DOH! I should have taken weeding 101...

Today, Dylan and Tyler have set out to weed! We have two plots that I really need to get out there and measure them again but they are something around 60'x80' (give our take 10 - 20 feet) and fourteen 4'x4' raised beds. Square foot gardening has been a big thing for many years (after quick research for a link for you guys, it's apparently been a big thing my whole life... see told you this was new to me), and if you are new to gardening or haven't had real success in the past but are serious about doing it, you should look into doing it because it makes a lot of sense and helps you get a decent understanding of what to do and what not to do. Here is that link I told you about a second ago - what-is-square-foot-gardening

First let me give you a little bit of information so that maybe you can visualize in your head what these guys are up to today and why I have decided to stay inside and work on the website and blog! In the first plot we already have potatoes, beans, lettuce, spinach, kale and cucumbers planted. The lettuce, spinach and kale are already growing and have been cut, washed, spun, dried, bagged, tagged and sold. We cut them in such a way that we get 3 - 4 cuttings off each plant before we have to crop it out. My hope is that one day, Dylan will start a vlog and I get to record him describing this process and how it works! It will also explain the importance of trimming the dying leaves off plants so that they can thrive. We also have some broccoli, but it keeps getting eaten on by our rooster (at least we hope its him) and he's leaving the other plants alone so we wont bother counting those right now. The one plot has two distinct sections and one of the sections was tilled and that made it easy to get those weeds out. The other section of this plot on the other hand has mounded rows that when made initially were just mounded up with no measurements but this year we are working on making them 30 inches wide and they are all about six feet long. We have twelve of those planted and there are 12 more of them that we are going to work in next with spinach and kale because we don't need as much of those as we do the lettuce in our salad mixes. And then also in this section are single plant mounds. I really am not sure how many of those we have but if I had to guess I'd say somewhere between 18 and 25 and they were put there to make me a happy woman! OK OK, really, they were put there for tomatoes! Which is perfect because I LOVE tomatoes and that makes me happy! The mounded area has been covered in weeds but the weeds have stuck mostly to the walk ways of it which originally had me really confused but when explained to me that this meant the mounds were taken care of, it made much more sense (yeah, sometimes I don't give my farmer enough credit I don't think). We have pulled up the weeds where we already started planting and put cardboard and wood chips down for suppression on those walk ways but they are working on the rest of it today. While they are pulling up the weeds (some are done with a hoe because their roots are just too strong to just pull) they are throwing them into buckets. What I learned today was that after you pull them you can't just stick them into a hugel mound ditch or into the compost pile without first killing them. Now, yes, I know, this makes perfect sense to anyone with any type gardening knowledge but to those of us with black thumbs, this was one of those Homer Simpson DOH! moments where it took someone actually saying it out loud to make me go... OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH That makes sense! DOH! lol. With the weather much nicer today than we originally expected it to, they are able to put the weeds into these buckets, put the lids on them and essentially bake the weeds so that they die and that makes them perfect additions to the compost and hugel mound ditch without worry of they sprouting more weeds! Makes perfect sense huh?

I wish that in the previous 5+ times that I have tried to grow simple things like flowers that I knew a quarter of the things I do now. Maybe I could have kept them alive for more than a month and not felt like I bought them just to bring them to their deaths.... On a much cooler note, we worked together to start two flats of lettuce. They already had soil in them so we just reworked that, Dylan made little holes and I stuck seeds in there, covered them up and he watered them. Low and behold in less than a week, we had tiny lettuce plants sprouting up! He's trying to give me all the credit so that he can prove to me that with a little guidance I don't have to claim my black thumb status but we will see how it goes if I do it from beginning to end on my own!

Thank you for dropping by and checking out my blog and going on this journey with me as I learn all about this new farming life that I have!