Getting Started with Living Soil Market Gardening
In this article, published in the Guide du Maraîchage Sol Vivant (2022), three important introductory aspects are addressed:
- The 7 keys to success in a market gardening system
- The danger of overwork
- The clichés to debunk that are too often seen in the field
See also the association Maraîchage Sol Vivant.
The 7 Keys to Success
Here are the 7 fundamental keys to gather from the start of a market gardening project and to maintain throughout your career. We will see in this list that technical skills, which are much discussed in this work, are scarcely present among the keys to success of MSV.
Motivation
Motivation is fundamental to maintain the necessary energy in this profession which is physically demanding and easily time-consuming. You will need to keep your motivation despite losses of crops, climatic hazards, or commercial setbacks and bounce back. Thus, reflecting on what motivates you most in the profession, and delegating/arranging the less exciting aspects (mechanical maintenance, nursery, washing vegetables in poor conditions, poorly designed ergonomics, etc.) will help keep the flame alive.
Alignment
It is essential to take a moment to align your dreams, your personal project, your professional project, and your physical capacities! Many project leaders start full of ideals about agriculture and overestimate their ability to tackle everything at once (renovating a house, building greenhouses, setting up marketing channels, installing an orchard and chickens, etc.). And all at the same time, from the first year!
Obviously, pursuing your desires for autonomy and agricultural production is a source of motivation. But we invite you to take time to follow installation projects around you, to realize what a typical calendar looks like and the time required to accomplish tasks. This is not about putting your dreams on hold but adapting their realization to your capacities and respecting your personal time. Take time for yourself on weekends, even the first year, to see what is done elsewhere or maintain your relationships and other passions!
Another important dimension is the alignment between the personal project (having a family life, having time for yourself, friends, and hobbies) and the professional project (earning a fair salary, producing quality food for the territory, self-fulfillment through work, etc.). For this, it is wise to set time slots not to exceed each week, plan personal time in advance so that it is not always postponed and thus nonexistent, and organize accordingly.
React at the Right Time
It is important to react properly when an unexpected event could have a significant impact on crops. For example, an invasion of slugs on a planting series, the announcement of an exceptional frost, overly abundant harvests, or a planting operation taking longer than expected disrupt the schedule. In these cases, not making the effort to react accordingly to the unforeseen can have repercussions on the success of the concerned crop. The idea is not to overreact to every event (aphid attack, weed growth) but to discern the moments when it is worth extending the workday more than planned to secure the income of the concerned productions.
Mastering Orders of Magnitude
Knowing how to estimate the orders of magnitude in market gardening allows you to better project yourself on the scale of upcoming tasks, and thus to better organize yourself. Below is a list of the main orders of magnitude to remember :
Agronomy
- Annual soil ration : = 20 t DM/ha/year = 40 t fresh wood chips (1 cm) = 60 t straw (7 cm).
- This ration will particularly feed 2 to 5 t/ha of earthworms as well as all bacteria and fungi.
- 6 t earthworms/ha = 600 UN released.
- Quantity of dry matter produced by a very successful cover crop aerial parts = 6 t DM/ha.
- Time to kill a perennial or meadow = 6 months of mulching during the growing season.
Water
- Water need of a plot = 1000 mm/year.
- Amount of water used in irrigation per year for 1 ha of market gardening = about 3,500 m3 /ha outdoors and 1300 m3 for 1000 m² of greenhouses.
- Storage basin for autonomy in rainwater harvesting = 2 to 3000 m3.
- Watering a seedling at start = 15 mm = With 2 l/h per dripper x 9 drippers /m² this gives 50 min of drip irrigation. = With sprinklers 15 min.
- Weekly watering in midsummer = 20 mm.
Productivity
- Area needed for food autonomy for a family = 400 m².
- Area to pay oneself a minimum wage : = 0.5 to 1 ha/person including 1000 m² of greenhouses.
- Estimated ITK profitability : e.g., 2 kg of beans harvested in 1 hour sold at €8/kg = €16/h. However, you should aim for €50/h at harvest to pay for planting time, monitoring, maintenance, marketing, administration, etc. –› It is important to regularly estimate the profitability of our actions.
- Rule of three : e.g., 20 min to plant/prune/harvest 10 m² = 15h to do 500 m² –› A slow start to a project should lead to reflection from the first meters.
The Surroundings
Market gardening is an extremely time-consuming activity and at the same time attractive to many curious people, so you can easily surround yourself with involved people, and benefit from many exchanges of good practices : family or friendly helping hands in exchange for vegetables, wwoofing in exchange for discovering agriculture, interns in exchange for learning, immersion days with student groups for education, participatory workdays with convivial moments, reciprocal help exchanges between colleagues, expensive neighbor’s equipment in exchange for vegetables or money… Creating these dynamics will also strengthen your business in difficult times (health problems, equipment breakdown, temporary overload of activity). A strong link with your customers or CSA members can be one of the pillars to get through turbulent times. Finally, good networking also means leaving your farm to build relationships with colleagues, discover other technical routes or marketing methods, and broaden the field of possibilities by drawing inspiration from others’ success.
Good Choices at Start and Daily
Of course, only making the best choices is not possible, but making decisions by taking both the time to be well informed from knowledgeable people and not delaying decisions too much is an essential attitude to acquire for any entrepreneur… even agricultural!
A typical example of a bad decision is choosing to postpone mulching a plot, which leads to a cascade of additional operations to perform. Another unfortunate choice : not repairing a tractor and doing all the harvests and transport of organic matter by wheelbarrow for several months. Ultimately, the market gardener may end up with back pain while the agricultural garage could probably have avoided such a mishap.
The agronomy of living soils is not that of conventional agriculture. Understanding the distinction between farmers’ recommendations based on soil tillage and living soil allows you to manage your business over time according to various comments.
Sales
Marketing can quickly become, especially at first, extremely time-consuming for the market gardener. Doing several markets per week to sell only €100 per market is obviously much less efficient than managing to consolidate everything into one or two sales. As a reminder, a market gardener can aim for €40,000 turnover/year for example, which, divided by 50 weeks of sales per year, gives an average target of €800 turnover per week. Thus, you need to size your CSA, market, or other sales system according to this target and give yourself the means to achieve it. Vegetables must be well presented, customers satisfied for word of mouth and customer loyalty to work.
Overwork in Market Gardening
We often hear about overwork in the agricultural sector. It can be linked to two parameters : work overload and time management facing this workload. By workload, we mean here :
- The number of hours worked per week in high and low seasons
- The duration of the high and low seasons
- The number of vacation weeks per year
- The regularity of breaks
- The number of weekends
- The ability to be supported and relieved.
First, to manage your workload, you must check the coherence between the targeted turnover, the type of sales planned, and the actual workload performed. How to do this? Compare with models from other market gardening farms. Create crop forecasts, varying quantities and selling prices, to meet your turnover (some basic Excel spreadsheet knowledge can be useful for this forecasting and planning part). Keep in mind that it is never possible to do everything as you would like : so it is important to prioritize.
To manage your rhythm well, it is relevant to set a typical week in high and low seasons, but also to check the compatibility of your vacations with the garden and marketing schedule (no point hoping to go on vacation the last week of July if you sell at the farm in a summer tourist area, for example).
To improve your organization and work vision, the main key is anticipation : good planning, pre-calculated quantities for plant orders, pre-established series dates, etc. Then, it is interesting to take notes on what is done throughout the year (yield - series shift - weed and/or pests problems - leftovers or shortages in quantities during sales, etc.). These notes form a useful basis for decision-making and improving the next year’s planning. At the production level, it is about noting everything done, under what conditions, and especially how you felt. This should also be done at the accounting level by taking into account all expenses as well as all income related to sales.
10 Clichés to Debunk to Start Well in MSV
Tilling the soil is dogmatically forbidden
Some market gardeners even avoid removing a dock with a spade because it disturbs the soil… Obviously, the network recommends not to till the soil (except for a revitalization phase with massive inputs), but if sowings often fail due to poor seed-soil contact, you might prefer a route with rotavator tillage on a few centimeters followed by hoeing of the crop. If marking permanent beds or re-butting is necessary, soil will obviously be worked. If a crop requires warmed soil in spring and your context does not favor this warming, a strategic choice could be to bare the soil to warm it.
In particular cases where the soil is extremely compact and biologically non-porous, soil tillage is necessary to avoid crop failure. Whatever the reason that leads you to occasionally till your soil, remember that by doing so, you create a strong mineralization that will lower your fertility stock and you will consequently have to feed the soil to compensate for this loss of OM.
My soil has an unbalanced pH
The measurement of pH in the lab is an average combining the nature of your soil / the rhizosphere / your soil humus. Field pH measurements give information on the free water pH of the plot. This explains why pH measurement is extremely variable (depending on moisture, sample composition, etc.). Interesting information nonetheless : rhizodepositions and soil biology tend towards a pH of 6.5 - 7, which is precisely the comfort pH for plants. Market gardening soils are often “anthroposols”, i.e., soils built by human hands, year after year. MSV can easily biologically rebuild soils thanks to tools such as inputs of organic matter, plants (cover crops, spontaneous grassing and meadow) and irrigation. Many times soils at pH 5 have been observed at the market gardener’s installation, which after two years of MSV reach pH between 6.5 and 7.
I don’t have the right soil, not the right structure
Even if sandy soils have less useful reserve than clay soils and obviously stones distort soil cores, it is above all soil nutrition and biological activity that create soil fertility. With good nutrition (and thus good biological activity) and adapted irrigation, most vegetables grow in any soils. Very stony soils, pure sands or clays will remain soils where miracles are difficult without massive biological reconstruction.
Thistle, nettle, dock or bindweed are absolute enemies : you must never let them seed
Gérard Ducerf teaches us that certain conditions favor the germination of weeds. Will they be met on your land? In MSV, perennials proliferate more by their ability to resist mulching by establishing their rhizomes. Vigilance is not necessary for mulched or heavily mulched crops. However, sowings with little compost (< 5 cm) require more vigilance : it is better to avoid weed bolting the two years before sowing. Also know that there is no irreparable situation in case of massive seed production by using mulched crops, thick mulches or very strong cover crops. Probably by developing cropping strategies in permanent covers our view on weeds will evolve. Could we even work directly with spontaneous covers? Some already do!
Installing on meadow means ensuring wireworm/cranefly damage
Installations on meadow have been numerous in recent years and have shown problems with wireworms or craneflies in cases of shallow water tables. Many theories are considered to explain this phenomenon, but practice shows that in MSV, there is little or no proliferation of these pests which are classically encountered during meadow turning.
Applying starter fertilizer is reserved for conventional agriculture
This is a stance often observed in the MSV network, especially in northern France. However, in systems under biological reconstruction or during periods of low biological mineralization, applying starter fertilizer costs little to the market gardener (about €0.20/m²) and helps secure yields or better tolerate a regenerative grassing.
Doing MSV means no longer needing to irrigate: "Let nature do it"
It is a huge loss not to have an irrigation system in MSV because the success of sowings and plantings depends on good soil and air humidity. Moreover, dry periods will be better managed thanks to irrigation. Finally, irrigation allows you to multiply yields and thus all the work already done on the crop. In short, irrigation is what allows you to move from an income that covers your costs to an income that pays you a salary. Let nature do it… Have you ever seen a wild melon in the park next door? The vegetable is not, or no longer, a wild plant. It requires care (competition management) and attention (fertility and irrigation management) for those who want to make it their profession and live from it.
You cannot start quickly in MSV if you are in a hurry
What despair to see project leaders say : “I watched all the YouTube videos”, but it was the beginning of the season, I had to start quickly from my meadow so I turned it over to plant quickly.”
How to start quickly in the case of a meadow or a very grassy plot?
- We have seen that ideally one month between laying the tarp and planting in the tarp is enough to start everything that is planted with spacing > 50 x 50 cm : potato, cabbages, squashes, tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplants, cucumber.
- If the tarp has been laid for at least 3 growing months (but you could not have 6 growing months), you can plant and sow. For example, lay the tarp at the end of March and sow carrots at the end of June on a bed of compost or wood chips. However, you should expect a burst of perennials at the end of the crop that will require going back to a tarp crop.
- If you don’t have 3 months ahead, you can choose to :
- Put a thick layer of wood chips (min 15 cm) then sow or plant.
- Lay several layers of cardboard then deposit a 5 cm layer of wood chips and sow or plant (see Richard Perkins on this topic on Youtube).
- Till the soil 5 to 10 cm deep to break the meadow then sow and plant (last resort if you poorly anticipated) then mulch to limit grass regrowth and compensate mineralization.
How to start quickly in the case of degraded soil?
- An already worked or low-growing soil is a soil that can be worked one last time to make a massive carbon input. The resulting nitrogen hunger can be offset by a nitrogen input calculated according to the more carbonaceous input. You can thus plant or sow quickly in a revitalization by massive input.
- Same for a gentle revitalization (see dedicated paragraph).
Plants must suffer to grow well
It is as absurd to make plants suffer as it is to overfeed them with water and fertilizer. Each plant has optimal growth conditions. Limiting irrigation increases sugar content, lowering greenhouse temperatures slows the growth of vegetables like Radish and lettuce that grow too fast and do not store well. But generally, stress causes yield decreases, bolting, and increased susceptibility to pests. The key is respecting the pedoclimatic comfort zones specific to each plant.
Blindly following popular sayings
“We need a cold winter to kill vermin,” “A leek needs to be cut to grow well,” “mushrooms are dangerous,” “wireworms are a scourge on meadows,” … All these sayings always contain some truth. Overall, agriculture fears biology and life because it does not understand them. For each problem, it is necessary to put the correct scale in perspective, define its place in the biological cycle, and understand its function. This is the only way to understand problems and solve them. See more details on pests in the dedicated section.
