Good Weeding

I’ve been trying to note differences between gardening practices at the farm and in my home garden. There are many similarities but in a lot of ways the farm has advantages because it’s just so much more land and so many more people working it. For example, on any given week, there are several types of lettuce waiting for members to pick up and eat. At the same time there are nearly matured lettuce heads waiting to ripen and be harvested, as well as a greenhouse filled with varying stages of new lettuce sprouts and shoots. At home, my lettuce crop is over and I have no seedlings waiting to be planted for later summer crops.

Of course at the farm the fish-based fertilizer is used and for certain crops, composted horse manure is mixed in with the soil. While I don’t use either of those methods at home, we do have a large compost pile for our kitchen scraps. Once a year we till the garden and add in some of this “black gold.”

A lot of people tell me they’d love to have a garden at home, but can’t stand all the weeding, and ask me how I have time for it. Simple: first of all, I only weed every 2 weeks or so. There are enough weeds for me to pull them out every week, but I just usually don’t find the time to do it. Secondly, I don’t really pick each individual weed out. At home, I run the sprinkler to water the garden and then afterwards when the soil is nice and soft and wet, I use my long-handled cultivator to dig up and rake away the weeds.

At the farm they use black fabric sheets and straw mulch around some plants to deter weeding. Mainly, though the method is: stay busy on the hundreds of other things that need attending to around the farm, notice that a certain crop is getting awfully weedy and then write “Weed spinach/celery/peas” on the dry erase board where weekly jobs for work-shareholders are written. Then the weeding is done entirely manually, as I can attest to after spending several hours doing so myself.

Writing this has made me realize the biggest advantage the farm has over my home garden: a dry erase board.

Written by guest blogger and Community Supported Agriculture Share Holder Gina Sampaio.