it. Bermuda grass, it pops up here and there if you let it get out of hand. Then you can’t even get it out. But the biggest one is the bindweed. I don’t think we’ll ever get bindweed out, honestly. That’s just such a vicious little weed and you can’t really pull it out and it breaks and it just kind of shatters. But you can see there’s bindweed that was in these crops. And by tarping it in the fall here, the bindweed dies off and doesn’t grow in the wintertime.”
“Little tricks, trying to take the labor out of weeding, are key,” said Shanon.
“So the toughest thing that we’re finding on these type of weeds with no-till is the borders,” said Michael. “The worst border is always the one farthest away from the area you walk in. So the ends of the rows are where our toughest weeds are. And they’re creeping into our beds a little bit.”
“But you know, the amount of weeding that we actually do compared to other farmers is still way less. I mean, I think I spend about thirty minutes a week weeding. But this is a very small plot — thirty-two 100-foot beds, so around 13,000 square feet. So it’s basically walking up and down, just spot-checking. And we’re also getting better at weed management, getting them really small.”
“One reason why we wanted to have a bigger piece of property is so we can leave plots fallow. We can water them, have the weeds come back, and then flame it down, or cover them. Without disrupting our rotation,” Michael said.
A mix of sprinkler and drip irrigation at Hillview Farms’ original location.
Credit: Hillview Farms
“The biggest thing is, when those weeds get out of control, how do you go back?” said Michael. “We had the landscape tarp here under growing tomatoes, and we did weed once in between the rows, and then in the summertime we were so busy, we didn’t weed much. But look at the amount of weeds in there.” A bunch of weeds had grown up over the course of the season through the holes in the landscape fabric where the tomatoes were planted.
That’s the big thing, keeping the soil covered. Whether it be mulch or crops, disturb the soil the least amount possible.
—MICHAEL WHAMOND
“And so the plan is now we have the landscape fabric on the rows. So I’m gonna take out the T posts, I’m going to occultate the area with a silage tarp. In the springtime we’ll grow our cucurbits in here, [with the landscape fabric and drip tape left over from the tomatoes the previous season]. Because I’m just going to leave the drip tape in there. If the gophers mess it up I’ll just have to leave it, and then run drip tape on top if they chew into it,” said Michael.
“So that’ll take care of these weeds and then the beds themselves will have been under cover for a year plus. And then we’ll see how we want to do the fertility management. We might take soil samples in spring just to see what’s in there, and then go from there because we’re not going to add compost again. We did a heavy composting and it’s already starting the system, so we don’t need to jumpstart it again.
“One of the reasons we added compost almost every [time we planted a new crop] at the other farm was because we needed to create tilth to plant into, especially those first couple of years. So if your soil is already softer and doesn’t need the extra compost, it doesn’t seem like adding compost all the time is necessary. You know there’s not just one road map. It depends on the scenario, and you’ve got to find your way around [your soil].
“So the ideal thing, if we started over again we’d get a tractor that had a wheelbase of at least thirty inches, that that could straddle a bed and drop compost. Right now we basically do a couple beds [at a time], and we’ll drive the tractor on there and we’ll smash down the sides of the bed and then over time it’ll kind of smooth back out again, but it’s not ideal.
“On the intensified level, the one thing that was really hard for us to keep up with is how fast the system moves. Because you’re always transplanting, you’re always harvesting. And when you have a four-season model you get burned out. If you don’t have that labor to take some of it away. I mean, it’s us two and then we have one part-time person that works fifteen hours, and so you want to space it out a little bit more by using the occultation, the dry seedbedding.
“So the initial idea of creating your system in a no-till market garden, is you really want to think about how you’re going to lay everything out. Next year we’ll have a hundred permanent beds and then the max I think would be about two hundred permanent beds 100 feet long. That would be more than enough. And then once those are set we want to get rid of all the equipment, never use it again. And then we just maintain it.”
“We can plug and play,” said Shanon.
“I believe that each farm that wants to do this is going to have different challenges. And it is most likely that the first hurdle to overcome will be weed pressure. Figuring out how to combat weeds is essential for a no-till operation,” said Michael.
“Let the soil do what it does best. It’s trying not to work against anything, I think it is a little bit more just working with nature,” said Shanon.
“It’s just simplifying things,” said Michael. “And it’s putting the soil first, that’s the key.”
Rolling out the compost to prepare beds.
Credit: Hillview Farms
“I feel like we’re in a hybrid model between Jean-Martin Fortier’s model [writer of The Market Gardener] and Singing Frogs. We’re trying to take the technology that Jean-Martin is using with these seeders and tools [to work more efficiently], and still use Singing Frogs’ basic principles of keeping the soil covered. That’s the big thing, keeping the soil covered. Whether it be mulch or crops, disturb the soil the least amount possible,” said Michael.
“We see in the future that we’re not going to be able to have human-scale labor. There’s just no one around here. So we want to try to do this on a scale where we use technology for labor, and think that’s going to be the key, especially with no-till.”
Shanon and Michael offered to show me their soil. We walk over to one of the patches that’s been in no-till the longest on the farm. The shovel goes right in and there are lots of earthworms in the shovelful that comes up.
“I mean you’ve got earthworms coming off of the dang shovel,” said Michael.
“That’s pretty awesome. I want a picture of that,” said Shanon (see photo pg. 189).
A close-up of the mural on Hillview Farms’ walk-in cooler.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“On top it’s still a heavy clay, but it just falls apart. The crumble and the texture are just perfect. And you can see where our mulching has started, and then the soil continues. But the aggregation of it is really good,” said Michael.
“Just look at all those earthworms. Employees of the month right there,” said Shanon.
“Soil reacts pretty fast. It gets to that stage really fast. It wants to create life. It starts going really fast. We’re just trying to manipulate it to get there faster,” said Michael.
“When you have permanent beds, you’re able to create [hedgerows] that you can bring into the farm a lot closer than when using machinery. That’s the next stage in our farming operation, to start making hedgerows and beneficial insect habitats right next to our fields. That was the one thing about Singing Frogs Farm that I realized. I got excited about no-till. I got excited about the profitability aspect. But the emphasis on the hedgerows I think is important,” said Michael.
“On our farm, we’ve never sprayed one organic pesticide. Looking at our crops, there’s stuff eating it. But there’s no real damage. A lot of it has to do with timing too. If the greens grow up and they go past their peak, we’ll start getting bugs. But really bringing those bigger predators and having homes for them is key.
“It’s just the evolution. Once you stop tilling the soil, then it falls into line. You have more time to spend doing other stuff, and thinking about the farm. Maybe it’s not just no-till, but I think permanent beds are definitely a key for small growers. They can standardize.
“We haven’t talked about money at all in gross sales, but we’re willing to talk about that stuff too. We’re right in line with the $100,000 an acre. Probably a little bit more,” said Michael.
Sprinkler irrigation staked in the pathways.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“One thing that’s interesting is the farm has actually scaled down every year. We started off at an acre and a half. Then we were at an acre and a quarter at the other farm. Now doing these two plots, we’re maybe at three-quarters of an acre. A lot of that had to do with time management. But actually we’ll be down this year from last year. Last year we did about $115,000 in gross sales. Then this year, I think we’ll land about a hundred,” said Michael. “But yes, you can produce so much on the small scale.”
“Our no-till model has been economically viable for us thus far. Singing Frogs Farm is doing a great job teaching people about no-till farming. We started with the knowledge we gained from going on three farm tours there, and just dove in after that because it really is just that simple. We’ve changed it a little bit to fit our system,” said Shanon.
“When I listen to the Farmer to Farmer podcast and someone says, ‘You know, I use 20 tons of compost an acre,’ and Chris Blanchard is like, ‘Whoa! That’s a lot of compost,’ I think, ‘Holy smokes. I put 40 tons of compost an acre.’ If I told him that, he’d say, ‘What the heck are you doing out there?’” said Michael.
The sun going down on a field of freshly set lettuce transplants.
Credit: Hillview Farms
“I hope that’s something that research projects can give us some clarity on: what compost is actually doing and how much you need. [One of the soil scientists] thinks that just a dusting of compost is enough to, basically, ignite those soil organisms and create that connection. And we’re using it as a mulch. I don’t know. There are a lot of questions.”
“It’s an exciting time because the research is happening right now,” said Shanon.
“Those Jean-Martin Fortier-style farms, they’re doing around 40 tons an acre of compost. It’s a tremendous amount of compost. The hardest thing that we’re running into is finding quality compost. Because we do the same thing. We start off with about 40 tons an acre [to build permanent beds]. Now we’re at year four at the other farm. We used about 15 tons per year. It doesn’t need as much anymore,” said Michael. “We sourced seven different facilities for compost.”
“And we used the best compost we could find,” said Shanon.
“At the Auburn farm, I thought that since the earthworms were doing all the work for me over there, I didn’t need to broadfork or loosen up the soil. What was happening was that even though the soil is being covered with plants, just the water hitting the soil started compacting it. It was getting really hard to work in there,” said Michael. “Now, we do a broadfork at least once a year. My hope is once we get that established and keep on working it, we won’t have to broadfork as much, because I don’t like broadforking.
“It’s a good workout,” said Shanon.
“A lot of these things we’re trying to change to be efficient with our system. We don’t want to use wheelbarrows [to lay compost]. We don’t want to do broadforking. It’s hard work. And you want to do it as easily as possible,” said Michael.
“Yes. Work smart, not hard. That’s our motto,” said Shanon.
“We use the broadfork and it definitely helps out. We also use more micro-sprinklers [instead of drip irrigation]. That has helped out a lot, because what we’re running into was that when you have the bigger cells and you’re transplanting, you get a bigger crop to put in, so it covers the bed more and establishes faster, and smothers the weeds,” said Michael.
“But what was happening is we were putting the compost on, and some of it was hydrophobic. The water from the drip lines would just bead off. So we would have to water a lot. Even though it was a bigger transplant. And in the summertime, we have multiple days of 100-degree weather. The drip wasn’t enough to establish the crop. We’d have to leave it on for 24 hours just for it to soak in. The pathways would turn to rock. What I was thinking was if I do more of the micro-sprinklers, I’m not only growing in my beds, but I’m also softening up my pathways so that roots could grow there,” said Michael.
“What we’re looking at is not necessarily growing the farm on top, but how do we connect the farm underneath. Having this plot be connected as one city under the ground. We can start geeking out on soil real easily.”
Hillview Farm is the change I hope to see in the world: People with no agricultural background getting interested in farming, being able to get started with little land or infrastructure, growing their business, saving farmland that would otherwise be developed, and creating a less centralized, more resilient food system.
