The Collaborative Farming Podcast · No-Till Market Garden Podcast

Growing on Principles: Soil Health, Farmer Health, and Community Health... An OAK Field Day w/ Jackson Rolett

·53 min·3 clips

Jackson says this church garden is at about $15,000 and is aiming for $50,000 next year.

Jackson Rowlett opens with a simple shift: instead of a studio interview, he brings Collab Farm into a field day with OAK at the church gardens. He says it was a last-minute choice to put on a wireless mic, and that gives the recording a loose, walk-and-talk feel. The group moves through the gardens with a couple of dozen farmers and farm professionals. Jackson points listeners toward the backstory video and a folder of photos, because some of the tour only really makes sense when you can see the beds and the layout. The heart of the walk is a practical conversation about the conservation practices currently being used on the market garden. He and the guests talk through what has been learned so far, and they pause often enough to take questions. A lot of the detail sits in the soil work. The beds shown in the tour had grown rye and crimson clover last winter, with Johnson grass before that, and later a second cover-crop pass with buckwheat and Sudan grass. Jackson explains how the stand was terminated: the rye and clover were crimped, then the top was flail mowed so the seed settled below the mulch. He also talks through the next steps for the garlic block, including broadforking ground that has never been broadforked, adding amendments, running the tilther, and pulling the mulch back over the beds when planting. That part of the conversation is where the show really works. It treats farm work as a sequence of decisions, not as a neat stack of best practices. The recording also keeps the community side in view. Jackson thanks Jenny, Mad, and the rest of the OAK crew for organizing the field day, and he makes a point of saying Kentucky farmers should join. The tour is not overly polished, and it does not try to be. You hear live questions, a few digressions, and the ordinary stop-and-start rhythm of people walking around a working garden. That texture helps. It makes the episode feel like something you might actually hear if you showed up with boots on and wanted to know how the place functions. By the close, the show has landed on its larger point: collaboration matters, and so does sharing the mechanics of it in public. Many hands make life work, and this one argues that the details are worth recording.

As heard by us

A practical field-day tour of cover crops, garlic bed prep, and the work behind a market garden.

This field-day recording is more operations than inspiration, with Jackson Rowlett guiding a couple of dozen farmers and farm professionals through the church gardens and using the walk to show how a market garden gets ready for planting.

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Why you'd press play

For a real-time walk through a Collab Farm field day, press play.

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