Planting tomatoes, melons and lots of weeding

It’s only been two weeks and we already have planted our second succession of tomatoes.

These tomatoes were actually supposed to be planted with our first tomatoes, but they were not ready. They are smaller plants, so they will likely be ready to harvest a little later than the first succession.

We added a few more varieties to this planting including Marvel Stripe, Black Krim, Brandywine, Sweet 100, Juliet and the mixed cherry tomatoes.

After we planted, we added row cover and irrigated them to help them settle in. The first succession under the row cover is growing nicely and we will have to start staking them very soon.

The first melons were planted in the field this week as we direct seeded a bed of green-fleshed Galia melons.

Tomorrow we are transplanting a bed of cantaloupe melons into the field that we seeded in the greenhouse. It was less than four weeks ago that we started the seeds and now they are ready to be transplanted.

That is the only planting of melons that we will transplant in an attempt to get our first melons slightly earlier than from the direct seeded melons.

Next week we will be direct seeding another couple of beds of melons in hopes to have them ready to harvest at the start of July.

All the cucurbits are being started in the greenhouse or soon to be direct seeded in the field. In two weeks we will be direct seeding some summer squash and last week we seeded some cucumbers in the greenhouse which are growing quickly.

With lots more veggies in the field now and the days getting longer and warmer staying on top of the weeding has been very crucial.

If we can get the weeds when they are small it allows the plants to not have to spend their time competing for water and nutrients, instead focusing on growing to the size needed to harvest quicker.

There are plenty of different tools we use to weed and it really depends on what crop we are weeding. There is still lots of hand tools we use but we try to do as much weeding standing up using a stirrup hoe or wheel hoe that weeds a larger area at once and is more comfortable.

A new tool we got to weed is a flex tine weeder which we run directly over the crop and it uproots small weeds while breaking the soil crust without pulling up the plants. We can use it on direct seeded and transplanted crops when they are very young every week reducing the amount of weeds there by a little bit every time.

This nice weather has allowed us to spend lots of time on the tractor preparing areas to be planted and mowing in the last of our cover crop. It is very nice to see a thick cover crop and even moreso to see the soil after all the organic matter is incorporated into it.