March brings the start of one of the busiest seasons on the farm: spring planting. Everything seems to be waking up, including the frogs, which were a constant background noise coming from the forest this week.
Potatoes haven’t gone in the ground yet, but the seed is being activated with light and warmth to produce green sprouts and give them a little head start, while the beds are prepped with trenches and a cover of rye in every other bed to confuse the potato beetles.
The hoop house (seen above) has been leveled and glazed after jumping over one block the previous week, and it’s ready to bake out the weeds and any solanaceous diseases that might be lurking in the soil. The tomatoes that we seeded last week will go in here after the sanitization is complete.
Carrots, a crop that is especially slow to germinate, are just starting to pop up in block 3. A precise douse with the watering can along the Jang-seeded rows keeps the crop growing while denying water to the recently scuffled weeds in between the rows.
In the Advanced Crop Production class, a prevalent topic of discussion, introduced by Kathy Jones and promoted by Eva (this week’s farm manager) was the observance of astrological cycles as a management tool for farming. At the very least, these practices can provide structure and sequencing to a farm’s calendar. To any skeptics out there who defer exclusively to hard science for their decision-making, have a close look at quantum mechanics and see what that says about the interconnectedness of all things. In that vein, as the warmth continues to build and the growth speeds up, we’ll be giving the farm a continual dose of the best fertilizer of all: the farmer’s shadow!
By: Rich Joiner
The Student Farm at CCCC 