With Salt
Because of God’s love for us, we are motivated to go about our day-to-day tasks and pursue customer relationships “with salt”. This means we practice honesty, integrity, and charity for the glory of God. For Biblical references see Mark 9:50 and Colossians 4:6.
Cover Crops
Cover crops build soil, suppress weeds, and improve soil structure/tilth. They are utilized between vegetable crops during the growing season and over the winter months. Maximizing sunlight harvest and living roots in the soil is a pretty powerful combination.
Judicious Tillage
We continually try to reduce tillage for the benefit of soil structure and soil biology, not to mention our backs! At times, however, we find it necessary to create an adequate seed bed or incorporate a high residue green manure. We utilize a broad fork, a minimal disturbance tool, to gently loosen the deeper soil profile.
Companion Cropping
Intercropping plant species that mutually benefit each other is called companion cropping. Organic pest control is an example benefit as multiple scents from different plants help throw off potential herbivorous predators. In this case peas (nitrogen fixer) grow between two rows of sweet corn which is a heavy nitrogen user.
Our produce is not Certified Organic at this time and we do not anticipate pursuing certification. The added cost and time/paperwork is simply not worthwhile for a market garden of our size. That said, we do our best to follow and even exceed Organic standards. We invite anyone with concerns to come out to the garden and ask questions or see our practices with their own eyes. A mentor of ours often says “trust is so efficient”, and we agree. If we get to the point of needing a piece of paper to verify we’re trustworthy, we did something wrong a long time ago.
We don’t claim to do everything right. Salted Spade is a learning effort for us among many other things. Overall we just want to keep the principles of nature in the forefront of our minds and mimic them as much as possible while growing and harvesting our crops. After all, the systems God has put in place are pretty remarkable!