Written by Booka | 22 February 2010

Symbiotic relationships exist between many organisms. The teeth-cleaning shrimp come to mind. A little underwater spa treatment would make anyone feel like a new animal. One lifeform needs the other to do its job or survive. Our beautiful bald berms needed a healthy dose of nitrogen, to complement our thick layer of carbon cardboard. Our job, as farmers, was to breathe new life into soil that had been robbed of a lot of its nutrients, by walls of thick ivy.  Our best solution for implementing the nitrogen cure: a healthy dose of water-resilient volunteers!

After the last few weeks of spreading cardboard and organic matter on the farm many people were wondering, what's next? What will be our first "crop" this Spring? The suspense is over. We planted thousands of fava beans! Favas are unique in many ways. If you hear people talking about planting them to "fix" the soil, here is a brief explanation of how this unfolds. Favas are a delicious legume, with edible leaves and a rich, buttery bean that can be eaten in soup or even blended into a light green humous. Hold onto your pita chips, though. First we have to enrich our organic matter. Favas can grow in almost any climate, but when you soak them in water first and then cover them in a bacteria from the Rhizobium genus, you get a wonderful partnership. With the help of the rhizobia bacteria that live in the root systems, the favas are able to lasso up nitrogen from the environment and digest it in order to grow roots, stems and protein-rich seeds. In return the rhyzobia bacteria get a sugary root secretion. The organisms work together to feed one another.

Much like the fava and the tiny little rhyzobia bacteria, the 20 HVF volunteers who braved the rain to get dirty, worked together to poke holes into the entire surface of the berm in a special diamond formation. Then we placed fava seeds in the holes, and by the end we had covered the entire hill with thousands of fava beans. The second seed we planted was a cover crop that also "fixes" nitrogen and will help enrich our soil structure. We mixed our woodchip compost with handfuls of New Zealand White Clover and broadcast it across the berms. These tiny little seeds will become a living mulch layer to protect our soil structure, and help slow the water runoff when it rains.

As always, big thanks to the volunteers who helped us sow our first crop and bring on the rain!

 

A special thanks to Sloat Gardens for the seeds  and Zoey and Janelle who created our first Hayes Valley Farm Seed Library!>