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