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