What does fall look like on the farm?
A farming mentor described fall to me as the time when you put away all your toys after a lot of playing. In the spring we pulled all the toys out, built things like trellises for beans and peas to climb and caterpillar tunnels to keep peppers and eggplants warm, planted everything, and got ourselves prepared for summer. Then all summer long we harvest, water, weed and 'play' with all those toys. And then fall comes and its time to deal with the crazy pile of toys! So fall is clean up time.
The clean up process is long but also exciting. Here's what we do...
First, we pull all of the left over plant material (like corn husks, broccoli leaves, squash plants, and weeds) out of the fields and we bring it all up to our compost pile.
Once the crops come out we till the fields (note we skip this step in our no-till half of the farm) and spread cover crop seeds. Which will germinate and then will add nutrients into the soil and hold the soil structure over winter.
Building our compost pile!
This week after getting loads of plant matter out of the fields, our new farm educator, Abby Siminon taught us how to build our hot compost pile. And the process to build was a lot of fun!
Abby teaching us about compost!
We layered green plant matter with brown leaves over and over till we used it all up, watered along the way to feed the bacteria in the pile, and now we wait for it to heat up! Once it gets up to 60 degrees we will turn the pile to cool it off and then wait for it to heat up to turn again. After a few turns the pile will have fully decomposed and cool off and then we will leave it to cure over winter before spreading it back over our fields for next spring's crops!
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Building the pile
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The finished pile Checking the temperature
Cheers!
Farmer Carly
