It’s NOT Soil Health That Saved This Crop + “Best Farm Advice Ever” Week Begins!

Hey nerds, Farmer Jesse here. Welcome to Growers Daily, your daily dose of ecological farming insight. It is Monday, October 7th. Today, we're talking sweet potatoes, how competition affects seed crops, and farming like you're old. So let's do it. Every day this week, I'm going to share one technical piece of advice I received about growing something, and one bigger picture piece of advice. I'm calling it best advice ever week, and of course, we will dive it deep into one listener's questions in the second segment of every show. Please like and subscribe if you're joining us via YouTube. I hope everyone had a reasonable weekend. I was really inspired by the community efforts, especially those by farmers over there in the areas devastated by Hurricane Helene. Cannot be overstated how important a community is in a crisis, and those stories are really inspiring. If you're looking for an excuse to just grow a bunch of potatoes, because they are not particularly profitable, so that's not a good reason to grow them, but having a bunch on hand to send to disaster relief is a really great service. Potatoes can obviously be a nice thing on your market table, but when we had the flooding here a couple years ago in Eastern Kentucky, we were able to send like 1,500 pounds of potatoes their way, which being a lettuce farm largely, it was nice to have some actual calories to contribute to someone's meal. Anyway, there will be a potato show at some point to update you on the potato trials we did this year with using slips instead of cuttings. In short, there is some there there, so look out for that. Let's see, I had a busy weekend soccer coaching, and I almost got some rest. I was like this close. I will try again next week on that. The kids played great, though, and had a lot of fun, which for me is always the goal. I want all of the kids to simply love this sport and want to continue playing it. Parents and coaches often over-pressurize youth sports, and if I could give sports parents any advice, it would be to just enjoy watching your kids play. Don't yell at them, don't direct them. If they don't develop a love for it and associate sport with fun and enjoyment, they will not want to play it at whatever the next level is. Developing a love of and obsession with the game is as important as developing any skill, but more on that later probably, I can't help myself. We went to the Louisville racing game that I had mentioned on Friday's episode, but they lost 2-0 to one of the best teams in the league, so that was not great for their playoff hopes, but I thought they held their own pretty well. So I'm still keeping the faith, as I know you are, for the official women's professional soccer team of No-Till Market Gardeners, but my Brighton and Hove Albion Seagulls defeated Tottenham 3-2 in an epic comeback on Sunday, so it wasn't all bad in my pro soccer world. All right, so like I said, every day this week we're gonna start with one technical piece of advice I received that made a huge difference, and maybe this is a recency bias, but the one I want to put out today is actually about sweet potatoes, but also pertains to other crops and specifically soil health. I'll explain. My friend and mentor Jeff, who I did the biodynamic agriculture videos with a couple weeks back, he and I were talking about sweet potatoes at the Acres Conference this past year, and I mentioned I was having trouble with scurf, which is, scurf is like this annoying fungal disease that doesn't really seem to hurt flavor or storageability necessarily, but makes the crop less marketable because it leaves black marks all over it, and I had tried several things, but I couldn't seem to find a remedy, and it was just getting worse. The scurf percentages were growing. None of the compost teas or foliar sprays or good compost additions or cover crops, any of that stuff was helping. Then he told me to try something that sounded kind of ludicrous to me or to anyone who has ever planted sweet potatoes, but it completely worked. For the uninitiated, for sweet potatoes, you generally plant what are called slips. This is basically where you plant full sweet potatoes below sand or soil and force them to sprout in a warm area, and then you pull those sprouts out and plant those. That's where your sweet potato plants start. You preferably, on those slips, you have some roots so they will take to the soil faster and not just die in the May or June heat, which is when we typically plant them here in Kentucky Zone 6B slash 7A, now that they updated it. What you want are small green plants, but with nice long stems covered in roots. Then you dip those roots and et cetera in essentially mud or compost, and then you plant them. There is a little more to this process, but you can watch the video we did on sweet potato slips to get an idea of how we had done it up until this conversation with Jeff. Jeff told me to grow the slips like normal, but then cut them off at the soil surface so they will be small and won't have any roots on them, and then plant those. If you stay away from the root, the scurf is less likely to transfer to the actual plant, at least that was the idea. My first response was that these tender young slips would instantly bake in the sun, and he said that's what I thought, but he assured me it would be fine, and so I followed his advice and cut the slips early and short. I then planted them 10 inches apart in the row, threw some shade, like some physical shade, not like shade shade, threw some shade cloth over top and watered them in, which he didn't necessarily recommend, but I wasn't taking any chances with this, and by golly, it worked magnificently, which as that word comes out of my mouth, I feel like that's probably the first time I've ever used it to describe anything, but it did, magnificent. I had only two plants with scurf in all that I have harvested so far, down from about 50% or more of the planting last year. In comparison, it's basically nothing. Now, some or maybe most of you won't care about this particular planting, probably because you've never tried our sweet potatoes, which are incredible, by the way, but that's okay, but I do think there's an important lesson in here about how sometimes we get caught up thinking that soil practices will save every issue, but culture is just as important for certain crops or maybe every crop. Your greenhouse procedures can cost you several days in the field or transfer diseases or just not be that effective. Sometimes the answer is super simple and basic and doesn't have anything to do with the soil, but rather the technique of how you grew the plant. Huge shouts to Jeff for that tip, truly a wealth of vegetable growing knowledge, that guy. All right, when we return after the break, what happens when we save a seed from a crop grown in weeds? BRB. Today's episode is brought to you by Rimmel Greenhouses. Whether it's tomatoes to market, flowers in the spring, or your family's harvest, growing in a greenhouse protected from the weather provides the right environment that you need for a harvest that you can count on. Rimmel Greenhouses are designed for durability and offer the quality that you need to grow productively year round. Visit rimmelgreenhouses.com to get a quote today. If I may editorialize for a second, I own a Rimmel tunnel. I love it, we built it ourselves, and I really appreciated the quality of the tunnel as well as the customer service we received in the process. So make sure to check them out. As always, Patreon members get first dibs on the questions of the day. If you want to support our work, join us at patreon.com slash no till growers. Not only can you ask questions over there like the one I am about to tackle today, but you can also help guide all of our podcasts and videos and et cetera or whatever else we do. We appreciate the support as it helps us to keep this work free and open to anyone and everyone. Oh, and I'm shouting out every new Patreon member who signs up in the month of October at the end of each of these episodes. Can't support us financially, but wanna help? Sharing the episodes goes a really long way and we really appreciate it. All right, so Patreon member Nathan Layal Crisp asks, can you grow cover crop seed with weeds to make a more competitive cover crop? The reason I asked, Nathan writes, is because there is an area I made raised beds with a borrowed BCS but did not tarp it. I did not have the resources for vegetable production yet so I spread a thick amount of cover crop seed. It did well even with the weeds and produced at least 2.5 times the more quality seed than I sowed. Okay, so thank you, Nathan. It is a very interesting question that will be somewhat hard to answer but brings up other interesting questions and ideas that were fun to explore. So to back up, the basic question here is, will growing out a seed crop in heavy competition, in this case a cover crop seed grown in weeds, but it could apply to any seed crop, really, in competition with any other plant, will that make for a more resilient, competitive crop the next year? On the surface, this idea makes sense, right? But as I will say a million times, sense is not science. We all gravitate towards ideas that make sense to us and confirm what we believe or want to believe. It's called confirmation bias. But it's good to keep in mind that just because something sounds right does not mean it's right or accurate or realistic. In fact, that's the point of the scientific method to try to take opinions out of the picture. Try being the operative word there, but at least it's a framework. So my challenge in answering this particular question was to find the closest relevant research around this idea of how the presence of weeds or competition alters seed crop genetics. I obviously can't speak to your specific situation, Nathan, and I wanna be clear that I'm not a seed breeder. I didn't conduct any of this research myself, but I can share some of the nerdy, fascinating tidbits I learned from the research that I read that may or may not at all be helpful, but like good sciences want to do, may point you in the direction of an answer. First, the word we need for researching this particular topic is transgenerational, meaning the effects of environmental stresses experienced by a parent seen in their offspring. One thing the research on transgenerational effects suggests is that it is not uncommon for competition to affect the traits passed down from the plant parents to the plant kiddos. So basically, what happens to the parent plants is seen in the plant babies. An example is what at least one study of plants from seeds whose parents were in high competition environments, those plants created greater total biomass and leaf area than their parents or other plants. However, that was only when the next generation was grown in a similarly shady environment. Put another way, the plant babies of parents who grew in competitive environments were better equipped for shade, like the shade of other competing plants. Fascinatingly, however, that didn't always mean they did as well out in the open. So maybe the plants performed better than their parents in highly competitive or simulatedly high competition. I don't know how to say that, you know what I mean. But that didn't mean they did better when they were grown in a non-competitive environment. I guess the analogy could be that it's like training a kid to play one sport and then having them play an entirely different sport. Like they may do fine because they're athletic, but not as good as if you had put them in the sport you prepared them to play. Also, the results were not always consistent in the studies I found. Sometimes plants that were grown in rough conditions just did not produce very robust seeds. A study on Polygonum persicaria, known as red shank, for example, which Wikipedia tells me is in the buckwheat family. It's fun. Found that the plant babies did better when the parents grew in moist soil in competitive environments, but the plant babies of parents grown in low moisture, dry environments, had overall lower quality. The researchers hypothesized that this is because of competition for below ground resources for the parents. So basically, the parents didn't eat well, and therefore their offspring suffered from that, from what would effectively be malnutrition. So to answer your question, maybe you created more competitive seeds, but perhaps, one, only if the plants are in a similar environment the next time that they are grown, and two, the parents got adequate moisture during the growing season. Of course, there is no way of knowing for sure, so grow them out against some other seeds and see how they compare. If nothing else, you may have adapted them to your region a bit more, which is generally a good thing. Anyway, I spent one morning researching something that people spend their entire lives researching, so feel free to let me know where I was right or where I was wrong or any other info that might be of interest. Up next, let us all be old farmers, even you young'uns. That'll make sense presently. Be right back. Hey, y'all, the No-Till Growers crew and I want to use the ad space today to point you towards a couple of resources to help farmers in North Carolina directly affected by Hurricane Helene. Both the Organic Growers School, or OGS, and the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, called CFSA, are local ag organizations who have done a lot of work gathering resources for those of us who want to chip in. So the resources will be linked in the show notes as well as the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, also called ASAP, which was the organization mentioned by Lyric last Tuesday when I spoke with her about her farm's experience with the hurricane. It is impossible to overstate how big of a disaster this is. Sincerely, Helene is one of the worst American disasters since Katrina. So please help if you can, even if just throwing a few bucks towards a farmer's GoFundMe would be huge. Thanks, and back to the show. Okay, so as promised, I will do one technical piece of advice every day, and one bigger picture, and the bigger picture advice I received is something I believe I maybe first heard on the Farmer to Farmer podcast a few years ago, or many years ago at this point, and it was to set up your farm not like you're 25, but like you're 60. In other words, even if you are 25, you cannot set up your systems like you will be that way forever. You won't. You need to start thinking down the line when you won't be able to haul buckets of feed, for instance, out to the piggies by hand, or set up systems or areas that can operate on wheels so you're not carrying things around everywhere, or planting and harvesting systems that don't break your back. Anyway, the idea is that when you're doing something really hard, and it becomes a part of your daily or weekly routine, it's important to ask yourself if you'll be able to do that particular task in that particular way until you're old, and if not, how can you modify it now to make it more possible later? Also, is it too complicated for someone else to do it, now or later? Can you simplify and systematize it so that when you become less capable, it won't be hard to explain to someone else how to do it? The beauty is that by modifying these systems now to fit your future abilities, your overall system will become easier and more efficient. How can you move the seedling trays to the field easier? How can you move produce around in your wash pack easier? Can you find a better system for managing your tools, managing maintenance, managing the harvest? How can you not haul slop to the pigs in five-gallon buckets? Lastly, don't wait until you need a chiropractor to start seeing one. This one's maybe coming out of left field, but I have a chiropractor appointment this afternoon, so I'm thinking about it. I've referenced my back issues before, but they are not actually from farming. Well, at least not exactly. My chiropractor surmises that they are from something I did earlier in my life, probably like falling after attempting a no doubt very impressive skateboarding trick. You would've loved it. It was amazing. And then when I started farming, I effectively built muscles around my back, my misaligned back, which further pulled my spine out of place for like 10 years. So don't wait until you feel it in your neck or your back to see your chiropractor. They have saved my career like a dozen times over now. Ask Hannah. We thought a few years ago that I would have to quit farming because I could barely get off my couch, but the chiropractor brought me back from the dead. Oh, hey, buddy. I have a jumping spider that lives in my desk and I consider it my friend. We just hang out. I love jumping spiders. Anyway, I could barely get off the couch and my chiropractor brought me back from the dead. I have to be careful with my back, but I can farm. Start now and avoid that situation for yourself. I have a chiropractor appointment today. Like I said, it's one of my favorite things, basically a holiday for me every month. Anyhow, I'd be curious to hear from older farmers, things that they've changed over the years to make their farming easier, things that they wish they'd changed. Also, keep the best advice you ever received coming and I will share some of those on Friday's episode. What technical or big picture advice changed your farm or life or farm life? All of the above. All right, I think that's gonna do it for Growers Daily on this lovely fall Monday. I will have a special guest host coming on tomorrow, I think, if everything works out, and if not, then soon. Make sure you are subscribed or following wherever you are hearing this. Please share it with friends and let them know you are pumped about this new daily show, specifically for growers. Shout out to Willie Breeding for the theme music. If you are indeed enjoying this show and want to see it keep going, please consider signing up to be a patron at patreon.com slash no till growers, where I am shouting out every new member who signs up in the month of October, or if you just bump up from one level to another, you will also get a shout. Is this show worth two or $5 a month to you? Hopefully. If not, I'm sorry, but I'm trying. Patreon is the best place to show that support. You can also snag a copy of the Living Soil Handbook or pre-order Dan Brizbois' new book, The Seed Farmer, at notillgrowers.com, or pick up a hat or other merch. Or if you're watching on YouTube, that super thanks button is huge for us. Also the like button, also the subscribe button, all the buttons, just hit them all. Otherwise, I will see you all back here tomorrow, and we'll close out today with Patreon shout outs. So huge shout outs this day to Chilo Ryan. Chilo, I hope I'm saying your name, or it could be Kylo. That sounds like, it's a great name. I feel like that's the alias that Kylo Ren uses when he checks into a hotel. That's what I would use. Also Emily B. and Ron Middleton, thank you all so much for your support. Thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow, bye. ♪ Da da da da da da da da ♪