Winter Street Farm

344 Winter Street, Claremont, NH
(774) 454-7637
winterstreetfarm.com
Art by Cecily Anderson

Products: Certified Organic vegetables, herbs & flowers

Where to buy: CSA shares available in early spring. Farmstand open to members & the public:

A word of wisdom: let the soils be

To support thriving plants, Abby Clarke and Jonathan Hayden of Winter Street Farm limit the disturbance of their soil. “For us, regenerative means no-till,” said Abby. “We’re trying to encourage the ecosystem as it evolved in the first place, and then it can grow the plant for you. It’s not that simple, but it also probably can be.”

Frequent tilling kills off microbes in the soil. In undisturbed soil, communities of microbes exude sticky substances that help soil form tiny clumps with air pockets in between. This structure allows the soil to absorb and hold water, like a sponge. But tilling breaks up this sponge, killing soil microorganisms, and thus stripping soil of its ability to hold this structure. When exposed to drought, it can simply turn to dust and blow away. In heavy rain, water can carry off the topsoil.

Without microbes and fungi to exchange nutrients with, crops in heavily tilled soil require greater amounts of fertilizer. Synthetic fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived and emit powerful greenhouse gases. They damage the ecosystems of the waterways they wash into, and disrupt soil life. And they aren’t cheap.

“Everything we were doing with heavy tillage cultivation just made everything so much harder. It was fighting an uphill battle the entire time: The soil goes away because you’re constantly stripping it of organic matter, but then you’re increasing your fertilizer costs to make up for that loss.”

In an organic no-till farm, both plant health adn carbon draw-down are supported by soil that is teeming with life. Plants “breathe in” carbon and then secrete some of it into the soil in a fascinating trade with soil microbes. Microorganisms feed on the sugars released by plant roots, and in return, they mine minerals from the soil and make them avaialble to the plants.

“We spent a really long time not paying attention to that relationship,” reflected Jonathan. “But the living stuff in the soil is actively fixing carbon and increasing your organic matter.” Healthy living soils grow happy plants.