There’s a lot happening on the farm with the egg layers in full swing, bushels of sweet peppers being harvested, and a fermentation experiment under consideration. Oh … and planning for winter, too.
The Iowa Farm Companion is a regular feature, written by Joe Villines, who operates Halfacre Farms in Iowa with his wife Lydia. The two are dedicated to living lightly on the planet and we’re delighted their sharing their sustainable practices — and great photos — with Bluedot readers.
We’re on our third summer here in Iowa, partially interrupted by a false fall — the week or two when the scorching summer heat recedes and then returns with a vengeance. I think the politically correct name for what we’re experiencing now is “extended summer.” Whatever terms you use, we’re looking forward to the first frost and putting the garden to bed for winter.
Autumn is the season when every farm activity from the summer is still happening, while at the same time, we must start working on our winter plan for housing, feed, and water for the livestock. We are still waiting for the last group of broiler chickens to get up to butchering size, while our egg layers are in full swing. We’re also actively marketing turkeys for the holidays, since this is the last big sales event of the year. The garden is at peak production right now, with everything needing to be picked and sold, preserved for our own use, or fed to the animals — usually in this order, because we always consider the highest and best use of all our resources.
Right now, there are four buckets of an amazing variety of sweet peppers we’d like to preserve, but which, due to our busy schedules, may end up being fed to the chickens. Maybe they’ll go into another long-term fermentation experiment, since they’re past their prime for pickling. (We like to play around with fermenting peppers and tomatoes for marinades and rubs and have had some tasty success.) Or, they could end up in the Chaos Garden, the spot in our pasture where we like to dump vegetable scraps and extra seeds to see what develops next year. It’s chaos because there are no rows, there’s no order, and nothing that comes up will belong to any real named varieties, as many of our seeds came from hybrid plants that will likely revert to recessive traits in the next generation. To us, it’s free food and contributes to biodiversity. Credit goes to Gabe Brown, who coined the name “Chaos Garden” in his book Dirt to Soil.
We participated in a food waste recycling program and used to receive literal tons of various edible items from a cafeteria, a test kitchen and a photography studio, and we fed it to our laying flock, which is when surprise plants first appeared. Chaos Gardening is a lot of fun, and there’s something magical about letting chickens eat, digest and deposit seeds with a convenient dose of fertilizer. Maybe I’m overthinking garden planning and should just let the birds take care of it.
This brings me to my next, more serious point. Now is the time for reviewing notes from the season while the “roses and thorns” are still fresh in your mind. We have already done the garden planning for 2024, because a nasty drought set back our produce sales, and time not spent picking is time we can use to get ahead in other ways. Now it’s time to ask ourselves questions like, “Did we do enough to prepare for this?” Or “What is the most practical, cost effective and labor-saving way to better manage our property?” That’s a lot to chew on, but we must think things through if our goal is land stewardship and a sustainable business.
We have decided to go no-till for established beds. Beyond its environmental benefit of releasing less carbon into the atmosphere, less tillage means less soil moisture lost to evaporation, which means less water we must pay for. We sold our tractor to make sure we wouldn’t be tempted to plow again. Selling unused equipment freed up some capital for other projects, too.
We decided to reduce the number of vegetable plants per row and plant more ground covers like dwarf white clover. It’s great for bees, fixes nitrogen in the soil, is edible as animal forage, and requires little to no maintenance. If you recall what I said about “highest and best use,” clover supports our goals.
One person’s waste stream is our goldmine. Our leaf mold experiment in the front pasture has been a success. We had a few lawn care companies dump enough from their fall cleanup jobs to fill an entire quarter acre paddock with about two feet of leaves which decomposed down to about six inches of beautiful compost over a twelve month period. Our chickens enjoyed scratching and pecking through them for insects and bits of food while depositing some of their own manure fertilizer. As a bonus, the leaves tracked in seeds from several species of trees, and we were able to transplant the resulting seedlings into our pastures. This fall, we’re going to have the lawn care companies drop their yard “waste” in another paddock where we’re planning to plant several native species of nut-bearing trees and shrubs. The once parched soil there is now holding adequate moisture for plant growth and will be ready for planting trees this fall. The leaf waste will become their compost.
We focus a lot on the soil here. Our favorite soil-building cover crops are Daikon radish, clovers, wheatgrass, forage kale, oilseed and buckwheat. Daikon radishes are a favorite because they shoot a taproot down several feet, then create a massive tuber up to three inches in diameter which continues to grow underground through most of the winter, scavenging deep minerals. The tubers then rot to leave large spongy voids allowing air and water to infiltrate and stay in the soil. An added benefit is that wildlife and our poultry enjoy grazing on them.
In short, fall is a wonderful time to reflect on the season and enjoy it with your loved ones. We talk about what worked and what didn’t, looking for the good in the bad and how to make the good better. It’s a good time to plan for those projects like a new compost bin or rainwater catchment systems. Some of the projects we dream of are here in Halfacre’s Pinterest account. Happy Fall, y’all!
