Tag: clean-up

Morning carnage

2 Jun 202628 May 2026 by Mike (tfb)

Weed tree, trash tree, table-eating tree, time to step back! Cutting back the invading box elder from the work table, using probably antique garden shears, the best tool at hand, seems kind of brutal, but this is tiny farming. The whole idea is to guide some space, some land, to your liking. It is kind of militaristic in nature, there’s no getting away from that! Take over, suppress what you don’t want, install what you do, and hunker down to maintain position. I’m kidding, of course, actually thinking about farming and gardening in those start terms is not helpful or enjoyable, IMHO, you layer on your framing and do what you have to do.

The garden shears only work well on the pencil-thick still-green upper stems, but that’ll do for now. Loppers—lopping shears, with long leveraging handles—would be perfect here, the tool for the job, though at the base this tree is probably a little past even them. So then, a pruning saw. I have neither, so a real saw, a sharp knife, and some bending and twisting may be involved for a proper cutback. Or, much as I don’t want to invest in a box elder battle, I’ll get ahold of a pruning saw. I wonder how much the roots can expand, year after year, without any leaves to feed them…

The great WARM outdoors!

20 Apr 20226 Mar 2009 by Mike (tfb)

Ahhh, yes, THIS is what warm weather feels like! For the first time this year, the temperature topped 60°F (15°C), with a hazy sun and a gentle breeze. We’ve had some melt-off days already, but this one tastes like spring! Usually, there’s a day like this sometime in February, so it’s been a long time coming, and makes me wonder how even crazier the rest of the weather will be. No worries…today feels great.

The photo is a good to-do list for when real spring comes and the ground is dry enough to work and get around on. There’s a jumble of spare lumber taken from the barn when we cleared an area for the new seedling room—it needs to be sorted and stacked, and some of it will be the new chickenhouse! (Only patches of snow are left on much of the land, but I’m sure it’ll be back before it’s really gone.) The abundantly overgrown grasses that partially surround the barn and border the moldboarded garden areas is a big clean-up job. And, up the slope, the Kubota compact tractor calmly waits for after the hired-big-tractor disking and the compost spreading, when we do the final tilling of the garden beds. Coming soon. Cool!

Greenhouse overgrown

10 Feb 20095 Feb 2009 by Mike (tfb)

The greenhouse is still snowbound. I cleared away the east-side door to get in and check out what’s left to pack up for the new farm move, coming soon! Usually, I do a bit of greenhouse clean-up in the fall, and then around February, prep half the area for some early greens. This time around, I’ll take out the small stuff—there’s tools, the big industrial fan, a few plug sheets, and tons of plastic pots stored under the tables—lots of good gear! The tables will probably be left till March, after the melt-off, when we come for the greenhouse itself. Once the bubble is removed, this little winter oasis will merge into the rest of the field. The pleasantly golden-brown dead stuff is mainly arugula allowed to go wild…

Drive shed clean-up continues

24 Mar 201311 Dec 2008 by Mike (tfb)

You can see the back wall! The fairly massive, once-in-a-century farm clean-up continues, and the two-floor drive shed, home of a million parts and pieces of not-junk, is an action center. I can’t imagine how one could capture a real feel for all of the stuff that was in there, you had to poke around and experience it first-hand. It was literally packed to the rafters with EVERYTHING. There were all sorts of shelves, racks, parts drawers, crates, boxes, a couple of decommissioned fridges used as storage, stuff hanging off endless nails and hooks, and much of it in murky half-darkness. All of that is being slowly and carefully peeled away. The superficial mess of tiny farming gear from a couple of weeks back is long sorted out. And as cluttered as this one corner still looks, that’s nothing compared to what was there even a few days ago. What impresses me now is not seeing, but FEELING the amount of life and time it’s taken to accumulate all of this, through having built and fixed so many things, with unexpected parts and tools that’ve magically appeared out of there. This is the history of a generations-old family farm recorded in its spare parts, methodically being unravelled… The whole clean-up is fascinating and kinda awesome to observe, in a low-key, mildly melancholy, wheels-keep-turning way… Life on a farm!

Drive shed clean-up

22 Nov 200821 Nov 2008 by Mike (tfb)

The drive shed is in a transitional mess. I’m part way through the post-season clean-up, delving into shelves, unpacking boxes, dragging things around, sorting it all out. Even with the trusty Troy-Bilt Horse rototiller as a bit of a clue (on the left, in red), to the untrained eye, it might be hard to tell that all of this is essential tiny farming gear. Who’d know that the stacks of Rubbermaid storage bins are in fact our mainstay harvest containers? Or that the weathered cedar trays and folding metal sawhorses (leaning on the left), transform in minutes into the farmers’ market stand. Those indoor/outdoor twin halogen lights are critical lighting components for after-dark veggie sorting and rinsing in the barnyard. That front-loading dryer I’ve kept around for years, in case it could become as useful as its companion the top-loading washer has been as a heavy-duty salad spinner. And so on. Every little item in the pic has its purpose. Much of tiny farming gear is plain, old ordinary stuff, pressed into garden service. And it all works!

After the row cover: weeding!

4 May 20164 Sep 2008 by Mike (tfb)

It’s been about six weeks, time to permanently remove the row cover from the last transplanting of fall brassicas! There are two sections, about 20 x 50′ beds in all, with broccoli, caulflower, cabbage, collards, kale. The cover protected against flea beetles, and at this point in the season, the FBs aren’t around much. Which leaves the post-cover weeding! I generally plan to remove the cover earlier, weed, and then replace it quickly, but this seldom seems to happen. Instead, it’s one big weed-a-thon at the end… Here, the mainly pigweed looks fairly big and dense, but it’s actually not much of a problem. The row cover has protected the ground from many days soil-packing rain, so the beds are nice and loose (it’s amazing how much rain can compact clayey soil). Weeds come out easy! With two people, it’s a relatively quick job, 2-3 hours for a pretty thorough clean-up. We worked with a combination of hoe and wheel hoe, me doing the paths and between-row clearing, and Lynn hand hoeing in-row, between the plants spaced at 18″ (45cm)…

Each time I use the wheel hoe, I grow to love it that much more. So easy, so TIME-SAVING! It’s such a sophisticated yet simple tool, a perfect marriage of wheel, leverage and steel (you could say! :)… Today’s job is heavier work than it’s usually used for, the weeds aren’t just emerging, they’re pretty big. Rather than rolling the wheel hoe continuously down the rows, I’m cutting the weeds with a series of forward and backward strokes that either slice the plants below the surface, or pull them out, roots and all…

Clearing a path (before and after, above) in the loose soil takes maybe 3 minutes for 50′, many times faster than hoeing or hand pulling…

For this heavier weeding work, I use a fairly forceful forward stroke that travels about 1-1.5′ (30-45cm), then raise the blade to clear the felled weeds as I step forward to start the next bit…

The wheel hoe is equally good at cutting on a backstroke, which comes in handy for dense areas and tough specimens… It’s not particularly strenuous work: the blade is sharp, the wheel and angle of the handles give lots of leverage and momentum, and some part of the hoe is always in contact with the ground, so you’re never completely lifting the whole tool. Like most things I do here in the field, I’ve figured out how to use the wheel hoe on my own, by reading instructions, looking at pictures and applying my version of common sense. Techniques no doubt vary. It’ll be interesting to eventually see how others do things! Meanwhile, everything seems to work out…especially, the wheel hoe! (Wheel hoe action photos by Lynn)

Back to the field!

29 Mar 200910 Mar 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Last seen planting garlic in November as we headed into winter, Lynn is BACK IN THE FIELD, getting a head start on spring. It was great to see her again and…continue! We headed out to the greenhouse and spent three hours or so, bagging the last of the grass mulch, pulling weeds, forking beds, chatting and basking in the sunshiny, 25°C (80°F) greenhouse weather! I also brought out a tray of arugula, couldn’t resist posing it in the snow… It felt excellent to get started out there. Fun!