The Three Pillars of Planting and your Soil/Gut Microbiome

The positively correlated relationship between soil health, plant health, and human health is fascinating. Only in the modern world would a statement like “nutritious food makes you healthy” be ground breaking! “Eating toxic chemicals is bad!” I’m hopefully that we are on the other side of the modern nutritional dark ages. We improved food quality, sanitation, food safety, and then over shot the mark. The key is now undoing a lot of agroecological and human harm that resulted from our agricultural decisions over the last 50 years.

How do we improve?

This questions is normal followed by very qualitative recommendations. Grow organically, regenerate the soils, promote species diversity and crop rotation. Those are great but very non-specific recommendations. How do each one of us grow more and better food on the land we have available. I have 60 acres and only about 12 in pasture/open land. Can I make a profit on this small of an acreage while still having a full time job? Can my net expenditures be offset by agricultural exports and direct market sales? More importantly can I improve my families overall health through the production of quality food? What at your goals; What are my goals?

Planning for good gut health

There are two ways to approach this problem. Soil Forward or Gut Backwards. What does my soil need to be healthier or what does my gut need from my soil. We can all come up with a list of health foods, cropping schedules, and create several harvest days every year. The real question is can we come up with a low input system that is regenerative and provides a relatively continuous food supply through crop rotation, succession planting, intercropping, and relay cropping. How do we keep plants in the ground and plants in our stomachs! This is surprisingly difficult if you are not a full time farmer so let’s work on this challenge.

Three Pillars of Year Around Food Production

1. Crop Rotation using species diversity- variety is the spice of life and is what provides the biodiversity to support a healthy soil/you.

2. Succession Planting- You need to keep plants in the ground and plants in your belly to have food for the year

3. Intercropping and Relay Cropping- the pairing of plants is both nutritious to the soil and delicious on the plate. Some things just go well together.

Crop Rotation

This is the first pillar. Some people are very systematic in their crop rotation schedules based on plant family. The benefits of crop rotation include reduction of disease pressures and reduction in external inputs (ie fertilizer). Corn and Soybean is the most common crop rotation in the world. The soybean is a legume and fixates nitrogen that the corn can use the following year. This is a foundational rotation in commodity crop agriculture. But, on a small and large scale we need more. We need more diversity in our diets and our soils need more from us. One approach is the Singing Farms approach where there is no set rotation. I like the chaos that this promotes and it’s cool how they leverage Tend to facilitate organization in this system. Other growers use crop families to help with their rotation:

Here is an example from 22 of my beds.

*Note Triple A = Amaranthaceae, Apiaceae, Amaryllidaceae

The problem I have run in to with this rotation and hence some of the changes is that I don’t feel that small scale bed rotations are enough with certain pest. For instance, potatoes really need more separation from the previous years crop. So I will probably alternate between bed blocks and try to get enough separation from the previous year. Here is a summary with several examples from each plant family. Let me know if you want my full excel sheet.

Triple A

This is fun grouping of plants that I love. Sometimes I think they deserve more bed space and that is why in 2021 I’m giving them about 140’ of growing room. Carrots are tricky but with 1 really painful weeding I have been able avoid the flame weeding that many growers utilize.

Asteraceae

This family along with the brassicas are your workhorses. I love growing this family and Succession planting allows you to harvest crops like lettuce almost all year (Zone 7). The heat is an issue in summer and without shade/water the salad can be more bitter.

Brassicaceae

Brassicas are awesome but apparently it is a good idea to give your fields some rest during the summer to break the life cycle of some of the most common pest that afflict this family. This helps anyway in the Southeastern US because of the high summer temperatures. This family is more extensive than the list on the left but at minimum you should grow kale, cabbage, radish, and turnips. These are all quite easy to grow and delicious to eat.

Cucurbitaceae

Aka the Pickle family! The production of cucumbers from one plant is awesome. Really cool family that produces large fruits and is a ton of fun to grow. Pumpkins and Watermelons take up a lot of space. A single row of watermelons will take up 3- 30” beds and thus need more space than you think.

Leguminosae

Oh the nitrogen, oh the nutrition. This is an awesome family and as mentioned earlier a cornerstone of crop rotation. The relationship with mycorrhizal fungi is pretty amazing. The variety of beans and peas is pretty amazing. I would check out the Southern Exposure Saver Exchange. I will say that deer love this family and absolutely devastated my peanut/cowpea experiment.

Note: I wrote my thesis in college on kudzu and am not advocating planting this in your garden.

Poaceae

Corn is fun to grow but whole grains have a definite place in your garden. Small scale grain production is pretty fascinating and adds large volumes of carbon to your soil.

Solanceae

This is a challenging family but very rewarding to grow. Potatoes and tomatoes really struggled for me this year secondary to a variety of pest issues. I’m going to do an entire post on this family in the future.