Galen's boys picking up rocks behing my house
[caption id="attachment_110" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Freshly plowed ground ready for sweet corn seed"]
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As you see we are getting ready to plant, Kay my father-in-law has been busy with Galen and the crews getting ready to start putting some seeds in the ground.
We do no-till, minimum tillage, and conventional farm techniques at Maize Valley. For the early vegtable crops we go pretty much conventional or the “old School” plowing and working the ground. We do that because that helps to warm the soil up and dry it out and that is really important to us early in the season. We go to farmers’ markets and for our own market our season is so short we have to try and get a crop to market as soon as possible.
We do plant “winter cover crops” such as winter rye as much as we can till it gets too late in the fall. They help hold the soil in place over the winter then we either let them grow up and bale the straw, or we plow them under as a “green manure” to add organic matter back to the soil. But you can’t let the rye get too big where you want to plant sweet corn because as the rye gets bigger it releases a chemical into the soil that is harmful to sweet corn! So when you hear about “chemicals” always get the rest of the story as a famous person used to say, mother nature has some too!
I also have a neat link in here I got off of twitter about the Ohio wine history, be sure to check it out.http://www.thesecondglass.com/features/they-make-wine-there-ohio
