Our Growing Practices Oak Hart Farm
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. —Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
We are committed to growing organically.
We would like our impact on the land to be such that future generations will be able to enjoy the beauty of the land, streams, and wildlife as we have. We are dedicated to not using synthetically produced chemical pesticides or harmful fertilizers on any of our crops. We irrigate our crops from a well dug specifically for this purpose.
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Our primary means of weed control:
- cover crops
- hand weeding and hoeing
- tractor cultivation
- hay mulch – grown and produced on the farm
- plasticulture
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Our primary means of pest control:
- planting trap crops
- companion planting (basil/marigolds with tomatoes)
- covering crop rows with fabric to create a physical barrier against pests
- occasional use of organically certified pesticide only in extreme cases
- crop rotations
Our main means of soil fertility:
- cover crops in the off season (green manure)
- chicken litter (nitrogen)
- mushroom mulch
- beet molasses – boosts nitrogen uptake