Johnny, To me it sounds like a great plan and I cannot think of any way to make it better. You don't need my comments or advice---you've got this all figured out already. (grin)

I do want to add this---because I am probably at least 150 miles south of you, my timing would be slightly different in terms of when to plant the corn. The standard time to plant it here is the last week in March. I'm sure that would be too early for y'all to plant corn up there. If I were to plant corn in late May here, the odds are that it would be tasseling and silking when our summer heat is at its worse, and the heat could denature the pollen and cause the ears to have poor tip fill. That happened to me in 2011 even though I planted on time in March. Of course, the high heat arrived in May and I kinda knew then that the corn harvest was going to be poor, and it was.

In a year when the weather halfway cooperates, I harvest early corn that was planted in March around Memorial Day weekend. That often allows me to get it harvested before coons expect corn (so they aren't looking for it, don't find it, and don't ravage the corn crop) and often before the corn earworms show up.

On the rare occasion I plant corn late, I chose heirloom varieties that are more like field corn than modern-day hybrid supersweet or triplesweet types. Those older varieties of field corn don't seem to be affected much by the heat as long as they have water.

Dawn

Dawn,

That was helpful. The corn mentioned in the rotation is for roasting ears and drying for corn meal. It is a variety from Mexico that is best planted on Dia De San Juan, 24 June. It was recommended for this area by the folks at http://shop.nativeseeds.org/products/zd084.
We plan to grow Kentucky Wonder beans on the stalks.

The other help I need is to come up with other crops for plots "C" and "D"

This year, we have 1.5 acres to use at St. Francis of the Woods. In the coming years, I expect to be able to use four >one acre plots.

I am focused on potatoes and southern peas / other legumes because they are nutrient dense and like to grow here. Also, they are simple to can or freeze or dry. PEPH peas, when combined with a whole grain, make a complete protein.

One obvious omission is okra.

Johnny

omg I'm envisioning 4 acres of Heavy Hitter Okra. Okra heaven! I know you won't do all 4 acres planted in okra, but it was a nice thought until I tried to envision having enough man-power to pick it all. oh boy

Johnny, I read somewhere there is some issues with following a root crop with another root crop? I've no experience, but the vague and undefined reading came to mind which is totally useless to you, I'm sure. Maybe it's just something ya gotta watch out for. Dunno.

man, that's a lot of food. Yum!

Bon,

Again, that was helpful. I will look it up later today. I asked for sharpshooters to find flaws. I want to produce good food, not stroke my ego.

I am trying to include cereal rye because it is known to control nematode damage to PEPH peas. Also, it is good for adding organic matter.

Keep 'em coming folks. This is a big project for one old man.

I appreciate it, too. I haven't shed a tear. Got a little angry while I was leveling that 5,000 square feet by hand, but no regrets. I turned my head away from my new tiny garden beds and toward your endeavors and said to self "Self. You shall pick. You shall pick in abundance!"

The alternator went out on the truck. Replacement is next on the agenda. I'm saving my gas money. Keep those emails coming!

The only thing that caught my eye was "perpendicular to the slope".

soonergrandmom,

That is a technique for limiting soil erosion by water run off. Did I say it wrong?

By the way, I inoculated the PEPH pea seed to increase the Nitrogen content of the soil.

soonergrandmom,

Please don't regret speaking up. I need good questions and suggestions.

Can you recommend any crops I haven't mentioned?

Johnny,

Now that I know you're growing the right corn for the heat, I won't give it another thought!

Is okra deliberately omitted or does it just not have an assigned spot yet?

Onions and garlic because....they last in a pantry for a while so don't require processing and they can be used in concert with pretty much all the other veggies in cooking.

Sweet potatoes as they have a long storage life in the typical household environment, and can tolerate pretty late planting and still produce a great crop. Might not be the best choice IF you have a persistent root knot nematode issue.

Cucumbers, melons, watermelons, summer squash and winter squash. Heavy producers but prone to pests so likely would require the use of some kind of pesticide to keep them in production for the longest possible time. The best choice for winter squash would be butternut and other varieties that are C. moschata. One problem with cukes, even with the most disease-tolerant ones, is that they need to be picked regularly, without fail, as leaving them on the vines too long causes production of more cukes to shut down. With summer squash, an early planting in April as soon as reasonably possible after the last freeze might give you a great harvest before squash bugs arrive, or you could grow the avocado squash (look a little like avocados, taste like squash, have pest resistance of C. moschata types) that I've come to love.

The glaring omission that is like a knife stabbed directly into my heart is tomatoes and peppers. I can understand the challenges you'd face in growing them on a large-scale. With a careful selection of determinate varieties you could large avoid the issue of how to support the plants, and by selecting heavy-producing hybrids, you'd get yields and resiliency not necessarily found in all heirloom types. Fresh tomatoes can be harvested at the breaker stage and would have a longer shelf-life, as you'd likely need when it comes to picking them, sorting and packing them, and carrying them to the food banks for distribution. Both sweet bell peppers and hot peppers are not just for fresh eating but also can be frozen or pickled. With tomatoes, unless you have an army of helpers to harvest them, I'd avoid the bite-sized tomatoes as they require an enormous of harvesting time. Or, I'd have a few cherry tomato plants but not too many or you might scare off all your harvest helpers. You could choose a good, basic multi-purpose tomato like Rutgers or Sioux that work equally well for fresh eating or for cooking. You could use the Florida Weave to support larger tomato plants. All you'd need is posts or poles and twine. It isn't hard to get the hang of it and it doesn't take long to occasionally run another length of twine to support taller plant growth as the season goes on and the plants get taller. At the end of the season, if you used sisal twine, it can go right into the compost pile.

Herbs. Maybe this sounds frivolous, but if you're wanting to encourage the folks who get food from the food bank to cook, then it helps if they have a few fresh herbs available to flavor their home-prepared meals. Cooking with fresh herbs is simple, and you don't have to have a large quantity of herbs. Plus, herbs are a huge splurge for a family struggling to make ends meet and to put food on the table, so imagine what a boost it is to their self-esteem to have a luxury item like fresh parsley, rosemary, dill or basil....or chives or whatever. Just receiving any food at all is welcome when a family is struggling to put meals on the table---but to receive something extra like a little bundle of herbs might offer a big psychological boost. It also might encourage them to devote more time to cooking healthy meals from scratch. The thing about the work you are doing with Vision Farms is that you aren't just feeding people: you're teaching some of them how to grow and how to harvest, and you're teaching some of them how to cook and/or can. Beyond that, though, you're helped heal hearts and souls that have had to worry so much about whether they'll have enough food to last the month. Adding herbs to the mix is not really a luxury----it is a way of telling them that they deserve to have good, tasty food just as much as anyone else, and I think that is a message herbs would deliver.

Dawn

She's right about the herbs! I picked up some dried herbs from a church member a few months back. One of them is greek basil. I swear, when I use them it really does feel like a luxury ! I have regular basil in the garden, but this different variety is really awesome. I can imagine what someone who isn't familiar with fresh dried genovese basil would do with that first taste.

And I'm ALL for bell peppers!!

Dawn and Bon,

I have received your message loud and clear. Can I plant herbs as a row crop?

We are already doing the Florida weave.

I wonder if it would be hard with your ag set up. Seems you wouldn't be required to grow very many rows. The basil is a rebounder after some harvests and would require recurring harvesters, but it's patient. I haven't successfully grown any other herb.

Bon,

I'll be reading more about herbs and how to grow them in quantity. Wish us luck.

Here is my first question. What is an appropriate quantity of herb to complement the 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of dry peas we expect? Also, which herb?

Johnny

Yes, many herbs are amazingly simple to grow. The ones that come to us from the Mediterranean appreciate rainfall but don't need tons of it, like well-drained soil (just plant on ridges created by one of your plowing attachments/furrowers that you pull behind the tractor), and actually benefit from being sheared back occasionally. You cut them back, distribute the harvest at your food distribution points, wait a week or two or three (depends more on available soil moisture and temperature than anything else), harvest them again. Every time you harvest, you only remove some of the plant, and the rest of the plant kicks back into a highly vegetative cycle and quickly regrows tons of new growth. The easiest herbs to grow, in my opinion, are basil, parsley (but it is cool season and a biennial so keep that in mind), rosemary (as long as there is good drainage), and chives (cool season, grow like crazy and are perennial if you don't plow them up---you can divide a one year old plant into a million babies to replant). Sage also is easy but I have found that people generally only use it around the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays so it might not be worth growing for a harvest that only would be appreciated for a briefer period. I have mixed luck with oregano and thyme---they seem to need better drainage than I can give them.

There also are herbs you can grow for tea----just the leaves themselves steeped in hot water provide a nice herbal tea or, in the case of chamomile, the flowers are steeped to give you the tea. I like lemon balm and lemon verbena for tea, and catnip and chamomile.

Many people appreciate mint, but be advised mint can be very invasive. Now, I don't mind invasive plants that want to run wild and grow everywhere because I have the dense red clay that tends to discourage invasiveness by causing plants to rot in wet weather. So, there's not much that truly is invasive in my garden. If it will survive the hot dry cracking clay soil in summer, it tends to die in winter's wet, soggy clay....and vice versa, but mint? Oh, mint has survived everything I've thrown at it here except for the summer of 2011. Mint can be used in tea or to flavor certain adult beverages (mojitos) or to add a nice little bit of flavor to sweet southern iced tea or as a garnish for fruit or melons.

You could try a handful of different herbs every year to see which ones are appreciated and enjoyed by your clients, and which ones are duds. Most are easy from seed. Another great thing about the mints is that some of them flower and their flowers tend to be little tiny ones that are not particularly noteworthy but which do attract pollinators and other beneficial insects to your garden plot.

I grow basil (one plant for every 3 or 4 tomato plants) with my tomato plants to repel tomato hornworms. I won't say it is 100% effective, but I grow about 100 tomato plants each spring, and in a bad year I'll see maybe a grand total of 6 or 8 hornworms all year long.....even though I see more tobacco hornworms than tomato hornworms (both feed on tomatoes) and maybe that's because I grow flowering tobacco (Nicotiana alata and others). I know lots of people who will see 6 or 8 hornworms on one plant, so I feel justified in believing my basil plants repel the hornworms, mostly, from my tomato plants.

Cilantro is problematic. It is a cool-season herb that bolts in spring as soon as the weather warms up a bit. That is unfortunate because it is used in many recipes that use tomatoes (salsa pico de gallo, chicken tortilla soup, etc.), which are warm-season plants. So, I don't think it would be a good herb for your use. When dried, it turns bitter, so I don't bother drying it. I usually stop harvesting mine when it begins to bolt, and then I let the flowers go to seed and drop where they may. The following year I have cilantro here and there. That's not an issue in the home garden, but wouldn't really fit in with your rotation plan as it would be in the way of equipment needed to plow, plant or harvest.

I think asparagus would be an awesome thing to grow, but it is perennial so wouldn't fit into a crop rotation scheme, and also would tie up its own growing area for 2-3 years before it could provide the first harvest.

Or, you can take a page out of my dad's book. A child of the Great Depression, he developed a fondness for lambs quarters and poke salad that never left him. I have an enduring image, burned into my memory, of his lambs quarters plants that always grew out in the back corner of the yard right beside his compost pile. It can be hard to get people to try things like lambs quarters, poke salad or dandelion greens, but often they like them once they try them.

Red Malabar Spinach or Green Malabar Spinach both are vining plants that need to be trellised, but provide a "green" for eating fresh or cooked in the summertime when it is too hot for most greens. With something like that, you might not want to introduce it for a couple more years-----wait until you get people hooked on eating and enjoying the regular veggies before you introduce some of the less common ones.

You might want to consider some of the less well-known beans like favas or chickpeas.

Green chickpeas are all the rage. Dried chick peas a versatile. My chickpeas survived the rains. Believe that? False impregnation, though. Not a pea in any of the (few) pods that they produced.

Dawn,

I am interested in growing many different Fall (hardy and semi hardy) crops. They can help to extend the fresh season. We expect to build Walipinis some day. They will allow us to grow fresh all Winter here.

Thanks a lot for the ideas. I'd be lost and confused without my team.

Johnny

PS Wish us luck!