Forum Friday has become more than just pulling threads from the forum and more about general trends and newsworthy things about no-till happening in our community.

Chickens in the garden

One thread that has run through the last week is the role of the chicken in the no-till market garden. Josh Sattin wrote about his method for clearing a plot for expanding production with chickens. Karl Hammer has mentioned how he uses chickens in the first stages of his composting process at Vermont Compost (and produces eggs without buying feed, which is totally worth exploration). And MosleyAcres posted a few questions about feeding chickens from the market garden in the growers community.

Though we focus more on the veg side of things here at NTG, layering animals into the market garden in some way/shape/form should be worth considering. Too often, they can be written off as not being profitable and many small-scale growers are actively discouraged. BUT, they have the potential to serve our farms in ways that may not “pencil out” on paper (i.e. ducks for the pond for pest control, sheep using marginal growing space to provide protein and carbon sequestration, chickens for composting garden waste, etc). Not to mention, they could bring an element of life to the garden and make it more enjoyable. What’s that worth?

My unsolicited advice? Get the soil and veg down first (more or less), then seriously consider what role animals may play on your farm. Chickens are the low-hanging fruit here… or would it be low-hanging protein?

Just Keep {Inter}Planting

We’re seeing a whole lot of interplanting going on around here on our respective farms, and more of it on your farms, too! For those of us working limited space (voluntary or involuntary) beds are beginning to fill up as the Spring overlaps with Summer. Our trellis peas are providing shade for late lettuce (photo above), clumps of scallions are being shoved into new beds of tomatoes, and the beet tops are filling in just in time to canopy over the onions at StoneHouse. Singing Frogs just posted about planting rounds of lettuce amongst the tomatoes. Jesse, the other half of NTG, at Rough Draft is just going crazy with it. We want to know, what are you interplanting? What is working? More importantly, what are some of your interplanting fails?

10K

No-Till Growers officially reached 10K on Instagram last night! Though we don’t want to brag about our following, it is worth mentioning because of, well… y’all. We feel it’s less the work we’ve done, most of what we do is highlight the work others are doing, and more about the rising interest in alternative methods of growing food. No-till is not the answer, and there is still a lot to learn/explore, but it may be an answer for the future of sustainable farming for the future. Speaking of the future, if we want to see notillgrowers.com grow, a season two of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast (rate and review, please and thank you), No-Till workshops (currently in the works), etc. support our work for as little as $2/month. We’re so close to reaching our $1K challenge. Really, y’all rock.