Blogs

Well that was a poorly maintained blog to say the least.
A quick point form recap
-strawberries were terrible this year
-raspberries good
-fruitstand has been very busy
-an incredible amount of corn from approx 7 acres

That is pretty limited info i know hopfully i will be able to prvide more detail later.

don't forget about the corn roast

So new hoes were picked up at the post office today. They work great. Also in the mail today was a big thick envelope of the experiences of the students of Beatty School of the arts, haven't had a chance to read more than a couple. I will excerpt some in the next posting.
3 of our wwoofers of are off to their next farming experience, 4 more have arrived in the last week.
Last we had our first on farm mini concert, a success the band: Morlove, and all of us had a great time, the house was beautifully decorated.
Ah the Strawberries, they are just around the corner. This wet couple of weeks has been excellent for limiting lygus bug activity. If the cool temperatures continue for another couple of days we won't even have to break out the bug sucker. Are bug sucker is a large hydraulically driven squirrel fan. It operates by disturbing the plants causing the lygus bugs to fly up where they are sucked then chopped by the fan into oblivion.
      

So we have just experienced our first 2-3 days of weed killing weather.
we massacred  weeds manualy, mechanicaly and with flame.
Manualy it is amazing what 20 poeple with hoes can do to cultivated corn 2 mornings and all of our early corn is done. Today i assembled a flame weeder for the front of our deere tractor and with the cultivater following up on the back we should have cut the amount of broad leaf weeds down considerably.
I guess some explanations are in order. We have to kinds of weeds broad leafs, and grasses.
Broad leafs include pig weed, lambs quarter, and the allways plentyfull canola. This group of weeds are the most immediately dangerous to what we grow, they can shade out, or choke out, and obscure the plants we grow as well as depleting the surrounding soil of the same nutrients our crops need.
Grasses while not an immediate threat can become established and be hard to remove. The worst id cuch or quak grass which spreads by ryzhomes that can pentrate just about everything including potatoes, carrots and rubarb roots.
The best way to remove these is a care hand and hoe.
Last thursday i began the process of replacing our aging stirrup hoe fleet with 4 new hoes.
           these are our current hoes these are the up grade, I will tell you how it goes.
good night