Assessing Cover Crops & Soil Health
I’ve written a lot about why we plant cover crops and what the benefits are but how do we assess those benefits? Today I thought I would share with you how I make observations on my farm to see if cover crops are working (hint: they are!). Cover crops have an important role to play on our farm and I can’t even begin to describe how delightful it is to see a field of green cover crops in late October/early November when everything else is dying back and being plowed under.
If I had a superpower I think it would be attention to detail especially as it relates to growing plants. I notice patterns in the color of crops, how the soil looks around and underneath the crops, how it reacts to different tools and so much more. These patterns inform my decision making and help me better understand what’s going on with my plants.
One really neat observation I made recently was noticing how many Rhizobium nodules were on the peas that are part of our cover crop mix. See the photo below, red arrows point to the Rhizobium nodules. These nodules house beneficial bacteria of legumes (peas, beans, etc), and pull atmospheric nitrogen from the air for use by the plant. We call this nitrogen fixing. Nitrogen is a critical nutrient for plants and the more of these nodules you have the more nitrogen the cover crop is pulling from the air and putting into my soil. As you can see in the photo below there are a bunch of nodules on the peas! That means next years drop will have more nitrogen available and I should need less fertilizer!
One other technical bit of information here: many companies sell innoculants that one would use to innoculate seeds for bacteria strains that would do this job. We typically don’t purchase or use innoculants. Why? Because our soil already has the beneficial bacteria present to form these nodules! That’s one indicator that we have healthy soil!
Looking Ahead to 2027
While our winter tunnel is ramping up crops out in the field are winding down. Our neighbors are busy harvesting their corn and soybeans and we’re day dreaming about what 2027 might bring. I’ve spent a lot of time in my head the past few weeks thinking about what worked this year, what didn’t work this year and what opportunities do we have. Here are a few things I’m hoping to switch up for next season.
Thursday Markets - We are very much leaning towards dropping the Thursday farmers market for a couple reasons. First, the Thursday market hours are inconvenient for our family. It means either Lara or I miss a night with our girls and that sacrifice is getting to be too much. Another reason is that while July and August are good sales-wise the rest of the months are pretty slow. Without the CSA, it wouldn’t be worth it to be there. We’d like to focus more on community drop sites & home delivery. Still figuring out how this would work but
On Farm Events - One of the biggest downsides to dropping the Thursday market is missing out on seeing our wonderful CSA members. We are thinking about switching to a monthly on farm event (farm tour, pot luck, music, pizza night, etc). We think it would be a better way to connect with our CSA members and share the beauty our farm has to offer. Plus, it’d be a great opportunity for you to connect with other CSA members!
More Beets & Carrots - While our early season carrot and beat game was the best we’ve ever had the mid and late season left a lot of people wanting for beets and carrots. I’ll be looking very closely at our beet & carrot crop plan so we can bring you more of these tasty and healthful root veggies for more of the season.
Tunnel Tomatoes More and Better - Our tunnel tomato management has improved greatly in the past couple years but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. We are planning to move nearly all of our tomato production into our high tunnels next year. We are also going to do a better job with mid-season fertilization which is an area where I really felt like I dropped the ball this year.
Fall Variety - I think we could have better selection of crops in the fall. Part of this feeling stems from loosing so many crops in the flooding earlier in the fall but there is room for more. Kohlrabi, bok choy, more broccoli & cabbage.
Flexibility: What Our Year-Round CSA Membership is All About!
Community Supported Agriculture, CSA for short, is one of the best ways to eat local, seasonal food harvested at peak ripeness but it’s not without its drawbacks. We’ve continually sought to improve the CSA model so that it works well for both our CSA members and our farm as well. Coupled with that is the notion that we are now a year-round farm with fresh produce from our farm available even in the dead of Minnesota Winters. We announced our new Year Round Cedar Crate CSA Membership this fall with a goal of making our CSA even better in offering more flexibility. Here’s how it works and how we think it will be more flexible for everyone farmers and eaters alike!
In simplest terms, buying a CSA membership from our farm is now buying credit that you can spend with our farm. We have varying membership levels to fit a variety of budgets and the higher the membership level the higher the discount! The credit doesn’t expire and can be used on all products in our GrownBy shop as well as at our farmers market stand. Here’s how we’ve added flexibility to our CSA with this new year round model.
Spend the credit at both our market stand or our online store!
Change your pickup location when you order OR opt for home delivery!
Order the weeks you want, skip the weeks you don’t.
Order anytime! This one takes a little explaining. Previously, CSA members would have a 12 hour window to customize their share. We know life can be busy and things get in the way and sometimes you just forget. So instead, you can order anytime. We will refresh our online store inventory every Saturday and again on Tuesday as we assess our crops. Order deadline is Wednesday at 11pm weekly.
Order Year Round! Since we’re a year round farm now, it makes sense that CSA members could order year round. That wasn’t the case before but it is now!
This model will also offer us some flexibility when the unpredictable happens. Take the flood of this year as an example. We had to cancel a week of the CSA because of the flood. With the new year round model CSA members won’t lose out on a week of the CSA. Instead, we’ll take the time we need to recover and re-open ordering when we have produce available again. Of course, all of that would happen with clear communication from us!
Freezing Peppers Is Easy, Here’s How
One way to stretch your CSA and produce purchases even further is to preserve some of the harvest for winter. One of the easiest crops to put up for winter are peppers. They retain great flavor and require very little preparation. Here’s how we freeze peppers for the winter.
Bell Peppers/Carmen Peppers
Typically we will julienne both bell peppers and carmen peppers. Remove the seeds, stems and membrane. We like to mix the colors together and then freeze in a 1 quart zip loc bag. They’ll keep for 6 months or so in the freeze and are great for making fajitas in the winter!
You can cut bell peppers in half, remove the seeds, stem & membrane and freeze the halves to make stuffed peppers all winter long!
Jalapenos, Serranos, Poblanos
I like to freeze a few bags of each of these types of peppers whole. I also take some time to dice these up for use all winter long. An easy way to spice up dishes during the winter!
How to Use Frozen Peppers
You can use frozen peppers in many ways. Any cooked dish that calls for peppers is a great use. Our most common uses include fajitas, pizza topping, and in scrambled eggs.
While you can eat the peppers in uncooked dishes they loose their crunchy texture when frozen.
And really, that’s it. It’s so easy there’s hardly anything to write about! Freeze some peppers this week!
The Flood of 26
This week we’re going to do a bit of a deep dive (hah!) into the flooding that happened about 10 days ago. We’ll go through what happened, how much rain we got, the impact on the crops, and the silver linings.
On Friday September 18th into the early morning hours of Saturday our area received a highly localized and intense rainfall event. Rain totals reported from across the southern part of Waseca County range from 6” - 9” or more and it came fast. Most of that rain fell in just a few hours. This caused significant and highly localized flooding that affected us, nearly all farms in the area, and especially New Richland, MN where up to 80% of the homes in the small town had at least some water damage.
For us, the flooding was extreme. I’ve never seen this much water on our farm, even when we had the significant flooding in 2024. A few examples that help illustrate how much worse this flood was. First, the water was up over our driveway and about 1’ deep across our driveway. In 2024, the water never got high enough to cross our driveway. Second, ALL of our tunnels had a minimum of 8” of water in them and up to about 3’ of water. A few more inches deep and our last transplants of the year would have floated down the Little Cobb Creek. In 2024, only one of our 5 tunnels was affected with flooding. We’ve never experienced anything like this before.
The flood waters did recede quite rapidly. By Sunday morning the water had receded from all tunnels and all outdoor beds and into only the lowest portion of our farm where we had planted the waterway cover crop mix. But the damage was done. Unfortunately, any produce that comes into contact with standing flood waters is considered contaminated and cannot be sold. This is because it’s hard to know what is in the flood waters - there could be sewage or more likely, runoff from the many nearby confinement barns that could contaminate the crops. We lost around 80% of our fall lettuce crop. Other losses include basil, tunnel peppers, celery and some tomatoes. We estimate the dollar value of crops lost to be around $7500.
There are other negative implications as well. First, is our winter crops. We are in the midst of planting our winter season crops into our new winter tunnel. Timing is critical for these crops because we run out of daylight and warmth very fast. We are about 1 week behind schedule with only about 1 more week left to plant before it’s too late. If these crops don’t mature in time, then we won’t have them available for harvest in winter. This could cost us up to another $7500 or more. Also, we have a large crop of carrots out in the field. While they were not flooded, the soil is VERY wet and we are not drying out very quickly at all. The carrots are at risk of rotting in the field because of wet conditions if we don’t dry out soon. If we lose our storage carrots that is another $5000 loss. These crop losses can add up quickly. We don’t think we will lose all of the carrots or all of the winter crops but we might see some lower yields on both depending on how things go.
I’ve painted a pretty depressing picture so far so let’s end this on a high note. What are the silver linings in this situation? I think the first silver lining is just how awesome our local food lover community is. So many people have stepped up and given us the support we need to keep going. It’s so remarkable and Lara and I are SO grateful.
Another silver lining is just really seeing and understanding how powerful our cover crops can be. Our cover crops, though small, kept our soil in place despite extreme rainfall, water washing across the farm, and super hydrated soils. It’s just astonishing to see how well they actually worked in this situation.
A technical silver lining that is just a hypothesis. We think the flooding will improve soil health inside our tunnels. Our tunnels are watered with well water that is quite hard with many dissolved minerals in the water (just ask our water softener and iron curtain). Because of this, salts and alkalinity build up in our soil over time causing the soil pH to raise. This can adversely affect plants causing lower yields. Rain water is typically slightly acidic and can help “flush” the salts out of our soil. If my hypothesis is correct, we could see lower pH and salt readings on our next soil test. Time will tell!
Finally, there are many crops that were spared and an error on my part will allow us to have lettuce again in a couple weeks. Crops that avoided flood waters include tomatoes, peppers, winter squash, kale, broccoli, cabbage, radish, cilantro, scallions, spinach, popcorn, salad turnips & more. And the farmer error I made means we have lettuce that was planted in high ground instead of the tunnels so we will have lettuce in mid to late October.
So, that’s the flood recap. It’s been a tough week but because of support from our community and the diversity of crops we grow on our farm we will press on!
Fall & Winter Crop Preview
Cooler temps and back to school has got me thinking fall. And while most farmers are gearing up for harvest, we’re just wrapping up planting for the season and harvest never ends on this farm! This week we’re going to go over some of the fall and winter crops we have in store for you this season!
Fall
You’re already seeing some of our typical fall crops like delicata squash back in CSA boxes and on the market stand. We also have a very nice crop of butternut squash coming as well. Another crop that stands out is our fingerling potatoes. If you haven’t had our fingerling potatoes before, they are incredible especially when roasted. Light pink flesh that’s creamy and extremely flavorful.
Radish, spinach and salad turnips will all make re-appearances soon! These crops can be a little tricky in the fall because they typically like cooler soil temps to germinate. But, once we’ve got a nice crop up the flavor is basically as good as it gets because the days just keep getting cooler as we head towards winter.
Winter
Our new winter tunnel will hopefully give way to new winter crops and expanded seasons. This year we are focusing our efforts on extending our lettuce season deep into January & February. While our growing techniques here are highly experimental - I think we’re the only farm in the upper Midwest attempting this!! - we think we will be successful. Other winter crops will include radish, spinach, bok choy, salad turnips & scallions.
We also expect to harvest a good amount of carrot & beets that we will store at optimal conditions for the winter months. Pair those with onions, garlic, cabbage, squash, shallots & more and we will have a robust offering this winter season!
From left to right: broccoli, cabbage and carrots!
Preserving The Harvest
I often get asked some version of “What inspired you to start your farm?” It’s a good question. Farming, especially vegetable farming, isn’t known as a quick way to get rich or an easy way of life. Thus, there must be some kind of interesting and complex answer to the question. I’ll save the full answer to that question for a later blog post but today I wanted to answer part of it in our work to preserve the harvest.
I grew up on a farm. My dad farms corn, beans, beef and used to grow and raise wheat, alfalfa, pigs & more. My mom was a stay at home mom and kept a HUGE garden. Every year we would work together as a family to preserve the harvest. Shelling, blanching and freezing peas. Husking, blanching and freezing sweet corn. Snapping and pressure canning green beans. Quartering, cooking and running tomatoes through the food mill. These were all normal summer tasks for my family to fill our freezers and the canning room downstairs with the seasons bounty.
I didn’t know it at the time but this was something truly special. Most families had stopped going to all this work. Most of what we canned and froze could be had at the grocery store for cheap. But, as I learned quickly once I got to college, store bought vegetables whether fresh, frozen or canned just taste terrible compared to vegetables from the garden. Plus, the time spent working together with my family was invaluable and instilled a deep appreciation for the independence that comes with the knowledge of food preservation.
So, one of the reasons I started this farm was so I could preserve the harvest. So I could pass on the knowledge of food preservation to my kids. And so I can connect with my family over the act of preserving the food we’ll eat this winter together. With any luck, my kids will want to pass that knowledge along as well!
Below is a copy of the salsa recipe I really love this year. It’s from the Ball Blue Book. You can find the recipe here: https://www.ballmasonjars.com/blog?cid=zesty-salsa
How We Dig Carrots
Carrots are one of our most important crops on our farm and something we’re known for. Each year we grow literally thousands of pounds of carrots for our CSA members, online store, farmers market & whole sale partners. When you’re digging that many carrots every season you need a better, faster and easier way to dig carrots than a simple shovel, broadfork or potato fork. We use a tractor attachment called a bed lifter to make digging our carrots much easier.
The bed lifter is a simple tool overall. It works by digging underneath the depth of the carrots and loosening the soil. This enables us to easily pull the carrots out by their tops for harvest. It greatly increases the amount of carrots we can dig and it’s a lot easier on our backs as well. One drawback is that it requires dry soil conditions to work best. If we have a rainy period, we can’t use this tool to dig carrots.
There are a couple tricks to using the bed lifter. It needs to be deep enough that we don’t slice off the bottoms of the carrots but not so deep that the carrot cling to tons of dirt and mud. The angle of the cross bar at the bottom needs to be gentle enough to not break the carrots but steep enough to loosen the soil. And the soil conditions need to be right. If it’s too dry the soil breaks apart in huge clods breaking carrots and not greatly improving the speed. Conversely, if it’s too wet we aren’t able to use the bed lifter because we’d either get the tractor stuck or not have enough traction to pull the bed lifter.
Our New Vacuum Seeder - One Year Later
We made a large new purchase for the farm last season: a new electric vacuum seeder. I just made a video on our socials about this vacuum seeder so I thought it’d be fun to revisit this blog post from last year and add some thoughts after our first season with it.
What is a vacuum seeder?
A vacuum seeder uses suction with air to hold the seeds to a plate. The plate rotates based on spacing needs and the vacuum is cut when the plate rotates to the position where the seed is supposed to be dropped into it’s furrow. Our particular vacuum seeder has a multitude of different plates with different spacing and hole sizes to accommodate a wide variety of seeds.
Vacuum seeders have much better seed singulation. That is, making sure a single seed is dropped at the designated spacing instead of a multitude of seeds. That’s because the suction of the air holding the seeds against the plate is easier than trying to have a single hole size that fits a the variability that comes with seeds. Not all seeds are the same size even within the exact same crop and variety!
Our new vacuum seeder! First crop seeded with it was beets.
How are other seeder types different?
Our other seeders, the Jang and Hoss seeders both work similarly. Each have a seed plate or seed puck that has holes drilled into it for different seed sizes and spacing. Instead of air suction through vacuum holding the seeds in the plate/puck only gravity allows the seed to fill the hole. Because the holes need to accommodate the variability in seed sizes even within crops you inevitable end up either jamming seeds or dropping more seeds than necessary.
Which crops will we plant with the vacuum seeder?
One of the things we love about the vacuum seeder we bought is that it can be used for a number of different crops. We plan to use it to seed peas, green beans, popcorn, sweet corn, beets, cucumbers, zucchini, summer squash & melons.
In particular I’ve been very frustrated with our Hoss seeder in our popcorn & sweet corn. The Hoss is just not accurate enough to singulate seeds nor does it achieve the desired spacing. We end up with lots of doubles, triples or gaps which is a problem because we’re either spending labor thinning doubles and triples or spending labor weeding gaps where there are no crops. The vacuum seeder will solve these problems for us!
My thoughts after one year of use:
Overall, I really like the vacuum seeder. It’s allowed us to have much better stands of various crops such as sweet corn, popcorn, green beans and others. That’s beneficial in two ways. First, we get a better harvest for each unit of space our crops take up. That’s because each seed is more accurately dropped so we have very few gaps or doubles. Compounding on that benefit is that we reduce weed competition because our crops shade out more of the weed more quickly. Second, we reduce labor both because of the crop canopy and because we don’t have to spend time thinning crops.
Some things I don’t like about it are that the motor feels really underpowered. I have to push when going uphill with the speed dial cranked to its maximum setting. I don’t love the design of the depth adjustment. It has almost too granular of settings so it’s hard to get things where you want them to be. Finally, and most importantly, is the cost. The unit was close to $6000 new with seed plates and other required accessories. It will take a few years for the unit to pay for itself but it has definitely earned its spot on our farm!
Garlic Harvest 2026
One big project we checked off the list last week was completing our garlic harvest. Not only is it a pretty big job but also it’s somewhat time sensitive. Leave the garlic out in the field too long and the cloves can start to split apart which negatively affects shelf life.
Garlic harvest went very well this year and we’re very happy with it. Our weed management in the garlic was a thousand percent better than last year - almost no weeds at all this year so it made harvesting a breeze and helped improve our garlic size and quality too!
Our garlic from late June. No weeds!!
Historically, we’ve used our bed lifter to undercut the garlic and make it easier to pull up. Last year we had some issues with both weeds and our row spacing and we discovered we really didn’t need the bed lifter to pull up the garlic. It could be done by hand relatively easily. We took that lesson to this year and pulled all the garlic by hand without a lot of extra effort.
After harvest, we wait about 2 weeks for the garlic to cure. That is, dry down the out layers that will form a protective seal and greatly improve shelf life of the garlic. Once curing is complete we’ll have plenty of garlic for CSA members, online orders and our farmers market stand!
Our 2026 garlic harvest!