Veggies in paper as prepared by Chef Brian, crabs on the farm, seedling viability

Chef Brian came out Wednesday to plant out some of the seedings he started at home. He is trying planting into paper, mostly as a weed control. The big advantage is that when the harvest is finished he can just till the paper into the soil where it will decompose. I’ll be very interested in following Brian’s experience. There have been a few small studies on planting into paper. The biggest problem is that some papers start to degrade in as soon as six weeks. Typically the paper gives way first at the soil line and the wind lifts the paper off the bed. You can prolong the usefulness of the paper by shoveling additional soil before the paper starts to tear, but that means extra time and expense. There has been some success with coating the paper with oil to repel the rainwater and prolong the life of the paper. Look for us to start experimenting with paper as the products get better. Meanwhile we'll watch Brian's experiments with great interest.

Chef Brian Scheehser with his newly planted crops.

I’ve had a number of conversations with Walt (Walt’s Organic Fertilizer) about our fertilizer order this year. It seems there is no longer a local provider of fishmeal, the main source of nitrogen that Walt and other local outfits used in their fertilizers. Walt reformulated with soybean meal, but ran into the problem that these days a high percentage of soybeans are genetically modified. The certifiers are not ready to certify his new formulation unless he can prove the soy meal comes from organically grown soybeans. No GMO’s is one condition for organic certification. In the meantime, Walt offered me crab meal. Crab meal is basically crushed crab shell. Analyses of NPK from providers vary quite a bit, but it does provide nitrogen and other nutrients. We bought out his stock of crab meal to get our planting started, but we’ll still need to purchase most of our fertilizer within a couple of weeks.

We’ve always used significantly less fertilizer than the amounts suggested by the soil tests or by the suppliers. We count on cover crops and compost to provide much of the necessary nutrients. One goal for a sustainable farm would be to minimize fertilizer and other external inputs. As we continue to learn and to refine our methods we’ll get closer to that goal. We now make a lot of our compost from leaves brought to us in the fall by local landscapers. You can point out that accepting these leaves is bringing in an external input, but I look at it as rescuing the leaves from entering and filling the landfill. We need to shred and compost the leaves, but that is also true for materials originating on the farm.

The photo below of broccoli seedlings is a graphic statement of the reasons I always lean towards trying more than one plant variety.

Broccoli seedlings; Packman on the left, Green King on the right.

John planted both at the same time, in the same planting mix, in the same flat. Both are seed packed for 2006, both were purchased from FEDCO, but I suspect they were grown at different farms. The Packman seedlings all came up within a day. The Green King seedlings first started popping up several days later, and never fully germinated.

So what’s happening here? Is this difference in performance due to the different varieties or due to way the seed was grown, prepared, and packaged? Since these are two fairly similar broccoli varieties I suspect the quality of the seed production rather than true marked differences in the ways the varieties germinate. We’ll continue observing these two varieties all the way though harvest. The Green King may or may not make up for it's slow start.

What’s playing today in the Jeep CD player?  The Chieftans – Santiago