Greetings!   

    More dispatches from the weirdest summer in recent Northern California history...

Weeds are one of the biggest challenges to growing any crop organically, and they can easily smother a crop or simply make it uneconomical to grow.   Since during the (usually) dry season here, weeds only sprout where the soil is moist, by far the most basic technique that we use at Terra Firma to control them is irrigation.  We irrigate the entire soil surface prior to planting, then cultivate to kill the weeds.  While the plants are small, we use mechanical and hand weeding to kill any additional weeds that germinate.  Once the plants are full sized, we use methods such as drip and controlled furrow irrigation keep much of the soil dry, delivering water to the roots of the crops while preventing new weed seeds from sprouting.

  Right now you may be thinking, "but TFF grows crops in the winter too, when it rains all the time".  The big difference is that during the cool season, both crops and weeds grow much more slowly (or not at all) during the shortest days of the year.  In the summer, weeds can grow as much as a foot tall in a single week -- much more quickly than our crops. 

   Rain in the summer, especially large amounts like we have had twice in June now, throws a wrench into our entire weed control program.   Many of our fields were recently hoed by hand to kill the weeds that sprout between the plants, where we cannot mechanically cultivate.  Hoeing is a time consuming, physically demanding, and expensive activity that takes people away from harvest.  Our goal every year is to get the majority of our crops hoed prior to our busiest and hottest time of year.  Now, with over an inch of rain falling and a heatwave expected next week, we will almost certainly have to hoe all those fields again at the worst possible time.

  Another big concern is our tomato field, now entirely staked and trellised.   The walkways between the plant rows are inaccessible to a tractor, so we have workers with small rototillers working every day to till the 15 acres that have now sprouted a carpet of weeds that would otherwise rise up and take over the field.

    It's true that this week's rain provided us with a free irrigation.  But to put that in perspective, consider this:  one person can easily irrigate 50 acres at Terra Firma in a week.  To cultivate that entire fifty acres with a hoe requires a crew of at least 10 people for a week.  Having grown up with summer storms, I miss the smell and sound of warm rain coming through the open windows.  But it's not worth the trade offs.

Pablito