Intensive Agriculture

I often find it hard to remember how our days start. I guess now that this is such a familiar routine for me (get up, ride my bike, drive to the farm, meet, start work, ... etc), I'm starting to find it difficult to differentiate the days. But okay, here's what we did today:

• Seeded the corn (popcorn), for the seed saving garden, by hand.
• Seeded two beds of sunflowers, by hand.
• Put out drip line for the fennel.
• Jeff cultivated the peas with the tractor.
  
• Jarrod and Jeff worked on the sprinkler system some more. by the end of the day they had got it running.
• Moved the very healthy brassicas seedlings outside so that they can acclimatise. The term "harden off" seems rather out of place in this heat.
  
• Hoed three beds of peas that had poorly germinated.
• Pulled back the floating row cover on the turnips, radish, and a bit of the pak choi and lo! the pak choi is beautiful, edible and huge! Well, not too huge, there is still more it can grow, but this is slightly poor timing since the CSA and markets doing start for a few more weeks.
  
• Leslie and I used the wheel hoes to weed the turnip and radish.
• Put out drip line for the flowers and the turnip and radish.
  
• Then Leslie and I hand weeded the lettuce mix.
  

Okay, and when I say "hand weeded" I mean it. We were down to the real grit of intensive organic agriculture. It's the kind of horror you think about when first try to fathom farming without herbicides and pesticides. You know, getting down on your hands and knees and picking out every last weed. Well, we did that today, in the lettuce mix bed. Why? Well, it was just rather weedy, unfortunately. Maybe a combination of poor germination in patches, slow growth of the lettuce, and not being able to get much closer with the tractor.

In any case, the job was concentrated and controlled, but actually incredibly fun. I gather this assessment of the job is highly subjective. Leslie describes it as "morally crushing" or something. But whatever, I think the amazing part is how accurate one can be at this task whilst still getting the job done at a reasonable (but slow, undoubtedly) pace. Lettuce mix is, as it sounds, various varieties of lettuce planted all very closely together. It's harvested when it's young. Currently the lettuce is not much more than a sprout -- maybe 1 to 1.5 cm tall, and as I say, packed tightly. In amongst and especially around are the weeds. The job involves precision picking and scraping with your hands to get all the weeds without harming the lettuce.

Part way through Leslie and I discovered a new tool -- the "oscillating finger stirrup hoe". Actually, we just used a small spare pipe clamp that was lying around, like so:
We then just bent it to form more of a U shape (i.e. a stirrup shape). This becomes an excellent device for scraping away at the earth, just like a regular hoe (or oscillating hoe). If bent into more of a V shape then the angled portion of the V can be used to pick out individual weeds from amongst a clump of lettuce and the sides of the V can be used to scrap larger areas clean. Fantastic, I say. I think I'm going to perform some user studies and the publish our results in a farm journal *wink*.