On New Life and Flower Farming
Originally Written on September 29, 2019
The farmland I grow my flowers on at Kin Loch Farmstead has a story that has gone untold. I only know snippets of it. It is said that 450 million years ago our sandy soil formed the bottom of Lake Ontario, for starters (that would explain the sand!)
We are just north of what is known as the Niagara Escarpment, a ridge that runs from Wisconsin, hugging the bottom of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, through Ontario, Canada, all the way east to our little chunk of Niagara County, New York (Niagara Falls being the most famous part of the whole thing). Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, erosion and compaction of sediments formed a basin of limestone and shale that formed a huge, rocky ridge spanning hundreds of miles across the upper rust belt. Growing up in Michigan I am highly disturbed I never learned of this escarpment in school, or in that Geology 101 class I took in college, but there's a chance I could have been staring out the window. I daydreamed quite a lot.
The second part of the fabulous history of the flower farm is that it used to be someone else's flower farm! According to several people that have lived in the area for decades, I am not the first person to grow flowers in this little chunk of earth. Knowing this, I feel I was meant for this work, specifically on the tiny patch I tend.
My blood, sweat and tears are an ode to those that have bled, sweat and cried (for better or worse) in this soil before me. I would love to know who these people were.
I do, however, question their growing methods. They were definitely not organic and some corn/soybean situation definitely came in between our flower patches, pesticides and herbicides undoubtedly killing off much of the soil life and small wildlife on the land. It's sad, and it happens everywhere across the county, but there is a happy earth ending to this story.
When I started growing flowers on the farm in 2018, the soil was nothing but sand. Because of its coarse composition, it has incredible drainage (I did not suffer in the least from this spring's unrelenting rains, unlike many other farms across the country whose crops were destroyed); however, when soil drains water it also drains nutrients right along with it. Nutshell explanation is that my farm requires a ton of inputs (compost, natural fertilizers, etc) for healthy plant growth.
When I started growing here, there were no worms. Not a single earthworm. Very little signs of life. Large populations of ground beetles but that's as exciting as it got.
In not even two seasons of growing flowers on this land, the soil has improved ten fold from our dedication to organic, no-till farming. I had not one single bug problem this entire season except asparagus beetles that decimated my asparagus crop. Bug populations do vary from season to season so we will see what happens in the future. I decided to dig the asparagus up and plant blackberry vines instead - no great loss there (I grow lots of edible plants because they produce incredible, textural foliage to add to my floral designs).
I truly believe doing next to nothing about the bugs is the reason why I have zero bug problems. The only thing I did all year was knock a few Japanese beetles off my zinnias into soapy water (and then they decided to fly away and land on the big ass wild grapevine growing on the telephone pole just outside of the garden and ate that to pieces). So we have this invasive, normally nuisance of a wild grapevine working as a complete distraction from my flowers. Nature is doing all the work for me.
I've also noticed new populations of bugs and small reptiles I've never seen before in my whole gardening career. New this year, I have an amazing population of leopard frogs that have incredible jumping abilities and at times, jump up and scare the sh-- out of me, but they're busy doing work eating flies, larvae, and keeping my bug populations in check. Same with the birds. Tons of birds visit the flowers to eat caterpillars. I've been meaning to do some research on which birds I want to specifically attract to keep bugs in check, and put up the appropriate bird houses in the corners of our fence. Lets not forget the gigantic 3-inch-long orangey black wasp thing that almost flew into my face last week. Scared the daylights out of me, but also an absolute wonder to see.
I've been very careful about cultivating a healthy crop of milkweeds and allowing the native Swamp Milkweed plant to sprout and reseed itself where it pleases. Monarch butterflies, as we all know, are a dying breed and milkweed is their only food source (monarch caterpillars will not eat anything else).
Along with the native Swamp milkweed variety, I've planted Asclepias tuberosa (Butterfly Milkweed) and Asclepias physocarpa (Hairy Balls) for cut flowers; the latter of which are home for countless monarch butterfly larvae. It's just incredible!
Even though I have all these new kinds of new bugs and new small animals, my flowers are healthier and I have less bug problems than ever. The moral of the story is to let nature take care of itself. Man does not need to intervene with the natural systems. I created this new habitat by planting all of these beneficial plants, leaving the garden soil alone (not tilling it), planting cover crops, adding compost, and refraining from using any sort of chemicals, including high nitrogen fertilizers.
Since I cultivated this place, nature is now playing a huge part and allowing me to grow tons and tons of flowers with very little mid-season work.
We still have a lot to do - fall cleanup will include adding manures to the dahlia rows and layers and layers of shredded leaf mulch collected from neighbors all over the entire garden to protect soil life from harsh, dry winter winds. Next year, more mycorrhizal fungi will be added to the soil with the spring planting, more compost will be added to annual rows, and new varieties of plants will be introduced to attract even more life forms.
