Slogging Through Bed Prep

Bed preparation is one of the aspects of AgPro farming that made me the most anxious.  It involves flail mowing, tilling, spreading amendments, tilling again or plowing them in while raising beds, shoveling out aisles and evening bed widths, then leveling the soil to be ready to plant.  All I remembered about bed prep during AgSchool was how difficult it was to use the BCS in my plot because the soil was so clumpy and rocky. I had actually forgotten how difficult it was to shovel compost into wheelbarrows and spread them out, which turned out to be one of the most exhausting tasks during bed prep. Bed prep takes a lot of time and hard work, gives me blisters from shoveling, and makes all of my upper body ache for a few days, and it can be frustrating when things don't go right. 

This week, I had just plowed my first bed and was starting on my second when the wheel of the plow just came off the BCS machine.  I realized the pin holding it in had fallen out, and I couldn't find it anywhere in my plot.  Knowing how much more work I had ahead of me, I started to panic. Several times, I thought to myself, “I can’t do this. I want to give up. Why am I even doing this?! This is a huge waste of time!” I had to just stop that line of thinking and calm down. After I called Coach Jay, who told me where to find extra screws, I found one that fit and carried on after half an hour. Farming is certainly teaching me a lot about patience, remaining calm under pressure, and taking things step by step without getting overwhelmed. I’ve learned many of these skills in my job at the Legislature, but I’m having to learn these skills all over again in farming.

Since there are many ways to go about doing bed prep and various concerns to address when doing bed prep, each of my cohort mates and I are going about everything in a unique way.  I consider myself an experiment in the feasibility of working full time while farming part time. Since I know time management will be an issue for me over the next few months, I'm trying to experiment with a technique called solarization to control weeds.  To do this, I bought a large piece of thick, black plastic to cover my beds to kill off any weed seeds until I'm ready to plant.  I hope I don’t kill off too many beneficial microbes and other things, but I’d really like to get rid of sleeping grass that might be lurking in that top layer. I hate getting pricked by them when pulling them out. I'm also raising my beds up pretty high because I've heard the drainage at the end of my beds can be bad.  I won't know until I start planting and irrigating whether these techniques work.  I guess that's part of the risk that every farmers takes.

One great thing that has happened through bed prep is that I've become much more comfortable with the BCS machine.  We all had the option to use the tractor to till.  I've heard it's much easier sitting on the tractor and tilling, rather than wielding the BCS up and down the rows, but I figured the likelihood of buying a tractor later is pretty much zero for me.  The likelihood that I'll purchase a BCS and implements in the future is much higher, so I wanted to practice on that and get comfortable with the machine.  I'm certainly not an expert, but I've gotten pretty good with it and don't hesitate to use it with multiple implements.  It feels great to be somewhat confident in my ability to successfully operate a useful machine. This time, using the BCS was much easier than in AgSchool. I suspect it’s because my soil is fluffier than in AgSchool, so the BCS didn’t keep jumping away from me this time. 

My two AgSchool beds were pretty uneven in width and crooked.  I'm proud to report that my first seven AgPro beds show improvement since AgSchool.  I had some help from my husband laying down a measuring tape to help keep me straight, but after that, I ended up just eyeballing it and doing fine.  I also figured out how to stick the plow right into the trench I made during the first pass, and it keeps the aisles from getting too wide. My husband helped me lay that large, heavy piece of plastic over several of the beds and weigh it down with soil and T-posts. Hopefully this is effective because it was relatively expensive and required a lot of manual labor laying and weighing it down.

All in all, this initial phase of bed prep was good work. I still have some power harrowing to do and a second phase of bed prep for the remaining beds, but I'm excited to get some plants going in the field soon, which will bring on the next challenges -- irrigation, nutrition management, pest and disease control, and weed management.