Saturday, April 11, 2015


With the title of this post, I bet you thought I was going to do a Guns'n'Roses parody. Not.

Saturday was amazing weather so the boys (Reed, Johnny & Chris) finished planting 6000 onions and 3000 leeks. We still have 2000 cippolini onions to go, but we ran out of compost.

Here is why the compost is important...

After putting down a layer of compost based starter fertilizer we put a strip of compost 4 inches deep and 12 inches wide where we will plant the row. This may sound like a lavish use of compost and it is lavish in the row.

Here is why we do this:

  1. The compost we use has no weeds in it so the compost provides a weed barrier for the first two months of growth.
  2. The root system of the onion plant is shallow so we want to put the nutrients where the plant can reach them.  We have to use less inputs and the Onion plant gets more.
  3. We are not feeding the plant. We are feeding the soil. So essentially we are ringing the dinner bell for the soil biology. 
  4. Earth worms love compost. It is a major food source for them. We find thousand of worms around the roots of the plants when we harvest. They have been there all season keeping things tidy (in addition to compost they eat dead organic matter). They burrow in the soil leaving channels that the roots often follow. Their excrement, called worm casting, is a highly enriched organic fertilizer. When we put down compost the worms come running (OK slowly crawling) to our row of compost.
  5. Water management. Compost holds 8x the amount of moisture that soil can. This drought proofs the crop.
  6. Carbon. Compost is nearly pure organic matter. So even though onion are not a carbonaceous crop we are still adding 30 tons of compost per acre, which is about 24 tons of stable organic carbon. The only thing better from a carbon standpoint would be biochar.
  7. Minerals. The substrate for the compost is plant based organic matter, mostly leaves. The trees bring up minerals from deep in the soil to recycle them. We get these minerals in their best organic form from the compost. That is why the produce tastes so good.
  8. Phosphorus. Roots like phosphorus. Onions are a root. Compost has a highly stable form of phosphorus. Onions like compost.
Sounds complicated, but it is really pretty simple. 

Feed the soil and it will feed us.

We want to be your farmer.

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