Work-ticket report
The contractors left at 4:00 PM today. I will tweak a few things they did, with Mrs ERJ's permission, of course.
From a budget standpoint we can pull off one project like this a year. Many of the basic mechanical and electrical systems in our house are 50 years old. Our plan is to have have it ship-shape and apple-pie order when we get old so it can go on auto-pilot.
I dug about 30 feet of potatoes today and it took about 25 minutes. I left the spuds on top of the soil. Call it one foot of row a minute. With 600 feet of row, that works out to ten hours or roughly three-and-a-half days at three hours, time-on-task per day. Running and lifting will have to wait. I have real work to do.
A couple of comments asked how I handle weeds. In a word, "Poorly". Or, if I am generous, "mediocre". My biggest weakness is lack of time-on-task. Weeding is one of my least favorite chores and keeps sliding to "tomorrow".
If/when we start playing for keepsies, it will be a non-negotiable two-hours in the garden/orchards EVERY DAY unless lightning is flying. Every day. All of that time will not be weeding, but any gardener worth his/her salt will pull weeds while they are harvesting or doing other chores. They will pull weeds when they are thinning seedlings. The Hispanics keep a basket to put the edible greens in as they weed. Those go into soup, gravy, side-dishes and so-on. They can also be fed to chickens/ducks and to rabbits in small amounts.
Soil moisture content makes a big difference. Weeds pull easily two days after a rain. My sandy-loam tills well after three days. Five days after a rain, it starts to become a fight to pull weeds. The fact that I let them get big enough to pull is an admission of failure. Young weeds do not have woody roots and are easily handled with a hoe...when the soil moisture is in the Goldilocks zone.
From a purely economic standpoint, garden yields are relatively resilient to some weed pressure after the plants have filled their space and/or they canopy over. However, yields are very sensitive to weed pressure before the plants fill their allotted space.
One of the problems with letting weeds "go" later in the season is that they set seeds, they restrict air-flow through your garden and they harbor pests. They also fight you if you want to plant a cover-crop like Red Clover.
For some crops, like potatoes, mechanical controls like mowing and tilling are viable options. For other crops that ripen later, mechanical control is more difficult and a hybrid method like using a string-trimmer (Weed-Whacker) to mow the tall tops that produce most of the seeds is worth considering.
No good answers. Just muddling along.
Pulling weeds by hand may produce the best result, but my knees quickly protest, even with knee pads and kneeling stool. I have found that a stirrup hoe provides results that are 'good enough', a lot faster and with less pain. Your mileage may vary.
ReplyDeleteWeeding is the bane of my gardening and farming efforts. It doesn't help that my ground is poor soil that can grow weeds very well but getting vegetables to grow is a Herculean task. I've tilled organic material in every year to amend the soil and it's helped. But it's helped the weeds more.
ReplyDeleteBuild a biggass compost area. Collect grass clippings,AFTER the interview where you are Certain that weed killers haven't been sprayed, because they live on after being composted. The best compost has brown stuff,too. Leaves, straw old hay, again, without the ugly stuff sprayed.
ReplyDeleteLaying a piece of steel siding on a row cooks the Everluvin Shit out of the weeds and shuts off the light.
Pay no attention to the occasional green sprout coming up through the gawdammed Asphalt..
I believe canopy is a key. Therefore, my potatoes are in a double row two feet apart. Then I have half as many paths to weed. My path weeding is done with a long T-handled push hoe that just skims the surface.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, I prefer hand weeding. Twice over with minimal soil disturbance and the weed seed count in the top inch of my soil is mostly extinguished for the season. Any weeds gone to seed don't enter my slow, cold compost box. Unfortunately, I only make my quick, hot compost pile in the Spring so the seedy weeds go into the green bin for the truck to pick up. Unfortunately, no fires allowed anytime in my city.
Once the onions are well established, they're mulched with last year's maple leaves for moisture and weed control. Squash are planted with nurseryman's landscape fabric -- two-foot square pieces with a slit up the middle as bibs for weed control while the plants are young then later the canopy suppresses most of the rest of the weeds.
Thanks for commenting MR Tumnus. I know that you are an extremely competent gardener.
DeleteI’m down to raised beds and pots in the hoop houses and green house so I can weed from a stool. I find that if you don’t pick up or pull chick weed it easily reroots. My six laying hens and rooter will eat a ten quart pail of weeds a day with no weeds growing in the outdoor pen. When I don’t have that many of the preferred weeds I try to at least give them overgrown pig weed or whatever and they help compost the coarse stems. When I grew potatoes in rows I spaced them so I could run my rear tine tiller between rows before hilling. I pulled most of weeds in the rows as I hilled. At one point I had twelve forty foot rows. Five weeks in the hospital in 2024 late April and all of May left me with a wheeled walker for outside stuff and a cane in confined spaces so I garden intensively in the green house and two hoop houses and my daughter is trying potatoes in “potato boxes” and this year a son has been staying a week at a time to do heavy work like getting the wood in the shed…. He has been tilling the outside garden ground to kill the weeds and maybe next year we can make a group effort on potatoes to share around.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting. I am guessing "H" from CRB, AK
DeleteYes
DeleteThe whole weeding thing makes my mind turn. Its so much work, there has to be something we're missing? The food-forrest idea and guerilla gardening make everything seem so much easier? Makes me think our manicured man-made garden squares are antithetical? What is nature telling us we aren't listening to?
ReplyDeleteGenesis 3: 17-19
Delete