Wow! Cultivating over 5-½ acres of market garden vegetables with a wheel hoe! We can’t help thinking that a good team of cultivating horses would just slow down the energetic farmers at the Sunflower Cooperative. We wish we had some of that sunflower power for quickly cultivating by hand Daniel’s wide ranging questions, especially the ones that open up new ground for this column, such as the topics of irrigation and seed varieties. Perhaps it won’t seem like such a long row for us to hoe if we begin by cultivating the more familiar territory of how the perennials and house gardens fit into the bio-extensive rotation.

The “feel and appearance method” is one of several irrigation scheduling methods used in Irrigation Water Management. It is a way of monitoring soil moisture to determine when to irrigate and how much water to apply. Applying too much water causes excessive runoff and/or deep percolation. As a result, valuable water is lost along with nutrients and chemicals, which may leach into the ground water.