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Colmonton in numbers

Colmonton is subdivided into 6 fields (tap or click the description to highlight it on the map):

How we farm here

In Colmonton, we practice something called ley farming, which at its simplest means alternating crops for human consumption with pasture for animals. For us, that means intensively growing market vegetables in three of our six fields, and grasses and legumes in the rest. A two-year cycle for a given field looks like this:

  1. As the vegetable season winds down, move our ducks and geese into the empty beds to eat weeds and weed seeds, dropped fruit, and pest eggs
  2. Once the birds are out of that bed we plant all the beds in these fields to a cover crop (usually winter rye)
  3. In the spring, the rye takes off, and on May 1 we start moving the flock through to graze it down completely and kill it
  4. With a strip tiller or power harrow, we loosen the top inch of material enough to broadcast or drill warm-season grasses and clovers
  5. In the fall, we’ll plant another cover crop underneath the warm season grass – often winter rye again, but in some areas, we’ll plant something that we want to die over the winter so we can get a head start on planting in the spring
  6. In the spring, we kill the cover crop by crushing it down and covering it with a black silage tarp
  7. We’re now ready to plant our market vegetables

We take on this higher planning cost because of Windsor loamy sand, a soil type common not only in Enfield and Longmeadow but throughout the Connecticut River Valley (glaciers no know borders). For the first four years we had gardens at Little Ark, we tilled manure compost and amendments in using our two-wheel tractor. What we discovered was that, due to the high porosity of what the USGS generously calls a loamy sand and I call a beach, any disruption of soil structure results in added organic matter evaporating before the season ends. Back in 2019, we were only farming two of those six fields, but we dropped from two to one, leaving the second field to be grazed by the birds, in hopes of adding organic matter without the compost bill. That was the last year we put the tiller on our tractor. No regrets there!

Our three intensive fields blend all the things we grow but do sort of have themes:

  • Main field contains the stuff we are harvesting the most for CSA shares – most of our leaving greens, sweet peppers, most of our tomatoes, radishes, turnips, carrots, etc. We call it “main” because we expect to spend more time there than anything else.
  • Potato field is never more than 1/3 potatoes, we grow more potatoes in it than any other single crop there. Also some sweet potatoes, which at least count for the name if not botanically.
  • Melon field is less than half melons but we like melons better than anything else we grow here so… a lot of farms our size don’t bother growing something as sprawling as watermelons and winter squash, but we can’t help ourselves. We compensate for the lost bed space by planting crops in between the melon rows. Those crops have to either very tall, very early to harvest, so we can get to them before the vines take over, or very late, so we can harvest them when we aren’t tripping over watermelons.

We’re now experimenting with how we can push our off-season fields to produce a crop for human consumption while still producing ample biomass for build soil. In 2025, we’ll be seeing if we can replace sudangrass with sweet corn and clover with dried beans…