Prepping & Amending Beds at SOLEfood

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.

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! 

Four Row Pinpoint Seeder

Seeding radishes.

Using the seeder is the job that makes me feel most like a farmer! It is maybe my favourite job on the farm. I’m definitely still learning how to best use this tool, but here is what I have learned.

We use a four row pinpoint seeder from Johnny’s. You can check it out here. The seeder works really well for us – we are planting in soil that is really loose and flat, no big clumps, rocks or bumpy ground. I imagine it would be much more of a challenge to use when seeding into real ground. The seeder is great for planting lots of seeds rather densely, which is how we grow most of our crops.

Axel with four seed hole options.

The seeder has a few parts – the axle has four seed hole sizes that work for small-medium sized seeds. You can adjust the axel to line up the right seed hole size with the centre of the hoppers. There are four hoppers allowing you to plant four rows that are 2 ¼ “ apart. You could also skip hoppers, or just fill seeds in the outside two hoppers to have wider rose.

Each hopper has a brush that adjusts how often the seeds fall out of the hopper. Adjusting the height of the brush is how you can adjust the spacing of your seeds. If the brush is really close to the axel, the seed will fall out less often, if the brush is high and away from the axel, the seed will fall out more often and your seeds will be closer together. If you want your seeds to be close, you could also use the large seed hole with small seeds – more seeds will come out with each turn.

It’s really difficult to actually see how high your brushes are or if your four hoppers are all set to the same height. It’s also a real challenge to remember what you set your brushes too in a previous seeding to get the same results. You kind of have to guess to start and then watch the seeds fall out and adjust your spacing accordingly. If you want, you can roll your seeder on a piece of white paper to be able to see clearly what their spacing will be. I usually just go really slow to start and watch the spacing of the seeds in the front and then adjust the brushes. As you continue to seed, you can watch the seeds fall out of the hopper and onto the axel through the back. Try to watch that the seeds are falling regularly and shift your attention from each hopper to make sure they are all working.

Adjustable brushes.

Line up the seed hole with the hopper.

The seeder works by the wheels turning the axel that drops the seeds. You want to make sure that as you walk backwards with the seeder, you aren’t just dragging the wheels in the soil but that they are in fact turning – otherwise you won’t actually drop any seed.

Seeded rows!

You want your ground to be flat, clear of any roots or leaves and also dry. Any moisture will cause the soil to clog at the bottom of the hopper and all of the seeds that have been dropping will just stay in that soil clump instead of falling into place in the row. Roots or other plant matter can also sometimes clog the bottom of the hopper so just check often. If I find that it has been clogged, I just go over the last foot or so again to ensure it is seeded.

After I finish one pass with the seeder, I walk back to the beginning to start again. Be sure to place the wheel in the seeded furrow of the last pass, rather than putting it back in the wheel rut. That way you make sure you don’t leave any rows without seed.

After the whole row is seeded, go back over with your hands or the back of a rake to gently cover the seeds with soil. Generally, you want a seed depth to be 3x the diameter of the seed, so small seeds like lettuce and radish really only need a shallow covering of soil. Once the seeds are all covered up we usually give them a watering with the sprinkler.

Any unused seed left in the seeder and go back in your seed package. This is perhaps the biggest downfall of this seeder – it’s so hard to get any unused seed out and safely pack in the package without spilling at least half of the seed on the ground. We’ve recently talked about getting some sort of funnel, but there has to be a better way! Update: I just read that Elliott Coleman uses this seeder and he tips all the seed over into a baking pan and then tips that into the seed package. Smart.

Finished bed, seeds being covered before watering.