Do you manually cross or are enough bees doing the work?
I don’t do any manual crosses. Luckily I have a good diversity of pollinators around, as there’s a good amount of biodiversity in the surroundings.
Did you separate GTS seeds because you weren’t sure you wanted it to cross with yours to ensure production for 50(!) people?
Every time I introduce new genetics, GTS or not, I put them in their own block adjacent to my saved seed. This is mostly so I can evaluate them separately. They are close enough there will be crossing but not as much as if they were completely intermingled. Any that I save seeds from will be mixed in with the rest for next year’s planting.
Are GTS grexes bigger because of it’s positioning on the right of the photos, is the reason consistently better sunlight?
They all have plenty of sun. I don’t really notice what you’re seeing except for the peppers where the ones on the near right are bigger. Those aren’t GTS though, the GTS ones are a bit further down the row on the right.
Does bigger mean better, more/better tasting fruits?
It depends Vigorous plants do often correlate to higher production especially over the course of the whole season, and healthy looking plants do tend to correlate with better flavor. However, sometimes there will be plants with beautiful lush foliage and a lackluster fruit yield.
I thought Ozarks had poor soils, these seem nourishing, did you bring manure?
The Ozarks are known for poor, rocky soils, and that is true on average but the soil quality varies greatly from place to place. The first two photos are from our upper garden which would have originally had poor soil but has been improved over the course of the 50 years that East Wind Community has been around. It’s still only the top foot or so that is fertile soil, if you dig down more than that it’s rocky orange-brown subsoil.
The remaining photos are from our lower garden, which hasn’t been in cultivation for as long but has better soils to start out with. We’re lucky to have an area that includes much of our lower garden and some of our pastures that is a bench area, meaning bottomland soil that’s still above the level of the current flood plain. The Ozarks are an eroded plateau, so all the creeks and rivers have carved out the landscape over hundreds of millions of years. The bench that extends into our lower garden was thus once part of a floodplain but eventually the creek cut further down into the landscape with a lower current floodplain but left deep soils behind on the bench land. The soil there is pretty fertile, deep, and has few rocks for Ozark standards. I do use compost and some animal manures as well, but ususally in relatively modest quantities relative to the area cultivated.
What’s the weeding maintenance system look like?
Some plantings get mulch but we have limited quantities available so some plantings are not mulched. I use a scuffle-hoe/stirrup hoe on unmulched areas when the plants and weeds are small. Later on hand weeding and a rogue hoe for bigger, tougher weeds are the main methods. Mowing is used between the trellised tomato rows. It’s variable how well the weeding is kept up over the course of the season as I have a variable amount of help.
Do you have a wintercovercrop to help with weed reduction?
It all depends. We use a mix or rye and hairy vetch planted in the fall in many areas. Oats are sometimes used as well. In the warm season, I use sudangrass, sunn hemp, and buckwheat (buckwheat only if it’s for a shorter time span) most often. I like to cover crop areas where there will be no crop for a significant amount of time, but some areas have no cover crop over the winter, especially those which had crops late into the fall or big tall summer cover crops for the summer. Often I’ll let cool season weeds such as chickweed, henbit and dead nettle grow for the winter in areas that don’t get cover cropped. Winter cover crops are nice for some areas but I like areas that didn’t have a cover crop for early spring plantings.
