Growing 90% for just CSA - here is my layout

[littleminnie]

My rental field space will be about 115x 150 this season. I am making all new beds- about 3.5 feet by 48 feet long. 50 of them plus a long squash row at the top. The paths between rows will be about 2.5 feet. I am installing all drip irrigation so the nice long straight beds will work really well.



You can see my crop placement ideas and successive sowing plan. I need to tweak, I am sure all winter, so any ideas about things that will be too much or too little let me know. I will go to market with just plants for 4 weeks in spring and then I will do a number of fall harvest markets with garlic, squash and pumpkins mostly. I will have 15 total shareholders this season and I am hoping to find a partner to provide eggs and sweet corn (fingers crossed).
I have to place all the nightshades together because the CPBs are so bad due to thousands of acres of potatoes and they were horrible last year; so the whole nightshade area will have to have a trench around it lined with plastic. I did this in 2009 and had hardly any CPBs but the potatoes were poor there that year. I think I didn't augment the soil enough. Anyway that is why they are all together. Also everything has been rotated as much as possible and of course the garlic is planted already.

The sweets on the edge don't need a path so they will be all over that area with 6x 100 feet of growing space.

How many peppers do you fit into two beds 3.5 by 48 feet? I usually squeeze in a lot. Tomatoes twice as much area. I figure 72 to 88 plants. I haven't decided how many will fit.

I am trying to bump up the numbers of carrots, broccoli, peas, onions and melons as they seem most popular. Any suggestions?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Congratulations on already having your shareholders.

I like planning gardens... Problem is, I'm not disciplined enough to follow the plan once my feet are in the soil.

I have settled on rows about 50 feet long. Seems really convenient for me to work with....

I plant storage onions in a bed... with about 18" between rows, then I weed with a wheel hoe.

I plant green onion (sets) in a grid, about an inch apart. This space can be reused all summer long.

I also plant broccoli in a grid on 18" centers.

In my garden, I plant a row of early spinach or radishes about 18" to 30" on either side of the squash. By the time it gets hot enough for the spinach to bolt, the squash is just getting started. I might could manage the same thing with early peas, but I'd plant them as far from the squash as possible.

I plant peppers a foot apart, so I'd put in 192 pepper plants per bed.

But I space tomatoes very far apart, so I'd only be able to put in 19 tomato plants per bed.

[oxbowfarm]

For peppers I find it depends on the pepper. Some are big and some are small and you need to know ahead of time if you want to maximize their potential and not waste space. Do you get CPB on peppers? I've never seen that, only on potato and eggplant.

Why alfalfa vs something like red clover for your successions? Do you find alfalfa works as a cover in such short rotation windows?

[oxbowfarm]

I looked it over some more and was laughing at how different our crop mix is from yours. I don't see any swiss chard or kale which are my two MUST HAVES. I see lots of emphasis on potatoes, onions and tomatoes. Our mix is tilted heavily to the greens end of the spectrum.

Its really cool that you can fit in stuff like sweet potatoes and NZ spinach.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Comparing littleminnie's crop mix to mine.

I only put one bed into broccoli, since my summers are so hot/dry that broccoli doesn't do well most of the year, and I get lots of shoots all summer long though usually they are not palatable.

I plant much less lettuce for the same reason. To me the only reason to plant lettuce is so that there is something to offer first thing in the spring.

For early spring production I gotta have a bed of Bok Choi.

I plant potatoes as a treat, not as a crop... so 1 or 2 beds of potatoes would be plenty for me. I can't compete with Idaho potatoes.

I devote much more space to tomatoes since they may be my most popular crop, they fetch a good price, and are among the hardest to grow due to our short season. I let them sprawl. No staking for me.

I gotta have a bed of Swiss chard and kale for summer greens.

I plant lots of corn!

I'm growing a couple beds of strawberries.

I don't grow any flowers, and a whole bed of herbs would be too much for me.

I plant about half as many peppers.

I've got about 5 beds worth of space planted right now into seed production for biennial crops and/or cold hardy breeding projects.

I think I'll try sweet potatoes again this summer, but it will be a small amount.

I devote about twice as much space to garlic, beets, and cucumbers, and similar quantities of other things not previously mentioned.

[12540dumont]

Minnie,
I also plant in 3 x 50 foot rows.

I cage my tomatoes, because I did an experiment here on the farm and found that I could grow half as many if I caged them. There were more usable and less sunburned tomatoes that way. I can only get 19-20 tomatoes in a 50 ft row.

I plant onions in 2 rows with lettuce in the middle, followed by carrots in the middle. Like Joseph, lettuce doesn't do so well here in the summer, so I go right on to one of the other interesting greens. (Wild Garden Seed).

In the spring I plant carrots on either side of the peas. As soon as the peas are looking puny, I plant beans on those same trellis.

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[12540dumont]

Minnie,

You can see here the raddichio in between the onions. I'll harvest this, and then put in carrots, and then put in lettuce and then put in beets. By then these onions will be done and it will be time to re-plant this bed, with cukes or zukes.

I haven't found that I am able to put zukes or cukes in a bed with anything else. They take the whole bed and try to steal the path. Same with squash and melons. I used to put leafy greens between them, but now I black plastic these beds when I plant the cukes and zukes. The results are faster veges, less watering and less weeding. I also do the paths between them if I'm doing sweet taters. (Darn things will root in the paths otherwise).

My garlic always comes out by late May early June. This is just enough time to put in either another crop of green beans, corn if I've put the beds side by side. ( I eliminate the path and put in 5 rows of sweet corn). Or a later crop of cukes.

My CSA gets onions and potatoes every week and garlic every other week. I transition away from broccoli and cauliflower by late spring, and really pour on the summer veges and flowers and herbs.

The hardest thing is to get the beds pulled and tilled and replanted. This always happens when 10,000 tomatoes all come at once! But each year I get better at getting out the weeds and replanting.

I try not to let any beds idle, unless they are cover cropped.

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[littleminnie]

Awesome! It is so interesting to read other people's planting styles. And it is cool to find other people obviously into what all you can successively grow in one bed.

The beds that are 'brassica greens' mean kale, baby bok choi, broccoli raab, chard and maybe arugula. I hate the smell of arugula and cilantro (best cilantro crop I have had was seeded in late summer on the edge of a carrot bed- both grew wonderfully! and the cilantro withstood freezing temps). yuck.

Peppers and CPBs: when the potato farms near me spray to kill the plants the beetles march into my garden by the thousands! It was 10x worse 2011 than 2010 and there was a whole corn field (several acres) in between me and the nearest potatoes this season! So they go after eggplant first, then fingerlings, then other potatoes, then tomatoes and lastly peppers. They were sucking on a few pepper plants before they died this fall. So if I trench just the pots and toms and eggs and leave the peppers out they will just kill the peppers. I have thought about it and must put all in the trench. I read about the trench thing on some university website a few years ago. When I first tried it I didn't poke holes in the plastic so it was a stanky moat. Then I went along and made holes. It really helped a lot.


This is not unusual in late summer! But I don't want to go too far from home to lease a field and all of my town and the nearby ones are potato fields.

Alfalfa: I use Big N alfalfa. It is awesome. It grows to full size in about one month and when tilled in and let sit one week, adds wonderful OM and N. It was bred in MN and is great to cover crop in short season areas.

This was about 10 days after I pulled my onions and seeded Big N this summer. Picture 8/21.

Well I guess every customer is different in the veggies they like. I had one say they got too many tomatoes which made me scream/laugh because we had such a horrible tomato season and I was so upset. I gave them 1-2 quarts per week and that was all there was! Another said too many green beans and who knows what the others think was too much LOL. Still I think they all would like more sweet potatoes, potatoes, melons and sweet corn and then some broccoli and carrots next. So I am trying that.

I am a little worried about my early zuc row with the walla wallas. Those zucs get big in one month! I think that will be my green onions beds if you know what I mean. Cucumbers I grow up a trellis. I did an early row this year and then dropped seed in over a pea row and that worked great. The second sowing was between tomato rows and those cucs were beautiful. I think they like a little shade. The area by the broccoli up to the cucs in 2012 has a tree that shades a little in midday.

thanks for reading and responding all!

[steev]

If CPB's are really all that numerous, is there any poultry that would eat them for good protein? Could you just put them in a plastic bag or jar in the sun to croak and then till or compost them as nitrogenous fertilizer?

[littleminnie]

I would love to rent some hens to peck at them. This year was really bad. I called the farmer next to me and he didn't confess any concern but seemed to acknowledge there were more than usual. I have been looking for bt tenebrionis but cannot find it anywhere! The trench should help (although I will be pretty sore from digging!). I will put deadly nightshade outside the trench and can maybe kill some of them.

This season when they were bad they were everywhere. When I walked on the sidewalk or driveway or in the barn they would get crunched in almost every step. I could kill literally a couple thousand in one day by squishing at that time.

[davida]

My chickens would not eat the CPB's. I had the chickens free rangaing in the garden and they totally ignored the CPB's, dead or alive.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I figure that the Colorado Potato Beetles are eating things from the nightshade family in order to accumulate poisons that are distressing to predators.

[davida]

Joseph,
Interesting theory and probably correct.

[steev]

So composting. What attracts them? I'm thinking a cage with a funnel-entrance or two so they get in, but can't find the exit. If there's really lots of them, that's N on the hoof.

[12540dumont]

It’s amazing that not long ago, this serious pest of vegetables pest was a harmless, well-behaved insect. It fed only on the buffalo bur, a tough weed that grows along the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Then, about 150 years ago, the beetles discovered a new food growing in the white man's gardens. It adopted the cultivated potato as its favorite food, spread rapidly, and we’ve been fighting Colorado potato beetles ever since.

It happened like this: with the opening up of the West following the Mormon migration to Utah in1847 and the California gold rush of 1849, pioneers arrived by the thousands and many of them planted potatoes. By 1855 potato growing reached westward to the native home of the beetle, and the insect started to spread eastward along the routes traveled by the pioneers.

By hitchhiking and flying with the prevailing winds, the beetle migrated about 85 miles a year. It reached Nebraska in 1859, Illinois in 1864, Ohio in 1869, and the Atlantic coast in 1874. This caused great alarm overseas, and almost every European country banned the importation of American potatoes. Europe’s potato growing regions remained free of potato beetles until after World War One, when they appeared near Bordeaux, France, where there had been concentrations of American troops and supplies. Now the beetle is widespread in Europe, too.

This was written by Vern Grubinger of Vermont Extension. He recommends flaming them when you get them in a trench!