Week 50 | 2023
If you ever join us on a farm tour, I’ll ask you to meet at the front of the barn. Then I’ll take you and your friends past the overflowing bins of squash, onions, and potatoes to the fields where the crops are grown.
Standing in a bed of lettuce, lined up like soldiers dressed in vibrant green, I’ll gently tug a romaine right out the soil. You gasp and your eyes are drawn from the savoyed leaves to the mass of intricate roots.
Then I’ll make a comment that at first sounds strange.
“Plants are like sugar factories,” I say.
Of course, you don’t believe it. But when I offer a leaf for you to taste, you agree that the whitish spine does indeed have a delightful sweetness mixed in amongst the pleasant bitter flavours. Some of you are still questioning, so I let you pick a sun-ripened tomato from the vine. Now you’re nodding enthusiastically.
Think of plant leaves as solar panels that can snatch carbon dioxide molecules from the air. Leaves combine CO 2 , water, and minerals and using the sun’s energy, “POOF,” they make sugars.
But plants don’t hog all the sugars for themselves like we might do with a bag of MandM’s on a fieldtrip.
Plants generously push tiny skittles of sweetness into the soil to feed invisible organisms. A feeding frenzy ensues.
Bacteria arrive first and greedily absorb the sugars they themselves are unable to make. They also reproduce like crazy and soon the region is taken up by millions, no billions, of hungry bacteria.
Nematodes, microscopic worms, are next to arrive to eagerly slurp up bacteria like a vacuum cleaner sucking up ping pong balls. And then they do what all other organisms do: they poop. Lots.
Remarkably, it’s these deposits that plants desperately need. Because locked in the bodies of the bacteria and other microbes are essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, magnesium, boron, cobalt, sodium, and many other trace minerals.
Try to think of soil critters as fertilizer bags. The bags can only be opened, and the fertilizer spread around when other organisms eat each other and excrete. Their excretions are in exactly the right form and deposited at exactly the right place and time for plants to suck up.
Amazingly, a plant can send certain flavours of sugars to attract just the right species of bacteria that contain just the right nutrients that it needs to either produce seed or substances to ward off pests.
In healthy soils, with a wide range of nutrients to choose from, plants thrive and generate a richer flavour profile. When we eat plants grown in good soil, we in turn have access to all these minerals and phytonutrients. It’s true, we’re made from the earth.
But what happens when we use artificial fertilizers or kill microorganisms by using harmful sprays?
Well, that’s a topic for the next tour. Now it’s time for a barrel train ride and a visit the cows and pigs.
Farm Grown Turmeric
Turmeric is a long season crop that needs tons of heat. Start tubers indoors in January by planting them three inches deep in organic-rich potting soil. Keep them moist and try to maintain a temperature of at least 25C. A growers heating pad works great.
By late April we plant the tiny shoots in an unheated greenhouse spacing them around one foot apart. We keep the soil moist and add compost several times to feed the plants through the growing season.
Turmeric will put on six feet of growth by September. In October they’ll begin to expand their root mass and will be ready to harvest in November. You can keep them in the ground and use them as needed throughout the winter provided you keep them free of frost and in soil that’s only slightly moist.
