The Second Field and Natural Roots Farm

The sec­ond field is look­ing GREAT! If you look close­ly you can see the pole beans climb­ing right up the corn stalks, and the squash is doing a great job of keep­ing weeds down. We’ve done very lit­tle to this field since plant­i­ng it, the idea was to keep it low main­te­nance so we could focus on our more finicky veg­eta­bles in the first field, and I’m hap­py to say so far it looks like the plan is working. 

Beans crawl­ing up corn stalks

Sun­flow­ers in the foreground

Win­ter squash keep­ing down the weeds. We plant­ed pump­kins, del­i­ca­ta squash, acorn squash and but­ter­nut squash.

We went to the NOFA (North­east­ern Organ­ic Farm­ing Asso­ci­a­tion) Con­fer­ence last week­end at UMass Amherst. It was real­ly fun and inspir­ing. I went to some work­shops on grow­ing mush­rooms and farm finan­cial man­age­ment (thrilling), Dave learned about ani­mal pow­ered log­ging and forestry and build­ing root cel­lars and we all got to vis­it a cou­ple of larg­er organ­ic farms.

Our favorite was Nat­ur­al Roots Farm in Con­way, MA. They are total­ly horse-pow­ered, which is great for envi­ron­men­tal (grass as fuel) and aes­thet­ic rea­sons (no trac­tor smells and sounds). We were also impressed by their inten­sive weed con­trol pro­gram. It was by far the most weed-free farm we’ve seen so far.

Look how clean!