Updates from the New Farm: How to Move a Tractor

Spring is my favorite time of year. I love watching the land green up, and I’m eager to see green on the mountains in the next few weeks. I love the brilliant blue skies and the deep spring rains (although, like most of us, I am less fond of storms than I once was).

I love watching everything flower! Intentional flowers and unintentional ones. At the new farm, there’s a little bit of mustard cover crop that’s coming into bloom. It sure is pretty, albeit a little bit patchy. We’ll have it in better shape soon!

There are also millions (?) of apple trees in bloom right now in Henderson County, so if you’re down that way, be sure to look out for them. You can even see a few fields from I-26! They are beautiful!

The farm team made the first hurdle toward breaking ground at our new farm yesterday. If you’re just tuning in to our new farm situation, you can read the details in this blog post.

The first step? Moving our equipment.

As you might recall, we’re working at both properties — old farm and new farm — until the end of November, so there will be an unfortunate amount of back and forth for the tractor and its implements. The tractor itself weights about 3,700 hundred pounds, and each of the implements weighs hundreds of pounds and has to be loaded and unloaded with the tractor.

When we began this process, we weren’t sure how we would get it done. We don’t own a big truck or a trailer, and we pay the dealership to haul the tractor to the shop for service once a year. But then our friend Ali at Seven Seeds Farm kindly reminded us that a tow truck can move a tractor, and we were on our way! We rented a flat bed from Home Depot to move the other implements. Still way cheaper than buying a big truck. Sometimes you just have to figure things out.

It took the better part of the day to move our equipment so we can work on the soil next week. It’s pretty overwhelming to think we’ll do this process at least two more — but probably four or six more times before we’re settled at the new farm. Hopefully we’ll get better at it with time! Still way cheaper than buying a big truck — I think that will become my mantra.

All that to say, many problems are solveable. We're excited to begin working the soil at the new farm next week.

We’ll be preparing all the soil we want to work with this year. We’ve already conducted soil tests, so now, we’ll add lime to improve the pH, and then we’ll cover crop the fields depending on when we need them.

Cover cropping is one of the ways we improve soil over time. Cover crops are plants whose purpose is to increase nutrient availability, encourage microbial life, add carbon to the soil and prevent erosion. These aren’t crops we harvest or sell. They’re part of a long-term strategy for building soil health. You can absolutely use these strategies in you garden.

The places we want to plant in September will get cropped in clover, and the fields we want to plant in spring will get cropped in sorghum sudan grass. We choose which cover crop based on ease of termination (clover is easier) and how much biomass it yields. Sorghum sudan grass creates tons of biomass to help improve our soil with organic matter, but we need cold winter temperatures to make sure it’s dead and doesn’t interfere with plantings, becoming a weed.

It might seem like the five months between April and September are enough time to create great soil, but in fact, building soil health takes years! We've been at our current farm for eight years, and in that time, we've created amazing soil, but it didn't happen quickly.

The new farm has a completely different soil type. Much lighter and sandier. We're going to relearn everything we do, beginning Tuesday. It's certainly an adventure!