June Farm Update: Weeding, Planting, and Pack Shed Progress!!

Wow! Where does the time go? We’ve been so busy on the farm planting, weeding, and setting things up for our season that time just seems to go by so fast. May and June are very critical months of the year on our farm. The work we do now helps ensure our season is successful. We are usually juggling multiple important farm tasks such as weeding, planting, and setting up infrastructure and each task usually has a set of weather conditions that work best.

Take weeding for example. We have multiple tools and strategies to deal with the inevitable weeds including flame weeding, plastic mulch, frequent shallow cultivation and hand weeding. Our flame weeder works best when the weeds are very small and when the wind speed is less than 15 mph. It’s been fairly windy this spring so we haven’t been able to flame weed as much as we like. Cultivation requires dry ground and for the most part we have had that. By killing weeds with cultivation and flame weeding now gives our crops a chance to establish themselves and out compete future weeds. Furthermore, by killing weeds now we ensure that the weeds don’t reproduce and add even more weeds to our fields.

Planting is another very important task for obvious reasons. There’s a lot of thought that goes into when we plant crops, where we plant crops both in relation to what it’s planted next to this year and what was planted in that spot last year. We keep a Google Calendar of our planting dates to help make sense of everything and compare year to year.

Our new pack shed is also coming a long nicely. Our posts are set, the rafters are up and they are beginning the work that will go into the floor including setting drains, raising the grade and installing pex tubing for our heating system. We expect the shed to be finished around mid July and hope to start using it then as well as it will greatly improve our farm efficiency.