How do we turn our field into an inviting home for the 1,500+ transplants we’ve started in the greenhouse?

Our field had a ryegrass cover crop over the winter. Ryegrass is great for cartwheels [see above], soil erosion protection, winter-long photosynthesis, nitrogen scavenging, and weed suppression. It is particularly good at weed suppression because it allelopathic (i.e., it produces chemicals that suppress the growth of other plants). Because of this property, we need to wait at least 2 weeks after we kill the ryegrass before we can seed into it.

We felt the pressure to stop cartwheeling and take advantage of the rare sunny spring weekend to kill the ryegrass. Then we’d be on our way to sowing peas, carrots, spinach, and arugula for the early boxes of our summer CSA.

But we didn’t actually have a plan for how to get rid of the cover crop. Do we solarize with clear plastic? Is it hot enough for solarization to even work? Could we weed the whole field by hand with a hoe? We’ve had one introductory lesson to the walk-behind tractor, are we ready to use it? Does the walk-behind tractor align with our no-till principles?

We obsessed about the right path forward all day. But we woke up the next morning with a game plan. Given the time crunch, we had to use the harrow attachment on the walk-behind tractor to pull the ryegrass from field.

Thank goodness we’re only farming a quarter acre. We got stuck in the mud several times and ran out of gas (both the diesel engine and our glycogen stores). But after several hours, it felt like such a relief to have started the process of creating hospitable beds for our vegetables.

I’m so glad to be building a year-round, no-till system with permanent beds. Next year, we’ll just clip out the previous crop or pull off a tarp and we’ll be ready to plant. Easy! Check back with me in 12 months to see if all goes as planned.