Highlights and Lessons From the 2024 Season

I have ideas for blog posts all the time while I'm working but I rarely get around to actually posting. Before we embark on the craziness of spring planting, I thought I'd share some of the highlights and experiments of last year's growing season. If you know me, you know I'm always running too many experiments on my growing systems at the farm.

The weather in 2024 was an interesting challenge- excessive rain in June and then a drought in the fall. While the wet weather in June ruined the grape crop with fungal disease (and I'm still researching natural ways to combat that), it did allow me to make strides with cover crops in difficult fields. Since our soil is so sandy, it can be really tricky to plant cover crop seeds across an entire field and keep them moist enough to germinate. We have a really difficult field up the hill by the blueberries and I was, thanks to all the rain, able to establish white clover in the pathways. Here's what it looked like when I planted:

Yes that's sand. Just sand.

I knew this soil was too poor for vegetables but I figured I could at least get some scrappy flowers out of it while I wait for the clover to work its magic.

The picture above was taken in June, by August I had a lush carpet of clover between some rows of "kinda okay" flowers:

I'm not going to qualify as a flower farmer any time soon, but I was grateful to be able to grow a really beautiful bouquet for my mom's birthday in July. Having extra color and beauty on the farm is, in my opinion, always worthwhile.

White clover has become one of my favorite cover crops because I get so many benefits from it at once. The more I learn about soil health, the more important I realize it is to have living roots in the soil as long as possible. As a farmer, I need to focus on creating a healthy ecosystem of soil microbes in order to grow healthy and nutritious vegetables. White clover creates a dense mat of roots that not only out competes weeds, but it also can collect atmospheric nitrogen and store it in its roots. I'm a big fan of letting the plants do the work of improving soil for me! The flowers feed our honeybees and attract beneficial insect predators and pollinators, such as this lacewing:

Can you see her? Green body and clear wings, just below the flower in the center.

I also really like how easy clover is to manage in field pathways (to a point- more on that in a minute.) Throughout the growing season I can mow the paths to stop any weeds that did manage to pop up and keep them from going to seed, and by fall the path is pretty much exclusively clover. This was wildly successful in the garlic field this year:

Early spring- the garlic is up through its leaf mulch, but weeds are sprouting in the bare earth pathways. Without a cover crop I'd be wasting time fighting these all summer. Nature abhors a vacuum!

Clover starting to germinate in the path between garlic, thanks to all the rain. You can see a line of lamb's quarters to the left starting to grow along the leaf mulch. It's easy to manage in this system when I can mow it down before it sets seed, and the clover doesn't mind being mowed at all.

Clover filling in the space

There are a lot of factors of course, but I think the 2024 garlic was the best we've had yet.

After I harvested garlic out of the field in late July, I was left with delightfully lush pathways and nice neat growing beds of leaf mulch:

Here is where we've hopefully made another leap forward at the farm: we bought a water wheel planter from a retiring farmer a couple years ago and last summer we finally got it fixed up and ready to use. After the garlic was harvested we used the planter to replant the field with thousands of broccoli and kohlrabi. In the past this would have taken us several days- with the planter we got the job done in a few hours. I'm hoping this new efficiency will help me expand enough to finally grow enough vegetables for you all!

My best friend Bronwyn, helping me assess the seat height setting on the planter and explaining that she needs a cup holder installed for her Starbucks.

Now in 2024 I did learn a drawback about clover- or possibly just a lesson in timing. I did this same system (garlic beds, clover in pathways) in a different field in 2023, since I rotate fields every year. The plan was to plant melons in that field for 2024, and keep taking advantage of the now VERY thick clover in the paths to keep the weeds down and make the melons easy to find. There were a couple mistakes I made in a row here that caused the field to be a total failure. I didn't have time to start melon seedlings so I tried to plant seeds directly into the thick leaf mulch. The seeds got buried in leaves and very few of them germinated. And clover spreads by runners (called stolons), so in June it had taken over a lot of the growing beds:

By the end of summer you could hardly find the growing bed at all. But you can see how well the weeds are suppressed- this used to be my WORST field for sand burrs- and the second year clover bloomed a TON. I guess I still consider this a net benefit, because 2024 was also our best year for honey production on the farm, and I think all the clover nectar was a factor.

One of our honeybees visiting some mullein last summer. I try to keep as much pollen and nectar diversity as possible on the farm in order to keep our bees healthy. It also makes for truly delicious honey!

This year I'm planning to put a tarp over the failed melon field to kill the clover completely. Once clover dies, all the nitrogen it accumulated in its roots is released and available to be used by a crop. The hope is that I can plant cauliflower and cabbage directly into the mulch left behind by the killed clover, and the soil will be so improved that I won't have to add fertilizer at all. This is entirely new territory for me, so stay tuned to see how it goes.

This is one of the trickiest factors I've found in improving soil naturally- it can take years and lots of patient planning to work on Nature's timeline. While the end results are worth it, a new farmer really has to scrape by and struggle in the meantime.

Another project with a slow timeline has been the wine cap mushroom beds under our asparagus plants. You may remember that in 3 of our 6 asparagus rows I added wood chips, straw and mushroom spawn in the summer of 2023. The hope was to improve the soil, provide long term food to the asparagus, and get a second crop out of the space. Mushroom mycelium takes time to fill a bed, but we started to see some benefits in 2024. Anecdotally (I'm planning to take weights and actually prove this scientifically this year) the asparagus rows with mushrooms had much thicker and healthier stalks and seemed to produce more. We also started to harvest some flushes of mushrooms this last summer!

Another benefit that I did not expect is that the wood chips seemed to provide great habitat for fast-moving, predatory spiders. I'm going to be on the lookout this year for effects on the pest populations in those asparagus rows too.

I cannot tell you how EXCITING it is to find these mushrooms popping up!

I'm always terribly proud of our asparagus and I want to care for it so we can enjoy it for years to come.

This post is getting long, but we did a couple other experiments on soil health in 2024 that yielded unexpected results. Every winter I try to buy a couple books related to farming and learn as much as I can. Last winter was "The Ecological Farm" by Helen Atthowe. The book is a treasure trove of knowledge but one of the most interesting principles was the idea of using grass mulch to replace fertilizer. We do plenty of mowing around the farm, so collecting grass clippings was an easy idea to adopt. In the last few years we have struggled with the health of our raspberry patch and knew they were in desperate need of new mulch, so we decided to run an experiment.

Plenty of grass to collect. The cuttings I get from mowing the clover pathways are particularly nutrient-rich. I don't know how I ever survived without my beloved tractor to move these things around!

Travis gets all the credit for the hard work here, but he painstakingly spread a very thick layer of freshly cut grass underneath two of the raspberry rows. By fall the difference was really shocking!

Raspberries without mulch in late August. Canes are short and stunted, the weeds have taken over, and the leaves show signs of yellowing and nutrient deficiency. In the top right you can see a glimpse of one of the mulched rows for contrast.

The two raspberry rows that were mulched, as of late August.

It was hard to take good pictures, but the raspberry rows that received the grass mulch were taller and thicker, with little to no weed competition, and the leaves remained a lush dark green late into the season. As I have been pruning these rows this spring, the canes look to be the healthiest I have ever seen.

I'm really excited about the results of this experiment and I'm loving the idea of caring for our fruit with fertility grown here on the farm, rather than relying on purchased fertilizer. As long as we can handle the extra labor of spreading the mulch, we plan to treat all the raspberry rows this summer.

Our last soil health advancement was really the continuation- or maybe completion- of an experiment I've been running for several years. I've talked in other posts about how we grow tomatoes in a field planted with hairy vetch and rye the previous fall. Now that I have trialed this system over several years in both extremes of climate- severe drought and excessive rainfall- I'm confident in saying that this is the best way to grow tomatoes holistically. I have never had such a perfect crop- basically no defective fruit from insect or disease damage- as I did in 2024. And once the field was planted, there were no interventions needed from me- no pruning, fertilizing, spraying or weeding at all.

I LOVE these "Manyel" tomatoes. They're beautiful and productive!

We harvested 1,599 pounds of tomatoes from the field in 2024.

The last puzzle piece I needed to solve was what to with the tomato field the following year, once tomatoes get rotated somewhere else. Pounding t-posts for tomato trellises is incredibly difficult work, so I wanted to keep them in place if I could. I needed a climbing crop that wouldn't mind the fertility used up by the tomatoes the previous year, so I settled on sugar snap peas. Peas are legumes that provide their own nitrogen (like clover), and you all seem to enjoy eating them as much as I do!

Both dwarf and full size sugar snap peas, taking full advantage of the tomato trellis.

The rye straw that suppresses weeds under the tomatoes has pretty much decomposed by the following year, so I decided to maintain the pathways with oat straw that I had left over from the mushroom beds. I did not expect how much this would improve the soil structure! The best source of organic material for soil is roots left to decompose in place. Rye has a huge, fibrous root mass which left the soil looking really dark and rich. This pea field following the rye was filled with more earthworms than I have ever seen- either feeding on old rye roots or the straw, but definitely benefiting from the shade and moisture that the oat straw cover provided. Once again this was a field I didn't have to weed in the growing season, and I was able to plant some really nice root crops along the shoulders of the snap peas.

The more I grow vegetables, the more convinced I am that they taste better when grown in a multi-species system. A natural ecosystem is complicated and diverse, so shouldn't our farm fields be too?

My seedlings for 2025 are already growing in the greenhouse, and I'm looking forward to the lessons I will learn this year. One experiment I'm excited about this year is pairing melons and squash with cowpeas and bush beans, again in an attempt to increase the diversity and productivity of the fields.

Thank you all for supporting our farm in getting this far, I truly am honored to grow produce for you. I'm looking forward to seeing you at the market!