At Opal’s Farm, just east of downtown Fort Worth, the weather has finally left behind hundred-degree temperatures and sun-dried days. The heat brought noticeable challenges to the land and people’s health and an intense joy when temperatures dropped into the eighties with large, dark storm clouds in late September. Fall had finally arrived!
Fall is a wonderful time in north central Texas. The weather is pleasant with many sun-filled days scattered in between comforting storms. Weekend mornings are now cool enough to open windows and enjoy the crisp air as our lazy days begin. At Opal’s farm, the summer crops are loving the weather, too. The tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, okra, zucchini, and peas have put out new blossoms as they produce one last time before the first freeze.
Though Opal’s Farm continued to produce through the summer (production slowed with many hours of labor worked), many small farms we sell alongside at the Cowtown Farmers Market had to take a break in the later half of summer. Temperatures got too hot to produce enough to take to market. Even with irrigation, plants like tomatoes will stop producing until temperatures fall below a certain point. Like Opal’s, those farms should start producing more and return back to market.
The past two weeks have been catch-up on the farm. Alongside fundraising events, volunteer groups, and harvest days, we have been able to prep almost two-thirds of an acre for the fall and winter crops. This preparation involves bed prep, weeding, seeding, and irrigating our fields.
Preparing our Biointensive 25 foot beds
We have a third of an acre field dedicated to biointensive farming. This field has more attention and organic inputs in its production so that more food can be grown on a smaller piece of land. Our twenty-five-foot beds will produce as much as one of our less intensive one-hundred-foot beds. This field currently has tomatoes, melons, leeks, greens, eggplants, peppers, and peas. Alongside that production, we prepared more twenty-five-foot beds for winter crops, including turnips, collards, spinach, cabbage, pak choi, and lettuce mix in the past two weeks.
The biointensive field does not utilize a tractor or BCS (push tractor) like our other fields, so the work is done using hand tools, including a broad fork, rake, wheelbarrow, shovel, and EarthWay seeder to create and seed the beds.
The process begins by breaking up the root systems of previous weeds and plants and aerating the soil where we make the bio-intensive beds. For this, we use a "broadfork". The broad fork is a heavy tool with two handles and several 12-inch steel teeth. I love using the broad fork because of how much fun it is. You begin by picking up the broad fork by the handles with steel teeth facing down and driving the teeth into the soil. I jump onto the board fork and use my body weight to drive the teeth further into the ground before pulling the handles towards myself and allowing the teeth to pull up a few inches of soil and root systems. We do this on the entire twenty-five-foot bed, making the soil easy to work with and the weeds and roots easy to pull out.
After clearing rhizomes and plant material, we use the rake to mound and shape the beds. We take soil from either side of the forked bed and pile it a few inches high before leveling out the top of the bed.
Before seeding, we top each bed with two-and-a-half-wheelbarrows of compost and a sprinkle of slow-releasing organic fertilizer. The completed beds are raked and smoothed out again before planting. Each thirty-inch wide bed is seeded with five rows of a winter crop mentioned.
The areas surrounding the raised beds are our furrows and footpaths. These areas will not have anything growing in them, leaving the soil exposed. We do not want areas exposed for several reasons. The first and most apparent is the growth and spreading of undesirable plants in your growing areas. There is a constant struggle on the farm with Johnson grass, bindweed, and many other plants we consider weeds. These plants quickly establish themselves and can choke out our plants. If we do not cover these spaces, the labor dedicated to weeding increases significantly.
The second reason for covering is for soil health and water retention. As soil sits without cover, the biology and structure continue to deteriorate. The soil's healthy biology and sound structure allow for more nutrients, sufficient airflow, water infiltration and retention, and decreased soil erosion. You can only have healthy plants and a sustainable, resilient growing operation with healthy soil.
Since we want the soil to be as healthy as possible, we cover these areas with either cover crops or a thick layer of wood chip mulch. Our volunteer groups mulch the footpaths and furrows with this hard mulch. The wood chips are great because they cover the soil while allowing plenty of air and water to infiltrate. Wood chips are heavy and take longer to break down, meaning they stay in one place and continue to cover areas for more extended periods. As wood chips break down, they compost and release nutrients into the soil, contributing to soil health. Wood chips also slow down water, allowing less water to wash away before infiltrating the soil. This also decreases soil erosion.
We keep hard mulch out of the growing beds at the farm and only in the footpaths and furrows. We want to avoid mixing slow composting materials like wood chips in our beds because they can tie up nitrogen and stunt the growth of our crops. Instead, we put down softer mulches like straw and leaves that break down faster and still cover areas of soil that our crops do not.
Finally comes irrigation and weeding. The weeding of the beds has been easy the past two weeks. As the occasional bindweed and grass poke its head out of the compost, we gently pull them out. Tools have yet to be used for weeding. Still, as the cash crops become established and easily recognizable, the stirrup hoe becomes our best friend. We can quickly scratch the weeds on the top of the surface between our rowed crops without bending over and painstakingly pulling each weed from the ground.
Irrigation, for now, is overhead watering. Overhead watering is happening for two reasons. One is the farm needs an established irrigation system put into place. After December, we should have a functioning irrigation system with overhead and drip options. The second reason is that the soil surface needs to be moist for adequate germination. We have been placing sprinklers and watering by hand with a hose. After about a week and a half, we saw a few new sprouts rise to the surface. And in another few weeks, we will have beds teeming with plants and food.
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