New Friends (Plants!)

     Exciting week for the Redwood Sustainable Agriculture farm. We have been hard at work preparing our beds. We have gone through the extensive process of double digging our beds, lying down compost as well as organic fertilizer including aerating the soil. We also spent time on our pathways and laid down some mulch to make it functional as well as visually pleasing. With the farm now being in excellent shape it was time for us to select some vegetables to plant. This is not as simple as just choosing some plants that would grow well in the current season but had a lot more depth and planning which was an eye for me, for the reason I previously was unaware of all the delicate intricacies in maximizing plant growth potential that are associated with biointensive agriculture.

   Biointensive agriculture is an organic agricultural system that focuses on achieving maximum yields from a minimum area of land while also increasing biodiversity and sustaining and increasing the fertility of the soil. There were few process we went through in choosing the correct plants for our garden the first step was checking what plants were growing in our beds and making sure to avoid planting the same plants for the reason planting the same type of plants seasonally over time will deplete nutrients. Each plant absorbs different types of nutrients from the soil and having the same plants seasonally will deplete the nutrients specific to those plants in the soil and the soil will become deficient in that nutrient and over time it will make the plants not have enough of that nutrient and it will stunt that plants growth. This also would be against the biointensive agriculture concept which is not only about maximizing growth of crops but is also about maintaining soil fertility. My bed group looked up what was previously planted from last year ago in our bed and beets, potatoes, and squash were the main species.

   We then decided to plant some baby lettuce, onions, leeks as well as bell beans. All these were a nice mix of plants that complemented each other as well as the soil. Lettuce is a relatively moderate feeder, while onions and leeks are light feeders. A reason for us going on the lighter side of types of plants that absorb a lot of nutrients is that we have a large tomato plant that has developed over summer and tomatoes are very heavy feeders on the nutrients of the soil. We felt this combination offered us a nice array of crops but would not put stress on the soil as well as a rotation of the crops previously planted. It's only been a couple days and we have already have seen some solid growth from the baby lettuces. (pictures below)

   We have also been working on crop reports which is the process of selecting a plant and becoming very well informed about all of its traits as well as it is scientific name. My crop is the banana which scientific name is  Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana there are two because there are two different species in the wild. A fun fact is bananas are very radioactive compared to other fruits and are sometimes used as a gauge of radiation exposure. But don't worry bananas are very healthy.

Preston MB