Hoes from a Different Area Code

In the Book of Genesis, God tells Adam that the ground will bring forth "thorns and thistles" (Gen. 3:18) for him during the painful toil he must endure to produce food. I don't mean to make a case for the veracity of the Bible; I quote it here to demonstrate that farmers have been battling weeds for millenia. It's such an integral part of food production that the writers of the Bible included it as a major part of life outside the Garden of Eden. Man is born through pain, suffers to produce food, and returns to the dust. While it may seem strange or trivial, weeds contribute more than their fair share of this pain down at Mighty Food, and we spend much of our time dealing with them.

So what is a weed? We all grew up hearing that dandelions are weeds, but, if my upbringing is any indication of the whole, no one ever told us what makes a plant a weed. The simple answer is: location. A plant is only a weed if it's growing where you don't want it to, particularly if it's hindering another plant's growth. This makes some of the parsnips in Mighty Food's parsnip bed weeds. If two parsnips grow too close together, neither plant will have room to grow, so we comb through the bed and pull some of them out to make sure they all have some wiggle room. This is weeding just as much as pulling out pigweed is.

Horsenettle

My very least favorite weed is horsenettle, which is a member of the solanaceae (or nightshade) family, the same family as tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tobacco. The spines you see in the picture not only cover its stalk, but also make an appearance on the underside of the leaves. Unlike the spines on a squash or cucumber plant, these are very hard, and dig into the skin with the slightest pressure, which has earned it the nicknames 'the Devil's tomato,' and 'the apple of Sodom' (which is oddly relevant to Genesis' thistles). The only way to pull out the plant without touching the spines is to grip it by the part of the stalk that is below ground, which can be difficult. Normally, I just use pliers or plant clippers to cut it down, but one may also use gloves.

Like the horsenettle, weeds like lamb's quarters, grasses, and milkweed crop up seemingly out of nowhere. Their seeds can fly in on the wind, lay dormant in a field until it is tilled, or come directly from a mature plant. Horsenettle can even grow from rhizomes, horizontal roots that send out shoots, creating genetically identical plants close to the parent plant. However they find their way to our fields, they take full advantage of the fertilized soil we provide for the crops, sometimes growing taller than the crops themselves. In doing so, they steal nutrients from the soil that our crops would have otherwise used to grow new stalks or fruits, and they block out the sun, preventing our crops from converting its energy into sugars they can use. Simply put, the more weeds we have, the smaller and fewer our crops are, so we lose money. We have no choice but to kill weeds whenever possible.

As much as I like dead weeds, these were killed with a chemical that does damage to the planet.

Starting around the 1940s, the above picture became quite common. This is when herbicides, chemicals designed to kill certain plants but spare others, came into common use. Unfortunately, most farmers continue to use them today. If the vegetables in your refrigerator came from a supermarket, you can bet they have been exposed to a number of chemicals used to kill weeds and insects. Of course, herbicides are the fastest, cheapest way to manage weeds, which contributes to low food prices at supermarkets. However, they can be very harmful to humans and animals. Agent Orange, for example, was a defoliant (leaf-killer) used during the Vietnam War to kill jungle, making it easier for U.S. forces to track Vietcong. However, it has been linked to hundreds of thousands of birth defects in Vietnamese people.

The herbicides used on farms today don't have such radical effects, but many of them contain the same types of harmful chemicals, like dioxins, found in Agent Orange. We are only just beginning to understand herbicides' long-term effects. Defoliants used in the Mississippi River Valley ultimately wash into the Gulf of Mexico, killing algae, which reduces the food supply of local fish and increases the levels of carbon dioxide in the water (because the algae would have used it in photosynthesis and put more oxygen into the water). Fewer predatory fish and more carbon dioxide creates perfect conditions for jellyfish, creating a very unbalanced proportion of fish to jellies, and limits human access to fish. In my opinion, it is always safer to avoid using chemicals when possible, because we will probably never fully understand the effects of the chemicals we use daily in bug sprays, weed killers, shampoos and soaps, and industry.

*Not a torture device*

So, to avoid using chemicals, we at Mighty Food Farm use shovels, hoes, and our hands to kill weeds. We generally weed a bed in three stages. First, my employer Lisa will drive through over the bed on 'the G,' a little tractor, with cultivating shovels attached to the back. These shovels are positioned to dig through the soil on either side of the plants, which tears up weeds and aerates the soil (mixes it up so that oxygen and nutrients in the uppermost layer go down next to the plants' roots). Our cultivator is much smaller than the one in the picture above, but they do the same job. I don't like how much we rely on tractors at Mighty Food. They substitute chemicals in the water for chemicals into the air, which ultimately raise CO2 levels in the oceans and produce the same Jellyfish Effect anyway. However, without them, we would need many more employees or horses to till the soil, which would make our food much more expensive.


Next, we bust out the hoes that give this post its title. Farm implements come in many shapes and sizes, and they're almost all made to dig and turn soil in different ways. I'm sure when I said "hoe," you thought of this type of tool, though, since it's the most commonly used 'hoe' in the United States. The hoes we use, pictured at left with the nice, marbled background, are made by Dewit in Holland. They have four blades, which allow us to push and pull them just under the surface of the soil comfortably. So, we use them to get closer to the plants than the cultivator can, and we can even kill some of the weeds between two of the plants in a row. I love these hoes. We've spent entire days just hoeing, and although it takes a toll on my arm muscles (I am getting ripped, though), they're super comfortable to use, and they just tear through the dirt and rip up anything you want, including grasses, which have very deep, firm roots. Those blades can bite you in the ass, though, in every sense of the phrase. They're very quick to cut through the stalk of a plant or to poke holes in the plastic sheets we use to cover some of the plant beds. That's bad (no duh), so we have to be very careful using them. Most of the time we have to move on to phase three of our weeding protocol before we're done.

Phase three? Good, old-fashioned hand weeding. I've spent many an afternoon crawling through the carrot field, pulling out all the little weeds that grow close to the plants. It's hard, dirty work. Not only are there numerous spiny weeds, but you can burn your knees on the hot soil or rub them raw on the rocks that litter the fields. Your fingers get beat up, and the sun just beats down on you mercilessly. Because of all this, I can understand Genesis' reference to weeding as the painful toil of life, but I love doing it. Almost nothing on the farm is as beautiful as a freshly weeded row of crops, and it's especially good to know that we do all of that work safely, and by the sweat of our brows. We don't subject our plants to any poisons which would ultimately make it into the air, the oceans, and your body, which will allow future generations of people to fight the good fight with the thorns and thistles of the field.

Sweaty, tired, and happy,
The Regular Farmer

...how about RAWberry?!

Well, I'm a bit behind my goal of posting every day, but I'm still hoping to make the more-reasonable, 3-posts-per-week schedule. Because I didn't post for my first few weeks at the farm, I have to revisit some things that we've stopped doing, before I forget them. I began my time at Mighty Food picking strawberries, for the most part. This activity took entire mornings (that's four and a half hours, by the way) during the peak of the season, and this was a bad year!


It was the plants' third year, so you can't blame them too much for their diminished yields this season. We keep strawberries around for three years at Mighty Food, precisely because the plants produce fewer berries in their third season. If we kept our oldest succession for next year, it would yield fewer berries and have a shorter season. As it was, about half of our strawberry plants died or produced no berries at all this season, so it's a good thing we have a brand new succession planted and getting ready for June of 2011!

That's right, we have our new succession in the ground already. That seemed pretty strange to me when I started. I wondered why we would plant them in spring, harvest no berries from them, and leave them out over the winter. However, most of the strawberry varieties we use peak in their second year, so we give them their first year to grow big and strong so they'll be able to stand up to the frost and snow in winter. Of course, they still try to produce berries this year, but we stop them in their tracks.

They also try to grow runners (the red things in this photo) and flowers. Runners are stems that plants use to create genetic clones of themselves. Once a runner plants itself in (or on) soil, a new plant will sprout and begin to grow. You can cut these off and plant them on their own, creating an independent, but identical plant, or allow the plant to grow with its clones. We do neither. Instead, we cut them off as soon as we can during the first year. The same goes for flowers and developing fruit. We've spent a few hours in the new strawberries on multiple occasions, removing flowers, berries, and runners along with the weeds that grow in the plant beds.

You see, plants are miraculous forms of life that will not only survive being cut to pieces or torn apart, but will continue to grow from there. Most plants grow at an astounding rate (the zucchinis in my garden are gaining leaves by the day), and consume an incredible amount of energy doing so. When we cut off all of the strawberries' attempts to reproduce and fruit, they have nowhere to put all of this energy except into growth of the leaves and roots that already exist. Of course, a little of the energy goes into creating more runners and flowers, but as long as we keep them pruned, the plants themselves will soak up most the energy, ensuring that they are big and strong enough to survive the cold Vermont winter.

While the strawberry plants will endure the cold and bear many fruits next year, some of the berries themselves will not make it. Before the berries are even fully formed, the Tarnished Plant Bug will wreak havoc upon them. This serious pest, known to farmers and gardeners by the foreboding name "TPB," feeds on the achenes* and the flesh underneath them before the berries develop. The places it eats no longer receive growth hormone and logically stop growing, resulting in puckered flesh with clusters of achenes (photo, right). We call those "cat-faced berries." To me, they don't taste much different - they're a little more sour, if anything - but we can't sell them because of their appearance and taste, so we get to eat them when we find them.

While the TPB strikes fear into the heart of many a strawberry grower, the common slug is arguably the most hated garden pest in this country. It, and its shelled cousin, the snail, are very difficult to combat; even some very potent pesticides do nothing to inhibit it. My cousin recently told me that he lined his garden with Black Diamond, a glass powder, to prevent slugs from getting in. Instead of eviscerating themselves like he expected, the slugs very happily slimed their ways over the glass and ate his plants anyway. There is really nothing we can do at Mighty Food to stop this mollusc menace, so we inevitably find quite a few berries that look like this:

What's worse that finding a worm in your apple?

Of course, we can't sell berries like this in good conscience. Unfortunately, many an unscrupulous farmer will look the other way and sell them anyway (I got a quart of berries for jam from a farm in Springfield, VT the other day that had quite a few slug-eaten berries in it. Don't buy berries from a guy set up on the side of the road.) The very worst part about it is that slugs always pick the very best berries! It's like they know which ones look and taste the best to humans. It never fails; you reach under a plant and find a cluster of berries that looks pretty good. None of them are moldy, they're all dark red, and you're getting pretty excited, because your boss wants 100 pints by lunchtime. When you turn the best-looking berry around to examine it, nothing appears to be amiss, so you pull it off and bring it to your face to study it more closely. Suddenly, your gut sinks to the ground because there are a few telltale holes near the stem; a slug has been snacking on your crop! So, you throw it into the row and smoosh it with your knees on your way to unpicked plants. At least it can beautify your junky, old jeans!


Besides creepy, crawly things, strawberries fall victim to many other damaging organisms. Mice are one (although some readers may classify them as creepy-crawly.), and we have standing orders to kill any rodent on sight. Another is mold. The longer a strawberry stays on its plant, the more likely it is to develop a mold, because it has more time to catch airborne mold spores. Unfortunately, once one strawberry gets mold, those spores are pretty common around the berries. The mold (and rot, which is caused by bacteria) spread to any berries that are touching the bad berry, so the best thing you can do is keep them cleaned out, so to speak. During a bad week, we spent many hours in the strawberry beds just picking moldy or rotten berries and throwing them very far away from the plants. Because we did this, the next week, the strawberries had a resurgence of healthy, good berries before they stopped producing fruit for the season. We probably lost $500 of berries to the mold, but we would have lost more had we just let them go.

Living berries are not the only ones that can get mold! If you buy fresh berries from a farm stand (or, if you're feeling masochistic, a package from the store) they will go bad pretty quickly even in a cooler. At some point, we've all opened the Frigidaire door and been assaulted by the full-bodied stank of bad strawberries. You can prolong your strawberries' 'fresh' period by leaving the stems on! I don't know why this is, but it's absolutely true.

So, if you've made it this far, you must love strawberries as much as I do! You may have never knelt in the straw and picked through the thistles to find good berries, but you should know by now what to avoid should you ever find yourself in a strawberry field. Come to think of it, next year, around June, head out to a local farm with a 'pick your own' section and get your hands under the plants! Nothing will teach you about berries faster than that!

Get Jamming!
The Regular Farmer
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*Did you know what we think of as 'seeds' on a strawberry are actually the fruit? Achenes are a type of dry fruit that develop on many flowering plants. A single seed is contained within each achene. The red stuff that we think of as the 'fruit' on a strawberry is excess flesh that has evolved to be tasty so rodents and other creatures will eat and spread the actual fruit and the seeds within.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs

Fwoosh!

So, it's the middle of my sixth week at Mighty Food. I just got this blog up and running, so I won't be writing the things in the order I learned them. Instead, I thought I'd start with a bang.

Close your eyes and imagine: A 15 lb. metal tank is bouncing against your leg as you struggle to hold it up. The rubber hose attached to the tank snakes up one arm and down the other, leading to a narrow, steel pipe. At the end of that is a heavier, iron pipe only about 6 inches which is spewing a two-foot, near-invisible flame, hopefully away from your body. What could you be doing? Perhaps you're setting an old building ablaze for firefighters to practice on. Maybe, under less fortunate circumstances, you're forced to depend on this flamethrower for defense.

Neither is true of course. In reality, you're flame weeding! Yes, like the rest of us, farmers will jump at the chance to use a dangerous, explosive, kick-ass piece of equipment, especially if it helps them do their jobs better. Unlike regular weeding, flame weeding is usually done before there are any plants in a bed, and it is meant to kill weeds early in your crops' life to give them time to mature with little to no competition from weeds. There are many techniques, including some that involve flaming a bed of plants that have already emerged from the soil. However, we used what is called the peak-emergent technique. This means we planted beds of our crop, carrots in this case, and flamed the entire bed just before the carrots emerged from the soil. In fact, there weren't even very many weeds visible in the soil either. Just a few young grasses were popping up here and there, meaning the bed was mostly just rows of tilled soil with little valleys where the carrot seeds were planted. What the flaming did, though, was to kill all of the weed seeds in the top of the soil - the ones that would sprout first and compete directly with the young carrots. If we had allowed the weeds to emerge, they would steal sunlight, root space, water, and nutrients from the carrots. Now, the carrots will be able to grow for a few weeks free of competition. They were planted a few inches deeper than the weeds, so they survived the inferno and will emerge in a few days.

As cool as it sounds, and as much as I've always wanted to play with a flamethrower, flame weeding left a bad taste in my mouth. It was the most violent thing I've done on the farm so far, though we haven't slaughtered any chickens yet. Of course, the flame was only scorching the soil and killing a few seeds and plants, and I've done much worse. Regular weeding involves tearing plants out by the root, and even harvest leaves lots of dead plants on the ground. With those jobs, though, you know you're doing good: nothing looks better than a freshly-hoed field full of healthy crops and dead weeds. Flame weeding offers no immediately perceptible reward, though. All I could see was the earth darkening under the flame, the green plants withering into ash, and the dried grass clumps bursting into flame. As I looked over the field, I saw a smoking wasteland, and I felt like I had needlessly destroyed the earth.

I felt the machine assaulting me as well, in a way. It was incredibly loud, and sounded like a large hose or a fire extinguisher next to my ear. I also had to be very careful not to burn myself. The clouds of shimmering air in front of the barrel normally stayed over the carrot beds, but occasionally, the wind would blow the heat toward me. It wasn't any worse than sitting too close to a bonfire, but I was already pretty nervous using this thing, so the extra heat stressed me out more.

Despite the negative experience, I know I've prevented a lot of weeds from taking over the new carrot bed. Our older successions of carrots are full of weeds; we've spent a good 3 hours per day hand weeding them for the last two or three weeks. The crew and I will be free from hand-weeding the new succession and happy for it. I just don't know if I would flame weed again if I had the choice.

Warmly Yours,
The Regular Farmer

Mighty Food!

Almost nothing, save water, is as important as food to humans' survival as a species. Developments in farming over the last hundred or so years have allowed our country's population to expand to an incredible size along with our wastelines. Unfortunately, expanding farm output to match the demand created by fast food and supermarkets has compelled farmers to use less-than-ethical techniques to produce more food faster. Michael Pollan and Robert Kenner can tell you more than I about the problems our farming practices have created. Instead of re-hashing everything they have produced, I plan to use this blog to recount my experience working for an organic farm this summer and fall.

The farm is Mighty Food Farm, which provides organic eggs, fruits, and veggies to the people of Pownal, Vermont and the surrounding area. It's run by two graduates of UMass Amherst, along with a hard-working crew. Everyone there cares very much about how our farming impacts our environment, and while we try our best, we could be farming more sustainably. Regardless, working there has been an invaluable learning experience for me, and I hope to share as much of it with you as I can. If anything, I can bring you a little bit closer to your food and the people who grow it.

Very Sincerely,
Ryan Heisler, The Regular Farmer