The garden is cleaned and ready for tilling. This warm weather is so great. We’ve got such a jump on the season, it’s crazy! How do you feel about tilling? I know a lot of people believe in ‘no-tilling’ What are your thoughts? It works for some smaller plots but is very difficult on larger areas.
Planted about 300 heirloom tomato seeds from http://www.tomatofest.com/ I found some Jiffy pellets greenhouse kits at Discount Drug Mart for $5ea. It was a steal. I couldn’t pass it up. Sure, I could have got some potting soil from the store and used some old yogurt containers but it was just simpler and more efficient to go this route…..
Hold off green judgement till my Earth Day rant coming up in just 35 days. My friend Hanna at This Garden is Illegal does a fantastic Earth Day rant and I liked it so much, I’m going to start it this year too. Thanks Hanna! Anyways, I digress….
We also spent the weekend cleaning up the chicken coop and preparing for our new arrivals in 2 weeks. We gave away our older hens to people in need and we’re getting a brand new flock of 10-12 week old Golden Comets on March 31st. We’ll miss our old girls but instead of killing them, we thought it was better to give them away to a good home.
Our weather in the Midwest is crazy warm, it was 76 degrees yesterday! Normally it snows every St. Paddy’s Day until Halloween in our neck of the woods.. so this is amazing.
Jake, Mindy and I were enjoying the warm weather Saturday by relaxing on the the deck with a few cocktails.
I did find time to hang up Z’s swing. She isn’t sure if she likes it or not yet but I’m sure a few more pushes and she won’t want to be let out of it. I had to move the bird-feeder but they didn’t seem to mind.
Ohh and great news! My friend Denise Ellsworth from Ohio State University Honey bee and native pollinator educator will be writing a ‘Guest Blog’ for us next month.
I’m so very excited. If you haven’t already, sign up for the OSU Entomology Mailing List Have a great Sunday everybody!
I’m so glad I discovered your blog!
We, too are getting ready for our new chicks and am looking forward to hearing what Denise has to say. We work hard to keep the bees happy in our garden and ALWAYS plant borage for them to enjoy. This early Spring is quite amazing! I already have artichokes and asparagus!
Good Sunday Morning to the Soulsby Farm!
Great post! Cant believe the weather so far here in Ohio – it is certainly giving us a great head start on the garden. We have never tilled – opting instead for hilled beds with a 6″ base of loosely chopped straw underneath about 8 to 12 inches of soil. For us, it just allows us to get our plants in quicker in the season and not wait for the soil to drop out.
Jim and Mary
Happy Spring to you! We were looking Springlike…but another 1/2″ of snow last night…. At least the moisture is welcome!
I’ve always tilled. I know it’s not great for the soil as it breaks down the particles and all that, but, when you have soil that gets rock hard and impossible to work by hand (or a garden that’s so big it would take you until Christmas) the tiller is just so convenient!
I want to raise chickens in such a bad way! One of these years…. I’ll be following your blog with interest and hope to learn a thing or two for when I finally make that leap. 🙂
I love your blog. Great pics. Thanks for the heirloom link. We hope to have chickens for eggs one day, too, but we couldn’t eat them. They would be pets. Looking forward to reading more.
It’s a busy time of year! I see what you mean about no-tilling (no digging) on a larger scale. I’ve turned more and more towards no-digging as it means I don’t literally dig up the heavy sub clay that is my soil, but then I have a small plot in comparison. I’ve found it better to lightly weed and mulch. But on a big scale I can see how that might not work so well.
Tillers. I’ve used front tyne and rear tyne. I prefer rear tyne but for raised beds, I have to say that double digging is working best for us. We have natively clay soil which is awesome for gardening if you work it right and tillers dont seem to get down deep enough for my taste. My favorite place to use the tiller is in the cold compost pile and dirt mound where I recycle most of our twigs and sods before spreading it areas that I need to build up.
Great photos! I am so excited about this warm weather – it’s been nice to be able to get some new beds built. I’m still paranoid about planting too much, though!
Can’t wait to hear more about bees! We may very well be getting some soon. Eek!
I’m certainly not a farmer, but my veggies seem very happy on a plot that goes untilled, so I’ll have to come down on the side of not digging. I’m in Michigan with heavy clay, but when I established the bed I added tremendous heaps of compost. By continuing to mulch, the soil retains the texture of chocolate cake. Yummy!
I agree that sometimes we have to do things more efficiently…I work full time so sometimes I have to take the more efficient route. We try to keep things simple! Loved the photos and am looking forward to your guest blogger!
I actually don’t know the argument for not tilling the soil. Having grown up farming numerous acres, it was our best option. Living on only half an acre currently, I haven’t tilled anything…..
I’m curious about the pictures of your chickens. What type of bedding/ground cover (I don’t know what you call it) do you use in your coop and yard?
We use straw and wood shavings for their nests.
I just no tiled our garden. I read more about you and found that we are somewhat of neighbors as we are near Wooster. Like the blog
We have 16 raised beds for vegetables and I do dig these over to get rid of weeds before planting and then add compost from our gignormous compost heap..
With regard to point of lay pullets, do check they are ready to lay when you pick them up. We were “seen off” with some underdeveloped chickens that took a further 3 months to come into lay. Perhaps you know what to look out for, developed crops and hip bones two fingers width apart. Good Luck
They won’t lay till about 20-24 Weeks old. So, it’ll be around July when they start. A long but much anticipated period 🙂
We use a small tiller to break up clods or when we start a new raised bed to incorporate the compost. Otherwise, we try to only hand till so we don’t disturb all the wonderful things going on in the soil.
When we first started “city gardening”, we rented a tiller for our approximately 5’x14′ garden. Since we had so much trouble with the rented ones, we finally sprang for one of our own, and my husband tilled the ground, incorporating our new compost every year. Our soil in Houston becomes so compact from the clay content, that it responds well to tilling. Now, our gardening is confirned to pots on a large patio.
I’m so pleased your chickens have been given a new home! There are plenty of people who love these animals as pets so once the egg production reduces or ceases somebody else could benefit.
Like many others we also have clay soil so have resorted to raised beds so we don’t need to till – you have more land than us though!!
Ooooh! I got stuck on “planted about 300 heirloom tomato seeds.” Can I come visit. I love heirlooms and because they won’t grow up in the Pacific Northwest, I make an annual visit to Sacramento at peak time to eat as many of my sister’s homegrown as possible.
Envious of your weather as we are just coming out of our wettest and windiest winter on record up in the north west of Scotland. As a result, very little fishing and the ground is still sodden. Just had a enthusiastic visiter teaching us all about hot composting and wormeries along with the advantages of rock dust. Having the raised beds we try not to till especially as we are both full time employed.
Love your blog 🙂 on the other side of the world we are starting to gear down for winter. Tilling or no tilling…the decision has been taken out of our hands. Our soil is heavy clay…no problem there apart from the fact that it contains about 90% rock (slight exageration) and as such a “no till” approach is most definately on the cards for us. Just got an invite to a bee keeping series of events in town and just might go. We have an elderly bee keeper just around the corner from us and one day one of his swarms is going to head on over to Serendipity Farm and I want to know what to do when it does! 300 Heirloom tomato seeds…WHAT are you going to do with all of those tomatoes? The one thing that I don’t like about the “sustainability” movement is how everyone feels so very guilty about doing ANYTHING that they perceive as being “unsustainable”. Surely throwing yourself into “mostly” sustainable is a whole lot better for the earth than being too scared to do anything because someone out there might take offence? (usually wearing a felt hat, a pair of birkenstocks and riding a pushbike…). We should all stop appologising for the few little things that we do that might not be 100% sustainable…it’s like being on a diet folks…it wont work if you aren’t realistic about it. Love what you are doing…till your soil if it is right for you…microbes and fungi recover…life goes on…
I’ve heard arguments both for no-till and against. I used to work in the Plant Pathology Department at PSU, and the one thing I can tell you for sure is that when you don’t till crop residues under so they compost away you can set yourself up for disease problems. I have also read that no-till systems have shown that they may not necessarily save nutrients or prevent erosion as well as previously thought. Have a look here for an article:
I’ll keep an eye on the comments here, since I’m really curious to hear what others have to say.
I hope you try Mrs. Houseworth from our farm. I believe tomatofest sells them:)
I did plant some Mrs. Houseworth’s! How exciting, pleasure to meet you! Tomatoharvest are an awesome company. They donated seed to our nonprofit ‘Project Garden Share’ and we really appreciate it! I tell everyone to buy from them 🙂 Thanks for your comment!
I am jealous of your chickens..I cannot wait for the day I will own some! Thank you for the comment on my blog regarding the Burpee seeds..this is all new to me so I don’t know which seeds are the best. Any advice is appreciated! Thanks again!
Biomass fixes carbons in the soil, keeps it out of the atmosphere. Troposphere is only seven miles deep!!! Nothing!!!! Old style book from Ruth Stout, ‘How to have a green thumb without an aching back’, she was heavily into mulches. Right now I think returning everything is what we have to do, we can’t afford to open up the ground too much anymore. Kristin.
Our veggie plot is only 45 feet by 40 feet and we enjoy digging so haven’t really considered no-dig but lots of people seem to use the technique successfully.
The weather has been freakishly warm here in New England as well. My wife has started a bunch of seeds. That’s her job, mine is to lug heavy stuff around and to help harvest… and then there’s the eating part too. We are getting our first ever chickens in 2 weeks! It’s all very exciting.
It’s great to read about what’s happening on the farm. I have relatively small kitchen garden plots and so usually turn them over by hand. My dad was an immigrant from the Netherlands and so always I feel a bit nostalgic about this spring activity that we used to do side-by-side. Of course each furrow is filled with a good quantity of compost and dry leaves to enrich the soil and loosen up the Indiana till.
I believe that tilling or not depends on your other options. My first option would be to add organic matter, a very thick layer, and avoid compacting the soil by creating separate paths etc for walking. You can often get organic matter for free. People will leave bags full of leaves out as trash. Coffee shops generate a lot of coffee grounds. Breweries generate much spent hops. Planting cover crops with deep roots that can break up the already compacted soil is another alternative. Keeping the soil covered year around, including winter, will help. Since you have chickens the pen system could work well for you. That means you keep the chickens on a plot of land for a few weeks, letting them scratch and fertilize and then you move them to another plot and plant a cover crop (radishes for example). Cut the cover crop down and leave as mulch. You should soon be able to plant the plot. I tend to take advice from nature about what is the smartest thing to do (because nature has thought about it and worked at it for over 4 billion years). Nature doesn’t seem to till unless you consider landslides a type of tilling, but that is a destructive process that ends the existing ecosystem for a pioneer system, meaning weeds..
Beautiful land. I envy it! My long-term dream is to leave the city ASAP and do something very similar to what you’re doing. Till then, enjoy it double for me!
I have to mention your barn, too. Beautiful.
Anyway, to till or not to till? I hear there’s an argument out there that tilling disrupts the soil, that things grow better untilled. I think the idea is biodynamic; they use methods other than tilling.
Personally if I had a lot of land, I’d get me some team horses and plow it that way. I’d have a lot of learning to do first, though. I grew up with horses and I’m no stranger to horse care, riding, ground work, etc., but running a team is a whole different skill set. Still.
For anything smaller than that, sheet mulch is my preference. It’s hard to argue with the lack of labor. And adding layers to the ground builds good soil. To me, the main deterrent to sheet mulch – on a trivial but practical note – is it’s pretty hard to lay the weed barrier on a windy day. Gotta wait for still weather.
We tilled our garden yesterday, we haven’t before, but felt we needed to this year to get the soil loose enough to plant in as we have a lot of clay and rocks. We also started to fix up our chicken coop. We have a little more work to do before we can add the space our girls need to lay, but the chickens are enjoying the nice weather and their current coop. The weather is helpful in getting things started early this year. We also started our seeds in pots to hopefully be ready when we can transfer them to the garden outside. The new baby chicks have already started ariving in our area… so cute! It’s nice to know we are not the only ones to be getting things ready for spring. Thanks again for liking my posts 🙂
We till our garden…harvest rocks…we’ve already planted our peas and onion sets! Spring is the new summer (at least this year)!
Jess
Dear Folks,
I did happen to glimpse your name on a little box below one of the articles on my own Internet page; however, being new to all this, I have promptly lost all trace of it; and did not see if a note had been appended. How very interesting to respond, and find this opportunity to see one example of how things are done on a small farm in America.
All the very best to you!
Yours sincerely,
Philip Livingstone
what do you use for mulch? (looks like straw in the pic?) i just sowed some seeds and i’d like to mulch but let them be able to germinate and pop up easily…
Yes, I use straw. It’s inexpensive and does a great job of keeping weeds out, keeping the soil warm and moisture locked in. If you’re planting seedlings, I’d cover with a light covering of straw. My herbs come up strong when I plant like this. Good Luck!
We tilled this past weekend! Hurray. Planted peas for the first time in a while. Usually the ground is still snow covered and by the time it is not, the days are too hot for the peas to go in! The year of the PEA! Today was a strawberry bed clean-up. The price of this warm weather is going to be heavy I fear.
*anna
Nice property. Always exciting to be getting a new pen of chickens. All the best from Oz!
this weather is crazy. I am getting ready to plant. It’s too early, but I am going to do it anyway and I hope I don’t regret it. aaah. Your chickens look happy.
We’re having the same kind of weather in MN. Unheard of! but fun. Your farm looks so pretty. 🙂 I’ll look forward to the guest blog article about honey bees!
Love the chickens! The guest post about pollinators sounds interesting. I wonder what sort of native bees you get in Ohio.
As a lazy gardener, I am quite opposed to tilling. Before mulching, I throw scratch grains over my beds. It only takes my lone chicken a day or two to get the ground cleaned up, and then sheet mulch goes on. This means compost, cardboard, and about 6 inches of mulch (like dead leaves, straw, or wood chips). This thick layer of mulch breaks down over the winter.
I suppose over a larger area, cover crops like clover would be a good solution between planting cycles.
I have been following your blog for a while now and wanted you to know how much I have been enjoying your posts. I passed on a blogging award to you.
http://thebeadden.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/i-won-i-won/
Who did you give your old chickens away to? I have some old ones and i am hopeless at getting rid of them.. c
I posted an ad on Craigslist and offered them to a good home for someone in need. They were picked up the same day!
Thank you for liking my WordPress blog Hungry Tourist. Because of that I found your beautiful farm.
Read in your post that you are using Jiffy Pellets for your tomatoes. I used a tray of those last year for my lettuce seeds. When the plants were ready I set them in the ground thinking the jiffy pot would decompose in the soil. Boy was I wrong. The mesh pots never decomposed and the lettuce didn’t do well at all; except for the ones I dug up and tore the pot away from. This spring before we tilled the garden you could still find some of the Jiffy pots laying on top of the ground.
Perhaps I missed reading that you should cut some slits in the mesh pots before you plant them to allow the roots to escape. I wish you better luck than I had.
Howdy: thanks for taking the time of writing up this information. I constantly seek to further my idea of points. Regardless of whether I agree or disagree, I really like info. I don’t forget the previous times when the only source of facts was the library or the newspaper. They both equally seem so archaic. : )
Thank you for visiting my blog and introducing me to yours. I am enjoying reading about your small farm, it reminds me of our smallholding which we sold, choosing retirement, only a few years ago (although we have kept 9 acres and a barn!). A fox got our last lot of chickens!
Thank you for visiting my blog and leading me to yours! I love the worm farm idea, I have always thought about having one.
Her x
http://willowcottagegarden.wordpress.com