Farm News: Fall/Winter

Hi, Phil here. I’m back to fill you in on the last few months here at Farm Kitchen. The early frosts in October killed our last flowers and the crops had produced their last fruits and have now been yanked out by their roots. That means it was time to tarp and cover crop, but first there was an entire field to turn into plantable soil.

Sodbusting in the fall is great. It’s tiring, and tedious, but it’s great. No more pulling weeds or harvesting or mowing twice per week. That’s sunny-season work. In the fall we break ground and get dirty. And next year, when our ag fields are bursting with fruits and veggies and our flower fields are blooming all the colors of the rainbow, it’ll be the dirty work we’ve done in October and November that made all that flavor and prettiness possible.

At the top of our priorities was the massive field on the southeastern corner of the Farm Kitchen property. Bainbridge Island’s Butler Green Farms had been farming the plot for years, but it’s ours now, and we want even more flowers for guests to make bouquets during Flowers and Fika, and to widen the backdrop for weddings and other events in the pavilion.

Because we use low-till practices, that means broadforking. Broadforks are giant, four-pronged forks with two handles. You drop them straight down into the soil, step on the bar across the back of the prongs to press them deep, and then pull back to lift the dirt. Then, take one step back and do it again. Then again, and again, and again and again… over and over until the whole field is turned into chunky lifted clumps. This lets air into the soil and makes it possible to harrow. We see a lot of worms.

Next, compost. We ordered two-and-a-half dump trucks full of organic compost from Vern’s Organic Topsoil, and then spread it across the broadforked field one single Gator load at a time. Imagine if a golf cart and a truck had a baby – that’s a Gator. And it holds way more than a wheelbarrow and can be driven back and forth, so we load it and dump it and load it and dump it, smoothing the piles out with rakes until the whole field is covered in black gold (that’s what we call compost).

Finally, the harrow. The harrow is an attachment on the BCS, our walking tractor. It’s a powerful machine with big wheels and an attachment that spins massive teeth in a circle. Rather than lifting to turn the soil, which would be tilling, the harrow spins sideways to break apart the soil clumps and stir in the compost. This is the quickest part of the process, and when it’s done the ground is fluffy and plantable.

Then there’s one last step, which allows us to walk away and know we’ve left ourselves in good shape to plant in the spring: covering. Our two best options are tarping, which kills any weeds and preserves the ground beneath, and planting cover crops, which grow over winter and build nutrients in the soil while crowding out weeds. (We use rye and vetch as cover crops.)

For the massive new field, we tarped half and planted cover crops over the other half. On other parts of the property, like the rows of our agriculture field and the long flower beds we’ve already established for this past Fika and weddings season, we’ve tarped in some areas, cover cropped in others, and even mulched to block new weeds (mostly with leaves from the trees shedding all over Farm Kitchen’s lawns).

It’s a ton of work. My face and clothes get really dirty. And I can’t even tell you how many times I got compost in my eyes and up my nose. But months from now it will really pay off. You’ll see.