Soil Blocks and the Bee

"Human beings are the only animals who have to work... Other animals make their livings by living." - Mansanobu Fukuoka

 I have attended two talks given by Ross Conrad in the past year on the subject of organic beekeeping for beginners. Conrad has published seminal texts on beekeeping: its history in Vermont, how to do it without Big Ag's chemicals, and the importance of continual improvement in how we live in relationship with our pollinators. At both talks he returned to a central question: how can we emulate the bee? 

A honeybee takes only what is freely given: pollen, nectar, resins, air, and water and it leaves each of its benefactors better for the interaction. Bees pollinate our plants, provide humans and other animals with honey, beeswax, and propolis, and their venom is even used in immune-boosting therapies. How can we take less from the planet and leave it better? 

On the farmstead we are preparing for spring. We have been reading furiously, gobbling up any information we can about those who have done this already. Somewhere along the way in our adventures we have stumbled into a belief that we can probably do anything if we have the right reference materials. I blame liberal arts colleges and a slight manifestation of insanity. 

 Our goal for this first year is to learn all we can and do our best to grow as much of our household's food for the year as we can. We're leaning into the homestead half of farmstead this year as we figure out how best to make this operation self-sustaining. The less money we need to spend to run our household, the less money we have to spend time off-farm to earn. I like to think of it as financial minimalism. Eventually every roof needs to be replaced and the cats refuse to eat kale so we will always have some expenses, but for a couple of food-loving homebodies, one of our biggest expenses has always been what we eat. Did I mention this enterprise also replaces the cost of a gym?

It is also officially time to start seed. Town Meeting Day, the first Tuesday in March, is the traditional day to start seeds if you ask folks with deep roots in Vermont soils. I suspect we're not the only ones who snuck in some hot peppers and leeks a couple days early, unable to resist the joy of planting on 3/3/23. Is there a word for the enjoyment of numerically satisfying dates? We're experimenting with soil blocks this year. This came about by considering deeply the values of our farmstead and how we can balance living those values with the costs associated by doing so. Almost every part of gardening can be accomplished faster and someone-not-named-Eli-or-Dan might argue more efficiently with machines.

  A person can plant each seed with their hands, digging and eyeballing the depth and spacing necessary. A human-powered seeder allows this task to be accomplished faster, with greater accuracy for spacing and seed depth, and keeps the human involved upright instead of on hands and knees. This sounds like a pretty good trade-off, but what are the costs? A couple hundred dollars buys you the machine, made of metal and plastic with unquantified costs to the planet, and the shipping takes some volume of petroleum to get it from the factory to you and packaging to keep it safe on its way. 

 But wait, there's more! A larger seeding machine can be driven from the comfort of a seat, using petroleum fueled engines to accomplish the same task even faster so one person can seed a field in the same time it might take me to seed a row. This efficiency costs more dollars, more plastic and metal and paint and petroleum and so forth, not to mention the trucking costs to get it to you. This sliding scale of "efficiency" exists for everything from bed preparation to harvest and beyond. 

How we've decided to make all these choices simply is to choose an ethos. Fundamentally we want to try to be like the bee. I only want to disturb the soil and its microorganism magic when doing so will leave it better than I found it, so I don't need a tiller, just a human-powered broadfork. There are times when we make tradeoffs and use plastics when another option is unavailable or too expensive. We also try to make use of what we have no matter what it's made of rather than buy a new "green" product only to throw away its plastic predecessor in a landfill. 

 I truly think farmers at all scales are trying to accomplish similar goals - to raise good food to feed people and in some way to provide for their families and loved ones. As in so many areas of life, the trick is to decide which tradeoffs are palatable in your philosophy. Do we spend the time and the labor seeding by hand or trade that time and labor elsewhere for the money required to operate at a larger scale? This year we're taking the laborious route for the most part. 

These thoughts were all part of why we're soil blocking this year. Can you see why it takes me so long to post a blog update? 

 

Soil blocks are fun! We use a metal tool to compress our starting soil medium into little squares à la WALL-E's trash compaction. Then we plant seeds in the top. This eliminates the need for plastic seed starting trays. The little cubes still sit on some repurposed plastic boot trays but it's one fewer piece of plastic to replace every few years and we already owned the boot trays. It's snowy up here y'all. Soil blocking enourages the plants to grow strong roots and to not outgrow it's 'container'. As the roots grow they will 'air-prune' themselves, that is, stop growing out of the blocks as they encounter no water or nutrition in the air. If seedlings grow for too long in plastic trays their roots will grow in circles around the cell of the tray as they look for a pathway out. This can effectively choke the plant's roots as it grows bigger after planting. 

There's definitely a learning curve to forming clean blocks that don't fall apart. I went to Youtube University and with some practice made 24 very servicable blocks for leeks and 42 crisp blocks for peppers. You can guess which one I made first. I am sure that our household ate only 2 leeks total in the last year, but I still think 24 is too few. Time will tell. 

 Come to Vermont dear friends and with some luck and some work we'll eat leeks in 100ish days.