A Wet Week

Surely, at some point this season we will pine for rain showers like we've gotten this week, but right now we could really use four or five days of sunshine.

When the fields are consistently wet we can't weed or plant. Simultaneously the rain seems to make the weeds grow nonstop. So those tomatoes we recently put in now look like this. In a day or two all those little green specks will be a carpet of weeds.

We could clean up those weeds pretty quickly with a tool called a wheel hoe, but with heavy, wet soil the wheel hoe just picks up dirt and quickly becomes useless.

So, we have to weed by hand. We are growing on some land that we haven't planted before and we have discovered that there are a lot of weed seeds that we'll have to take care of before we plant the fields again. Here are two beds of onions that we weeded by hand (you can see the remnants of the pulled grass in the path between the beds). To the left is a third onion bed that we've since been able to weed.

We like crops like peas, which manage to stay ahead of the weeds. Peas are also a favorite crop of ours because they are great to snack on while harvesting!


The only thing we may need to do differently with the peas next year is put up a taller trellis...