weeding

Shifting gears for summer…

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The spring rush is over, and fieldwork is shifting into summer mode, from mainly planting to mainly weeding and watering, and then, HARVESTING. Seedlings for the most important crops and varieties are in, although there’s still quite a lot to transplant.

Here, we’ve just finishing another 100 or so tomatoes, with Lynn watering them in (the Redhead water breaker is GREAT, delivers as much water as you’ve got pressure, while softening the flow so that you’re not smashing or burying the seedlings). Creating a little basin around each seedling makes the most of hand watering in.

In my continuing experiment with shortening seedling production time, these are the youngest toms to go out ever, a third set started at the beginning of May, with their first true leaves now just coming in!

There are also more squash, melons, and a few more toms to transplant—in years past, I’d’ve been concerned about the date, but I’m learning to adapt the season’s resources (time, people, irrigation capacity,…) to the WEATHER.

Keep the workflow balanced is my new first mantra, so we also spent a few hours weeding today (Ryan dropped by to help for a few hours, he’s a new CSA-er this year who is also about to move his family to their own tiny farm at the end June!), instead of rushing on the last transplants.

It’s hard to measure, but for this type of small, diverse market gardening, in this time of extreme weather, things quite often don’t work out as they traditionally should. For example, the recent rain and cold, and now, more heat, have created a situation where the dominant weeds—pigweed, mallow, and lamb’s quarters—are seemingly slow, but are in fact about to explode. Weeding now will probably save way more time and deliver more harvest than putting off weeding just to transplant a few more beds a few days earlier.

I dunno, I’m figuring this out as I go, but I think traditonal garden rules and timing have to be increasingly bent as the weather gets crazier… I guess you could say: EXCITING TIMES! :)

Great day in the field

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Especially compared to yesterday, today’s mainly sunny, quite warm weather added up to a glorious day in the field. Lynn, Raechelle and Shannon were all on hand, plus the inadvertent pet chicken, Colonel Saunders (I guess there’s no going back to the flock for him now, he’s been separated for a few days and probably wouldn’t be welcome, but, uh, he will be eaten…). It’s so absolutely fun to do even the most potentially tedious tasks (like hand-weeding between tiny green onion seedlings—done!) in a group with such a happy vibe. Besides a good amount of weeding, and putting ALL the chickens outdoors for the first time (those White Rocks don’t seem to want to do anything chicken-normal on their own, except eat), we transplanted the first 100 tomatoes. These were the deluxe early starts (Juliet, Striped German, Big Beef, Stupice), and they got the best transplant treatment ever: a deep, dug hole with a generous amount of compost, burying to the topmost leaves, a thorough watering in, mulching with the oat straw, and then, floating row cover over top for the coming few cold nights—it’s hard to imagine this is a…commercial operation, especially when you’re selling toms for only $1.50-2/lb. :) We mulched directly around the plants with straw, I’ll fill out the rows with grass mulch as soon as there’s enough. On the marker stake, there’s the variety, seedlng start date, and today’s transplanting date. At the other end of the row, Raechelle and Lynn mulch (Shannon seems to mysteriously avoid the occasional snapshots most of the time…). With all of the recent cold, we’re definitely at least a week behind the last couple of years in transplanting and in growth, but with a few hot, sunny days to complement the decent amount of rain we’ve been getting (not usual in recent years at this point), we might even catch up… Anyhow, a fine day!

Not THAT cold…

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It’s not really as cold as the picture might make it look, but May continues to be an overall chilly one. The hats and extra layers are more a personal preference, but I’ve been wearing a lined flannel workshirt over my regular clothes much of the time. Here, as Lynn and Shannon sort seed for numerous smaller plantings in the herb garden, it’s about 60°F (15°C), cloudy and the kinda damp that can give you a shiver if you’re not a little bundled up. Shannon, sporting an illustrated, ear-flapped cap brought from her travels (it gets cold, especially at higher altitudes, even near the equator), has been back in Canada for less than a month after spending two years on farms in Central and South America, and is still getting used to the local weather. Lynn, in hoodie, vest and classic Canadian cold-weather headgear, was just…chilly! The slowdown in both crop and weed growth from the cold is quite noticeable, still, things are definitely moving along now… Weed watch, and the start of serious WEEDING, is on…

After the harvest

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Finally, today, no more potatoes in the ground! After a near-pristine potato patch for much of the season, field priorities got switched around and pigweed had its turn with the taters. Eradicating the weeds before digging up the last 50’x50′ section seemed to take forever (but was actually a few hours spread over the last couple of weeks). Anyhow, this last haul is about 200 lbs (91 kg). It’s not much when you can buy a 50lb (22 kg) bag of great, unsprayed, unwashed potatoes for $14CDN at the farmers’ market. But in my crop mix, it makes sense. We harvested somewhere around 1,000 lbs (454 kg) this year. In the usual 1-2 lb bags, some sold at a by the pound (not bulk!) price, and the majority used for CSA shares, that works out just fine… Of the Yukon Gold, Norland and Gold Rush, YG performed the best, from small, early, supertasty new potatoes to a good amount of nicely big mature ones—they’re not for storage, but who stores a pound!

Weed gone to seed

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With more people in the field this year, end-of-season clean-up is already well underway. Here, Midori, visiting after moving to France a couple of years back, removes weeds that’ve gone to seed from three older beds of mesclun that’re waiting to be tilled in.

Ideally, finished beds would be promptly mowed down, spread with compost, tilled, and then seeded with a new veggie or cover crop a week or two later. Things aren’t usually that efficient, finished beds sometimes sit for weeks, weeds pop up in the interim, and if they go to seed, have to be removed before tilling so as not to add more seed to what’s already there…

Lying around: the green plastic garden totes are quite useful once the handles have been properly reinforced with rivets; the old builder’s wheelbarrow comes in handy for rocks, fallen tomatoes and the like.

The grass in front, in need of mowing, is part of a wide path on one side of the greenhouse, the grass beyond is the magnificent oats green manure cover crop.

Oh, no frost last night, as you can see from the happy peppers at the top of the pic!

Tossing rocks

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What better to do on a pleasantly cool and misty day in the market garden than some leisurely rock picking? It’s a relaxing if neverending task, often put off during the busier days of spring and summer, performed here by Heike. In the field, fist-size rocks push up every winter, get raked from the beds to the paths in spring, then get in the way of weeding all summer long. They’re a growing season harvest all their own, and picking is ongoing. The biggest, 10lb (4.5kg) and up, and quite rare, are set aside for anchoring row cover. The rest are collected in buckets, and taken by tiny tractor to a spot along a fence where I’m gathering quite a pile. Been thinking of building a low rock wall, but haven’t decided on a perfect spot—get it wrong, and it’d be kinda hard to move.

Pigweed piled high

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A mountain of pigweed

A vast repository of uprooted pigweed is collecting by the wagon load in the southwest corner of the field. It’s crazy the amount of effort that’s been put into pigweed pulling this year, that in addition to hoeing and tilling in younger specimens. The pigweed pile has already achieved almost surreal dimensions and a fascination all its own. I stop and gaze at it on the way by… What can I say? PIGWEED!!!!! Guest photo by Mami.


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