I want to know not only the amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (the NPK of the fertilizer labels), but also the micronutrients boron, manganese, zinc, copper, iron, and sulfur. In addition I’ll look at the soil pH and the amounts of calcium and magnesium which affect the availability of the other nutrients for uptake by the plants. The report gives other useful information that I won’t go into here.

If I were starting a home garden, particularly in an urban area, I would pay particular attention to the amount of lead reported by the testing lab. Leafy greens such as spinach are well known to take up lead & other heavy metals from the soil.

There is a strategy to taking a soil sample. You want your sample to be representative of the entire field and you want to sample where the roots are taking nutrients from the soil. You accomplish this by taking a dozen samples scattered across the field and blending all the samples together. All the samples are collected the same way and depth, in our case about 8 or 9 inches.

You can sample with a shovel, digging a dozen pits in your field, slicing out a slab, cutting out a vertical slice of each slab, and blending the 12 slices together. In your backyard, this is a reasonable thing to do. However, if you want to sample a number of fields, this can add up to a lot of work.

I chose to invest $100 in a tool that greatly reduces the workload, and also probably gives a more consistent sample than I could get using a shovel.

A soil sampling probe, a bucket, and a trowel are the kit for collecting soil samples for testing.

I bought my probe years ago, probably  from Peaceful Valley. This is something of a deluxe model, 3 foot long, with a foot step. Both reduce the effort and bending required to collect a sample. A bucket for collecting and carrying the samples and a trowel to break up and thoroughly mix the samples completes the kit. Sometimes I take along a screwdriver to help poke soil out of the probe tip. It is important the the tools be stainless steel or plastic. Rust rubbed off a rusty trowel will throw off the iron analysis.

In this closer view you can see the sample of the top eight inches of soil still held by the soil sampling probe.

With the probe, the sample collection goes quickly. Push the probe into the ground with a twist. Carefully pull the probe back out. Take a moment and examine the soil. Can you see different layers? Is there plenty of organic matter? Do samples from different areas look different? Dump the sample into your bucket and go on to the next spot.

I send my soil samples to the UMass Soil Lab for analysis. There are plenty of other testing labs that you can deal with. Due to variations in the test methods, there is apparently significant variation in exact details from lab to lab, although they should all give similar recommendations. If you do want monitor the effects of your management strategies by looking for trends from year to year, then it is important that you always use the same lab.

You can purchase do-it-yourself test kits for pH and for NPK. I don’t have any experience with soil test kits. The lab tests gives so much more information at a modest cost that I’m happy to wait for the lab to do the test for me.

I got my test results in the mail a few days ago. I sent them off to Walt, at Walt’s Organic Fertilizer in Ballard, for Walt’s suggestions for this year.

Turns out there are a number of things I have trouble doing one-handed. I had to hire in an extra worker to help at the farm yesterday, so it turns out the broken wrist is also painful in the wallet.

The continuing series of rains has kept the fields too wet to work, so as the fieldwork falls behind schedule, at least I can blame the weather rather than my broken wrist.

I can mouse around on the computer and turn pages, so I’ve been doing more research on a number of topics, including possible herbs to add for essential oils or teas and additional plants to use as cover crops. I have been adding more tasks to my list at a much greater rate than I have managed to complete any.

I’m hoping that soon I can get back to shrinking the task list. There’s a whole lot to get done.

On the farm, where we are growing a large number of plants, we need ways to change the amount of heat, light, and water that our plants receive. Anything we do beyond sticking plants out the in the field and waiting for them to grow will cost us in time and materials, so you can be sure we wouldn’t use methods if we weren’t convinced the techniques paid us back for our efforts. The payoff may come in being the first to market, extending the growing season, providing some insurance against an unusual weather year, reducing weed competition, or even reducing plant disease. We’re not doing anything that couldn’t be done in a backyard garden. We’re just working on a bigger scale and with a smaller budget for each plant.

Low tunnels, drip line, plastic mulch, row cover, raised beds, hoophouses and shade cloth are the seven techniques I’m writing about today for manipulating the growing conditions around our crops.

Low tunnels act a miniature greenhouses, so tulips bloom earlier.

I took this photo a few days ago because it is such a graphic illustration of the effect of the ability of low tunnels to boost the growth of plants by gathering heat.  You can see that the tulips inside the low tunnel are blooming, while the plants outside still have quite a ways to go. Low tunnels are simple. Here Famai has used sections of irrigation pipe purchased at the nearby hardware store to make arches. He has draped plastic sheeting over the arches and buried the edges with soil. One advantage of using the pipe is that Famai can walk through the low tunnel and pick the tulips without disrupting the tunnel itself. In fact, Famai has already harvested half or more of the tulips in this low tunnel.

Low tunnels boost the growth of young plants.

This is the the type of low tunnel I like to use. The hoops are heavy gauge wire and the tunnels are much lower, significantly reducing the cost of the tunnel. I use the tunnels to protect the transplanted plant starts from cold nights and to give the plants a more rapid start. We remove the plastic once the plants start to flower or grow tall enough to touch the plastic. You can see that this plastic is perforated for ventilation. I used this type one year, but I much prefer plastic with slits for ventilation. The slits allow us to reach inside to hand weed around the plants. It turns out that low tunnels are also excellent for boosting the growth of weeds!

Supplying the right amount of water to the growing plants can be a challenge. Right now the soil in our fields is still mostly saturated with water due to the winter rains. However, it is surprising how little rain we receive in the summer. If we want our plants to thrive, we need to deliver water to the plants. Overhead sprinklers are tremendously wasteful of water; when the air is dry, most of the water never reaches the soil. In any case, hauling sprinklers and hoses over acres of fields takes up huge amounts of time that could be spent on other tasks.  We use drip irrigation wherever possible. Installing the drip system each spring takes up valuable time when we are already very busy, but once set up, we just need to open and close valves to control the water flow. Plus, the water is delivered directly to the soil, greatly reducing losses due to evaporation.

You can also see the black pipeline in the photo above. This pipe carries irrigation water along the edge of the field. At each row of plants you can see a tube branching off to deliver water to that row. The thin tubing has outlets at regular spaces. I like the 6-inch spacing. The tubing collapses flat when there is no water pressure, so it is commonly called drip tape.

Row cover fabric protects tiny plants. Onion starts do fine without.

I took this photo and the next when we were still growing vegetables for sale at the farmstand. The row covered with the thin white fabric has been planted in bok choy and other Asian vegetables. Row cover can serve some of the same functions as low tunnels, but without the hoops to raise the fabric off the plants. The row cover is thin and light enough to let the rain pass through. The fabric is laid loosely over the row, so the plants can grow, pushing up the fabric. Another major benefit of the row cover is that it blocks incoming flea beetles and other pests from reaching the plants. If you have seen tiny pinholes in Chinese cabbage, bok choy, arugula, or other greens then you are most likely seeing flea beetle damage.

The three beds to the right have all been planted with onions. All these were planted in holes punched through a very thin black plastic.  The black plastic gathers the heat from the sun, warming the soil below, and giving the plants a heat boost. Another major benefit is that the plastic blocks the weeds from growing, so we only have to weed where we have punched through the plastic. Last year the plastic mulch really paid off. In a difficult year for winter squash, our farm had much greater success than our neighbor farms.

Another advantage of the plastic is that it keeps the soil moisture from evaporating. Since the drip tape is under the plastic, all the water stays in the soil, available for the plants. Drip tape under plastic is even more efficient at conserving water than drip tape lying on the ground.

The plastic mulch is laid using a tractor-mounted implement that rolls out the plastic and covers the edges with soil to hold it in place. We have also laid plastic mulch by hand. The tractor is much faster, and does a better job, too.

A thin sheet of plastic warms the soil, giving the plants a boost.

This photo illustrates a number of techniques. The very front row is a red lettuce not long transplanted out. The next row looks like romaine lettuce. Behind that is a row of rainbow Swiss chard. The next row is spinach, followed by two rows of red or green lettuces, some ready to harvest.

Here you can see that the plastic is stretched over raised beds. We have a tractor-mounted implement that scoops up the soil to raise the level of the bed, while at the same time stretching the plastic mulch over the bed.

I like to use raised beds early in the season when we still might get a fair amount of rain. Raising the top of the bed those few inches lifts the plants up out of the puddles, so the roots are less likely to smother from lack of air. Also, it is amazing how much raising the top of the bed those few inches helps your back muscles when bending down to tend the plants.

In the background you can see several of our hoophouses. Hoophouses, also call low tunnels, are simple structures of plastic sheeting stretched over a framework of pipe. Typically we use the term hoophouses for structures that are not heated and where we grow plants directly in the ground inside. Usually we use hoophouses to extend the season, either to be early to market or past the early frosts. I’ve used one to grow bigger pumpkins than I can grow outside.

Here in the Pacific Northwest growing tomatoes in a hoophouse is an excellent way to prolong tomato production. In the fall when the rains start, the tomato plants outside typically get late blight and die in a few days. The organism causing late blight is splashed up onto the plant with the soil. Sheltering tomato plants from the rain and watering them with dripline lying on the ground may mean several additional weeks of tomatoes in years when the rains come early and the frosts come late.

We may add roll up sides to spill out excess heat on hot days. We may add a thermostat-controlled exhaust fan if we don’t want count on always opening the doors or rolling up the sides on time. We may add fans inside to move the air around to reduce the chance of moisture-induced fungal infections. We may add a second layer of plastic on the roof with a small fan blower to puff up the top layer and add some insulation. We may add a heater, but by that time we are calling the structure a greenhouse, rather than a hoophouse.

We use this hoophouse to grow plant starts for transplanting.

We also use hoophouses to start seedlings for transplanting out into the field. We can start the plants in the hoophouse before we would risk planting the seeds directly into the soil, and them transplant them out when it is a little warmer. If the summer is cooler than average, that extra growing time in the hoophouse may make all the difference in a successful harvest. Putting growing plants in freshly prepared ground also gives our plants an important head start over the weed seeds, which are sure to sprout in abundance. Except for the corn in the corn maze, we transplant most of the plants on our farm.

We have made a number of changes to this hoophouse to make it more useful as a starts house. We have put weedblock fabric down on the floor. This is not strictly necessary, but it does keep things tidier as well as keeping our feet out of the mud that would result from daily watering. We have put in tables to raise the plants to a better working height for us. We have added a greenhouse bench in the far corner where we fill the seeding flats with the seedling mix and poke a seed or two into each space. You can’t see them in this photo, but we have added roll up sides and a thermostat-controlled exhaust fan at one end. A hoophouse can heat up remarkably quickly on a sunny day. One afternoon of unexpected sun could kill off most of the tiny plants in the house in a few hours. That could mean that we could not grow those crops that year, resulting in a tremendous financial loss. Crop loss due to weather such as hail or windstorms is difficult to deal with. Loss due to forgetting to open the hoophouse doors would be much more painful.

When summer is in full swing, we have one more tool to moderate the hoophouse temperature. We add shade cloth over the house to reduce the temperature buildup.

Shadecloth is a woven material used to cut down light intensity.

Shade cloth is a loosely woven black fabric. It comes in various percentages in light blocking. I enjoy looking up through the fabric from below when the birds walk about on the fabric.

We use shade cloth to moderate hoophouse temperatures, but shade cloth is most commonly used to provide shade. Nursery growers routinely use shade cloth when growing shade-loving landscaping plants. When grown in an open field, some commercial crops, such as ginseng, are only successfully grown under shade cloth. Farmers in hotter regions have been successfully experimenting with using shade cloth to help them extend the growing season for cool-season crops such as lettuce and other greens further into the heat of the summer.

So, no big secrets here. No high tech. Nothing that couldn’t be used by any grower from a tiny backyard garden all the way to a huge farming operation. The only difficult calculation is whether using one of these techniques will pay back the time and effort to use it. And like so much else in farming, it all depends on this year’s weather.

]]> http://drmazesfarm.com/farmerroger/2010/03/13/7-techniques-microclimate-manipulation-tools-techniques-farm-part-2/feed/ 0 http://drmazesfarm.com/farmerroger/2010/03/11/tools-techniques-farm-introduction/ http://drmazesfarm.com/farmerroger/2010/03/11/tools-techniques-farm-introduction/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:11:15 +0000 FarmerRoger http://drmazesfarm.com/farmerroger/?p=474 What do you need to farm? If you were starting a farm from scratch, what would you need to pull together to make a go of it?

Every farm is different. The crops or livestock grown, soil type, climate, amount of cash available to invest, accessibility of water, farming style, zoning and other regulations associated with the land, attitude of neighbors, and many additional factors all affect the farmer’s choices. Even so, there are common themes and tasks, including planning and record keeping, planting, weeding, harvesting, animal care, maintenance, buildings, water, and crop sales. In this series I will look at our choices here at Dr. Maze’s Farm.

This is a good time for me to take on this series. I have been spending a lot of time recently contemplating just this question.

The year 2010 is a transition year for us personally. The partnership that owns the land and that has operated The South 47 Farm since 2000 has decided to step back from farming and make the land available to farmers to rent.

Since the partnership no longer needed me as a farm manager, I was left free to decide what exactly I wanted to do next. My wife Carol & I have grown a strong attachment to the farm and to the community working on and visiting and supporting The South 47 Farm. After much thinking and discussion, we decided in the end to take over some favorite projects of the many endeavors of The South 47 Farm and to continue them as our own venture, renting the necessary acreage at The South 47 Farm.

And so, Dr. Maze’s Farm was born as a brand-new family farm with a 10-year history.

We have spent much time thinking and planning the transition. Gradually the momentum of the new farming year has gathered. We are now starting the first farming activities of the new year. We have ordered and received three dozen varieties of pumpkin and winter squash seed. We have purchased tractors, hand tools, and endless other items. Chamomile is sprouting in the herb garden. Tomorrow I have two field workers coming in to help start weeding the herb plantings.

For this series on the tools of a farm I envision a series of small snippets, rather than trying to cover large areas at time. As the year progresses I’ll look at tasks such as planting or weeding. I’ll show how to create a corn maze and how to set a fencepost. I’ll show some photos and describe our equipment and why we made the choices we’ve made. I have some videos of equipment in action and I hope to put together and post a few videos. I am going to define “tools & techniques” rather loosely to include anything I find useful or necessary around the farm. We’ll see if I can keep writing when things get really busy on the farm.

I’d like to start out the series with two elements common to all farms, a farmer and soil.

A farmer's hand gets to know the soil.

Not really tools or techniques, I suppose, and perhaps it is obvious, but it is worthwhile to reflect that the person and the place both have tremendous impact on how the land is farmed. Organic or conventional? Bananas or boysenberries? Lamb or legumes? Wholesale or farm market? The list goes on. Just as the photo shows my hand, this series will reflect my own personal experiences and biases.

Here on The South 47 Farm this year there will be six farms-within-the-farm. Other renters include CSA farms, chefs, and farmers’ market sellers. All will be different. Different crops, different techniques, different styles, different ideas. How is it that Famai’s peas are always earlier than any one else’s? Will Brian’s experiments with paper sheet mulch and cover cropping between rows continue to prove effective? What refinements in tomato pruning with Claire come up with this year? I’ll be watching.

If I were to try farming elsewhere, I’d have to change my techniques. I might have to give up some favorite crops and try growing different things. How long should I go between waterings? When is the earliest I can expect to drive across the fields? How much heat can I expect in the summer? What crops will my neighbors want to buy from the farm?

I always try to put a photo or two into my blog entries, so when I decided on this theme I cast about for various ways to represent the farmer. The back & shoulders to represent work and perseverance? The brain for knowledge & curiosity? The eye or ear for the senses and information gathering? The mouth or ear for communication or enjoyment?

I was struck by how well the hand does at representing all these characteristics. Grabbing, holding, touching, hefting, lifting, nudging, typing, writing, waving, patting on the shoulder, patting on the back, shaking another hand, holding another hand; a hand does all of these.

I was also struck by how much easier it would be to photograph my hand than any of the other options I was considering to represent the farmer.

What then but to show the classic test for soil moisture, squeezing soil in the hand,  giving me the additional benefit of allowing me to show the soil and the farmer in the same photo. Camera in my right hand, grab some soil in the left, shoot a few different angles, and the job is done.

Efficient use of time and resources is another useful trait on the farm.

I’m looking forward to this year on the farm. I’d be pleased to have you along for the journey.

I had thought I would write next about tools for information gathering and record keeping, but I took a photo today of Famai’s tulips that has inspired me to write next about microclimate manipulation.

I’m hoping to find a volunteer or two to help keep our alpacas and goats socialized and trained. They all are interested and curious about people, but they tend to get shy and skittish without ongoing interaction with people.

Stella wants to know what's up.

We have three African pygmy goats. Stella & Luna are the twin sisters shown in the photo above.

Tillie snoozing away the afternoon.

Here Tillie is snoozing in the sun on a late October afternoon.

Although tiny, our goats all have big personalities. They are curious to the point of being nosy.  When not eating, sleeping, begging to be fed, poking around, looking for food, or bossing each other around, they are usually shouting in their goaty way for me to come feed them again. Rest assured that they are not underfed.

Our alpacas and goats enjoying their morning hay.

The alpacas and goats get along well together in spite of the size discrepancy. If a dog happens by, the alpacas stand guard over the goats until they see the danger is gone.

Like the goats,  the alpacas are also curious about people. Sabino, the white alpaca is the more reserved. Faron, the dark alpaca is willing to come up to you and check you out, especially if you have food.

Frost on Sabino's back shows the insulation value of alpaca fleece.

Alpacas are native to the mountainous Andes. Their fleece is very warm for its weight. In the photo above you can see how well alpacas are suited to frigid weather. The morning frost on Faron’s coat was insulated from Faron’s body heat, and didn’t melt away until the sun heated up his dark coat.

If you would like to spend time with these engaging animals, let me know and we’ll talk.

Much is changing, but some of your favorites will remain.

The partnership that owns the farmland and has operated the farm for the last 10 years has decided to get out of the farming and farmstand business. Instead we will concentrate on renting the land at The South 47 Farm to other farmers and farming organizations. The partnership feels this is the most sustainable way to keep the land in farming.

Carol & I have decided to take on and continue some of our favorite projects as our own family farm, Dr. Maze’s Farm. We will continue the familiar fall harvest farm activities and the teas and the essential oil distillations, and we plan to add even more excitement. Other farmers will be growing vegetables and fruit.

In September and October visit Dr. Maze’s Corn Maze & Pumpkin Farm for harvest time fun! Explore our fabulous mazes, pick a pumpkin from the field, greet the goats and alpacas, shop at the farmstand, take a hayride, and enjoy refreshments. Discover our three dozen varieties of pumpkins and winter squash, as well as gourds, cornstalks & other fall decorative objects.

Visit Dr. Maze’s Botanicals where we create herbal teas, essential oils, mists, and other botanicals from lavender, rosemary, mints, chamomile, and other plants grown right here at the farm. We plan to expand the herb plantings and start production of a variety of new items in addition to our essential oils and hydrosols (herbal mists). We are planning to start with foaming hand soaps, lotion bars, and bath salts. Stop by to see our two hand-made copper stills and check out our selection.

Keep in touch with our website, blog, & twitter to see the new developments.