At Janesky Farmstead, all of our farming decisions are made with nature at the top of our mind.
Many people think growing food and taking care of nature are two separate things. You can either maximize crop yield by ripping out wildlife habitat, tilling the soil every year, and using harmful chemicals. Or, you can reserve your land entirely for wildlife and not even begin to think about growing food for humans on it.
But the truth is we can do both. In fact, it is the primary goal of acroecology and regenerative agriculture.
Agroecology: a way of farming that applies ecological principles to food production, treating farms as living ecosystems rather than industrial operations.
Many of the same principles and practices for growing great vegetables can be applied to both home gardening and small scale market farming.
Understanding The Soil Food Web
The most important place to start is having a grasp on how the soil food web works. Plants are producers, soil microbes are primary consumers, insects are secondary consumers, and birds and mammals are tertiary consumers.
Illustration by Madeline Schill.
If any part of this cycle is missing, the entire thing will collapse in time - leading to pest problems, infertile soil, and excessive weed pressure. So what are the best ways to keep this system intact in our gardens?
Strategizing Our Producers: Interplanting, Companion Planting, and Rotating Crops
Interplanting is the act of planting different crops together in the same bed. Companion planting is when these plants provide some notable benefit to one another. For the intent of this section, we will talk about them as the same practice. Rotating crops is moving the location of crop families year to year.
Providing diversity by planting several crops in the same space is beneficial to soil health because each plant releases a specific amount of sugars, amino acids, and other organic compounds called exudates. The more variety of exudates in your garden beds, the more types of soil microbes will be attracted to that area. This will improve the soil's ability to naturally feed plants without the need for much fertilizer.
Rotating types of crops year to year contributes to microbial diversity as well, but also helps prevent disease.
Crop families and examples include:
Nightshades (Solanaceae) - tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tomatillos
Brassicas (Brassicaceae) - broccoli, cabbage, mustard, collard greens, kohlrabi, cauliflower, kale, brussels sprouts, bok choi, tatsoi, turnips, and radishes
Cucurbits (Cucurbitaceae) - cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, winter squash, pumpkins, gourds, and melons
Legumes (Fabaceae) - beans, peas, lentils, soybeans, and peanuts
Grasses (Poaceae) - corn, wheat, barley, oats, sorghum, rice, millet, rye
Alliums (Liliaceae) - asparagus, onions, leeks, chives, garlic, shallots
Carrots (Apiaceae) - carrots, parsnips, celery, dill, cilantro, parsley, fennel
Asters (Asteraceae) - lettuce, endive, radicchio, chicory, artichoke
Spinach (Chenopodiaceae) - spinach, beets, swiss chard
Above: Lettuce interplanted with shallots. Note how little soil is exposed, which leaves less opportunity for weeds to grow.
Feeding Our Primary Consumers: No-Till
Tilling the soil every year damages the complex, interconnected community of organisms by tearing through mycelium, the underground body of fungi, and exposing bacteria to powerful UV rays from the sun.
When left undisturbed, fungal networks expand and pass nutrients and water between plants Other microbes and nematodes break down organic matter into available nutrients.
While the basic premise is simply not tilling, there are a few other things we do to protect the soil:
- Build permanent beds - the beauty of no-till is that you design and build the garden once, and those beds stay there forever. You have very little work to do each spring, and barely any weeding throughout the season because you are not constantly bringing up new weed seeds by tilling. You want to have beds filled with soil you never walk on, and dedicated walkways covered in mulch.
- Keep soil covered at all times - use mulch (wood chips, organic straw, compost, grass clippings, leaves, or grow cover crops). This keeps soil out of the sun and reduces evaporation, therefore reducing the amount you need to water.
- Leave roots in the ground - don't rip plants out by the root ball. Cut them at ground level so the old roots can help with water infiltration, sequester carbon, and feed microbes.
- Avoid all synthetic fertilizers - these are quick fixes that will boost plat growth in the short term, but harm soil microbes and will lead to dependency on these fertilizers long term. Plus, they are expensive!
Protecting Our Secondary Consumers: Avoiding Pesticides, Leaving Cover, and Maintaining Native Habitat
It's crucial to avoid all pesticides, even organic ones! Yes, you read that right. Even organic pesticides like diatomaceous earth and neem oil will have lasting negative effects on your garden because they don't discriminate between pests and beneficial insects. Most pests have a predatory counterpart, so interfering with this natural balance hurts the garden in the long run.
Beneficial insects include hoverflies, parasitic wasps, lacewings, ladybugs, assassin bugs, ground beetles, praying mantis, bees, and butterflies. Some of these are predators of pests like aphids, mealybugs, and caterpillars, while others are essential pollinators.
- Leave cover over winter - to follow up what you just read about good and bad insects, leaving debris in the garden over winter will provide places for beneficial insects and pollinators to safely overwinter. You will see more of them next year!
- Plant flowers to attract good bugs - yarrow, marigolds, alyssum are good to incorporate directly into the garden
Above: Adult hoverfly feeding on nectar from a yarrow flower.
Managing Our Tertiary Consumers: Inviting Them to the Garden, While Minimizing Damage to Crops
Birds and mammals are often seen as a nuisance in the garden. Birds will peck off all of your berries just as they ripen. Rabbits can quickly destroy ground level crops, and squirrels will devour beautiful tomatoes before they ever make it to the kitchen. Moles will dig tunnels and occasionally push carrots up out of the ground. Deer will trample and obliterate everything in their path in a single night.
While these critters have destructive tendencies, they also benefit the garden if we can manage them effectively. The first step is evaluating and observing the pest pressure in your area. We have a high density deer population here, but less problems with voles and raccoons. Your situation will likely be different, so understanding your particular challenges will help you determine the best ways to deal with it.
Totally excluding these animals isn't always the best answer, however. For example, letting rabbits and deer in during the dormant winter season will allow them to deposit manure. Moles have a bad reputation, but they are actually quite beneficial as they aerate the soil and eat grubs and other insects while generally leaving crops alone. Birds can also put a dent in pest populations like squash bugs and caterpillars.
Fencing & Netting - Using physical barriers to keep crops safe is one of the most effective ways to do it. These can be temporary or permanent solutions.
Build Habitat & Food Sources - Providing more appealing habitat elsewhere can relieve some of the pressure from critters. Try planting a prairie strip, placing a bird feeder and bird bath or brush pile away from the garden.
Using Livestock to Mimic Nature - In the off season, we will allow chickens to roam our orchard and gardens to aerate soil and deposit manure. We do this in a controlled manner to make sure the manure is fully broken down before the next planting season. Another approach we plan to use in the future is using ducks to control insects. They will typically leave mature plants alone while eating slugs and other pests. You would not allow them free access all the time, only when it would be beneficial, as they definitely can eat plants if left alone for too long!
Beyond Biology: Yield Maximizing Techniques
Let's step away from the soil for a moment, though that really is the most foundational part of growing an abundance of nutrient dense vegetables.
Succession planting is absolutely critical if you want to optimize the amount of veggies you can grow in a season. This technique really could have it's own blog post, but I'll at least explain the premise of it here with an example.
Let's use the example of lettuce. It is a fast growing crop, but does not store for more than about a week in the refrigerator, so it wouldn't make sense to grow many heads at the same time. And, most varieties don't grow well in the heat of summer. So, to maximize the amount of lettuce we will have to eat, we need to plant multiple small successions in spring and fall when temperatures are cooler. This means planting seeds about every 2 weeks for a continuous harvest.
Variety selection is an overlooked part of gardening. When you buy seeds at big box stores, you are usually limited to common vegetable varieties that may or may not be well adapted to your climate and the information on the packet is minimal.
Say you were to pick up some onions seeds that you like the look of. You start the seeds indoors and they grow into little plants. You plant them out in spring and wait to see a big onion bulb... but it never happens. It turns out the onions you are trying to grow are a short-day variety, but you live in the northern US and really needed a long-day variety!
Select seeds from reputable retailers that can give you information on ideal climate and growing zones, disease and pest resistance, and any other special considerations.
In Conclusion...
These are the essentials to growing food in step with nature. There will never be a product in a bottle that can replace understanding soil health and respecting that your garden is connected to the broader ecosystem . Using these techniques will not only help you grow more and better food, but benefit everything around you by reducing soil erosion, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, and filtering water before it makes it to our drinking water sources.