Planting and weeding

 

Lovely. Just flipping-lovely. Circled area is my area-of-operation

Air quality is currently rated as bad, locally. The good news is that it is expected to resolve over the next 24 hours.

Even better news is that the weather-guesser (Mr Richard Tease) is suggesting that we might get as much as an inch of rain from Sunday-to-Tuesday. We need it.

Cabbage transplants are going into the garden today. Deadon and Typhoon.

The watering schedule means that I can only work certain sections of the garden on any given day. Walking on damp soil compacts it and the footprints become spots where weed seeds like to germinate. That means that I schedule the day's work on the section that is driest. When transplanting, I will do a spot-watering of the plant to get it through the day. Then I put the sprinklers on that section for the over-night watering.

Stakes

It seems like I am always cutting stakes.

In very round numbers, I have a stake about every 10' of row. I like to mark seeding rows with stakes every so often so I can till before the seedlings break the surface.

In total, this year's garden is about 7000 square-feet (1/6th of an acre) and my rows are 37" apart. That works out to about 7000/30 square-feet per stake. In round numbers that is 200 sticks/stakes.

Euro-centric, rectilinear, Xenophobic partriarch

I image that somewhere in America some Social Justice Warrior is writing a Grant that reads something like this:

Solicitation for Grants:

Leptard Community Farm

Veer/Vus/Vii are seeking funding for an interactive study where Feminist Ideals are used to reimagine Agriculture and create a safe-space that reductively diminishes the Cultural Imperialism of the Heteronormative, Cis-binary power structure.

The Leptard Commune envisions an agricultural space that will provide all of the food, fiber and medicine for the members of the Leptard Commune with each receiving to her needs.

The Urf, our birthing-Planet, will be coaxed into producing in a non-coercive way that does not perpetuate Euro-centric, Patriarchal norms. Specifically, our Urf’s skin will not be breached in violent, non-consensual, penetrating ways. Seeds will be made available to the Urf’s birds and furry creatures for them to plant in natural ways. Plants that rise from indigenous seeds will be raised and nurtured just like the ones we plant. We will nurture our children, the plants through poetry and song and used Pampers.

No poisons will be allowed, nor will any sharp tools be used to injure or traumatize ANY plants in our sacred, agricultural space.

We feel that productivity will increase in the first year by at least 16-fold (a sacred number) as we treat the Urth with love and kindness. Furthermore, we feel that productivity will increase by 256-fold the second year.

 

The thing about straight lines and evenly spaced rows is that it is efficient to cultivate which is the most cost effective way to suppress weeds. There is only so much water, sun and soil nutrients and what goes to growing weed biomass is not available to grow broccoli, tomatoes or other plants more suitable for human food.