Breaking Ground
What do you think of our new logo?
We have spent the past couple weeks working with my good friend Garrett to design it. You can find him on Instagram here. And by “work with” I mean we provided input while he did everything. We think it’s going to look so good on a bag of lettuce greens!
Magda spreading gypsum prior to tillage. The gypsum should help break up clay.
What we’ve been up to!
These past couple weeks have been very productive. We are still very much in the early stages of getting the farm going but the progress we are making has been feeling more and more real.
The majority of our time was spent shaping and composting our beds. The growing area for the farm is going to be broken up into four “blocks”. Each block is 50 feet by 50 feet and will be broken up into 13 beds. To shape these beds we needed to break the ground through tillage. Though we subscribe to no-till practices for our farm, to start out it’s almost essential to break ground. The pastureland that we are leasing for our growing area is too densely packed with grass to successfully grow anything. So, we had our four 50’x50’ blocks tilled. It will hopefully be the first and last time we need to till this space. We also ran a subsoiler through the growing area at a depth of about 6 inches to break up some clay and compaction. Bit more on that later.
Barry using his tractor to till the land.
We suspect we will still have some issues with grass growing in our beds, even after tilling, and it will likely take us a few years before we start to deplete the seed bank existing in the soil. To help alleviate some of this weed pressure we covered two of the four blocks with silage tarps. Smothering the ground with tarps is sometimes referred to as “occultation” and effectively kills most weeds that may germinate in the newly tilled earth. The other half of the farm we measured out and shaped our 26 growing beds using our trusty rakes. Once the beds were raked (which involved moving soil from the ‘path’ area onto the ‘bed’ area) we applied compost to each bed using wheelbarrows. Yes it did take as long as you think it did. In the end we moved about 85 wheelbarrows full of compost (close to 18 yards) more than 400’.
Once the compost was spread we also broadforked each bed. One of our concerns with the land is that we may be dealing with some compaction prior use as horse pasture. We have definitily noticed some standing water in spots during rainstorms. Broadforking is great at alleviating compaction and getting air into the soil. Coupled with the subsoiling we did previously we should have greatly improved drainage in the soil.
Beds being shaped. You can see our tape measure still on the ground.
And that is where we are currently at. Not super exciting but hopefully interesting. We have several trays of lettuce, kale, chard and green onions waiting to be planted in the newly shaped beds. Before that can happen though we need to install an irrigation system and our recently received deer fence. That should all be happening very soon. Magda and I have been having a blast working together at the farm. It has been exhausting at times and we are still figuring out some of the details about our new roles as farm owners.
Wishing you all a Bright and Happy May Day,
Zach and Magda
Dog Star Farm
