OUR FIRST NO-TILL TRIALS HAVE BEGUN, Y'ALL!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0NtroaasaoWhen I envision our farm becoming 100% no-till over the next few years, there are a few basic concepts that define for me what that will (more or less) look like.The first is that the growing beds will be permanent (which, albeit a little wonky, they technically already are). The idea here is that we never have to rebuild the beds with machinery and by avoiding that process we can maintain nice, loose vegetable beds with good soil structure and a healthy population of macro and microbiology.The next is that they will always have something growing in them to increase photosynthesis. This process, as I vaguely recall from high school biology, traps carbon and feeds soil microbial life (and grows nutritious food, obviously). And we want to take advantage of that by never having empty beds so we can always be storing carbon instead of loosing it.Another core no-till concept for us is that we will plant these beds densely to decrease the amount of soil exposed to the sun, and increase the amount of food grown per square foot. We hope with all this vegetation to eventually no longer need the broadfork at all, and instead allow the roots and soil life to move the soil around and aerate it as necessary.There will also be a fair amount of compost involved, depending on the crops. Next year we will add a significant amount to each bed, then supplementary amounts as we go forward.Anywho, with that I want to introduce you to Ever Bed with the above video. We are in the middle of a few no-till experiments this month, but perhaps none more exciting than this one. Ever Bed is a kind of proto-type for our transitioning no-till farm that encompasses much off what I sort of envision most of, if not all of, our garden looking like in the coming years.The idea here is to never take it this bed of production (ergo “Ever Bed”), and to use it for growing food (not cover crops) year-round, adding compost before every crop in requisite amounts. We will also always be trying planting Ever Bed’s next crop before the last one has come out of the ground. What we’re trying to do, especially in the summer, is take advantage of the canopy of certain crops (not all) to help provide shade for more tender crops. In this way, Ever Bed‘s first crop was celery, which we will start harvesting in two weeks, so we just interplanted the bed with Salanova lettuce, which conveniently needs two weeks of partial shade to establish itself (especially in this summery May we’re having).Of course, we are not going at this blindly. We have always done some amount of interplanting, and we know where it works and where it doesn’t. Also, I have taken a soil sample from Ever Bed to make sure that it is still building organic matter throughout this process as I can compare it to the average of each of the plots. If it is not, I will change gears and regroup. If you see anything that strikes you as not-quite-right about the process or video (beyond my haircuts which, yes, I unfortunately do myself), let us know. As I often emphasize, I will always take one good criticism over a thousand attaboys any day.There is more information in the video and more information about out no-till adventure at our YouTube channel (which you can subscribe to here, if you so please).- Farmer Jesse