When we last checked in with you, we were filled with a renewed sense of gratitude for clean air while we adjusted to shorter days and prepared to wrap up our harvests. Now, a month or so later, as we celebrate the Winter Solstice, our big harvests are complete and our gratitude for the blue skies is coupled with an appreciation and hope for more rain.

Our focus at the farm has shifted from harvest and field clean up to sorting and packing squash for orders while preparing the fields for winter and spring. We do this by applying compost and gypsum, mowing the asparagus ferns as they move into dormancy, and planting our cover crops, barley, and snap peas. Once those tasks are checked off the “to-do” list, we settle into a few months of “hibernation.”

We don’t actually hibernate, of course, but once the winter seeds are in the ground, we spend notably less time out working in the fields, and much more time thinking about the fields. It is necessary during the upcoming winter months to take a step back and assess what’s working well, what needs improvement, and what we can try differently when we’re back in the thick of the action. These short, slow days of winter we’re settling into present the perfect opportunity for reflection. We’ve been participating in lots of webinars, reading studies and seed catalogues, and researching new things we might want to try next year.

This year opened our eyes to the fact that many things are not quite as secure as we may have thought, especially those things that we often take for granted. It took a considerable amount of energy just to stay on top of the outside influences we had never faced before in quite this measure of complexity: unprecedented smoke from wildfires, record high heat, labor shortages, and, of course, a pandemic that is still raging on today. When they are stacked on top of each other, these hurdles felt, at times, nothing short of too much. But, these hurdles also opened our eyes to one of the many beauties of farming once again; plants don’t stop growing, fruit doesn’t stop ripening, (we still want and need to eat) and so we, too, as a community, are called to carry on.

While many ideas have come up already during our review of the season, one big thing we are focusing on at this very moment is disease pressure. And no, I’m not referring to the pandemic!

Over time, we’ve noticed disease pressure continuing to creep into our fields, but this year a large portion of our cherry tomato crop was affected. This was sort of a wake-up call for us to address the root cause of the issue. As we are all well aware of by now, there are many factors to consider when attempting to mitigate diseases, but one of the issues at the forefront of our minds right now is identifying host plants and non-host plants. This will help inform our crop rotation decisions, a primary tool organic farmers use in breaking up disease cycles. Identifying what crops we could add to our rotations and our soil health tool-kit to decrease the viral spore populations may be an easy first step to reducing virus populations in our soil.

One of the soil born pathogens we are seeing in our fields, especially tomatoes, is verticillium wilt. Verticillium wilt has a huge host range (many plants can be affected and “host” the spores, helping the population grow) and a very long survival time (it tends to survive for over 10 years in the soil, even without a host).

In addition to avoiding spread of this virus to other fields, our main goal is to reduce the spore populations. After consulting with our local small farms advisor, Margaret Lloyd, we think we can achieve this by making small adjustments to our crop rotations, like adding non-host and antagonistic plants to our rotations and cover crops, and by adding chitin into our soil amendment toolkit.

As Margaret reminded us, any time you add something to the soil, what you’re really doing is stimulating the microbes that are best at using that food source. Chitin, which we are exploring right now as a potential new “tool,” is a complex polysaccharide like cellulose, but more rigid and water insoluble. Basically, it is the material that makes up exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans (commercially available chitin comes from crab shells). It is also what fungi are made of. Being rigid and water insoluble, chitin is tough to break down, but because everything must break down and decompose at some point, there are specialized microbes that do just that – break down chitin AND fungi to use as their food source! So, by adding chitin into our soils, we are feeding and encouraging populations of the same microbes that feed on disease-causing fungi (thereby reducing the spore populations over time). How cool is that?!

In addition to acting as a specialized food source for certain microbes, field studies have also shown that chitin increases plant health. It’s presence in the soil and on the leaf surface triggers a plant’s disease- and stress-fighting genes to turn on, making the plant better able to cope with stressors throughout it’s life (like diseases, pests, heat waves and water shortages). It’s not too unlike the concept of a vaccine…

There’s a lot of chemistry and microbiology involved in caring for our soil's health, and the more we can understand the relationships between the organic and inorganic players in the soil, the better stewards of the soil we can be. We’re still learning about chitin, and we are always learning about the vast microbial populations and networks that exist in healthy soils, and what we can do as farmers to encourage the beneficial populations of microbes to flourish in our soils.

New problems or challenges can present new opportunities for change and discovery. With humility, we are always looking to learn and improve our farming practices. We are very excited for the potential chitin may hold in our endeavor to care for the soil, and we anticipate adding it into our toolbox this coming season.

M.F.K. Fisher said, “First we eat, then we do everything else.” We share that sentiment around here so before we get back to our thinking about the fields and what the microbes in the soil feast on, we’ll leave you with a few links to what we’ve been eating (and thinking about eating)!

We've been devouring these tomato crisps that we made with the intention of having tomatoes all winter long
Our store of frozen roasted cherry tomatoes is coming in handy

Braynt Terry's book Vegetable Kingdom is filled with recipes we want to try, but this butternut squash sesame seed hand pie is on the top of our list
Collard green pesto on everything! Our garden is very lush with greens right now.
We are getting around to roasting and making sugar pie pumpkin puree to have on hand for any cooking and baking occasion
And speaking of pureed winter squash, we've been enjoying classic butternut squash soup. What's your go-to winter squash soup recipe?