Where to start? We actually start in October. By then all the old crops are gone and the wind is cool and the nights can be downright cold. This past season it was still dry as the preceding summer. We had no choice but to do minimum or no till because of the lack of soil moisture. It was still akin to planting in the desert. This video shows just how dry and dusty it was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BCeR7Oqtv4 We plant, hoping, praying for rain. It got worse before it got better. Because of the dry soil, germination and emergence did not occur uniformly or sufficiently robust. The mustard you see us planting with the Tye drill only yielded 60 ponds of seed off a 2 acre plot. Normal yields are around 2000 pounds per acre. The crop was a failure on that account, but since we only planted 6 pounds of seed and harvested 60, our goal of increasing the seed to a more viable amount was achieved. I would like to repeat the planting on a larger scale next season. We also planted Elbon Rye in this session which fared much better than the mustard, yielding a low but very viable 25 bushels per acre of grain this spring. Winter crops do delay spring planting six to eight weeks. It is possible to drill corn and such into rye or wheat in February but not southern peas. Cowpeas like it hot, and our native American corn varieties prefer it hot as well.So we delay.
We prep the garden in the fall as well. Compost time. Lots of it if we can get it. If we raise our own onion plants, we plant the seed in October. We start tomatoes In a hot bed or green house in February as well. We use a 3 pint hitch Caroni Rotary Tiller to prepare land that is not no till. A subsoiler is handy to crack the seed zone open and allow roots to penetrate to the subsoil and moisture. It also allows moisture to migrate deeper in the soil instead of running off in a rain. This a major concern for mostly dryland farmers.
Peas and corn follow cereal crops in June. Immediately.
I would like to plant more winter grains on more acreage to be marketed to conventional grain markets. The crops would qualify for Federal Crop Insurance and I believe our antiquated methods and equipment will allow us to do well on acreage up to 100 or so without compromising our time. These crops could be followed with soybeans or corn.
I am dumbfounded that the Farm Bill has to be held hostage by food stamps. If the Farm Bill was a separate affair, there would be no question of passage. That is for another blog post on another day.
In the meantime, planting crops cannot wait on politics. If it did, we would all go hungry.
Methods and fertilization... organic is tough to do. Let no one kid you, especially if you do it on a large scale, it is expensive. We use mechanical fertilization and we use smother crops. One of the reasons we used Elbon Rye was because it produces a huge amount of organic matter that we no till into. This organic matter suppresses weed growth, theoretically allowing our crops to spread to full canopy before weeds emerge. This method is called organic no-till. That is the cost efficient part. Fertilization, especially with corn is another issue. We prefer to use Neptune's Harvest Fish Emulsion fertilizer to fertilize everything. Fortunately our corn does not require as much nitrogen as conventional hybrid varieties so this is adequate for everything. Bat guano is our next best option. Its like Brylcreem, a little dab will do. Buying compost to cover large acreage is cost prohibitive.
The crop year really never ends. You simply do the work required in that season while planning for the next.
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