Incredible, but true – two days without rain! I wanted to do a little non-rain dance…instead, I harrowed. I tilled a full field of green manure, prepping for my fall brassicas. Perhaps you know my obsession with green manure – cereals and legumes that I grow for no other purpose than field fertilisation. Last night, I laid low a mixture of oats and peas which I buried, leaving it to be further worked on by the denizens of the earth. It is astonishing to witness the speed with which worms and other bacterial hordes transform a patch of freshly destroyed vegetation. In hot and sunny weather, composting only takes a few days, so a field can be worked again within a week. There really is method to the madness: at Arlington Gardens we’ve placed a bet that intense green manure management will be central to the fertilisation of our fields and that we will do without importing anything from outside the farm, be it compost or animal manure. It’s a bit risky, but the pay-off has been great so far, as demonstrated this year’s brassicas, our corn and our nightshades (solanaceas). I got religion, so to speak…I now sow a trinity of buckwheat, oats and peas and let Mother Nature do the rest.
