Self Guided Field Tour - Flipping Beds #1 - Ottawa Farm Fresh

Hey folks, Farmer Joe here coming at you fresh from the field. So if you're watching this video you're probably on our self-guided tour and you're probably still out in the middle of the field and you'll see the significance of why you're out there instead of here. But I just want to take a second to introduce our BCS. So BCS is an Italian company. They make these two-wheel walk-behind tractors and you can put all sorts of different implements on it. So today I'm going to demonstrate how we switch over. This is the rototiller we use for prepping the beds sometimes and yeah, let's just do this. All right, here we are. Now this is where you probably are on the self-guided tour and so what you probably see here is a large black sheet of plastic. That's called an occultation tarp and we use it as a method of destroying crops to get the beds ready for the next crop. So here we've had salad mix, so like baby kale, arugula, salad mix, you know different different types of brassica greens and instead of disking the beds a lot, instead of using the tractor to work up the soil a lot to kill the arugula, we're just going to mow it and cover it with that plastic tarp and in about three or four weeks it'll be totally dead underneath and we'll just take it off, disk it once and plant our next crop which will be lettuce here. So we're going from arugula into lettuce. One of the challenging things about diversified vegetable farming is knowing how much of each vegetable to grow. We grow 35 different types of vegetables planted every week from you know April all the way to September and the challenge is that how do we know exactly the right amount? So for instance here, this is a bed I plant, I planned way too much arugula. I had enough arugula to do like four times more arugula than what I needed. I don't know what happened. I think my math wasn't quite right or something. Anyway, no worries, this is just going to become a cover crop. So basically this amazing bed of arugula, instead of harvesting it, we're going to mow it. It's going to feed the soil microorganisms and all those nutrients are going to get recycled and that's one of the things we do here in organic agriculture is we work with the biological cycles instead of using chemicals and fossil fuel based inputs to do agriculture. We work with the natural cycles to regenerate the soil and to nurture an ecosystem that feeds us and the entire ecosystem. So yeah, let's get this mowed.