Year: 2022

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How to Have a Weed-Free Garden

How has your garden grown this year? For many years, I welcomed the fall’s first frost to kill all the warm-season weeds and give me a fresh chance to manage the weeds for the winter.

I waded through the weeds, watching in dismay as hundreds of thousands of crabgrass seeds shattered onto the ground.  I resolved to do better next year, and as next year came, with hoeing weeds or applying (expensive and/or difficult to manage) mulch as my only defense against the inevitable.

In my book,  How to Have a Weed-Free Garden , I describe the methods I have finally found to manage the weeds in my garden.  I wrote the book in 2018, when I was still gardening and not farming.  I use the same methods, generally, on my farm that I used in the garden on a larger and (I hope) more efficient scale.

The primary method of weed management is weed prevention.  Until I realized I needed to prevent weeds from ever germinating, rather than perpetuating the myth that I would, this year, keep up with the hoeing, only to find myself on a hot July morning standing in a jungle of weeds that were too big to hoe, did I discover how to manage the weeds and spend more time enjoying the garden.

Get your copy of my ebook here.  It’s free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers and $2.99 otherwise.

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Enrich Your Soil with Cover Crops

I originally wrote this post in 2012 when I was a want-to-be farmer, or preparing to farm, or maybe just a gardener.  New readers might not know that I wrote a weekly or bi-weekly gardening column for “The Country Chronicle,” a local paper in Blythewood for about eight years (goodness I am not sure of those dates, maybe it was fewer years than that). I know I began writing in 2008 because I remember taking my oldest daughter to the interview with the publisher when she was a toddler.
The information in this article remains accurate, except that now I have moved on first to pigs to till the soil and then onto a tractor.  I also began using silage tarps to smother weeds and cover crops and I would recommend them to any gardener.  Oh, and I no longer let anything go to seed if I can possibly avoid it.  
As I clear the summer garden of plants that are past their time, in the areas where I do not have mulch, I am planting cover crops.  As every
gardener knows, something is going to grow on bare soil.  If the gardener plants nothing, weeds will take the job, and weeds are better than bare soil.  Weeds prevent soil erosion and enrich the soil when they decompose.  The only problem with weeds is that either they shed thousands of seeds that make more weed plants, or they have invasive roots that make life difficult for the plants you actually want to grow in the garden.
A cover crop is any crop you plant in an otherwise bare section of the garden to enrich the soil or to prevent weeds.  If the gardener tills in the
cover crop, soil microbes and worms decompose the crop and enrich the soil.  If the cover crop remains on top of the soil and dies, worms and microbes will come up to consume the crop.  Turning a flock of chickens into the cover crop nourishes the chickens as they eat the crop, helps till in the cover crop, and enriches the soil.
In past years, I have planted canola (rape), and daikon radishes in the hard clay outside my garden so that their thick taproots could break up the soil. Last winter, I planted rye grass in the orchard area and in the newly cleared land where we cut pine trees. The color of the rye grass is an excellent indicator of soil fertility: among the apple trees, where the chickens had spent a lot of time and I had added compost to the soil, the grass was thick and dark green.  In the newly cleared area, the grass had trouble growing at all.  The chickens enjoyed eating the rye grass and seed when we turned them in the area.  
Healthy rye grass fertilized by chicken manure

 

Stunted rye grass in newly cleared area
 
Inside the garden, I planted wheat and oats in small sections of the garden last fall, and this fall I have planted large areas of the garden in these grains.  I allowed the grains to make seed last spring, which I fed to my chickens.  I cut the grain stalks to the ground, used the straw as mulch, and planted my sweet potatoes among the stubble.  The grain will not grow back during the summer’s heat.
 
Last year’s cover crop of wheat.  The chickens enjoyed the grain!
I tilled some of my rye grass into the soil, and some I mowed.  Heat kills rye grass, and it is an annual, so it will not become a weed.  Rye is one of the easiest cover crops because the inexpensive seed is available in many stores and it germinates quickly. Heat also kills crimson clover, and clover fixes nitrogen in the soil.  One cover crop I do not use is vetch.  Many gardening books recommend using it as a
cover crop, and the writers of those books must not have the problems we do with vetch invading the garden as a weed.
If you plow the garden every spring, using cover crops is easy because you can plow them in and allow them to decompose for a few weeks before you plant. I do not usually till the soil, so I must plan carefully to avoid having a thick patch of something difficult to remove growing in the place I want to plant my spring vegetables.  However, with some planning, I can mow the cover crop, smother it with mulch, or plant
my summer plants along with the cover crop and wait for summer’s heat to kill it. 
Buy seeds for cover crops at local feed stores and garden centers.  Feed stores carry varieties that are successful locally.  Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply, at www.groworganic.com and Johnny’s Selected Seeds at www.johnnyseeds.com also carry many cover crop seeds.  Read the seed descriptions carefully so you do not end up with vetch or some other weedy crop; buy locally to help you buy crops that do not become weeds.
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Flowers, Flowers Everywhere

I was not a naïve city girl who moved to the country to follow a farming dream when we began this farm.  Although farming was not their full-time job, my parents had a beef cattle farm during most of my life and they had an enormous garden.  I had a substantial garden before we moved to this property, and I also had grown chickens for meat and for eggs.  Regardless, I allowed my enthusiasm to get ahead of me a bit and I entered our first season selling pork, eggs, vegetables, and dabbling in growing cut flowers.

I knew I couldn’t pursue all those farming ventures at one time for the long term, but I decided to experiment with different farming avenues.   When I considered raising animals, I knew that caring for them involves a great deal of hard and potentially dangerous work.  I chased enough cows and watched my father fix fences and bale hay to know that I did not want to raise cattle.

I chose pigs because they are smaller and easier to keep in the fence.  The three batches of pigs we raised produced some wonderful food for us and for our community, and, well, pigs make me happy.  However, although I have children and a husband, I am the primary caretaker of the farm.  I can lift 50 pound bags of feed, daily, to feed the pigs, now, but I don’t want to risk a back injury or some other injury from 300 pound hungry animals. 

Cut flowers as a primary crop is not something I thought was even possible when I began dreaming about farming.  I read an article in a magazine at least 20 years ago about a farm that grew cut flowers.  I thought it sounded like a lot of fun, but how could anyone make money growing zinnias?  I had a yard full of them! I dismissed that notion.

Anyway, when I read that article, I lived in a subdivision.  My immediate goal was to get enough land so I could have a large garden, and so I could live far enough away from others so I couldn’t hear my neighbor’s toilet flush or smell their bacon cooking.

After getting the large garden, and some distance from my neighbors, I was satisfied with gardening and homesteading for many years, as you can see from the articles in the archives of this website dating back 10 years or more.  I grew every vegetable I had ever heard of, and I canned and froze vegetables, made jam, and raised chickens for meat and for eggs.

Eventually, I began to want to have a farm.  They do say chickens are the gateway farm animal, and I think that is true.

A few chickens for eggs sounds like fun, and they are, and eventually you find yourself watching the sun rise through the windshield as you navigate back country roads while hauling six pigs to the butcher.

In the intervening years between dreaming about a farm and actually having one, I read every book and article I could find about farming and large-scale gardening.  I experimented with many methods of farming and gardening, and decided what worked for me and in my climate and what did not.  I already knew that I did not get along with machinery, although I knew tillage was necessary to break new ground.  I knew about tarping, and drip irrigation, and mulching.  I knew how to compost and to use cover crops.

It is probably a good thing I didn’t have the money or the time to grow things on a larger scale, because with larger scale endeavors I would have been able to make huge (expensive) mistakes.  Small mistakes on a garden scale are affordable.

We enjoy the vegetables from the garden, and we have of course loved our meat and eggs.  Last spring, the critters ate my chickens and so I have no animals on the farm now and I have no plans to get more.

The cut-flower aspect of our business is easily the most profitable, and so for 2022 I am going to devote all my energy to growing flowers.  I will primarily sell to local florists and event planners. I hope to also have some opportunities for people to come to the farm and to pick their own flowers as well as opportunities for people to purchase bouquets.  I enlarge my planting space each year, and I this spring I have close to 1/3 an acre in cultivation.