Prepping beds for new plantings is one of
my favourite tasks. The farm has a really thorough planting schedule – lots of
succession planting ensuring that there are crops growing throughout the whole year,
not just the standard growing season. In the height of the summer we are doing
twice a week seeding of lettuces, arugula, asian greens and radishes. We also
do continual plantings of carrots, beets, dill and cilantro. As the weather cools, we
were seeding lettuces once a week, and also transplanting some
starts of hardier greens like kale, collards, chard and purple sprouting broccoli.
Prepping Beds
After a crop is done producing, we pull out
the finished plants, roots, and dead leaves (crop trash). The soil gets turned
over with a digging fork and all the soil clumps broken up with a rake or by
hand. It’s important to pull out all of the roots because they get stuck in the
seeder really easily and jam up the wheel – otherwise they wouldn’t be such a
big deal to just leave in the bed. Once all the clumps are broken up we either
rake or level out the bed by hand to make sure it’s nice and flat – again,
easier for the seeder.
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| Bloodmeal sprinkled on half a row - in the beds further back you can also see the darker worm castings that were applied. |
Amending the Bed
Plants require three primary nutrients –
nitrogen for healthy leaf and stem growth, phosphorous for root growth and
potassium for overall plant health. There are other micro nutrients needed by
plants, but these are the big three. Crops are generally removing these
nutrients from the soil as they grow. This is how our food becomes nutritious –
healthy soils mean healthy food. This means that after each planting there are
fewer nutrients available in the soil for the next succession. If we just
continued to plant, we would loose our soil fertility and run into serious
problems with plant health.
In lots of conventional farming operations,
you would counteract this nutrient loss with the application of synthetic
chemical fertilizers. But there are also some more sustainable and organic
options. Ideally we would be turning in our own compost as a fertility source
for our soils, but we are currently unable to compost most of our plant matter
due to municipal bylaws. Also, as an urban farm, we really value space and
therefore use soil amendments that have less bulk and take up little storage
space. For us, that means instead of bringing in compost or manure, we use worm
castings and bloodmeal.
Blood meal is dry, powdered pig’s blood or
cow’s blood. It is very high in nitrogen, a nutrient that most soils are often
lacking. There are other similar amendments - bone meal has a high phosphorous
content and is made of powdered animal bones, feather meal is ground up chicken
feathers and also has a high nitrogen content, and fishmeal is the same idea,
ground up fish bones and guts. All of them will generally do the same thing,
and all of them smell absolutely terrible. Make sure to keep all of these very
dry as even a bit of moisture will cause clumps that are hard to break apart.
If this does happen, be sure to beak up or remove any clumps before applying to
the soil.
Worm castings are essentially worm poo – it
is organic matter that has been digested by worms. The castings provide a
source of nutrients and also provide a source of beneficial microbes to the
soil, enhancing soil biology
Once a bed has been prepped we sprinkle one
yogurt tub of castings per box and two yogurt tubs of blood meal per row
(highly scientific calculations.) You want a light sprinkling of the blood meal
– too much nitrogen will burn your plants. Once you’ve sprinkled your row, you
can scratch in the amendments with a hand cultivator, or your hands. You want
the amendments to be about half an inch below the soil so that they are
available for the seeds and young starts to use.
You can then begin your planting!
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