There are many ways to live and many ways to farm.  Here at Kingfisher we try to live responsibly and farm with care for the earth without being dogmatic, knowing that we are all on a journey and our practices will change and grow over time!  The word "sustainable" has often been applied to our way of farming.  I feel that the minimum standard for sustainability means using methods that allow us to produce healthy crops without damaging our ecosystem and depleting the soil.  The "even better" level, to which we aspire, is to leave our land even better than we found it!

To that end we spread lots of compost on our field every year, we use natural amendments to feed soil life and we grow cover crops which we incorporate back into the soil to build organic matter.  We never spray synthetic chemicals on our land for the purpose of killing weeds, insects or diseases. We try to minimize soil disturbance and maximize biodiversity by planting a wide variety of vegetable crops in our fields and we see the wider community as allies in joining us to foster an environment of biodiversity that is beautiful, healthy for people, and attractive to all kinds of pollinators and other wild critters!

Paul

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​What's growing on the farm?

Here's a little update.  This week we finished putting in all our tomatoes (we have most in greenhouse space and then one bed of field tomatoes which have small fruit already!).  Peppers and eggplants made it in the ground this week as well.  We grow somethings in plastic (as shown above).  This is reusable landscape fabric that will help with increasing the heat for the peppers and keeping the weeds manageable.  We are growing them in a section of the farm that was previously a field.  It had been composted and covered last fall to kill the grass but this will be the first year it's growing vegetables for us.  Cucumbers, winter squash and beans are all growing in the field and melons will get into the ground this next week.  We might have to plant those one evening as the hot sunny days make it hard to get transplants into the ground without a lot of wilting.  So as you can see, lots to get into the ground.  Market season can be really busy but in the whole scope of the farming year - May is the craziest for farmers.  There's intense pressure to get seedlings in the ground at the right time, get all the irrigation done to keep things well hydrated.  We have been loving working in this gorgeous weather; even if we do flop into our beds each night.