In a very early episode (Season 1, ep 2!) of the No-Till Market Garden podcast, Alex Ekins of Ace of Spades Farm proposed to the podcast host that this is the moment of delineation between so many styles of farming —what will you do in this moment where the spent crop is still sitting in the soil and you need to prepare the bed for the next round of growth.
“That’s the moment when it all happens - the reason why a tractor exists…what do you do in that moment? What do we do with organic matter that exists above ground, what do you do with the root matter that exists below ground…what are you looking to achieve in that moment? There’s a lot of dialogue, to talk about what happens next, because every kind of farming follows from that moment. You either till, or you use herbicide to kill it back, or you graze animals on it, or you just only clear the surface matter, which is what we’ve started to do. Or you tarp it, or you flail mow it, or you power harrow it. You have all of these things available to you, but it’s just like—what’s your goal? Where are you trying to get to next. I think that’s the moment that’s most interesting to me.”
I had several rounds of experience planting in the Goat Field Garden between June and now, but this will be our first try at flipping a bed for the next period of either dormancy or production. I had thought I would feel settled about removing the pumpkin vines (to compost or, for the ones brutalized by squash vine borer, to the burn pile) and covering the majority of the field back up with the silage tarp until spring planting. Now that it has come time to make that call, months under suffocating plastic seems really disruptive and unnatural, when we still have weeks or months to get some photosynthesizing plants on the scene before deeper winter.
Instead of just tarping the fields, we will try a couple ways to get the field back in use ASAP:
Trial 1: Silage Tarp —We ended up terminating a small section of the field early (planted with buckwheat and clover, plus some dying vines that had wandered over from the Blue Hubbard and Red Kuri squash rows). At the end of August, we mowed the cover crop and mulch there on the ground, then placed a section of silage tarp on top in anticipating of planting some winter seeds there after about 4 weeks (late Sept), which would still put us in good timing for spinach, kale, lettuces to germinate.
Trial 2: Pusher mower—In a separate section of the field, after giving the squash vines a couple more weeks to produce, my dad mowed down the finished vines on the soil surface with the push mower, leaving most of the root matter intact. In a spur of the moment decision we decided to move my parents 6 chickens onto the garden to get after the hoards of bugs that surfaced when we mowed over the vines and displaced them all. Soon, we will scatter cover crop seeds to grow up over the fall and winter:
For one area we will plant some cover crops that will die over the winter—oats and peas—which means with enough frost the cover crop will die off naturally and form a mulch to protect the soil from erosion + protect the tiny stuff in the soil until the next warm season. In the early spring we will be able to rake the cover crop debris off from the bed and plant into it pretty directly. Hoping these beds would be the early spring beds—onions, beets, carrots, snap pea.
For the other area, we will plant some cover crops that will grow right on into the spring—rye, hairy vetch and crimson clover. These will need to get knocked down and tarped in order to end that set of plants’ life cycle and form a nice mulch bed to transplant seedlings into. This will be the perfect place for tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc. late next spring.
Meanwhile, the seed garlic has arrived! It will go in the ground soon when we pull off the silage tarp next week, hopefully along with flower seeds I wanted to try overwintering (echinacea and poppies).