Gardening and flame weeding

This was our first real farm weekend. I got to help with the flame weeder--really cool! You just point this massive blow-torch at the plants and they melt. You don't want to hold it on so long that you make them crispy, or start a fire, but you just pass slowly over the whole bed, killing weeds and seeds close to the surface. Then you can turn the vegetative material back into the soil. I did the flame weeding on part of the garden then we got them turned into beds.

We (well, Pat mostly, I was tending to dogs most of the time) turned four beds in the garden and mixed in compost and elemental sulfur. The pH test showed it was about 7.4-7.5. Good, but a little high for cabbages and peas especially. After researching some alternatives, we decided to look for zinc sulfate or iron sulfate at the store. They only had alumnimum sulfate, which the online research said would build up in the soil to toxic levels and warned to stay away from that. We went with elemental sulfur instead, which was the only other choice at the store. The elemental sulfur will break down slower in the soil, so most of it won't be available for the plants this year but it will be the future. So we dusted that on the beds and turned it in with the compost.

Pat planted by seed peas, carrots, radishes, and lettuce and cabbage plants. We put row cover over the lettuce and cabbage bed, and placed electrical wire bent into U shapes over the plants to protect them from the weight of the row cover. The row cover is held in place by rebar (found in the field, put there 30 years ago by my dad! Re-use!) and some old bricks. We used row cover for the first time last year and it did great. Really kept the bugs down and allowed the plants to grow to a robust size before we had to take it off for pollination.

I mostly played with the pooches to keep them occupied, tired, and so they wouldn't take themselves off somewhere. They had a ball! So did we :)