At Cedar Mountain Farm a major component of our operation is a 4 acre market garden. We grow 26 varieties of vegetables in sequenced crop rotation. Green manure/cover-cropping is an integral piece of this rotation. The principal consumers of our produce are 85 community supported agriculture (CSA) customers, with the balance of the produce being sold wholesale to 2 local restaurants, a food coop, and direct sales at our farm stand. Managing the garden primarily for a CSA allows us to plant a wider variety of produce than if we were selling through more conventional markets, which tend to avoid lesser known vegetables like kohlrabi or celeriac. As a result of our variety, our CSA market garden looks more like a very large home garden than a traditional “truck farm”. We know our diversity creates a healthier ecosystem, enhancing the opportunities for organisms to flourish and for a balance to be established between “good” and “bad” insects.

Our cover-cropping system is inspired by the bio-extensive market garden ideas of Eric and Ann Nordell of Trout Run Farm in Pennsylvania, which we’ve adapted to our local climate and markets. The size of our garden relies on our irrigation capacity. We have extremely well-drained soils with a gravel base. In most years only dry land farming would be possible by planting full-season crops like our traditional Vermont neighbors who plant the home garden on Memorial Day and harvest on Labor Day. Between high-tunnel greenhouses, the propagation greenhouse, and the succession planting in the field, we are seeding something almost year round. In order to keep our CSA customer’s baskets filled we plant a succession of crops. Fall-planted garlic is harvested in mid-July and then the ground is worked up with compost and planted to mesclun, spinach and Asian greens. In other sections, a spring or mid-summer crop is harvested, and we work up the ground and establish a cover crop like buckwheat, oats, or rye for the rest of the season. We go into winter with as little bare dirt as possible.

Our garden planting season begins in late winter in the heated propagation greenhouse and continues into high summer. Some of this is direct seeding in the field and some as transplants from the greenhouse. In either case the new seedlings need to be watered at planting and require the minimum equivalent of an inch of rain a week in order to thrive. Our garden has no surface water source so we irrigate from an artesian well that is 400’ deep and yields about 5.5 gallons per minute. We began gardening on this site with 6 acres in market garden but after a couple of dry summers we scaled back to 4 acres, which we could keep in production during dry years with our available water supply. In a wet year our garden tends to fare better than our neighbors who are on silt or clay soils, and we’ll see less disease, fewer pests and slugs. Even in a normal year, we do the primary tilling with horses so we can get out on the land earlier to work it without creating the clods and cinders of a heavier soil.

The year before we established our market garden we soil tested of the entire field. We do this now every third year. The field had been in alfalfa for the previous five years and had low potassium levels, but enough phosphorous and nitrogen. These are the 3 essential macro-nutrients. We spread wood ash (a source of potash) and lime over the garden. That fall we hired a neighboring dairy farmer to spread cow manure from his herd. Our fledgling herd of cows was not yet producing enough manure to meet all the fertility needs of the land.



The results of our first soil tests also indicated that the organic matter content was roughly 3%, which is considered barely adequate for vegetable production. When we tested  last time, the soil had increased potassium levels to the sufficient range and we had an organic matter content of over 6%, considered excellent  by soil scientists (virgin prairie stands at about 10%), and all the micro-nutrients were sufficient as well. The market garden has been receiving regular applications of compost, and the crops are in a sequenced rotation with a variety of cover crops like oats, rye, clover, field peas, and buckwheat, each of which draws up a different profile of minerals from the subsoil, and the legumes fix their own nitrogen from the air in symbiosis with the soil fungus rhyzobia.

Cover crops, crop rotation, and tending to the soils sustain us, our land and farm, and all the souls we feed.