Hello from the farm,
We bought a rotary hoe.
Which, given that I've spent quite a lot of time talking about regenerative farming, may require some explaining. I promise we haven't changed our minds.
One of the basic principles of regenerative farming is that soil doesn't like being naked. Expose it and the extraordinary little ecosystem underneath starts to suffer. So we try to keep ours covered with plants, pasture, compost or mulch. Once our flower beds are established, we'll disturb them as little as possible, adding our homemade compost from the top and leaving the earthworms and soil biology to do the work for us. Frankly, worms are cheaper than fuel.
We have built all our annual beds, as no-dig (no till), but our perennial beds are staying put for years, so we get one chance to prepare the soil properly; Enter the rotary hoe!
So we have now removed our apparently inexhaustible supply of rocks, fluffed up the ground and incorporated compost, well-rotted chicken manure and some other organic potions that we prepared. Then we plant and mulch. And that's it. The rotary hoe gets retired from those beds and the worms take over.
I love the cycle of it all. The chickens help make the compost, the compost feeds the soil, the soil feeds the flowers, the flowers feed the insects and the flower farm apparently feeds my increasingly concerning need to buy agricultural machinery. I'm fairly certain that last part isn't regenerative farming.
