Soil Preparation In Fall By Farmer Bill

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A letter from farmer Bill to a Gardener Named Lori
We have to start with the calciums. Calcium regulates a lot of things most notably the mineral content of the cells. The mineral content of the cells is decided by the amount of calcium in the cells. So nutrient dense starts with calcium dense.Go to Menards and get 2 bags of lime (40#) and maybe one bag of gypsum and a small bag of Scotts Starter fertilizer. (ONLY the Scotts!)Go to Bob’s Salt and Feed in West Chicago and get a 50# bag of alfalfa meal and a 50# bag of meat and bone meal. 630 -231 -4040 to order these things and they should have it in a week.. This should last you most of the year
next year.Start collecting leaves and wood chips and make about a 4″ layer of leaves .
1-2″ layer of chips. Make your beds with this. If you can, try to make small
beds, maybe 3 or 4′ wide and running east and west.
There is an electric current that runs thru the soil and it goes north and south
so beds that run east and west can catch the most amount of this energy.
At the farm, our beds run north and south because that worked best for the
2 miles of drip tape we had to install. I wanted to do east and west. It’s also
easier for u-pick folks if the rows are north and south.
The calcium, gypsum, bone meal and alfalfa will go on top of the leaves/ chips
combo and get watered in by the snow and rain and be predigested by springtime.
Next I recommend some biologicals to help the digestion. Allan a farmer from Princeton,Ill likes Biogenesis
from Tainio which you can by from Alan (he’s a dealer) and that is a very good
product. I have used it with good results. I like Biozome http://www.biozome. com
which is also very good with very good results and is a bit cheaper. Alan has
had mixed results with it but I use it on my farm. Both products are outstanding
compared to any other biologicals or compost teas that other people talk about.
Use the Scotts starter fertilizer on your raspberries and some will go on the veggie
beds.
Don’t forget to make your food list. Don’t get too exotic, just do the stuff your
family will ACTUALLY eat. Hopefully you have a fence and that can be used
for cucumbers and zucchini. They also work well in pots on the patio because they
like the extra heat. Let the vines sprawl on the patio and soak up the heat and it kinda
looks like landscaping.
Fruits can be a little tricky so you can use me for a backup on that one. Fruits
scare most growers to death because they are so perishable but that is because
they don’t feed the plants very well.
My farm will probly just grow veggies for you guys but so much for the general
public. Veggies are fairly easy to grow but no one has confidence with fruit.
People will come to my farm to pick fruit but not vegies. Labor for harvesting
is huge.
Good luck. Let me know it goes and we can make adjustments.
Bill
P.S. yes, tomatoes on tomatoes is best. Dont worry about late blight. The Biogenesis
and/or the biozome with over power that pathogen. Late blight thrives in low
calcium soils. It is a very poor competitor. It is there by default because
conditions were too poor for the probiotics in the soil. Check out my friend
Tom Giannou’s site, www.tandjenterprise s.com. His garden kit works very well
and he grows very high brix crops with some outrageous photos. On the front page,
scroll down to the photo of his tomatoes. The new tomatoes are side by side with
the tomatoes from the previous year and BOTH are high brix! Even the year old
ones.
Highly mineralized fruits and vegetables do not rot, they dehydrate.
I was feeding my tomatoes and raspberries once a week but that was not enough
to keep up with the bumper crop that was developing. I have to do 2x or 3x per week
to keep up with the fruit set. My soil just couldn’t keep up!
And other growers tell me they feed their plants twice a YEAR. It boggles my mind.
Ok, I wont get started on *that* one. Enjoy, Bill