Dad's Soil Amendments and the Risosphere

Dad believed in doing anything possible to improve the soil and even proactively build biology and soil structure. He would do this by adding compost, cover cropping, and using various soil amendments from AgriEnergy Resources.

He would use fish emulsion, a biological preparation of chicken manure, and various inoculations. I especially like the inoculations, where AgriEnergy would culture various micro-organisms from the soil and then under the watchful eye of their staff microbiologist they would increase these cultures to commercial quantities. Dad used to inoculate his seed and extended this practice to his soils. You see he understood that there was more going on in the soil than just a soup of chemical nutrients.

Soil for Future Generations

Dad had a 40 year long collaboration with the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) in the 70's dad built terraces, in the 80's he planted windbreaks and completed a wet area tiling program, and in the 90's he completed riparian strips, headlands and continued a hay rotation. In the 2000's the CSC came out with a new program to integrate various conservation practices under one umbrella. There were three tiers a first level with basic practices, a second tier with intermediate level practices and a third tier with some really stretch goals that a farm could achieve over time.

When the tier system first came out the CSC came to Dad's farm to evaluate his practices against their system. What they found was one of the few farms in the state of Iowa that met all the tier three criteria and then some. Dad didn't do all these things to achieve a tier system or fit into a government program,

Walking Beans With My Dad

When I was a teenager Dad would have us kids walk through the bean fields and pull or cut weeds. My father would hire neighborhood kids to work with us to speed up the process. The weeds between the row were generally taken care of by the tractor and the 4 row cultivator. But there were a few weeds in the rows that continued to grow. Those were the target of the bean walkers. Being a bean walker wasn't some kind of mystical thing or some kind of new sleeping disorder...

Dad's Farm Soil Conservation

My father Lynn Petersen and his father Roland Petersen won some very prestigious conservation awards back in the 1970's for being one of the first farms in the area with full conservation plan of terraces and waterways. A terrace is a type of soil structure created by a bull dozer pushing up "benches" of soil around the contour of a hill. The terrace holds rain runoff and allows it to soak into the soil. The grass waterway is a grassy area in the channel where water runs out of the field.

Lynn and grandpa Roland embraced the conservation practices and cost share monies that were available through the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) and quickly build these new structures in a few short years. Not everyone was keen on these new fangled inventions because...

Market Menu for April 5, 2014

We will have the following items at the Farmers Market for Saturday, April 5, 2014. We are at the fair ground for winter market this week.  (New items are in Bold Print)

Salsa - Brandywine, Cherry Tomatoe, Roasted Roma, Hot'n'Sweet, Jalapeno Jelly (yum)

Crunchy Candy Carrots - these are amazing eating carrots. We also have a few juicing size.
Red Onions
Garlic (We ran out of garlic, but shallots are a good substitute, see "shallot week posts")
SHALLOTS
Sweet Spanish Onions - these babies are very sweet.
Chipolini Onions - limited supply
Dried egg plant (see recent blog posts)
Cipotle Smoked Peppers
Smoked Sun Dried Tomatoes
Sun Dried Tomatoes

I have a few herb plants big enough to bring this week,

• Chives
• French Tarragon
• Apple Mint
• Chocolate Mint
• Oregano
• Rosemary
• Sage
• Thyme

These herbs are all able to handle a light frost, but should be protected from a hard freeze. There are a limited quantity that are big enough so if you want a pot or two to set on your window sill or porch please stop by early.

Enjoy the warm-ish weather. See you there.

Dad's Watermelon Memories

Some of the old timers around Elk Horn, Iowa would remember when a teenager named Lynn would take watermelon to town. He would take a wagon behind a Farmall H, which was new at the time and sit on main street and sell delicious melons. This was a popular venue for the folks in town to get a taste of summer, I'll bet he took sweet corn a few times too. Later the better Elk Horn club would host a watermelon day at the city park and I always wondered if the roots of that event weren't from a local teenager, who later became my father.

I'm sure dad hasn't really thought much about watermelons in the last few years, but I have.

Walking with My Father

My Dad had "Management By Walking Around" all figured out over 40 years ago. When I was little we would often park the pick-up by one of his fields and walk for what seemed like hours to look at the crops. It was often hard to keep up with my shorter legs and I would often have to run a little, but there was nothing more fun than being out "farming" with Dad. I know more than once Dad would feign the need to pull a couple of weeds until I could get caught up and we would launch into the next field.

With my own crops, I can relate to the deep sense of enjoyment this gave him.

The Gobblers Knob Controversey

In our previous post on compost, I was explaining how my father was very innovative in the making and use of compost. He often used compost to rebuild areas with poor soil, Dad called one of these spots that the glaciers messed up "Gobblers Knob", because they would see turkeys in this area of the field. It is a bit of a local land mark with the neighbors and he had a colorful sign commission that he posted out in the field to show how to get there. (No one ever went there except my Dad or his family, this was kind of an inside joke, and he thought that was great.) But I digress...

It was kind of steep on "Gobblers Knob" and so Dad had it growing local prairie species like "Big Blue Stem" and volunteer clovers. It was very pretty in the early summer when everything was blooming but later in the season the organic matter from these native species was massive. So he got the idea that he should compost all this organic matter and return it to the soil. Gobblers Knob was a little thin on top, kinda like my Dad's hair, so Dad thought it could use a little enrichment. No not his hair, "The Knob".

The Only Book My Dad Ever Read

The only book my Dad ever read (other than the Bible) was the Rodale Book of Composting. I gave that to him one Christmas thinking he might look at a few of the tables on what you could compost. You got to understand that Dad, like many farmers, wasn't much of a reader, he would read the occasional article in the his farm magazines and he definitely read many of the AgriEnergy publications, but otherwise "not so much".

Composting was a major exception.

A Conversation with My Dad

I wrote down the conversation I had with my father about an hour before he died. My daughter Andrea Petersen read this for my father's funeral. It is entitled, “A Conversation With My Dad”. I was very thankful I had this opportunity.

I had about a half hour alone with Dad the morning he died. So I'm thinking what do you say to your father in the few hours before he goes to Heaven to meet Jesus? As was characteristic of our conversations in those last few hours, he was sleeping comfortably and I did all the talking.

A number of possible topics of conversation crossed my mind, I'm going to let you in on the ones I chose for a very intimate father-son communication.