Weed Control 101 2026 Version
Weed control is something every farmer has to deal with. On our farm, we don’t spray chemicals on our crops or use pre emergent herbicides to control weeds which means we have to work really hard to control weeds on the farm. It doesn’t take long for weeds to get out of control and choke out the crops you’re trying to grow. Here’s how we do it.
Flameweeding
We use our flame weeder to burn small weeds just as they’re emerging from the soil and before our crops emerge. Because many weeds will germinate and sprout before our crops come out of the soil we can give our crops a head start by burning the weeds off. It’s been an effective tool for us especially in carrots and cilantro which have relatively long germination periods.
Our flame weeder.
Finger Weeding
No, not your fingers (although we do hand weed too). Finger weeders are discs with polyurethane “fingers” that spin and flick weeds out of the soil when they are young and vulnerable. This tools works particularly well on transplanted crops where the crop is vastly bigger than the weeds. This tool is highly adjustable and customizable for the varying crop stages we use it in. While the adjustments do take time, it’s very satisfying when it works perfectly!
Finger weeders in yellow. Notice how the fingers penetrate into the soil in the row.
Tine Weeding
Tine weeding is a type of blind cultivation - that is, cultivation that is “blind” to the crop rows - that uses many small wires that vibrate in the soil and help to uproot very small weeds.
Closeup of the tine weeder.
Hand Weeding
Hand weeding is the most expensive and slowest weeding on the farm. All of the tools above help us reduce the hand weeding we have to do. We won’t completely eliminate hand weeding but in many cases we can reduce the time we spend hand weeding by 70% to 90% by using the tools above at the right time.
Finally, we take all of these tools together and apply a couple principles to them and we arrive at our weed control methodology.
Cultivate after every rain/irrigation session.
If you can see the weeds, it’s already too late to be most effective.
Stack cultivation tools as much as possible. Stacking tools means you use more than one method on each crop as often as possible.
Never let a weed go to seed.
Plant cover crops in fallow ground.
Winter Tunnel Complete!
How we’re preparing it for it’s first crop.
The crew at Quality Structures who built our new winter tunnel wrapped up construction about a week ago. All that remains is a bit of dirt work around the outside perimeter of the tunnel. That means it’s time to get this tunnel ready for it’s first crop: paradoxical summer lettuce. I’ll explain why summer lettuce and what we are doing to prepare this tunnel for production.
When we designed the winter tunnel we knew we wanted a space that we could use for both winter and summer production. We’ve seen other deep winter greenhouse designs and they are basically unusable in the summer because they get too hot. We are pretty confident our winter lettuce will be successful and cost-effective but we’re not 100% sure about that. We thought that if we’re going to invest this much money then we need to be able to utilize it like our other tunnels. So, because this tunnel is also capable of producing summer crops and due to some space limitations in our other tunnels the first crop in this tunnel will be summer lettuce. In future seasons we will rotate this tunnel between summer peppers/cukes/tomatoes and winter crops.
To prepare the growing space we planted a cover crop mix of annual rye grass and clover. These cover crops will grow for about a month before we terminate them and prepare beds for summer lettuce. The annual rye grass and clover will help loosen the soil and add some nutrients back into the soil. Both will also suppress weeds and add organic matter to the soil.
We can’t wait to start growing in this new winter tunnel!
In the new winter tunnel!
Landscape Fabric: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with landscape fabric. I love that it dramatically reduces weed pressure AND keeps our crops clean. I hate that it’s plastic and managing it can be difficult to say the least. Last week, we laid down landscape fabric in our field pepper & tomato beds so it’s the perfect time to talk about how we manage it, why we use it, and some tricks we use to make it easier to deal with.
Landscape fabric is made from woven plastic strands that allow air and water to pass through but block weeds from growing (for the most part). We use it for two main types of crops lettuce & long season crops like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant & kale. While lettuce is a very short season crop, it’s still really nice to suppress weeds so they don’t end up in your salad and keeping our lettuce clean is another big plus. On our longer season crops the main benefits are weed suppression and reduced disease pressure. Many diseases that would affect our tomatoes are soil-borne so reducing soil splash up from rain events helps reduce disease pressure.
Landscape fabric can be re-used for around 5-7 seasons in our experience with careful management. We typically fold landscape fabric up neatly, tie it with twine so it stays neat, label it so we know what length, hole spacing and the date it was last used and store it in our storage shed until the next season. To keep landscape fabric fastened down to the soil we use hundreds of staples about 8” in length spaced every 2-3’ to keep the fabric in place.
When brand new, landscape fabric doesn’t have any holes. We created these custom plywood templates with different hole patterns and spacing. This allows us to quickly and accurately burn holes into the fabric at optimal spacing for the crops were growing.
The Good
Weed suppression, disease reduction, cleaner crops
The Bad
Labor to manage, lots of staples, you need a calm day to install it.
The Ugly
Plastic :-(
Burning holes for crops into landscape fabric with this template.
Vacuum Seeder Explained
Last year we made a big (and expensive) upgrade to our direct seeding equipment with the purchase of a Wizard Electric Vacuum Seeder. A vacuum seeder is going to help us solve some of the biggest problems we have with our direct seeded crops like sweet corn, peas, beans, beets & more. This weeks blog post will go over how the vacuum seeder works and the problems it helps us solve.
The name gives it away: vacuum seeder. The seeder uses vacuum to pull seeds up against a plate. The plate rotates at a configurable rate to allow for variable spacing for different crops. For example, peas like to be really close together at 1”-2” between plants whereas sweet corn and popcorn need more space at 9”-12” between plants. Once the seed held against the plate is at the precise location it needs to be the vacuum is cut and the seed drops down into the soil.
The biggest advantage of a vacuum seeder over our existing gravity based seeders is seed singulation. That is, making sure a single seed drops into the soil at the spacing it’s supposed to. This solves two problems at once for us: jams and double/triple seed drops. Our gravity based seeders often jam which means we’re no longer dropping seeds at the right spacing. The other double/triple problem is when multiple seeds are dropped at one time when there should just be one. That means we have to go back and thin the plants. More time, more work and worse yield.
We’re happy to have this new seeder and we’re excited to share the results with you later on this summer!
The Frost Dance
Hot, then cold. Hot, then cold. Repeat for April and the first 10 days of May. It’s been a roller coaster ride for weather so far this spring. Not so much of an issue in the first half of April but once we have our tomatoes and peppers planted in our tunnels we need to take extra precautions to make sure these cold-sensitive crops survive the chilly nights.
You might be surprised to know that in the early morning hours that the inside temperatures of the tunnels basically matches the outside temperature. That’s because the single layer of 4 mil plastic doesn’t have much of anything for R-value. Anytime it gets close to 32* F we worry.
If we know it’s going to be below 32* F we move our trays of not-yet-transplanted peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, basil & eggplant from our greenhouse to our pack shed. That’s not an option for the tomatoes, peppers and basil already transplanted into our tunnels.
To ensure these cold-sensitive crops survive we use row covers, pictured below, to help trap the heat of the soil under the row cover. We typically see about 3-7* F temperature difference under the row cover which is enough to get us by these chilly nights.
We’re in our 12th season farming and I don’t remember a spring where we had so many frosty nights between April 20 and today. Sure, we expect a 2-3 frosty nights in that time frame but not the 10+ nights and counting.
Tomatoes tucked under row cover for another frosty night.
Improving Soil Health
It’s hard to describe the excitement, hope and anticipation leading up to the first day of planting out in the field. It’s true that I’ve been planting seeds indoors, in the tunnels, and in trays since February but it really feels like the season has begun when we get outside in our fields.
This year brought a heightened sense of excitement, hope and anticipation. We purchased a new attachment for our tractor called a field cultivator pictured below. It’s purpose is to loosen, smooth, and make the soil soft and easily workable for both our direct seeders and for transplanting into.
One of our biggest goals from a soil health perspective is to reduce our reliance on our rototiller. Rototillers are notoriously destructive to the soil and since healthy soil means healthy plants means healthy people then anything we can do to reduce rototiller use will be a huge benefit for our soil, our farm and ultimately you. I’m happy to share my initial impression of our field cultivator is that it does a MUCH better job in less time and using less fuel while also being less destructive than our rototiller.
Once our fields were prepped it was onto seeding. I planted sweet corn, snap peas, snow peas, radish, salad turnips, spinach, potatoes & cilantro. The next day, we transplanted cabbage, broccoli, scallions, broccolini, shallots, pearl onions, kohlrabi, lettuce, & bok choy.
We’re off to the races as they say and we are SO excited to be bringing healthy, sustainable produce fresh from our farm to your table!
This tool, called a field cultivator, is our primary seedbed prep tool.
After using our field cultivator we have loose, smooth, soft soil that’s easy to work with for both planting and transplanting.
Winter Tunnel: One Step Closer
Long time farm fans will know we’ve been working towards buying and building a new high tunnel with winter growing in mind. It’s been a process. Initially, we were waiting to see if we’d get funding through a USDA program called EQIP (Environment Quality Incentives Program) but that path seems unlikely with the goals of the current administration. We spent about a year in limbo on this before we decided that it wasn’t going to work out. Fun fact: we had actually put in our application for EQIP in December 2024.
We decided we just needed to go for it and secure our own financing through Compeer Financial. We know that even if the winter growing fails (we don’t think it will), that the tunnel would still be valuable for growing other summer crops like tomatoes and cucumbers. Then, we were met with long wait times for building and big cost increases. The whole project increased in cost by about 50% from its inception to when we finally decided to move forward.
Jump to just last week and we finally received the tunnel parts with the builder planning to begin construction in early June. I am SO excited for this and maybe a bit nervous too. It’s one of the bigger farm purchases we’ve ever made. The only thing more expensive than this tunnel is our vegetable wash & pack shed.
What will we grow in the winter tunnel?
We’ve been experimenting with winter growing for around 5 seasons now and we have a good idea of what could work and what probably won’t work. We plan to grow lettuce mix, radish, spinach, salad turnips, scallions & bok choy in the winter tunnel. With supplemental heat and normal to slightly below normal temperatures in winter we should be able to produce these crops all winter long!!
That’s really exciting for us. When you consider that we can pair these fresh winter crops with storage crops like beets, carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic, shallots, cabbage & winter squash, we suddenly have a huge selection of fresh, local, sustainably grown veggies available even in the dead of Minnesota Winters!
Our goal is to make local foods easily accessible year round and this winter tunnel will be one giant step towards that goal. We can’t wait to start growing!
May Crop Preview
One of the areas we excel at is having a good selection of produce available early in the season (think May and the 1st half of June). There’s a lot of planning and a good bit of luck that go into our ability to produce crops so early in the season. Today we’re going to go over our May crop plan and what goes into having these crops ready so early in the season.
May Crop List
Lettuce
Radish
Salad Turnips
Scallions
Cilantro
Spinach
Beets
Broccolini
Carrots
Snap Peas?
Step One: Grow In Tunnels
When we began investing in season extension infrastructure like caterpillar tunnels and high tunnels (referred to as “tunnels” henceforth) we knew that we wanted to do things a little different. At the time there were plenty of other vendors selling early tomatoes and cucumbers which are quite commonly grown in a tunnel. We wanted to focus on other popular crops that make sense in a tunnel. We landed on lettuce as our main focus crop but also wanted to have more available than lettuce. We added beets and carrots to our spring tunnel lineup as well as the others listed above.
Step Two: Think Ahead
We use software to aid in our crop planning so we know at a glance when certain tasks need to be done. Still, early in the season it can take a long time for soil conditions to be right for bed prep. In February we’re closely monitoring soil moisture levels inside the tunnels so when bed prep time comes around we are ready.
Step Three: Account For Cold Weather and Limited Sun
It can take a crop as much as 2-3 weeks extra to reach maturity early in the season. This is due mostly to colder temperatures but also due partly to decreased sunlight. This pushes our plant dates as early as March 1st for carrots and beets. With day to maturity ratings of around 60 days you would think they would be ready by May 1st. Instead, it’s more like May 15 for beets and May 22nd for carrots!
Step Four: Tunnel Management
The nice thing about the tunnels is we can achieve much warmer soil & air temperatures much earlier than we can outside. This also means on really sunny and warm days we can hit temperatures that are too hot for our crops. So we ventilate our tunnels to make sure we keep our crops in ideal growing temps. Since weather fluctuates wildly in the spring we also try to conserve heat on cooler and cloudy days. The compounded effect of this is earlier crop maturities!
When will we see these crops on the market stand/online store?
Early May: Lettuce, Spinach, Radish, Salad Turnips
Mid May: All of the above plus: Beets, Cilantro, Scallions
Late May: All of the above plus: Carrots, Snap Peas, Broccolini
Carrots with first true leaves showing!
Tunnel Seeding Begins!
The Ides of March Blizzard has just passed and I can’t think of a stronger juxtaposition between a blizzard and planting spring crops inside our tunnels. It looks more like the dead of winter than the cusp of spring outside but the season is shifting. You can feel it in the power of the sun, the length of daylight and the sounds of migrating birds returning for summer.
Seeders, seeds and supplies
In the past few weeks I’ve prepped about half of the beds inside our tunnels and planted carrots, radish, beets, salad turnips & cilantro in the tunnels. Bed prepping is an important part of our growing process inside our tunnels. We broad fork each bed to loosen and fracture the soil and to provide nooks and crannies for fertilizer to fall into. Then we apply organic, pasteurized, pelletized chicken manure fertilizer to provide safe nutrients for our crops. Next, we till the beds to provide a soft, “fluffy” soil that’s easy to work with. Finally, we rake the beds so they are even. All of these steps are very labor-intensive but the results they provide are worth it.
Once the bed prep is done the bed is ready for planting. The first crops to be direct seeded are beets and carrots. Direct seeded refers to directly planting the seeds into the bed as opposed to transplanting where we take a live plant and transplant it into the bed. Planting this early comes with some risks but also offers plenty of rewards when things work out. Fresh beets and carrots available in mid to late May being the main reward. This is over a month ahead of when a outdoor, field planted beet or carrot would be ready!
That little red speck is a beet!
Marbleseed Conference
Lara and I spent last weekend at the Marbleseed Conference in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. It’s a conference for small scale organic farms to come and learn, network and share ideas about how to be better farmers and improve the food system. This conference often gets the gears in my head turning about ways I can improve Cedar Crate Farm and also has me thinking about our food system more broadly. While there were many so called take-away nuggets of information gleaned at this conference, I want to share two of them with you today. One is a practical tool we can implement on our farm this season and another is an observation of the food system more broadly.
Takeaway 1: The Practical Tool
One of the presentations we attended was from a researcher from the University of Wisconsin - Madison who presented on some new tools they’re developing to improve disease and insect management for farmers. Essentially, bug and disease life cycles strongly correlate with weather: usually heat and humidity. By putting together knowledge on disease and insect life cycles with known weather data we can make predictions about when certain diseases or insects will have intense pressure. Knowing this then allows us as farmers to implement management practices to help reduce insect and disease damage. The folks at University of Wisconsin have even built an online tool where I can plug in my farm zip code and it will automatically pull weather data and make predictions about when disease and insect pressure will be worst for a host of pests. We’re really excited to give this a try this season!
Takeaway 2: The Industrial Food System Is Broken and Farms Like Ours are the Fix
Austin Frerick - an Iowa native - is the author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry and presented on not only this work but upcoming work he’s doing on solutions to the problems laid out in Barrons. Barrons examines the food system through “robber barrons” in several segments of the food system. Robber Barrons within the food system include large meatpackers like JBS and Smithfield Foods, Driscolls in berries, Wal-Mart in Grocery. Frerick argues that each of these companies employ anti-competitive practices while simultaneously benefiting from government subsidies while providing no benefit to consumers. Prices are not lower and the food quality from large companies is abysmal. If you eat you should read this book.
I often go back and forth feeling proud to be part of a solution to the broken food system but also feel incredibly disheartened to see the slow rate of change around me. We as a country are rooted in a farming and food system that externalizes costs and produces bad products. We are now at a point as a country where we import more fruits and vegetables from foreign countries than we produce ourselves. Isn’t that crazy?! The produce that is imported is not good - think about those pale barely pink tomatoes and strawberries that are hard and flavorless. They’re engineered to be shipped internationally and not for flavor.
Our farm is part of the solution. Not only do we grow really delicious food but we also serve as a connection point for developing community around food. These two acts while seemingly small could be duplicated across agricultural lands all over the country. Imagine tens of thousands of farms like us growing vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs, honey, herbs, and so much more. Food is one of the best common denominators we have as humans.
You are an important piece of this puzzle. By supporting our farm at the Farmers Market, by being a CSA member, or shopping our online store you making a powerful statement. You’re saying that at least some of your food dollars should stay within the community. You’re rejecting the narrative that only large corporations and farms can feed us. You’re saying you value freshness, flavor & quality over the convenience of the supermarket. It may seem small but to us it means the world!