Organic Weed Control at the Farm

Farm Update

It’s been a wet week at the farm!  It’s been raining pretty consistently, but it dried up enough for us to sneak in a planting on Monday evening after the Alma CSA drop-off.  We were able to get the next round of crops in the ground, which we were really hoping to do this week, and we were also able to transplant on Wednesday.  The insect pressure at the farm has been low, because bugs really prefer dry weather. But wet weather does bring out some plant diseases, so we’re monitoring those closely.  The weeds are also coming on strong, but we’ve fortunately been able to keep up with them.  Our cool-season crops, like onions, lettuce, and kale, are doing really well!  Also, Tuesday is the 4^th of July, so if you are unable to make it to the drop-off this week, just let me know!  You can either pick up your share at one of our other drop-offs this week, or we can postpone your share and get you a double share next week.  Just let me know if you need to make arrangements for your share.  See you all next week! J

What to Expect in Your share

If you pick up your share at one of our regular drop-offs, here are your options!  If you have a half share, choose one item from each station, and if you have a full share, choose two.

Pearl onions

Carrots

Beets, cucumbers, or bok choy

Spring mix, romaine, or head lettuce

Kohlrabi, cilantro, or micros

Zucchini

Kale or Swiss chard

If you have your share delivered to you or you pick up at the Lansing or Okemos drop-offs, here are your options for this week. If you have a half share, choose one, and if you have a full share, choose two.

Share A:                               Share B:

Carrots                                 Carrots

Beets                                    Cucumber

Spring mix                           Romaine

Kohlrabi                               Cilantro

Zucchini                                Zucchini

Kale                                       Swiss chard

Organic Weed Control at the Farm

Our two old Farmall Cubs have custom cultivators
underneath them that help us take out the weeds between
the rows of vegetables.

When the weather turns warm and wet, our plants start growing by leaps and bounds.  For quick crop growth, you just can’t beat warm temperatures and frequent rains.  The only trouble with that is that the conditions in which our veggies thrive also bring out the weeds in full force!  People often ask how we keep weeds under control in an organic system.  “Doesn’t all that weeding take forever?” they ask.  The short answer is a resounding yes.  The long answer is that although keeping the weeds under control is nowhere near as quick or efficient as it is in conventional systems, where a farmer can just spray an herbicide over the field and call it a day, we do have methods of making sure there are fewer weeds in the first place and efficiently taking care of the ones that do pop up.  Some are newer techniques popularized in the last few decades, and some are methods that your great-grandparents knew and (probably didn’t) love.

One of the best ways to keep weeds from emerging in the first place is to plant the crops in plastic mulch, which is a layer of plastic similar to a garbage bag that you spread over the whole row where you intend to plant the crops.  We then drive over the plastic row with a machine attached to the back of the tractor that pokes holes in the plastic at regular intervals.  After planting, the crops grow up out of the holes, but the weeds are kept from germinating.  So then it is really easy to just go through and pull out the few weeds that have managed to find their way up out of the holes.

Another way to keep the weeds down is to starve them of water.  We use a drip irrigation system in the fields, which is basically a thin hose with tiny perforations.  We run the drip line right along the base of the plants, and the water seeps out of the perforations and into the soil directly surrounding the plant.  That way the plant we want gets watered, and the weeds don’t as much.

Two other amazing tools are our cultivating tractors!  Fred had two custom-made cultivators attached underneath our old Farmall Cubs (one is from the 1940s and the other is from the 1950s).  When the time is right to cultivate, he drives over the rows of veggies, and the cultivators take out the weeds in between the rows of veggies.  We have one with shanks that dig into the soil and disturb the weeds, which we use for plants that have already reached a certain size, because it has a higher and wider clearance for bigger plants.  And we have one that has rotating metal baskets that work up the soil between the rows of crops and put the soil right back down where it found it.  This is used for smaller plants.  Cultivating really makes weeding faster by taking out all the weeds between the rows so we can focus on pulling up the ones right in the rows. 

We plant our Swiss chard in black plastic to keep the weeds
from growing up around it.

We also engage in a ridiculous amount of good old-fashioned hoeing and hand-weeding.  Hoes are used to scrape out the weeds that have emerged right in the rows of veggies and couldn’t be taken out with the cultivator.  They are great for things like cabbage, which have quite a bit of space between each plant.  And then, of course, there is hand weeding.  Sometimes things (like carrots and onions) are grown so close together that a hoe would run too much risk of damaging the plant.  For those things, we get out there and pull up the weeds the old school way, with just our hands and a good pair of garden gloves.  This is a time-consuming prospect when the weeds start taking off, but it is a great way to make sure that all of the weeds are pulled up.

So that is how we control the crazy weed population at the farm!  It’s by no means quick, but we feel really strongly about not spraying our fields with artificial chemicals to control the weeds, because that is the best for all of our health and for the environment.  And we are so thankful for all of our CSA members who support us in this endeavor!  You all help us make a small difference in the overall face of agriculture, and for that we are really grateful!

Recipes

You've probably noticed that everyone gets zucchini this week!  Rural areas joke about the glut of zucchini that appears in August, where you can't even give away a bag of garden zucchini because everyone already has too much of their own. Well, our glut of coldframe zucchini has come early, and you are all the beneficiaries!  Here are some ideas of what to do with it. :-)

Zucchini Chocolate Cake:  I made this yesterday, and it was awesome!  Here is a great way to make dessert just a little bit healthier.

We also grill a lot of zucchini, and it's one of our favorite ways to prepare it!  Here are a few different ways you can do it from myrecipes.com.  

Enjoy! :-)