Dispatches

In case you missed it, the first No-Till Dispatch went up on Patreon this week. It is open to the public, because we aren’t cool with unnecessary paywalls. However, it’s a great opportunity to—while you’re already there—support our work as we begin to put season two of the podcast together. We reached our goal, because y’all rock, but we already see the potential to do so much more in bringing no-till veg to even more growers. Like the Frith Farm at Rough Draft Intensive in October. Let’s do more of that, yeah?

Other Grow Season Podcasts

Podcasts are changing the nature of education. As farmers, most of our work is manual labor, and a lot of it. Now, we’re able to learn while working. Here is a hard and fast list of other farm-related podcasts we’ve come across and really enjoy, in case you need something to listen to while waiting for season two of The No-Till Market Garden:

The Thriving Farmer Podcast
A great dig into the business side of small-scale farming.
Farm Small, Farm Smart
A wealth of great insight on here. I highly recommend his interviews with Javan.
The Ruminant
One of our favorites. Diverse range of topics, always interesting.
Intellectual Agrarian
The philosophies of small-scale and organic agriculture.

But, I practically stop listening to farm podcasts about this time of year. It can just be too much. And that’s what Winter is for, right? The season we breathe it all in. Instead, Farmer Jesse and I mostly listen to things that speak to other areas of our life. Regardless of whether you’re a main-season grower, or a year-rounder, this is a grinding time of year, and podcasts can be a great way to keep in touch with your other interests.

Farmer Jesse’s Top Three
Embedded
The Gist
Aaron Torres Sports

Farmer Jackson’s Top Three
On Being with Krista Tippett
Seth Godin’s Akimbo
RadioLab

All of that said, you could go back and listen to season one of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast, again. Futher, Audible is a great means of reading when you don’t have time to read. We’ve each listened to The Hidden Half of Nature and Farming for the Long Haul, two titles we cannot recommend highly enough. Overdrive is a great app to checkout audiobooks from your library and is FREE. I recommend the classics.

Don’t forget, though, you just can’t beat the sound of birds on a perfect harvest morning or rain on a greenhouse. Take some time to unplug, as well. Some of my best “ah-ha” moments have come from hand-weeding carrots in silence.

All the no-till carrots

I remember when Jesse was on the fence about going completely no-till. He was hung up on carrots. Now, after seeing it work—rather well, I might add—carrots have become a cornerstone crop on his farm. Indeed, one of the benefits of no-till farming, especially within a deep-mulch system or bed, is not being hung up by the weather. Once the bed is prepped, just uncover and seed. In the middle of Winter, even. Meaning, first to market with fresh carrots… and we all know how important being first to market with a fresh crop can be.

So, I decided to take a different angle with no-till carrots. There are long (read: looong) day-to-maturity crops that we love to grow and provide for our Winter market and CSA. Sometimes, these crops don’t make sense when working less than an acre. Instead of thinking about it in terms of potential crop revenue per bed over time, how about potential bed revenue over time with interplanting? Not only may it provide more revenue per bed, making monetary room for some harder to justify crops, but increases diversity and keeps living roots in the ground more often than not.

Here’s what I’m doing: sowing a round of Parisian market carrots (Atlas) between rows of Winter leeks. Typically, for larger carrots, we sow four or five rows on a 30” bed depending on the size we desire. We chose Atlas because we feel the short, round, root shape would interfere less with the development of the leeks. If it does work, we’ll end up with the equivalent of an extra bed of carrots for every two beds of leeks, all while the leeks are growing. Let’s see how good my timing is, because so much of successful interplanting is about timing. Disclaimer: don’t try this at home, folks. Or better yet, experiment a little, and tag us in your #notill #interplating experiments @notillgrowers.

Hope everyone has a killer market weekend. Pile it high, folks…