Like so many, I started flower farming with just a basic plan in mind.  See if I could grow flowers in Philadelphia and if I could sell them.  That was pretty much it.  That first season, I never thought about what it would be like to do this work in 15 years.

And here we are 15 years later.  The 2023 growing season has wrapped up and I am once again in my winter planning mode, considering the evolution of my Philadelphia flower farm.  At the start, I sold flowers at two farmers markets.  Then a handful of weddings came into the mix the second season.  The third year weddings really took hold so I left the farmers market and also added a flower CSA.  In the fourth year at this Philadelphia flower farm of mine, I began teaching workshops at the farm and added selling to two local independent grocery stores.

Everything trucked along nicely until a global pandemic sent us all reeling.  In 2020, this Philadelphia flower farm relied heavily on our amazing community to keep the farm financially stable after our main income stream – weddings and other events – was erased in a blink of the eye.  Our flower CSA – rebranded as our popular Porch Petals Prescription program – saved us that year.   In the fall we were able to add back open air workshops and we were humbled by how many friends of the farm came to those workshops when most of the world was still hunkered down.

As that tumultuous year came to a close, I started thinking hard about the long-term future of my Philadelphia flower farm.  I was emotionally, physically, mentally and financially threadbare.  It wasn’t just the pandemic.  I had been working so hard for over a decade to juggle four demanding sales channels along with running a complex flower farm.  I was stretched too thin.  It was time to simplify.

And so began an overdue longer-term plan for evolution for my Philadelphia flower farm.  We have let go of our grocery store bouquet program in 2020.  And 2023 was the last season for wedding flowers.   Lastly 2024 will be the final year for our flower CSA.

The focus moving forward is two-fold: workshops at the farm and selling wholesale to other florists.  Narrowing down to these two offerings means that we can still engage with our wonderful local community through the workshops and also make sure that local weddings and other events still have beautiful locally-grown flowers in them, albeit not designed by my own hands.  A welcomed side effect would be for me to get a little more rest too, but I’m not one to sit down for very long.

Evolution like this in a small business can sometimes be viewed as giving up on something that customers felt was wonderful and so it can feel like failure.  But let me assure you that it’s not. Each of those many sales channels for my farm were highly successful in their own right.  I just need a change and I am confident this focus moving forward will ensure the long-term sustainability of my Philadelphia flower farm and actually lead to greater success and customer appreciation.

As a follow up to my last post, No-Till Flowers Farming: The First Step to Regenerative Flower Farming, here are some practical lessons on no-till farming, be it flowers or other crops.  Important to note is that we use the “deep mulch system” here at Love ‘n Fresh Flowers, which is a scaled-up version of lasagna gardening.  There have been many bumps along the way in my experience with no-till farming, which you’ll read about some below, but it’s been so very worth it!!!

No-Till Farming Lessons Learned (so far):

Lesson 1:  A deep mulch system may conserve water ultimately, but it’s critical to regularly irrigate newly planted transplants!

I learned this one the hard way and lost a lot of transplants in 2019.  We use a lovely screened and aged compost to mulch our beds and had been putting about 4” of compost on top of each bed before transplanting (our transplants are grown in 128 trays).  The roots of the transplants were therefore mostly surrounded by compost and only just touching the soil below.  We did make sure to get the roots down to the soil surface at least, but that wasn’t enough. Compost is very prone to drying out and can actually become quickly hydrophobic.  Therefore, the transplants would dry out to the point of desiccation and would not recover if they didn’t get water daily during the first two weeks while they were getting their roots established down below.  

The solution to this problem was to first, realize what the problem was and acknowledge that a deep mulch system does not mean you don’t have to water. It actually means we have to water more often when beds are newly planted! Lesson learned.  After realizing the problem, I also reduced the layer of compost to be only about 2” thick so more of the transplant root ball could get into the soil itself at planting time.  And instead of the three lines of drip tape on each planting bed that was previously the standard at my farm, we now lay five lines of drip tape.  Since we plant five rows per bed (our beds are 36” wide and rows within the beds are 6” apart), that means there’s a dedicated drip line for each row of transplants.  This may seem like a lot of extra work and materials, but we offset that by using the drip tape as our guide for planting rather than running twine as guidelines (which we used to do) and the tape remains in place all season long (since no tilling happens) so we only have to do this once each spring.  The resulting transplant vigor is well-worth the extra investment. 

I’ve also been experimenting with overhead watering (sprinkler system), which I have always avoided as a flower farmer since conventional flower farmer wisdom says to never let moisture get onto flower petals.  While that rule of thumb is still very much true, I find overhead irrigation is much better for transplant health as it keeps the compost on the beds more evenly moist (and therefore also more biologically active).  The hope is that by getting the plants established with overhead irrigation initially, no more irrigating will be needed once they develop enough canopy of leaves to shade the soil in the bed, at which point the tenant that a no-till deep mulch system conserves water would truly come into play.  So far this is looking likely, but I haven’t followed this approach for an entire season yet so can’t say for certain that it will hold true throughout a hot summer.  If it does, then I will skip putting down drip tape in future seasons and rely instead only on overhead irrigation until the crop sets buds, at which point all irrigation will cease so as not to damage the flower petals.  I have been trying to reduce plastic use around the farm, at least plastic that can’t be used for many seasons before being tossed.  Getting rid of drip tape would go a long way towards that goal!

Lesson 2:  Definitely put drip tape on top of the compost (not under) and as close to the young transplants as possible. 

Originally, we were placing the drip tape under the compost, thinking that would help the moisture get down to the soil better.  But then we damaged the tape a lot when planting, slicing into it with trowels/soil knives.  And, hearkening back to Lesson 1, it meant that the compost itself did not get moistened during irrigation, which meant it really became hydrophobic.  Not only did young transplants dry out and die as a result, but also whenever it rained, the water would just sheet off of the compost instead of infiltrating it.  By having the irrigation lines on top of the compost, it means the compost doesn’t get so hydrophobic. 

As with all types of farming, in no-till farming, keeping the irrigation lines as close to the young transplant as possible also means they truly get water right at the roots and irrigating can happen over a shorter period of time, thus conserving water.   

Lesson 3:  Up the planting density!!

Wow!  This may be the biggest eye-opener I’ve had with no-till farming.  I used to plant most of our annual crops (i.e., zinnias, cosmos, etc.) at 9” to 12” spacing.  That was recommended by the seed suppliers and all the reference books.  But that left a lot of bare soil for the weeds to grow up between the transplants.  Even when the zinnias got big, lots of sunlight was able to filter down into the soil, and weeds were still able to grow.  The soil also tended to dry out a lot because it was far more exposed to the sun’s rays. 

In doing research as I started down the path of no-till farming, I listened to the some no-till farming and regenerative farming podcasts that talked about planting density and how that could really be something more nuanced in a no-till farming system.  Nature really hates bare soil.  That’s why weeds grow!!  Anywhere we, as farmers and gardeners, do not plant, Nature is going to plant something for us in the form of a “weed”.   The reason for that lies in the symbiotic relation between plant roots and the soil web of life.  Photosynthesis in plants creates sugar exudates which the plants use to barter with the fungi in the soil for nutrients or  water the plants can not access themselves.  The fungi (and many other organisms) depend on the plant’s exudates (as well as the decaying root sheaths naturally shed as plants grow) for food.  It’s a win-win relationship that is fundamental to the functionality of our planet.  Thus, Nature is motivated to keep as many living roots in the soil as possible at all times.  Weeds are not “weeds”, but rather critical cafeterias for soil life.  If you don’t want what Nature plants (“weeds”), then you need to plant more of what you do want!

With that powerful bit of knowledge now in my brain, I’ve been experimenting with closer and closer planting density since my soil is becoming so much more robust without tillage.  Many of our annual flowering crops at the farm are now planted at 4” spacing!   At this density, the ground is quickly shaded, which reduces the number of weeds tremendously and the soil stays much more moist once the canopy is established.  And since the soil is being fed by so many living roots, the crops planted at greater density are actually much healthier, sturdier, and more productive!  Yield per square foot has vastly increased.  I had plans to expand the acreage of the farm by another acre in 2020, but am now sitting tight with the 3.25 acres we already have in production since no-till farming means we can put twice as much into the same amount of space as we were. 

Lesson 4:  Be cautious and thoughtful when using tarps!

Tarps, both clear and opaque, are an important tool talked about a lot and frequently used by many in no-till farming.  Tarps are used often to terminate cover crops and suppress weeds in a modified version of “stale bedding”.   I’ve struggled with tarps on both a practical level and on a philosophical level when it comes to no-till farming. 

I’ll start with the philosophical concern.  Given everything I wrote above about soil life and how Nature wants living roots in the soil at all times, tarps are directly counterproductive to all of that.  While many advocates for using tarps in no-till farming will say that the tarps don’t overheat the soil itself and that soil life will survive the time under the tarps, tarpping certainly has to cause serious stress on the soil web since it is robbing it of all sugar exudates from actively photosynthesizing plants.  Most no-till farming practitioners are using impervious tarps to exclude all sunlight from the plants they are trying to kill.  As such, the tarps are also excluding all rainfall from the soil, creating a near-instant desert.  No food and water, even if only for a few weeks, sounds like hell to me. 

As such, I’ve ceased to use tarps except to open up overgrown ground that is covered in large and intensive invasive species such as wild grapevine, multiflora rose, and Aralia spinosa.  I use tarps in this instance because the alternatives would be spraying a strong herbicide multiple times and/or tilling aggressively and repeatedly to weaken those tenacious plants. 

Now, instead of using big silage tarps for terminating cover crops or for “pausing” a bed if I’ve screwed up my timing somehow with transplants, I only use black woven landscape fabric, which is porous and allows water through to keep the soil moist.  A notable additional benefit is that the landscape fabric we use is 4’ wide, which makes it very easy to move around (versus the giant heavy tarps).  And, perhaps more importantly, we just cover the rows themselves rather than an entire swatch of the field, which means the soil life gets an emergency exit nearby in the remaining grass covered aisles to get away from the sudden change in their ecosystem.   

My goal is to never have the landscape fabric on a given row for more than 10 days.  My goal, surprisingly, is to NOT kill the cover crop under it, but rather just weaken it so that when we mulch over it with cardboard and compost to establish the bed for planting, it won’t have the life force to regrow, but it also wasn’t stone dead and therefore left the soil devoid of a food source for an extended period of time.   Additionally, the living (but slowly decaying because they’ve been greatly weakened) roots of the cover crop will “nurse” the baby transplant that we are planting.  The microorganisms that had bonded with the cover crop roots, since they haven’t been killed by aggressive tarpping, will still be there to “jump ship” to the new transplants, instantly giving them a support network to gather more nutrients and moisture than they would be able to all alone.

Lesson 5: Don’t remove the terminated crop’s root system when flipping a bed.  Plant new transplants right next to those old roots. 

Coupled with that sentiment above, we no longer rip out previous crops before planting new crops.  Instead, we simply cut down the old crop at the base (using hand-snips or a string trimmer depending on the crop), leaving the entire root system in the ground.  This means the soil is not disturbed at all.  Then we plant the new transplant right next to the roots of the old crop.  I’ve observed remarkably better transplant health and growth as a result (little-to-no shock).  And – bonus! – bed flipping is so much faster and a less backbreaking effort this way! 

Lesson 6:  Cover cropping has opened my eyes to the immense benefit of polycultures and intercropping.

I’ve got to do an entire blog post sometime on cover cropping, including which ones we use at the farm and exactly how I’ve come to easily terminate cover crops without any big equipment.  But that’s for another day. For now, I just want to mention that observing how much healthier the soil was after having a diverse mix of cover crops rather than just a singular cover crop (i.e., just winter rye versus winter rye, vetch, cow peas, and clover), I’ve come to really understand the immense benefit of polycultures and intercropping.   

I have been experimenting with intercropping more in the 2020 season, and I’m really loving the results.  One that I can confidently say has worked well since they’ve reach maturity and have been harvested is agrostemma interplanted (direct sown) with snapdragons (transplants).  I’ll be reporting on a few more that I’ve tried once I see how they yield.

And I’ve taken to direct sowing radish seeds into any beds where the transplants will be slow to put out a canopy of their own.  The crop I trialed this on the most this season was lisianthus, a infamously slow grower.  Intercropping with radishes (which were sown into the bed immediately after the lisianthus were transplanted) has been tremendously effective for reducing weeds in the beds and has also been fun to have a bit of food to harvest.  The radishes aren’t a cash crop for me at all; simply, I want them to create a big root that will then decay and release nutrients back into the soil as well as provide some quick canopy while the lisianthus are slowly puttering along.  I’m using regular red radishes (cheapest bulk organic seed I could find), not tillage radishes, which I think would be too big for intercropping with lisianthus in particular.  When the radishes start to bolt, we cut the leaves off at the base and have just left the radish bulb to rot in the ground.  I’ve never had better-looking lisianthus in my entire farming career and I’m so excited to see them bloom in just a week or two!!!

Lesson 7:  Most crops like a deep-mulch no-till system.  Some really don’t!

Another lesson learned the hard way.  Most of our flower crops thrive in the deep mulch system.  However, a few notably hated it and suffered a lot as a result!  Those were lisianthus, celosia, basil and eucalyptus.  The lisianthus is a bit of a mystery, but the other three make sense now that I thought it through.  They are heat loving crops that want warm soil.  When we created beds for them in 2019 with the deep compost mulch in May, the soil was still cool and the mulch over it meant that it stayed cool for a long time.  These heat lovers hated that and were very stunted. 

In 2020, to avoid this problem, I changed two things.  For beds that would be planted in heat-loving crops, I put black landscape fabric on them for 5 days prior to establishing the bed (before mulching even). The goal was to have the black fabric collect and trap heat to warm up the soil.  Then, immediately after removing the fabric, we put just 1” of compost on the bed (plus the cardboard) and planted right away.  The eucalyptus, celosia, lisianthus and basil are doing MUCH better this year as a result! 

Lesson 8:  Weeding definitely still needs to happen, but it’s much faster!

So there’s this notion that no-till farming means you won’t have weeds.  I’m here to testify that that is decidedly not true.  At least not in the first few seasons!  But what I can say is that the process of removing weeds is so much faster!!  A crew of three can now weed over an acre in one afternoon now that we are no-till farming! 

I see two reasons for this increase in weeding efficiency:  1) with the dark compost on the bed, we can much more easily see the weeds than we would if the soil was tilled and light brown so we can zip along rather mindlessly.  2) Weeds pull up much easier out of the loose compost on top of cardboard than out of our formally very compacted clay/loam dirt. Especially things like crab grass and dandelion! 

And while there are still a lot of weeds at the farm, I have noticed a substantial decrease in crab grass, which used to be one of our biggest “bad guys”.  Tilling would chop up crab grass into a million little pieces that could propagate to become new clumps.  Crab grass also loves depleted compacted soils.  So with tilling out the picture and the soil loose and loamy with life, the crab grass is dwindling.  Hooray!

So, there you have it:  Eight important observations for anyone starting out on their no-till farming journey.  Please feel free to share some of your own observations here in the Regenerative Flower Farmers Network so we can all learn together!  #NoToLowTillPractices

Recently I was remembering back to 2009 as I was going into my second growing season as a flower farmer.  I just had a tiny community garden plot that year that totaled a grand 1,682 square feet. But from that garden, I managed to grow enough flowers to go to two farmers markets a week that year and to do my first handful of weddings. I remember how hard I worked on mapping out that garden because Every. Single. Inch. mattered.  It was there that I put in my first perennial bulbs for cut flower production.

Since space was precious, I was conflicted about adding perennials. I also wasn’t sure how long I’d be in that particular garden plot; I wanted very much to find a larger space to farm (and did the next year). But, because I’m a plant nerd who covets unusual stuff, I decided that year to take a leap of faith and place my first big order for perennials from North Creek Nurseries. I remember their minimum order requirement was $300 back then, and I was sweating bullets writing the check in their office when I picked up the plants.  I have to confess that I laugh at myself now, looking back, knowing how invaluable that purchase was for my business and how small that expense was in the grand scheme of this farm’s history.  I’ve probably spent more than $30,000 on perennials by now!

I decided to put together this quick list of my five favorite perennial bulbs for cut flower production because bulbs are usually a bit more affordable than, say, fancy peonies or big shrubs.  Bulbs are a good place to start if you’re just dipping your toes into cut flower production and you want to add some perennials.  They generally can be planted fairly close together and will produce for many seasons.

Five Favorite Perennial Bulbs for Cut Flowers

1. Narcissus

This one is probably not much of a surprise as so many of flower farmers now grow specialty narcissus. And for good reason. They are deer-proof (hallelujah!), fragrant, nostalgic harbingers of spring that let many flower farmers enter the market place earlier than they might otherwise be able. They tolerate being planted under deciduous trees so you can use otherwise marginal space for flower growing. They naturalize and multiply if you give them space and put them where foot/machine traffic is light so they can just do their thing. They store well for a long time if picked in goose-neck stage and kept in a cooler. And bulbs are typically readily available and affordable. The only downside is the sap the cut stems ooze. But just be sure to wear gloves when harvesting and don’t mix the freshly harvested bunches with any other flowers in your buckets. After 24 hours, you can mix narcissus stems into mixed bouquets or arrangements, just don’t cut the stems again so sap doesn’t start oozing again. Three of my favorite varieties of narcissus are ‘Prosecco’, ‘Acropolis’, and ‘Obdam’.

2. Muscari

I have to make a confession. I’m utterly obsessed with these dainty, diminutive darlings that come in sky blue, white, blush and navy. I also have to confess that they aren’t a good crop for all flower farmers. They’re really only useful if you are a farmer-florist such as myself or if you are selling to event designers. Topping out at 8” usually, the stems of most muscari are far too short for anything other than delicate wearables or short vase designs. But they are so very useful if you are indeed designing boutonnieres, corsages, bud vases and other littles. They come into bloom right in the heart of spring wedding season, and I’d be lost without them. Bulbs are CHEAP! And they naturalize if you make sure to put them somewhere they won’t get stomped on when they aren’t in bloom. You can also easily grow them in crates. One crate can hold about 80 bulbs if you pack them in. Try some and I’m betting you’ll join me in my obsession!

3. Leucojum

Another spring favorite that is phenomenal to have if you’re a farmer-florist or selling to designers is Leucojum aestivum, or Giant Snowdrop. Cute white bells dangle from tall, straight stems, making you think it’s an oversized lily of the valley (it’s not). They are incredibly easy to work into spring bouquets where they add a real touch of elegance. L. aestivum pair perfectly with Icelandic poppies, tulips, and hellebores. Their bloom period is pretty long for a spring bulb since they shoot up several stems per plant. Bonus: they naturalize like bunny rabbits when they are happy. At this point, I have more than I know what to do with, but I’m not complaining! They’re just as endearing left in the landscape as they are in the vase. One important note about leucojum is that they too ooze sap like narcissus so handle them the same way as I described above.

4. Fritillaria

Ah, the much sought-after Fritillaria! In particular, Fritillaria persica, has been making waves in the designer world for the past few seasons. Stems can fetch as much as $28 each in the New York City market!! Holy moly!! But the bulbs are pricey (up to $8 each depending on your supplier), can be short-lived if you don’t know how to treat them, and usually only put up one nice stem their first year in the ground. All of which makes the cost of this particular fritillaria as a cut flower high. However, if you can get them to perennialize at your farm and you have a high-end clientele, you’ll have yourself a real golden goose. The trick to keeping F. persica happy is to plant the big fat bulb on its side in very well-draining soil. The bulb is very prone to rotting and there’s a hollow spot in the tip of the bulb that catches too much moisture if you plant it straight up and down. Laying it on its side helps circumvent rot. My F. persica bulbs are five years old now and they’ve actually started to self-seed around their beds so I’ve got lots more than the 100 I started with originally.

There are two other Fritillaria species worth noting, though I don’t grow either as a perennial. F. melegaris is a diminutive cousin to F. persica, beloved by designers for the checkered pattern on its nodding bell-shaped head. Bulbs are cheap and it’s worth treating them as an annual if they don’t take hold as perennials for you.  And F. imperialis is a stately, exotic-looking bloom that may tempt you as a cut, but its skunky smell usually puts most people off.

5. Formosa Lily

My new favorite perennial, blub or otherwise!!! I have to thank Mandy and Steve at 3 Porch Farm, long-time flower friends, for introducing me and many others to the fantastic Formosa Lily (Lilium formosanum)! Super easy to grow from seed, Formosa Lily is a stately and robust perennial that blooms in late August and early September, just when a clean white bloom is most welcomed after the tiring dog-days of summer. If you can resist cutting all the flowers, you’ll be rewarded with really striking seed pods later in the fall too. If that wasn’t enough to entice you, this lily also seems adapted to grow well in part shade, which is where mine have naturalized freely over the past two years. After getting established for a season or two, plants start sending up several stems each. The fragrance is a very light perfume that does not overpower the nose like many lilies, but does frequently lure people to lean in for a sniff.

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Did you notice the list didn’t include tulips? That’s because we do not perennialize our tulips here at Love ‘n Fresh Flowers. They are grown as an annual and we plant fresh bulbs every autumn so we get the most vigorous and vibrant blooms possible.

I was recently asked to chat “on the record” about my use of living walkways at the farm over on No-Till Growers podcast.  In preparation for that, I jotted down some notes on a discarded brown-paper bouquet sleeve while I ate my (always hurried) lunch and then realized this would make a good blog post.  

Before we can really dive into five reasons to have living walkways on a small farm, we have to address the alternatives to living walkways. Other options for maintaining the walkways on a small farm are to cultivate aisles regularly, to mulch pathways heavily, or to lay down large swaths of plastic/landscape fabric, all in the name of suppressing weeds and making life “easier” on the farmer. But I’d like to challenge those approaches and ask you to consider putting in living walkways at your small farm (or home garden).

5 Reasons to Have Living Walkways at Your Small Farm

1) Living Walkways on a Small Farm Feed the Soil

Unlike the alternatives (listed above), having living walkways means there are living roots in the ground which ultimately feed your farm or garden’s soil. Weeds pop up in walkways because Nature always (ALWAYS!!!) wants something growing on every centimetre of soil surface because ultimately the vast universe of life under the ground is highly dependent on the life above the soil. Roots from plants, be it “weeds” or your desired vegetation, give off sugar exudates and sloth off “skin” that feed all the microorganisms in the soil. In exchange, those hardworking little soil guys mine minerals and draw up water for the plants. It’s a beautiful barter system! Farmers who support this magnificent trade route going all the way from plant leaf tips down to fungi and vertebrates in the soil will see an increase in production and a healthier ecosystem at their farm.

The above is in contrast to the other ways of managing walkways that leave barren strips of “desert” between your planting beds, which makes it challenging for soil life to migrate and thrive. When you’re microscopic in size, crossing two feet of the Sahara wouldn’t be top on your list of things to do on the weekend, right?

2) Living Walkways on a Small Farm Reduce Runoff

Picture a torrential summer rainstorm. Now picture your walkways between planting beds while those buckets of water fall down out of the sky. If you have landscape fabric down, those walkways become gutters gushing with rainwater hurrying off your field. Do you really want rainwater leaving your field? I sure don’t! All that runoff also overburdens local waterways and may take too many nutrients with it, polluting the water.

If you have cultivated aisles instead, you’ll likely loose a lot of soil with the runoff and your plants will get splashed with a lot of mud, making your job harder when it comes to processing for market. Also, the impact of all those rain drops will create even more compaction in your soil.

Mulched aisles are pretty decent at mitigating some of the problems created by landscape fabric and cultivated aisles during heavy rain. But, the downside of mulch is that mulch itself can get washed away in a heavy downpour. D’oh!

Living walkways create a naturally absorbent surface that’s attached to the ground by the roots so it’s not going to wash away. Those roots also hold all the soil in place during the downpour so you don’t loose a single aggregate. And all that rich soil life I mentioned in Reason 1 is quick to soak up the rain water and provide an absorbent sponge that will slowly release water back to your crops’ roots as they need it over the coming days. Team work makes the dream work!

3) Living Walkways on a Small Farm Are Relatively Easy to Maintain

So, when I mention living walkways to other farmers, the major gripe I hear is about how hard it is to maintain them. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s a myth! I’d much rather pull out my push mower once a week and spend about 30 minutes zipping up and down the walkways than I would spreading a lot of heavy mulch, scuffling with a hoe, or pulling weeds out of landscape fabric (when they ultimately show up in the heat of July, which they always do).

The key to maintaining living walkways on a small farm with relative ease is to be consistent with your mowing routine. We mow once a week, religiously, at my farm. We’ve created aisles that are 21” in width, which is the exact width of the push mower. We use a mulching push mower with an adjustable height deck and strong (for a push mower) engine. Sharpening the blades a few times a season really helps too. With this system, mowing the aisles is a breeze.

But word to the wise: NEVER SKIP A WEEK OF MOWING!

4) Living Walkways on a Small Farm Provide a Cooling Effect

In the world of small-scale flower farming, carpeting an entire field in landscape fabric somehow became a big trend. Perhaps this works well if your farm is in a cool temperate climate. But here in Hades-hot and rivaling-the-tropics-humid Philadelphia, all that black landscape fabric turns into a frying pan on a bright sunny day. Even cultivated or mulched walkways tend to create a heat sink, particularly if your soil is dark or you’re using a dark compost for mulch.

In contrast, the green of the living walkways creates a cooling effect that brings down the overall temperature of your field by a few degrees. You’ll appreciate that and your crops will appreciate it too!

5) Living Walkways on a Small Farm Beautify the Farm

Well, this one is pretty straight forward but one that is very much worth mentioning. I’ve tried other systems for walkways and none have made me feel quite so happy to be at my farm as living walkways have. It just feels natural, you know?

So now that I’ve hopefully gotten you thinking about creating living walkways on a small farm of your own, here are a few tips/thoughts to help you along the (walk)way.

• If you’re starting from scratch with bare soil, sow clover seed to start. In my experience, the clover won’t hold its own for very long, but it at least gets something growing on your soil surface to discourage any truly beastly weeds from showing up and hogging all the space. Eventually the “native” grass just took over our walkways here and that’s been great!

• As I mentioned above, but I’ll repeat: mow religiously once a week! Even when your walkways are just getting established and the vegetation is patchy, run that mower real quick and get in the habit.

• Make your walkways the width of the mower you plan to use. For us, that means 21” for the narrow walkways between our annual beds and 60” for the wide grassy aisles in our woodies/shrubs field. Make sure your mower(s) are a fairly standard size because eventually they’ll wear out and you want to be able to easily get a new one that matches your walkways perfectly.

• Use a MULCHING push mower for narrow walkways. Mulching mowers drop the clippings straight down on the ground rather than spitting it out the side and dirtying your crops. Mulching mowers are usually a little bit more expensive because they need a stronger motor but it’s absolutely worth investing in one.

• Living walkways work in beautiful harmony with deep-mulch no-till planting beds. We’re able to run the mower right up to the edge of the bed without fear of catching landscape fabric in the blades. It’s easy to pull creeping grasses off the deep-mulch no-till beds and lay them out in the walkway for the mower to zip over to quickly terminate them. When you have landscape fabric on beds and living walkways, the creeping grass (i.e., crabgrass) can get really ensnared in the fabric and even when you get it off the fabric, you can’t run a mower along the edge because the fabric will catch. So, yep, big thumbs up for a deep-mulch no-till system in this regards (and many others)!

So, who’s going to consider living walkways on their small farm after reading this? Hands in the air!

The soil in hoop houses typically gets very depleted over many years of crop production and revitalizing hoop house soils becomes a necessary focus as a farm matures.  There are two unheated hoop houses at Love ‘n Fresh Flowers, both Gothic-style and measuring 24’ x 48’, giving us a little over 2,300 square feet under cover.  The one house has been in production for nine seasons and the other for seven. 

One of my hoop houses is dedicated to perennial foliage crops like eucalyptus and rosemary and is the prop house in spring; that house has been cranking for many years with little fuss or input. Each fall I put a layer of fresh leaves on the beds in that house, but otherwise not much goes into them since the plants are well-established with deep root systems that are able to mine their own minerals and moisture over the seasons. 

The other house is what I call my “Spring House”, with production being primarily focused on early spring blooms like ranunculus, anemones, poppies, campanula, sweet peas, stock, and snapdragons.  Getting these flowers to harvest-stage in late March means Love ‘n Fresh Flowers is primed to provide florals for the popular spring wedding season here in Philadelphia, which runs April through June.  If you haven’t already, be sure to grab a copy of Cool Flowers by flower farming guru, Lisa Mason Zeigler, to learn how to do maximize fall plantings for early spring blooms at your farm too.

It is this second hoop house that is the focus of this article.  After seven seasons in production, I noticed a decided degradation in the soil, a marked increase in disease, and a frustratingly robust pest population in this house.  Of those seven seasons in production, I had been tilling the soil for six. Because the house was such “valuable real estate”, I had neglected to give it any downtime for cover cropping or rest. Organic matter was low at 3% and the pH had creeped up.   

In the early spring of 2019, the ranunculus in particular were a tragedy with massive amounts of root rot and an infestation of aphids.  While it might be tempting to just purchase and apply formulated fungicides and pesticides to combat these issues, I realized those would be merely band-aids.  The real problem was the soil.  Without balanced and healthy soil for their foundation, the crops would continue to languish despite all the sprays I might use (for the record, we have never used any types of synthetic sprays here at Love ‘n Fresh Flowers). 

The challenge with revitalizing hoop house soils is that you must take the hoop house “offline” to make any serious progress.  A hoop house not in production would make many a farmer anxious.  It’s prime real estate and some of the best money-making square footage on most small farms.  But there comes a time when you can’t keep putting off the project of revitalizing hoop house soils.  The key is to have a really solid game plan in place and make the most of your efforts!  Many farmers will just take the “skin” (plastic) off a house and let it sit open to the elements for a summer, which does help leach out the salts.  But you can do a lot more than that to renew the life and balance in your hoop house soil!

Steps Taken at Love ‘n Fresh Flowers to Revitalize Hoop House Soils

These steps were taken over the course of the 2019 growing season.  Cash crops (ranunculus, anemones, sweet peas, stock, campanula, and snapdragons) were removed in late May and then those same cash crops were replanted in early November.  The process described below took a little over five months. 

After removing the cash crops in late May, all irrigation and other crop infrastructure was removed from the hoop house beds to create a blank slate.  Any large weeds were pulled and removed from the house.  The soil was broad-forked. 

Buckwheat seed was broadcast across the entire surface of the soil in the hoop house to be a quick-turn cover crop.  A metal rake was used to scratch the seed into the surface and it was watered in with a hose.  This was Round 1 of buckwheat.

Buckwheat is a fantastic cover crop for so many reasons. It germinates easily from broadcasting (versus some cover crops need a seeding implement such as a drill seeder).  It is cheap.  It grows very rapidly so it outcompetes any weeds.  Its rapid growth (a full stand will grow in just over 30 days during the heat of summer!) also means it can be planted when there is not much of a window for a cover crop.  It thrives in our hot summers here.  It is a tremendously beneficial plant for pollinators who are attracted to the multitude of little white buckwheat flowers.  Because it is so tender and succulent, it’s very easy to terminate with just a push mower (excellent for no-till/no-tractor farmers). And it has great root system that loosens the soil as it decays after termination (also great for no-till/no-tractor farmers).  All of this added up to buckwheat being the perfect cover crop choice for revitalizing hoop house soils during the summer months. 

If I were trying to do this process during cooler months, I would have used a mustard and daikon mix.  The added benefit of those two would be that they have biofumigant properties that would help with suppressing disease build up.  If disease becomes an issue again in my hoop house, I will cover cropped it during some cooler months to get at least one round of mustard in there.  But since revitalizing my hoop house soils during the 2019 summer, the disease issues seem to be a lot better. 

After Round 1 of buckwheat had gone to flower, but prior to it setting seed, I used my walk-behind string trimmer to chop the buckwheat down at the base.  I broadcast another round of buckwheat seed throughout the house and then gave it a good soaking with the hose.  Within a few days, Round 2 of buckwheat was germinated and pushing through the old buckwheat debris.  At this point it was late June. 

Round 3 of buckwheat was sown in late July after Round 2 was terminated.  Same process as described above.  Round 3 of buckwheat was then terminated in early September. 

After chopping down Round 3 of buckwheat, it was time to move forward in the process.  The buckwheat had helped to fight weeds in the house all summer.  The three rounds of finely-networked buckwheat root systems had created substantial biomass in the soil that was now breaking down rapidly to feed the microbiology that was (hopefully) multiplying in the soil now that The Rule of Return (more on this later) had been followed.  The buckwheat also mined a lot of minerals during its trio of growth cycles that were also being put back into the soil ecosystem. 

The next step was to get all that plant debris from “the summer of buckwheat” to break down without having to till it into the soil.  After using a hose to wet down ground for about 15 minutes, we pulled tarps across the entire interior of the hoop house, all the way to the edges.  This tarping over moist soil in the warm hoop house created a highly digestive state under the tarps, which churned up all the remaining plant material from the buckwheat in just three short weeks!  It also killed any weeds that might have managed to thread their way through the summer of buckwheat.  

At this point, it is late September. Next up was compost and amendments.  We removed the tarps and broadcast an assortment of soil amendments that were chosen based on soil testing results.  Included in these amendments were agaronite, granular humates, worm castings, sulfur, and soil mineralizer.  Your soil will likely need something different than mine so be sure to get a detailed soil test. I recommend Waypoint Analytical for that. After the amendments were broadcast on the soil surface, we brought in some high-quality, well-aged compost.  A thick layer of compost (about four inches) was spread across the entire hoop house.  We used wheelbarrows rather than a tractor as I did not want to compact the soil after working so hard to revitalize it!

The next step is optional:  Because the environment in a hoop house can be quite arid (no rain), high salinity is a potential challenge if growing intensively in a hoop house over several seasons, especially if the farm is using synthetic fertilizers or mushroom compost (notorious for high salts).  My farm has never used synthetic fertilizers or mushroom compost so the salinity level in the soil here was really pretty good (.43).  But since I know it is recommended to remove the skin from a house every so often to let the rain in, I figured now was a good time to simulate a heavy rain event by running a sprinkler in the house for 48 hours straight.  If you have a soil salinity reading of more than 1.25 (using a 1:2 testing model), you’ll want to be sure to incorporate this step during the process of revitalizing your hoop house soils. 

After letting the house dry out for about a week after running the sprinkler, it was time to layout the beds and get ready to plant.  Having learned from my mistakes over the years, we were very diligent this time about measuring out the beds precisely and marking them with permanent short corner stakes pounded securely into the ground and tomato twine run on the ground around the boundary of each bed.  This has been superbly helpful in making sure we are not stepping into beds and whenever adding amendments now we know precisely where to put them.  Wish I had been this careful the first time I laid out this house!! 

With the beds clearly defined, prior to laying drip tape, we broad-forked the beds once more.  Then we laid the drip tape: five lines per 36” bed (six inches between the lines).  The drip tape doubles as a planting guide so we know planting is straight within the rows.  The third week of October we planted flowers once again (ranunculus, campanula, snapdragons, etc) to grow through the winter and bloom in the spring.  After the beds were planted and the transplants were growing nicely, in December I spread a thin later of mulched leaves on all the beds for a little extra microbial boost.  I also thickly mulched all the walkways with leaves so no weeds will come through.  

So there you have it!  A process for revitalizing hoop house soils.  And it really worked here!  The soil in this house, previously pulverized, compacted and uninspiring, has been fluffy and full of life ever since!  Where there was a hard pan just a few inches down and planting was a real chore, now it’s easy to sink a probe 12” or more into the soil!  The crops are healthy and the pest pressure has gone way down, though some credit should likely be given to having adopted Korean Natural Farming (KNF) practices too.  Another topic for another info-packed blog post in the future!  In the meantime, be sure to listen to the No-Till Flowers Podcast if you haven’t already, particularly the episode with Tony from Bare Mountain Farm for more info on KNF.   

All photos in this post are property of Love ‘n Fresh Flowers.  Do not use without written permission. 

 #HoopHousesProduction

Since the launch of the No-Till Flowers podcast, I keep hearing from listeners about how the show is helping them feel less intimidated by regenerative farming concepts.  Each new episode seems to be explaining another piece of the puzzle by breaking down a big scary system into digestible bites.  I remember feeling pretty overwhelmed by all the regenerative farming “stuff” that came when I first started doubting conventional ag approaches. 

Just the idea of never taking my tractor and tiller through my planting beds again nearly blew the top of my head off.  But once I got comfortable with that idea and saw that no-till cropping really did worked, I hit another big stumbling block when it came to turning my back on commercially produced “inputs” (fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, etc).  I remember first reading about this radical idea in the book Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown.  He wrote about how he’d stopped using fertilizers on his farm/ranch years ago (it was either that or go bankrupt!) and the soil has just gotten better and better since.  That’s absolutely counter to everything any traditionally educated farmer is taught.  Mind swirling in confusion, soon after Gabe’s book, I started reading about Korean Natural Farming (KNF) and another variation of that called JADAM.  The basic premise of both is that a farmer can – and should – rely on his or her own local ecosystem to self-produce mineral and biological inputs for their farm’s soils and crops.  Terms like “close the loop”, “zero waste”, and “cradle to grave” all hint at this very same mantra. 

But why go to all that extra work when you can just buy bags of nitrogen or a formulated spray to zap whatever ails your crop?  First, buying in your inputs is an added cost to production.  Many farmers spend massive amount of money on buying fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and other inputs every growing season.  In contrast, you can make your own inputs for pennies per application instead.  Second, by making your own, you are self-reliant; free from a system that depends on Big Ag and perpetual commercialization that asks farmers to keep spending more money on newer and bigger products.  Third (and most important to me), by using building blocks from the local ecosystem, you can make farm inputs that are in step with your farm’s natural biology.  Rather than truck something in from across the country or even the globe, which is for all intents and purposes alien to your farm’s ecology, you will instead be using that which naturally exists in the space. 

It is this last point that so closely aligns making your own KNF inputs with the broader scope of “regenerative farming”.  To heal broken ground, reinvigorate life, and amplify soil’s innate ability to sequester carbon, we had best do that with what nature intended, rather than dumping lots of foreign material onto the land.  It just make makes sense when you think about it. 

In an effort to help anyone feeling befuddled or intimidated by making their own farm inputs – a  la KNF style –  I wanted to put together a three part blog series with recipes for three easy-to-make and highly-effective homemade regenerative inputs I use regularly at my own farm.  We’ll start here with Leaf Mold Tea, my favorite! 

For the record, I did not dream up any of these recipes for inputs on my own.  They are all fundamental to KNF and JADAM.  I relied on several sources to get going, including Nigel Palmer’s book, Chris Trump’s website, the JADAM handbook, and Bare Mountain Farm’s YouTube channel. I have tweaked all those formulas a tiny bit to suit my own needs, much like adapting a recipe from a cookbook to your own taste. 

LEAF MOLD TEA
Also known at JADAM Microbial Solution (JMS) or Leaf Mold Biology 

Goal: To gather the abundant microbiology of a healthy nearby forest soil, multiply it, and spread it around your farm or garden to increase the soil web there. 

This is the input I’ve rely on most heavily for bringing biology to my tired soils. Wherever there might be compaction on your farm or if a given planting bed has been prone to root diseases in heavy wet soils, try a drench of Leaf Mold Tea. It can make quite a difference rather rapidly by introducing what I like to visualize as a herd of microscopic Pac-Mans racing around the soil, gobbling up bad buys and making tunnels for air. 

“Leaf mold” is the dark textural loamy material that is on the forest floor when you brush aside the recently fallen leaves. It often can look like worm castings. In a healthy forest, there should be several inches of this “black gold” before you might reach the native soil underneath. Use your hand to scoop some up into a plastic sealable bag while out on a hike. Thank the forest for its gift. Treat it with reverence. This leaf mold contains billions of lives you are now asking to come with you to help your farm thrive. 

Leaf Mold Tea should be made when night temperatures are above 40F. Biology builds in the tea best at a temperature around 70-75F. Because of this, I typically make and apply Leaf Mold Tea in the late spring, summer, and early fall. But I have made it in my hoop house this winter, using a seed heat mat under the bucket and Agribon 19 frost blanket draped loosely over the bucket to create a nice heat pocket. It developed very slowly at this temperature, but it still worked. 

Ingredients

1 cup of leaf mold soil
1 medium (think “lemon-sized”) organic white or red potato, boiled
1 tablespoon of fine sea salt
4 gallons of rain water or water from the tap that has been left to sit for 24 hours in advance* 

Tools

5 gallon bucket
2 fine mesh bags made of cheese cloth or similar (you can also use old socks in a pinch)
2 small rocks
Florist wire or similar
Wide wooden plank or sturdy piece of cardboard big enough to cover the bucket 

To Make:

Place the leaf mold soil in one of the mesh bags along with one of the small rocks. In the other mesh bag, place the boiled potato and the other small rock. 

Working near where you’ll want to ultimately use the resulting Leaf Mold Tea, put 4 gallons of rain water (or tap water that’s sat overnight) in the bucket. Thread the florist wire across the top of the bucket, from one side to the other, securing it firmly so it will make a sturdy “clothesline” from which to suspend your mesh bags in the water without letting them sink to the bottom. 

Add the sea salt to the water and swish it around to get it to dissolve. Now secure the mesh bags to the wire “clothesline” at the top of the bucket, making sure they will stay suspended in the water about halfway down into the bucket. You may want to use a clothes pin, additional wire, a zip tie, or likewise to fasten the mesh bags to the wire if they don’t want to stay put. 

Once the mesh bags are in the water, take the bag that contains the potato in your hands (holding it below the water still) and smash it up so that the water turns cloudy with the potato starch. This is food for the microbes so they can multiple! Next, massage the bag with the leaf mold a bit until the water turns brown, ensuring water is penetrating well into the leaf mold. 

Place the wooden board or cardboard over the bucket’s mouth to keep out rain or any marauding animals. Maybe put a rock on top too just to be safe. But don’t seal the bucket! The mixture inside needs plenty of air as it is full of life! 

Check the bucket every day. The process can take anywhere from 2-6 days in my experience, but it varies greatly with air temperature. In warmer weather, the process goes quickly. In cold weather, it moves more slowly. So it’s best just to keep a keen eye on it. What you are looking for is a thin foam of fine bubbles to develop on the surface of the water. The foam will start in small patches but eventually spread to cover the entire surface. When the foam reaches the outer edges of the bucket, your leaf mold tea is ready. Use it immediately after the bubbles fully cover the surface because the biology will start to die from that point forward. You can not store Leaf Mold Tea! 

To Use:

Remove the mesh bags. Use a stick to stir the contents of the bucket briefly so biology is evenly distributed in it. I like to use watering cans to then apply the leaf mold tea to soil. 

For a two gallon watering can, I add one pint of leaf mold tea and then fill the can the rest of the way with plain water.  You can dilute the tea more or less as desired.  I like to apply the tea drench to already-moist soil, so either after a rain or on freshly irrigated beds.  

Use the watering can to drench the soil wherever you are hoping to add more biology, combat compaction, improved drainage or address root rot issues. After you finish applying the Leaf Mold Tea, go back over the bed with a hose to make sure it’s well soaked and to “push” the biology deeper into the soil so it’ll be safe from drying out and dying.  

Leaf Mold Tea is also a great input for your lagging compost pile if you want to get it churning more quickly.  

I use Leaf Mold Tea a couple times a year in my hoop houses in particular to keep the soil life humming in there and break up long-standing compaction.  I also like to apply this to my perennialized dahlia beds in the spring or fall so the microbes can work on the mulch residue and help loosen the soil that has settled around the tubers over the seasons.  

Leaf Mold Tea may also be used as a foliar application to combat pathogens.  I have not personally done this, but it is indicated in several reference books. 

*Note: If you are on municipal water, you’ll want to make sure you draw enough water out into buckets 24 hours ahead of time to let it off gas any chlorine that would harm the biology in the leaf mold tea. This includes the water you’ll use in the watering cans for the drench. 

If you are more of a visual learner, go check out this video by Bare Mountain Farm about making JMS (which is what I call Leaf Mold Tea). Tony does it a little differently than me, but it’s all the same idea and he’s great at explaining the process. 

#NaturalHomemadeFarmInputs

>UPDATES<

This article was first written/posted January 2021.  I’ve learned a lot about natural inputs since then.  I became certified in JADAM in 2022 and have done a fair amount of analysis on WCA in particular, with the help of soil scientist Bryant Mason.  

With that in mind, here are some important updates to this article:

The type of eggs you use are very important.  The calcium content in the eggshells directly correlates with how much calcium you’ll be able to extract.  Use shells from the best quality eggs you can… free range, organic, brown eggs from a brand like Vital Farms (if you don’t have your own flock) is the best choice.  Eggs that are hard to crack are eggs that have a lot of calcium in the shell.  Eggs that crack and almost crumble with the slightest tap have very little calcium. 

The ratio of eggshells to vinegar should be higher.  The KNF handbook calls for a ration of 1 part eggshells to 10 parts vinegar.  After lots of experimentation and analysis, I have adjusted my own recipe to use a lot more eggshells in a batch.  Now I fill a glass jar 3/4 of the way full of crushed toasted eggshells.  Then I add enough vinegar to just cover the shells.  There will be excessive foaming so be sure to place the jar in the sink for the first hour or so.  With this ratio, you will get a much higher calcium content in your WCA and a better pH of around 5.9 (which is perfect for foliar fertilizers).

Toast the eggshells on a baking sheet in the oven. Rather than using a skillet, I now toast up big batches of eggshells in the oven at 200F for 30-40 minutes. I toast whole shells on a baking tray lined with parchment paper.  When they’re out of the oven and cool afterwards, I put a baking tray n top of the first tray and push down hard to break the shells into small pieces.  This is much quicker and easier to clean up than using the skillet. 

Increase the rate of use.  The KNF handbook said that WCA should be used at a rate of about 1 teaspoon per gallon of water.  However, after careful analysis and experimentation, I’ve increased the rate to 1 Tablespoon per gallon of water for foliar feeding and sometimes up to 5 tablespoons per gallon for fertigation/soil amendment.  Cut flowers need a lot of calcium and using WCA at a rate of 1T/gallon aligns with the suggested rate of synthetic liquid calcium feeds on the market.  

Here’s a link to a podcast episode with Bryant Mason where we discussed the calcium content in WCA.  

Continue reading for the original article…. 

Making Eggshell Extract or WCA

Last week I started a little blog series on easy homemade regenerative inputs for your farm by explaining what leaf mold tea – or “JMS” a la JADAM – is as well as how to make and use it.  Leaf mold tea is great for boosting the amount of biological life (bacteria, protozoa, fungus, etc) in your soil and ultimately helping loosen it up if it has been compacted from tillage or has poor drainage.  That’s what we refer to as a “biostimulant”.  But leaf mold tea does not add any nutrition to your soil (i.e., minerals/fertilizer).

Today I want to introduce you to one of my favorite homemade regenerative inputs for adding a vital mineral nutrient to your soil: calcium extracted from eggshells.  This input comes straight out of the Korean Natural Farming (KNF) handbook, where it is referred to as WCA (shorthand for Water-Soluble Calcium).  Or, if you are not that into acronyms (and boy are there are lot of acronyms in the world of KNF and JADAM!), you can just call it eggshell extract.  I love it because it is SO easy and it makes all my spent eggshells feel really useful (big egg-eating household over here!). 

Calcium is critical to the formation of strong cell walls in plants as well as helping to facilitate the absorption of other minerals and nutrients to ensure disease resistance and healthy growth. It’s particularly important at the seed and bud stage of a plant’s lifecycle.  Calcium helps seeds break dormancy to germinate.  And calcium helps buds form properly.  If your flower crops do not have access to enough soluble calcium, the stems of your flowers will be weak and buds may be aborted.  A prime example of this that many flower farmers will know is split stems on anemones, which is one of the reasons I started using the WCA eggshell extract in the first place!

Calcium also plays a critical role in soil structure, helping push soil particles apart for better aeration and drainage.  You will want to make sure to soil test regularly (I soil test each August at my farm) so you can keep an eye on mineral levels.  Make sure the soil lab/test you choose will do a full spectrum on minerals, not just the macro nutrients, NPK.  For calcium, look for about 68% saturation in your soil.  A little more or a little less is not cause for concern, but major deviations should be addressed.  

In certain parts of my farm, there is only 47% saturation of calcium and the soil there is “tight” with poor drainage.  Adding WCA eggshell extract is slowly helping to loosen them up.  I’ve also found drenching chickweed infested beds with eggshell extract WCA (and chickweed JLF) is one way to fight this weed that is there to mine calcium from the subsoil to add it to the top soil as nature tries to bring soil into balance through species successioning.  By adding the eggshell extract, I seem to have been able to help nature skip ahead and the chickweed died out.  But more on that later…

One thing I did not know when I first started using eggshell extract around the farm was that calcium is taken into plants almost exclusively via transpiration.  It is not very mobile when applied to plant tissue itself.  In other words, it is best to use WCA eggshell extract as a soil drench at the roots of the plant rather than a foliar feed sprayed onto the leaves.  That being said, I have used it regularly as part of my routine foliar feed for dahlias when they reach bud stage and it seems to still be effective.  Several respected resources for KNF reference using it in foliar sprays as well.  So just consider your objective when using it in order to choose the best delivery method; when in doubt, just use it as a drench. 

One other note here:  Tony of Bare Mountain Farm, who has continually and generously mentored me in KNF practices, recently mentioned that I might want to try another variation of this extract process that uses charred bones rather than eggshells so the resulting liquid would contain both calcium and phosphorous, which is even better for plants in the flowering stage of growth.  I have not tried this preparation myself yet (somehow bones scare me <shrugs>), but Tony has a great video on it here that you can check out if you’re curious.

EGGSHELL EXTRACT or WCA

Goal: To extract the calcium in eggshells and suspend it in a liquid soluble form that can then be applied to the soil as a drench or used in a foliar feed when plants are in bud. Helps strengthen weak stems and loosens compacted soils, among other things.

Ingredients
Eggshells (try starting with a dozen; scale up or down as desired after that)
Organic raw apple cider vinegar or organic brown rice vinegar  (about quart if you’re using a dozen eggs)

Tools
Large glass jar, such as a quart or gallon canning jar
Paper towel or cheese cloth
Large rubber band

To Make:

Place the eggshells in a heavy skillet over medium heat to start.  Use the back of a spatula to crush the shells up into smaller pieces.  No need to go crazy with crushing at this stage.  Just break them up so heat gets around all the pieces more evenly.  After about four or five minutes on medium heat, lower the heat to low and put a lid on the skillet.  Let the shells sit on low heat until they are toasted golden brown.  This usually takes about 10-12 minutes, but sometimes I walk away and get busy and they’re on the stove for 30 minutes and it doesn’t seem to matter.

Turn off the heat and let cool completely.  Once cool, crush the eggshells into even smaller pieces. You can do this with the back of the spatula again or you can put the shells into the glass jar, screw on the lid tightly, and give them a real good shake.  Just don’t add the vinegar yet!!

After the eggshells are toasted and placed in the bottom of the jar, it’s time to add the vinegar.  You are looking for a ratio of 1 part eggshells to 10 parts vinegar.  To give you some idea, a dozen medium-sized eggshells usually is a good amount for a quart-sized jar to achieve that 1:10 ratio.  Slowly pour the vinegar over the eggshells, stopping about halfway in case there’s a quick chemical reaction that creates super fizz.  Once you’re sure nothing crazy is going to happen, fill the jar up the rest of the way, leaving about one inch of space at the top so bubbling won’t cause it to overflow.

You’ll notice rapid bubbling almost immediately.  This is the vinegar extracting the calcium.  Place a paper towel or cheese cloth over the mouth of the jar and secure with the rubber band.  Never put the lid on the jar when in the process of making WCA eggshell extract as it creates a lot of gas that needs to escape.

Let the jar sit for 7-10 days. If you are in a hurry, you can decant the extract after just 5 days but it may not be as strong. If you totally forget about the jar for a month, not to worry.  It’ll still be good to use. When you’re ready to call the extract “done”, strain the liquid through cheese cloth or a fine mesh strainer to catch any remaining pieces of eggshell.  Place liquid in a sealable container with a tight-fitting lid.  I usually just pour mine back into the same jar in which it was brewed. Label the jar so you remember what it is and when it was made.  You’ll notice that while there will still be a hint of vinegar smell to the extract, most of the typical “zip” of vinegar is gone.  Thus you won’t burn your plants when applying it.  

What’s nice about this particular extract is that it is totally self-stable and does not “expire”.  So you can make a big batch over the winter here and keep using it all throughout this coming season!  I keep my jar in my flower cooler so it’s always handy at the farm for use.  It doesn’t technically need to be refrigerated, but you do need to keep it away from sunlight. 

To Use: Dilute at a ratio of 1:500 to 1:1000.  Here at my farm, I typically use 1 teaspoon of the eggshell extract for each gallon of water which is a ratio of about 1:757. It can be applied to the soil with a watering can or used as a foliar feed in a sprayer.  You can mix it with leaf mold tea to apply both at once. 

Never use pure concentrated eggshell extract on your planting beds as that will really throw your soil and crops off balance!  

If you’re more of a visual learner, here’s the video by Chris Trump that I used originally to learn how to make eggshell extract or WCA. 

#NaturalHomemadeFarmInputs

This is the third in a short series of blog posts on easy homemade regenerative inputs for your farm and garden. If you missed the previous two posts, be sure to check out how to make Leaf Mold Tea and Eggshell Extract.   Once you’ve caught up with those, it’s time to talk about my favorite of all homemade regenerative inputs: Weed Juice.  Why is it my favorite?  Because it gives me a whole new appreciation for weeds, so much so that I’ve even gone begging my neighbors for some of theirs!

While I call this concoction “Weed Juice” because I use plant material from what many people consider “weeds”, you may have already come across the concept.  Comfrey tea, nettle tea, and JADAM Liquid Fertilizer (JLF) are all versions of this.  I first read about steeping plant material in a bucket for months until it disintegrated in a gardening book Garden Anywhere by UK-based author, Alys Fowler, more than a decade ago.  She wrote about using comfrey tea as a natural fertilizer.  I remember trying it one time back then; it was the foulest smelling stuff ever! I couldn’t stomach making it again and pretty much assumed all British gardeners must be a little nuts if they were using that stuff. 

Fast forward several years and I started learning a lot more about homemade regenerative inputs for the farm thanks my curiosity about Korean Natural Farming and JADAM.  I read about JLF (yet another unfortunately awkward acronym that scares so many of the initiated away from KNF and JADAM) and made some using nettles.  Just like that bygone bucket of comfrey tea, the stench was pretty darn bad.  However, I was delighted with the results: when applied to rows of young transplants, their leaves became glossy and vibrant!  The stink was worth it! 

But it was while reading the book, When Weeds Talk by Jay McCaman, that some seemingly disjointed pieces clicked into place beautiful in my mind.   JLF became “Weed Juice” and I got pretty carried away with it. To explain why, I’ll first need to tell you about The Rule of Return. 

For starters, let’s take a moment to pointedly acknowledge that all of this trendy “regenerative farming” talk we are immersed in today is not new or groundbreaking. Critical and important, yes.  But not new!  Discussions of naturally balancing the soil and the ecosystem at the farm level through a closed loop system have been around for many decades.  There is much to be learned from older books if you’re willing to take some time to dig around and find them.  For one, in the 1940s and 50s, Dr. William Albrecht was writing extensively on the subject of soil health and biology, rallying against the “modernization” of American farming and its use of then-new synthetic fertilizers and large machinery.  If only more farmers had listened to him then! 

I am not sure if it was Dr. Albrecht or one of his contemporaries (possibly Lady Eve Balfour – yes a female farmer!!) who originally coined the phrase “Law of Return”. [I’ve since bastardized it in my own mind to refer to it as the Rule of Return because the writer in me likes alliteration.] In short, nature requires that whatever is taken out of a soil ecosystem must be returned to it in order for the soil to continue on in a balanced and healthy manner. 

It makes complete sense when you think about the simple (and yet beautifully complex) function of a mature deciduous tree. The tree pulls nutrients from the soil all throughout the spring and summer to develop leaves that enable it to prosper. Then in the fall, the leaves drop to the ground to return nutrients to the soil and the life therein. Next spring the tree accesses those processed minerals and nutrients to stretch its limbs even further. And so the cycle continues effortlessly it would seem. Or at least until some stupid human decides they don’t like leaves on their lawn and they hire a posse of leaf-blower wielding landscapers to vacuum up the leaves and haul them away. Grr. 

As farmers, what we take off the land must be returned to the land in some way. This is the golden Rule of Return. It cannot be broken or ignored without consequence. But all too often, we farmers are not putting enough back. Especially flower farmers who take massive amounts of plant biomass off the farm with each vanload of blooms. I know I’ve been guilty of this more than I care to admit. 

As I was contemplating the Rule of Return, I was also reading Jay McCaman’s book, all about what weeds can tell us about our fields. While his discourse can be rather disjointed by times, he does bring to the forefront of the readers mind the idea that weeds are not “bad guys”, but rather the talisman of soil balancing. With their root systems reaching into the subsoil, weeds are mining the minerals needed to bring tired topsoil back into balance again. For example, when a soil is low in calcium, crabgrass, sorrel and chickweed will proliferate, on a mission to bring that calcium up from deep down and make it available to the soil food web near the surface. Once their mission to bring calcium into balance is complete (usually after a handful of generations that grow, die and decay in place), those types of weeds will dissipate, making way for the next set of species to take over. 

But if we, as farmers and gardeners, pull up the weeds and cart them away, we are denying the Rule of Return. Yes, we could supplement with another amendment we buy and have shipped to the farm to be spread around between bed flips. But why do all of that when Nature has already done half the work for us and just wants to complete this cycle of mineral balancing as intended? “Well, Jennie, you can’t very well just stop weeding and let the place go to hell in a handbasket!” Trust me, I know you can’t skip the laborious task of weeding. But what if you could flip the script on that chore and consider it to be a type of harvesting instead? Harvesting nutrients! Now you’ll love your weeds! And maybe even covet your neighbors if they’ve got nettles, yarrow, or comfrey growing wild. 

The process is so darn easy too! By fermenting weeds in rainwater to make Weed Juice, you’ll be able to extract all those minerals the weeds were mining and put them right back into your farm’s soil via irrigation or drenching, ultimately feeding your crops, balancing the soil, and reducing future weed growth. The Rule of Return is being met and the farmer’s job becomes a little bit easier and more pleasant. Win-win! Oh, and it’s free! Win-win-win!! 

Start with making five gallon batches like outlined below in the recipe. Once you get into the swing of it, consider scaling up! This will look different at each farm. At mine, I’ve installed a rain catchment system off my barn, culminating in a 750 gallon tank so I have plenty of rainwater for making Weed Juice and for the other homemade regenerative inputs and foliar feeds I’m making. This spring I’m also installing a series of 55 gallon drums next to the rain tank where I’ll be fermenting Weed Juice on a larger scale that will then get pumped through my drip irrigation system. I’m so excited! 

P.S. – I’m not going to lie to you. This is still a very stinky input but somehow more bearable when you think about the Rule of Return. Or at least I think so! 

WEED JUICE (aka JLF)  

Goal:  To extract the minerals out of the plant material via a long-term fermentation process. A little bit of biology is also likely included with the end product, but this input is mostly about nutrients (unlike Leaf Mold Tea, which is primarily about ramping up biology in the soil).  

Any type of weed or crop reside (i.e., the tops of dahlias when you pinch them back) will work here, but I would encourage you to scout your farm for your most common weeds and make an inventory list of your Top 5 and then focus on making batches of Weed Juice specific to those and consciously using the resulting liquid around the same areas where those weeds have proven to be a problem.  Observe what happens! 

Ingredients

– A big pile of freshly pulled weeds
– Rainwater (well water can also work, but do not used treated municipal water)
– A handful of leaf mold freshly gathered from under a healthy tree 

Tools

– 5 gallon bucket with tight fitting lid


To Make: 

Shake off all the dirt from the roots of the weeds. You can also just cut/pull roots from the plant tops if that’s easier. 

Working with just the green materials (no dirt), chop up the weeds/plant material with scissors (or use a mulching push mower if you’re handling large volumes). 

Place chopped up plant debris in the bucket, filling it about three quarters of the way full when stuffed in. 

Add water to cover the plant material completely, filling nearly to the top of the bucket. 

Sprinkle the leaf mold over the surface of the water in the bucket. Do not stir it in; just let it float on the top. The leaf mold adds some biology to the mix that will help decompose the debris faster. 

Cover the bucket with the lid, making sure it’s sealed up so the stink doesn’t seep out when fermentation begins. 

Label the bucket with the date and contents so you remember several months from now what exactly was in there! 

Set the bucket in a place away from sun and rain, but ideally not inside a building where you’ll be close to it often. The contents will stink so you want plenty of airflow! I use the back porch off my barn during the summer and then bring any remaining buckets inside for the winter so they don’t freeze. 

Let contents sit for several months, stirring occasionally with a stick. Hold your nose when you stir! When the bucket is not actively stirred, it doesn’t smell too badly unless you get right up close to it. You want the plant material to be pretty well dissolved. 

Usually my batches take about two months during warmer weather and four months during colder months. Letting it sit for an entire year is apparently ideal, but I’ve never been able to hold off that long before I wanted to use mine. You can actually start using it after just a few weeks, but you won’t be maximizing the mineral content if you use it before the plant material is fully dissolved. *You may also use a proper lid for the bucket and seal it up completely. In JADAM, it is actually recommended that the container holding JLF be sealed because air is not desirable for fermentation. I personally found sealed buckets just way too stinky for my stomach to handle. By letting air in throughout the fermentation process, there seems to be a little less stench. But if you have no choice but to hold these buckets in an enclosed area, you’ll probably want to seal them off and only work with the finished contents outdoors. To get a visual for all of this, check out Tony and Denise’s amusing video over on the Bare Mountain Farm Youtube channel. 

To Use: 

To use as a soil drench, I add about 1 cup of Weed Juice to each gallon of water.  The dilution rate recommend varies from source to source in the reference materials:  Fowler’s Garden Anywhere doesn’t recommend diluting the comfrey tea at all; Nigel Palmer recommends a 1:20 dilution rate in his book The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments (he calls this Leaf Mold Fermentation, by the way); and JADAM itself recommends a dilution ratio of about 1:200 to 1:500.  I suspect the range of recommended dilution rates has a lot to do with which weed is the base and how your soil might hold onto nutrients (sandy soil leaches nutrients and so low dilution rate would be better; heavy clay soil can hold onto nutrients so a higher dilution rate would be better. 

To use as a foliar feed, I use 1 tablespoon of Weed Juice per gallon of water and apply with a backpack sprayer. I usually only use Weed Juice made with nettles for foliar spraying.   I like to combine it with Eggshell Extract, Leaf Mold Tea, kelp and fish emulsion as a nutrient and biology stimulant for young transplants. I hope this short series on easy homemade regenerative inputs for your farm has helped make the practices of KNF and JADAM a bit more approachable.  Fertilizing your crops and bringing your soil into balance do not have to cost a lot of money. What you need may very well already be on hand at your farm and might otherwise be something you’d just throw out.  Hopefully Weed Juice in particular will give you a whole new appreciation for Nature’s mineral miners! 

Be sure to follow @notillflowers on Instagram and subscribe to the podcast feed for more discussions and ideas about deeply sustainable flower farming. 

 #NaturalHomemadeFarmInputs

I’ve been getting a lot of messages about no-till flower farming bed preparation.  For ease of quick reference, I’m outlining below the cardboard/compost mulch system for no-till flower farming bed preparation that I used in the 2020 growing season.   I will continue to tweak the no-till flower farming bed preparation and other systems at my farm this season, but this will give you a good start. Generally I love this cardboard/mulch system and it’s been great for most crops.  However, there have been some hard lessons learned along the way.  I have a very detailed blog post written last summer about those critical lessons. Be sure to read it too so you can skip some of the trial and error at your farm!  And give the No-Till Flowers Podcast a listen for more valuable know-how!

Steps to No-Till Flower Bed Preparation Using Cardboard and Compost

1)  Cover crop (a mix of rye, vetch, triticale, and clover) that was sown in late fall and grew vigorously when the weather warmed in the spring was maintained with bi-weekly high-deck mowing until a given bed was ready to bring into production, at which point, the cover crop was “scalped” with a mulching push mower.

2) Four foot wide woven black landscape fabric was put over the freshly mown bed and pinned in place with landscape staples. The fabric remained on the bed for about 10 days to weaken the cover crop.

3) A single layer of 36″ wide corrugated cardboard was placed on top of the bed. The cardboard was sourced in rolls from a packing supply company, which made it very easy to place on beds.

4) A 2-3″ layer of well-aged compost was spread on top of the cardboard the full length and width of the bed.

5) Five lines of drip tape are placed on top of the compost. Lines are spaced 6″ apart and double as a guide for planting transplants in a straight line.

6) Transplant into the bed, spacing plants 4” to 6” apart, depending on the crop. We found that a long screwdriver was actually the best tool to pierce the cardboard easily and wiggle a little hole open for the transplants. Root balls must have immediate access to the native soil below the cardboard.

7) Water in the transplants well with a solution of KNF inputs, kelp, molasses, and fish emulsion. Make sure to keep them irrigated regularly with the drip lines for the first two or more weeks while their root systems are expanding into the soil.

#NoToLowTillPractices