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If you’re an organic vegetable farmer, weeds can break you. It was a lesson I learned first-hand on Saturday morning. Charged with harvesting 10 small, clean, market-ready bunches of cilantro, weeds turned what should have been a 10-minute task into a frustrating half-hour-long nightmare. Weeds obscured and out-competed the cilantro, making it challenging and time-consuming to find and snip out cilantro with stems of the appropriate length, without also snipping out foxtail, scarlet pimpernel, common ragweed, and hairy galinsoga. When weeds get in the way of harvesting, they’re cutting into profitability, which is why “every farmer needs a weed management plan!” to quote Seed Farm director, Sara Runkel.
Know your weeds. Amidst intermittent rainstorms and in especially soggy fields, students learned the first step in every weed management plan: figure out what weeds you have on your farm. This spring the rainy weather made fields at The Seed Farm too wet to cultivate for many weeks. Then, the rapid switch to 90+degree-weather quickly baked soil in many of the fields to concrete, again preventing effective cultivation. Scott Guiser, horticulture educator from Penn State Extension in Bucks County was on hand to help students identify the resulting weeddiversity at The Seed Farm. From perennials like yellow nutsedge and Canada thistle, to annuals like hairy galinsoga and yellow foxtail, students got lots of hands-on experience identifying weeds in their natural field conditions.
Learn their ecology. Are your weeds mostly annuals or perennials? Do they have a fibrous root system or a taproot? When to they germinate? Learning all of these characteristics about your problem weeds will point the way toward effective management solutions. For example, hairy galinsoga, a common weed in many vegetable systems, is a summer annual weed with a rather delicate, shallow fibrous root system that matures from seed to flower in less than a month and has no seed dormancy. While this list of characteristics may at first make hairy galinsoga seem like a formidable enemy, Saturday’s students learned how to spot this species’ weaknesses. The lack of a seed dormancy period and shallow root system, make hairy galinsoga seeds especially easy to clean out of your seedbank using false seed-bedding, a technique where the farmer tills the soil to stimulate a flush of weed seeds to germinate. Then, the farmer returns and cultivates out each flush of weed seedlings to clean the seeds out of the soil.
Manage weeds with the appropriate (sharp) tools. Ann Adams and Liz Brensinger from Green Heron tools arrived to demonstrate the ergonomically appropriate way to hand cultivate on a small scale. Dedicated to providing tools that maximize comfort, efficiency, productivity and safety, Ann and Liz inspired hope that there are ways to effectively manage weeds for hours on end without pain. Using tools with long handles to keep your spine in proper alignment and ergonomic grips to keep your wrists in a neutral position can go a long way to prevent the aching back and wrists often associated with many hours of weeding. Tianna DuPont, sustainable agriculture educator and course instructor, emphasized proper tool maintenance to keep the effort of actually using a tool to a minimum. Clean (with a wire brush), sharpen (with a bastard file) and oil your hoe/ pruners, harvest knife, etc. often – definitely after every use. A sharp tool will take far less effort and be much more effective than a dull tool.
Get ‘em when they’re small (a
nd definitely before they flower), is Scott Guiser’s cardinal rule of weed management. Whether you’re flaming a bed of carrots before the carrots have emerged, hand-hoeing cabbages or cultivating a field of fava beans using a tractor-mounted Williams Tool System, the best time to kill weeds is at the “white thread stage” – just after the weed seeds have germinated, but before they have true leaves. It’s not only the time when it’s easiest to kill weeds, it’s also the time before the weeds have exerted their competitive damage on the crop. If you miss them at this early stage, all is not lost, just be sure to mow them off or plow them under before they go to seed. Each weed can make thousands of seeds, so, to avoid contributing to next year’s weed woes, be sure to kill them before they set seed.
Despite the having to dodge raindrops, students seemed thoroughly satisfied by the day’s end. Having had a chance to:
- learn about a wide variety of weeds and effective organic management practices for each,
- experiment with and compare a wide variety of hand tools,
- get some hands-on experience sharpening tools, and
- examine and compare an array or tractor-mounted weed management implements
Yeawah Sano, an aspiring vegetable farmer said, “this class was totally worth the [3 hour] drive from Maryland!”
Part of Penn State Extension’s Start Farming program, Introduction to Organic Vegetable Production is a practical, hands-on course for anyone considering making the leap to producing organic vegetables for profit. Saturday’s full-day session started with a crop planning exercise at the Lehigh County Ag Center. Students learned the ins-and-outs of planning a crop rotation to effectively avoid and manage soil-borne diseases, build soil fertility, and achieve their production goals. The afternoon portion involved demonstrations and hands-on experimentation with a dizzying array of seeding and transplanting equipment at The Seed Farm, a new farmer training program and agricultural business incubator in Lehigh County.
Sara Runkel, The Seed Farm’s executive director, started with a succinct and candid overview or each of the seeders: 1) The Earthway, 2) The European Seeder, 3) Johnny’s 6-Row Seeder, the Seed Stick, and the Glasier Pull Seeder. Students also examined brassicas started in plug flats vs. soil blocks. Plug flats add convenience and speed to seeding and moving trays of seedlings around, but the seedlings in the soil blocks were considerable larger than the plug flat seedlings and do not get root bound. The soil blocks facilitate air pruning of the roots.
Rotating between 4 stations in the field, students gained experience planting raw and pelleted carrot seed, beet seed, and summer squash seed.
At the Glasier pull seeder station, students struggled to get the seeder to work, even in the relatively fine seedbed. Driven by gear wheels that should have been turned by being pulled across the soil, the wheels just didn’t turn. Likely the Glasier just needs a good oiling and then the one-row Glasier Seeder would make seeding in the center of a bed much less of a gymnastic feat.
The Earthway was a much less frustrating experience for many students. The lightweight frame makes emptying seed and changing varieties an easy affair. On the other hand, some students found the lightweight plastic frame bounced quite a bit and was difficult to guide in a straight line down the field. In beet and carrot plots planted a few weeks back, students saw that the Earthway tends to seed a bit heavier than some of the other seeders .
Devida McKevitt, Seed Farm apprentice, Master Gardener, and longtime urban grower lead the group trying out the European Seeder. Devida is sold on the heavier metal frame. Although it is harder to dump the seeder out and switch varieties, it is much easier to guide the seeder in a straight line. Devida and others at The Seed Farm have solved the seed switching issue with a 2 gallon bucket that hangs from the handle of the seeder. Every time they want to change seed, they simply pour the seed into the bucket and then from the bucket back to the packet.
The Seed Stick was another exercise in patience. Designed to eliminate the squatting and bending over usually involved in seeding large-seeded crops by hand, the Seed Stick often gets clogged with soil. Checking to see whether the stick is clogged after each seed, makes the implement more laborious than just seeding by hand, according to Sara Runkel, who recommends seeding large seeded squash and melons my hand, rather than dealing with a seeder.
The day wrapped up with transplanting Brussels Sprouts and tomatoes into both soil and black plastic mulch with Johnny’s hand hoes, a hori-hori transplanting knife, a Hatfield transplanter, and then with the tractor-mounted Nolts water wheel transplanter. The Hatfield offered a nice break from bending over, but the seat on the transplanter is probably as comfortable as it can get for transplanting. That said, Sara reminded attendees that the ~$3000 price tag on a tractor-mounted transplanter is probably not justified for a beginning grower. Seed Farm apprentice, Blake Unis, said he thinks money is much better spent on greenhouse space than a tractor or tractor-mounted equipment, when you’re first getting going.
At the end of the day, everyone had seen and tried some equipment that might be right for them, and learn what was definitely not right for them, before buying anything.
