The
Old Days
You’ve probably heard
the expression back in the old days we did so and so. Well those old
days were teachers that helped us through the days ahead. Here at
Ashcombe, perhaps forty years ago we used a lot of chemicals on our
crops to prevent disease and keep down the insect pests that plagued
them. My bro. Bob and I shared a very small office in a concrete
block building that served as a warehouse, boiler room, packing shed,
and maintenance building.
Often times when we
could catch a minute or two from our many tasks we would discuss how
we farmed our vegetables. The farm, previous to us, had been share
cropped and the farmers had allowed the soil to be depleted of
nutrients. We took regular soil tests and added the recommended
amounts of commercial fertilizer to keep our crops growing and put in
cover crops over winter that added organic matter to the soil. We
thought we were doing all the right things to increase yields of our
crops but really didn’t see a great difference.
Both Bob and I were,
could you say, innovative, and wanted to go beyond the accepted
practices of farming at that time. Organics were not yet come of age
but having had an uncle who farmed with no irrigation only manure and
raised nice crops of vegetables for his roadside market we thought
that there must be a way without manure which we didn’t have to
accomplish the same thing.
We learned of a company
that made a product that was all natural but the ratios of fertilizer
did not meet what our soil tests called for. It was a risk at that
time to put on an untried product but we felt it would be worth the
risk. After that decision was made, no commercial fertilizers were
put on our fields and we scouted out crops for insects and only used
low toxicity sprays when damage was evident.
We saw little
difference in yields initially and felt better that we could say no
commercial fertilizers were spread on our fields. Sometime later
perhaps five or six years we tried a one half acre plot completely
organic and separated them in our store marking the organic as such.
At that that time there wasn’t a concern for lesser use of
chemicals and we didn’t continue the half acre. But we could feel
good that our veggies were probably as healthful or more so than many
grown in the area. And were we to have continued to grow in later
years it probably would have been organically.
Story by Glenn Gross
co-founder of Ashcombe Farm and Green house
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