Weeding in the sun & prepping the field

All the veggies have been enjoying the sunny weather and showing signs of growth along with the weeds growing just as fast.

Most of the past week has been sunny throughout the day even with a morning fog and all the plants are photosynthesizing more including the weeds which have been garnering more of our attention.

We have been spending a lot of time weeding the lettuce, onions and garlic we planted in the fall that is growing decently and will rapidly speed up as the days get longer and the temperatures warm up.

Weeding is always a necessary task on the farm as we want reduce the competition the veggies have to grow into harvestable plants without the added stress.

There are many tools we use to do the weeding but sometimes we have to some hand weeding to get close to the plant.

For the garlic and onions it is crucial to keep the plants as weed free as possible to allow them to get all the water and nutrients in the soil for best growth.

When there are weeds the garlic and onions end up being smaller than we want and the weeds keep the area more moist which causes some rotting in the field.

The challenge with minimizing the weeds in the garlic and onions weed is that they don’t really have leaves to cover the soil like other plants which use those leaves to shade out the weeds after they have started growing.

That leads us to have to do many more passes through the garlic and onions to keep them weeded.

Every year we get to the spring and fall behind on the weeding of those crops slightly so we are working to get ahead of the weeds and then do a weekly weeding with tools instead of needing to hand weed.

Weeding in the field has taken up most of our time but on Monday we spent some time in the greenhouse seeding the second round of tomatoes.

The first succession we planted January 1 are growing well on the heat mat and in a couple of weeks will be potted up into large cell trays so they can grow into strong, big plants before we transplant them.

In two months the first planting of tomatoes should be transplanted in the field and the second one should be following behind a couple weeks after that.

All of the greens and brassicas we seeded in the greenhouse are growing really well and just a couple of ways from being transplanted in the field as the weather warms up.

We are planning to do the first direct seeding of the year in the field next week so this week we are preparing the soil by mowing the cover crop and then spreading compost over it.

After that we will use the chisel plow, disc and roto tiller to prepare a good seed bed for the seeds to germinate in.

The first direct seeding always takes a little longer to germinate since the soil is cooler and starts to warm up more when we expose it to the sunlight.

Even with the clouds and fog yesterday there was a great pop of color in our citrus trees with the Navel oranges, grapefruit, blood oranges and lemons.

We will have the last of the Bergamot at the market this weekend and the Page mandarins are done as we’ve harvested everything on the those trees.