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- Click on Photos to Enlarge -
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Seeding Down Grain & Clover Cover Crop on Just-Harvested Organic
Seed Potato Ground on Maine’s Wood Prairie Family Farm.
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Once we harvest the Organic Maine Certified Seed Potatoes from one of our fields we immediately get to
work. First, we’ll use our mechanical
‘Lockwood’ Rockpicker to gather and clean off leftover rocks. Then we’ll deeply till the field with an
‘International Harvester’ Chisel Plow and smooth the ground with a drag to
get it ready for seeding.
The final step is to seed with our ‘IH’
510 Grain Drill. In this photo, Jim is
using an ‘Oliver’ 1650 Diesel tractor to pull the Grain Drill. The large hopper on the Drill holds a
thousand pounds of Seed Grain. The separate and smaller “Grass Box” located down low towards
the back of the Drill holds a hundred-pounds and independently dispenses fine
seeds, like Clover, Grass or Brassica Biofumigant seed. Towed behind the Drill is a well-designed, green farm-fabricated rubber-tire “Grain Roller” which firms up the top
inch of soil and improves seed-to-soil contact.
Just three-inches of new Cover Crop Grain meets threshold for reducing by 90%
the erosive impact of raindrops hitting the soil. Left
unprotected, that grain drop pounding can cause the valuable soil fines to go mobile. Protecting the soil which sustains us all is
top-priority no matter what scale of production we are!
Now that Potato Harvest is complete, the
Best-of-the-Year selection of Organic
Maine Certified Seed Potatoes are available RIGHT NOW for ordering
from our website. Order TODAY and we can ship whenever
you want them
Stay warm and enjoy these
wonderful days this side of Winter!
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Special Offer! FREE Organic Potato Fertilizer!
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Amish-Made Powerhouse. Great for Side-Dressing Heavy Feeders Like Garlic in the Spring.
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Excellent Potato & All-Purpose
Fertilizer for All Crops. Place 2" Below Potato Seed Piece During Planting.
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Easy-to-Use. Effective General Use Fertilizer. Good For Potatoes, Veggies, Fruit and Flowers!
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Order TODAY And We Will Ship Your FREE Fertilizer With Your Order!
Place a NEW Order and Receive a FREE 3 lbs. Sack of Organic Potato Fertilizer ($9.99 Value) with a Minimum $65 Order.
FREE Fertilizer must ship with order and no later than 05/03/24.
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Megan's Kitchen Recipes: Potato and Corn Soup.
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1 T Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 T Butter
1 Medium Amber Onion
1 Clove of Garlic, diced
2 English Thyme sprigs
2 Prairie Blush Potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
2 c Vegetable or chicken stock
1/2 - 1 c Water
2 c Fresh Dorinny Sweet Corn
Heat the oil and butter in a large saucepan until melted. Add onion, thyme, pinch of salt, and garlic and cook over medium low until onion is soft, about 8 minutes. Add potatoes, stir, and cook for another five minutes. Add stock and water. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to simmer. Cover and cook until potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes. Add corn just before the potatoes are done. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot.
Serves 4
Megan
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Wood Prairie Family Farm Stories.
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Rock Collecting While Seeding Down Wood Prairie
Potato Fields.
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Many
other local farmers have sworn off Chisel Plowing after complaining the
practice brings up too many rocks to the surface. They are correct about increasing the
population of rocks, but we still believe that aerating the soil by chiseling is
well worth the trade off. We designed
into our homemade green Grain Roller a handy shelf for carting rocks out of the
field.
The Grain Roller also serves to help push rocks down into the soil out
of harm’s way. When in the future we
come to mow this field for hay, the mower will be set to cut at a height of
three-inches. So, any rock sitting atop
the soil after it has been rolled which rises more than about two-inches gets
the boot and is manually lifted and removed from the field. This is the 4-acre rock-rich field which we
cleared about 15 years ago. Once we cut
down the trees and bulldozed the stumps, we ended up hauling away 800 yards of
rocks before it was possible to farm.
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Potato Ground One Day, Seeded Back into Sod the
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In
a shot taken late last month, during this pass, the IH Grain Drill is seeding
ground which had grown this year’s field crop of commercial Maine Organic
Certified Seed Potatoes. Immediately
adjacent (to the right) is the green plot where next year’s Long Tunnel crop of
FY1 (Field Year One) early-generation Seed Potatoes will be grown. That crop will be grown from
tissue-cultured Potato Minitubers we produced this year in our Short Tunnel. The
crop you see growing is Biofumigant Rapeseed which had been planted four weeks
earlier. For fast-growing crops like Brassica Biofumigants, it takes
about four weeks for the plants to spout and get their legs under them. In contrast, during the second set of
four-weeks the plants exhibit rocket-like growth. Beyond that Rapeseed is the
just-dug (and seeded down) plot where this year’s FY1 crop was grown under the portable Long
Tunnel. And finally, beyond that newly-harvested
plot is sod ground where previous crops of FY1 were grown in the Long
Tunnel. We have a seven-year Crop Rotation for our Long Tunnel Potato crops. This means that after one year of FY1
production, the soil is immediately seeded down and rested in soil-building sod
for the next six years. In year 8, we’ll
come back again and plant the plot to Organic Potatoes. This luxury rotation provides extremely high quality organic seed stock.
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Quick Links to
Popular Products.
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Caleb & Jim & Megan Gerritsen
Wood Prairie Family Farm
49 Kinney Road
Bridgewater, Maine 04735
(207) 429 - 9765 / 207
(429) - 9682
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