We began with a meadow that had been mowed for the past 10 years and hayed and grazed for about a century before that.

We spent time walking through the meadow that was teeming with life and made a commitment to remember that this is what the land was like before we came onto it, and to try to keep a level of life, biodiversity, and social benefit that would honor this meadow.

Any meadow, even a marginal one like this one, is capable of sequestering and storing much more carbon than an agricultural field, even a no-till one.

We hired someone to mow the meadow down with a bush hog and then come through with disc harrows and till the sod under. We chose to till twice the first spring to speed up the conversion process as opposed to sheet mulching and slowly killing the grass over the course of a season. In addition we chose to till as a way of thoroughly incorporating amendments in order to prep the soil for growing vegetables.

Prior to signing the lease for this land, we had taken soil tests to make sure we knew what we were working with. Once the field was mowed and disced once, we then went about amending the soil based on the soil test recommendations. We spread tons of lime as well as other amendments and then tilled one last time to incorporate the amendments.

We chose to create a permanent bed system through raising beds. This could have been done with a rototiller with a rotary plow attachment, but we did not have access to that equipment, and we do have lots of people power! So we strung out where the beds and pathways would go, and we shoveled the soil in the pathways onto the beds. It was helpful to do this shortly after the final till, so that the soil was less compacted and easier to shovel. We opted for 3 foot beds and 2 foot pathways which works well for our human-powered system.

For our pathways, we lay down cardboard first, and then put a thick layer of straw or wood chips on top.

Finally, we spread compost and seeded down a mix of perennial ryegrass and medium red clover that we grew for the rest of the season and over the winter to balance out the soil, suppress weeds, address compaction, and build up organic matter. Scroll to our cover crop section to learn what we did next!

The way we managed this conversion from meadow to permanent raised bed, no-till system was informed by the fact that we do not own a tractor or rototiller and we run lots of community and teen programs where there are lots of hands on deck. In addition, because this is our second site, we had the luxury of taking an entire season to enact this conversion process.

Like many farms, our go-to winter kill cover crop is a mixture of oats, peas, and forage radish. For a cover crop that over-winters, we use winter rye and vetch. In beds that we are putting into cover crop for a year or more, we use a perennial mix of perennial ryegrass and medium red clover. We will be experimenting with a more complex mix of annual species as we convert sod into an orchard pasture.

Given our scale and our lack of equipment, we seed all our cover crop by hand using a technique called “broadcasting”. We tend to prep the soil by clipping the food crop, say tomatoes, at the stem, slightly underneath the soil, and then pulling out any weeds by hand. If we are adding compost or amendments, we will spread them on top of the bed and then rake the bed to incorporate them and smooth it out before broadcasting the cover crop seed. We then rake in the seed and roll a rolled up tarp over it, a hand-make “culti-packer”. Finally, if planting in the summer, we try to water the seed in, or seed right before a rain.

For our over-winter cover crops and perennial cover crops, we kill them by tarping the living cover crop with a black silage tarp about a month before we plan to plant a food crop into that bed. We use large plastic silage tarps and weigh them down with sandbags. (Occultation means the state of being hidden from view)

In the summer months, when we want to quickly transition a bed from one food crop to another, we will use a sheet of clear, used greenhouse plastic and seal it down with lots of sandbags so that the heat accumulates (creating a greenhouse effect) and the food crop is killed by the heat of the sun. This usually takes 1-3 days. Then we rake the bed clear for a direct seed crop or plant directly into it for a transplanted crop.

Our tight crop rotation means that usually we plant our rye in October, and need to kill it back starting in early May, but on the occasion when it gets to a straw-like state where the stem can be snapped, we crimp it by hand, crawling on either side of the bed. In addition, we have experimented with growing a living cover crop of buckwheat around our pumpkin crop that we crimp back when the pumpkins begin to spread. As with all our techniques, this is incredibly labor intensive, but we find that people enjoy the task and we have lots of people and no machinery, so it is the right choice for our system!

We have experimented with growing pumpkins amidst a living cover of buckwheat. In this experiment, we broadcast the buckwheat a couple of weeks after transplanting the pumpkins, and then went through and crimped by hand once the buckwheat was starting to compete with the pumpkins for sunlight. We then had to go through a couple of more times over the course of the season to hand crimp again. We didn’t have to handweed a single time the entire season, and the crimping went much faster than a hand weed. Some buckwheat still flowered, which attracted incredible pollinators which benefited our pumpkin crop. We converted these beds into well-mulched garlic after harvesting the pumpkins, and we didn’t have any problems with buckwheat coming back the next season.

When we transplant into a cover crop killed through occultation, the cover crop residue usually serves as adequate mulch for about two months. At that time, we either add more straw mulch, or at this time we pull back the remaining cover crop residue and under sow a new round of cover crop. Pictured above, is a row of tomatoes that we sowed oats, peas, and radish underneath in early August (about 2.5 months after transplanting the tomatoes into occultated winter rye)

We continue to experiment with inter-cropping. We will be growing sunflowers as a shade crop for summer seedings of cilantro and dill to grow underneath, as well as sugar snap peas as a shade crop for radish and lettuce to grow underneath. Stay tuned for updates on these experiments!

While a living cover will always sequester more carbon, we are quite well practiced with our system of occulating a living cover crop, and then transplanting into it, leaving the cover crop as a mulch. We plant our winter rye more densely and don’t let it get into a woody-stage, and find that this enables us to easily transplant into it. The cover crop mulch tends to last about 2 months until we need to supplement with more straw mulch. Alternatively, at that point sometimes we pull the mulch away, undersow with the cover crop, and then return the light mulch to hold moisture for the undersown cover crop to germinate.