We generally try to avoid any hand weeding on the farm, favoring preemptive hoeing. This bed of carrots was just a little too valuable to let go though, and the hoe can't get everything. The crew spent a few hours yesterday carefully cutting out smartweed with knives. Smartweed is prolific in this previously neglected field. The carrots were seeded a little over a month ago. They were weeded with a propane torch a week after they were seeded. They came up shortly after, very evenly and with excellent spacing. We did hoe once which makes the hand weeding much easier. Unfortunately carrots are very slow, and smart weed is not so it's been getting the upper hand, until today that is.
There's a lot going on in this photo. It was on and off spitting rain drops all day yesterday, which made other hoeing more difficult as soil clogged the hoes slowing our progress through other crops. Despite the little precipitation we still need to irrigate, and so during the day we took advantage of the calm weather to soak areas where we'll be working up ground and planting summer cover crop before late summer plantings of greens and brassicas.
You can also see the potatoes to the left of the crew. They're up nicely (also with a good understory of smartweed). We'll be gradually hilling these with rakes over the next couple months, until harvest in late August or September.
To the right of the crew are beds of salsify and scorzonera that were seeded last week and haven't quite germinated yet. These root crops won't be harvested until late into the fall, and with a little luck will go all the way through the winter.
There's a lot going on in this photo. It was on and off spitting rain drops all day yesterday, which made other hoeing more difficult as soil clogged the hoes slowing our progress through other crops. Despite the little precipitation we still need to irrigate, and so during the day we took advantage of the calm weather to soak areas where we'll be working up ground and planting summer cover crop before late summer plantings of greens and brassicas.
You can also see the potatoes to the left of the crew. They're up nicely (also with a good understory of smartweed). We'll be gradually hilling these with rakes over the next couple months, until harvest in late August or September.
To the right of the crew are beds of salsify and scorzonera that were seeded last week and haven't quite germinated yet. These root crops won't be harvested until late into the fall, and with a little luck will go all the way through the winter.
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