Little trip up north...

We just returned from a brief road trip to New Jersey and New York, where we caught up with friends and family. Along the way we visited our friends at Regeneration CSA in High Falls, NY. Regeneration is located right next to the Mohonk Preserve where I used to go hiking and fishing with my dad. It's a beautiful area.


Regeneration is a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. That's a system where members of the local community buy shares in a farm at the start of the season to pay for the farm's expenses. In exchange they get a weekly share of the produce throughout the growing season. In addition to being a good economic model, CSAs are also a great way for people to participate in the growing of their food. Many CSAs -- including Regeneration -- hold regular tours, workshops, potlucks, and many other events that educate people about farming and help build relationships between people and their food.


Here's me with Sarah and Kevin, who started Regeneration in 2007. Before that they were working on the farm where Kristen and I met (well, actually, they set us up -- but that's another story). Regeneration uses permaculture growing techniques. Permaculture is (among other things) a theory of designing gardens, farms, and landscapes that mimic relationships found in nature. The idea is that ordinary problems like pest control, irrigation, fertilization, and many others can be solved in more ecologically sustainable ways by recreating structures found in the natural environments around us. In a lot of ways it takes the ideas of organic farming to the next level.


They start vegetable seedlings in a salvaged kit greenhouse that they modified to be solar heated. The walls are made of double-walled polycarbonate glazing ("twinwall"), which keeps the heat in. A home-made solar collector heats water and circulates it into the greenhouse. A pile of decomposing compost in the back also gives off some heat. Kevin is kind of a genius when it comes to improvising things like this -- the water is moved by a solar-powered pump he threw together and it's heated in black plastic tubes normally used to warm up swimming pools. The greenhouse doesn't stay as warm as an electric- or propane-heated greenhouse, but it uses minimal fossil fuel inputs, and gives seedlings a good head-start on the growing season.


The seedlings then graduate to this coldframe (above), which is kind of a miniature version of a hoop-house -- what a lot of farmers use to extend their seasons in cold climates. It takes the edge off the cold nights and lets the plants warm up during the day.


Beautiful herb and flower seedlings for sale. (Seedlings for planting are still in soil blocks.)


This is one of many types of no-till beds found at Regeneration. This means that they generally don't plow up the ground when they plant. Instead, they cover over the previous year's bed (or over a mowed field or lawn) with paper, compost, and mulch. All the weeds and dead roots from the previous year decompose. The idea is that by leaving the soil alone and simply adding on top of it, you improve soil structure, organic matter content, and the diversity of organisms living in the bed. All of these things make the plants healthier, improves drought and disease resistance, and makes soil nutrients more available -- which is very important when you don't use chemical fertilizers.



Here are some more no-till beds. All that hay is used to keep the weeds down and to keep moisture in. Vegetable starts are planted into pockets of compost.

Being at a farm like this makes our garden look like a little patch of barren dirt! It takes a lot of hard work and careful growing decisions to build up the soil, and we're definitely going to experiment with no-till next season.