We’re wrapping up our planting activities for the year right now, having lost over a week due to wet conditions from the early October storms. Fall Onions went in last Thursday and yesterday, and the last of our Broccoli is getting planted as I write this newsletter. We started planting Garlic last Friday, continued on Monday and hope to finish up tomorrow or Friday. The last round of leafy greens will get done today as well: Spinach and Lettuce.
Once we’ve concluded the vegetable planting, we have one big planting task left for the year: Cover crop. Cover crops are grown not to harvest and sell, but to protect and build the soil. While they can be grown any time of year, we primarily grow them in the winter when they usually don’t need to be irrigated. In the spring we’ll graze sheep on the leguminous, vining vetch plants and then incorporate everything back into the soil to build organic matter, add the natural nitrogen that the plants pull from the atmosphere, and feed the microbes that make our soil so productive and healthy.
Generally speaking, our goal is to plant a cover crop in each our of our fields at least once every 3 years. Like with everything else we do, though, the weather often decides how close we get to accomplishing that goal. We have just a three- or four-week window — from now until Thanksgiving — to get everything planted before the days get too short and cold for the seeds to sprout. If we get a series of storms during that period, we won’t meet our goals.
On the other, we also don’t plant if it’s too dry, for several reasons. During very dry Autumns, we are simply too busy irrigating all the vegetables and don’t have time OR water available. Plus, irrigation is expensive, and cover crops don’t pay for themselves the way vegetables do. But if you plant into unirrigated soil, and let the first rain sprout the seeds, there’s a risk. If it doesn’t rain enough to moisten the soil deeply, the seeds will sprout and then die when their roots hit the dry soil further down. So I generally wait just before the second storm of the season arrives.
There have been several years recently where we planted hardly any cover crop because the ground never dried out enough after the “first storm” to do so. Other years, we’ve planted it into wet and muddy soil — never a recipe for success. And of course in the worst years of the drought, we planted almost no cover crop at all.
2025 has been a Goldilocks year for farming at Terra Firma overall, so it’s not surprising that it is playing out perfectly for planting cover crop. We have a large number of acres of fields that we had prepared prior to the early October storm that soaked it up all the moisture and are in perfect planting condition. And now we have another storm in the forecast for next week. We even have time to lightly cultivate those fields to kill the weeds that sprouted thanks to the copious moisture. We’ll start planting cover crop tomorrow, and should be able to get most of those fields planted before rain returns on Tuesday. If it all comes together, it will be the earliest date we’ve ever gotten so much cover crop planted.
Thanks,
Pablito