Planting potatoes much faster and weeding class

Almost every month of the year we are either planting or seeding something into the field but there are certain times where the planting signifies a larger change in what is happening on the farm.

Last Thursday we planted 200 pounds of seed potatoes during the sunny and warm weather that we had.

It was perfect to get them planted then as next week there is a forecasted to be a good amount of rain.

We picked up the Sifra potatoes from Full Belly Farm a couple of weeks ago and they have been in our barn sprouting. This variety is the same we have grown the past three years and is very delicious.

To plant the potatoes we prep the soil and then dig a furrow with the tractor so that the potatoes are further under the soil to prevent damage from the sun. Once we drop the potatoes into the furrow we then add in some compost before using the tractor to cover up the furrow.

This is our first year of using the tractor to cover up the potatoes as previously we had used a hoe to pull the soil back over the furrow.

That was a very time consuming process and doing it with the tractor made it go so quickly. We hill the potatoes numerous times while they are growing and hopefully we will be able to use the tractor to do a couple of them.

After we tucked the potatoes in underneath the soil we irrigated them to help them sprout in the coming weeks and it won’t be too long before we will start harvesting the potatoes.

We are always looking to make improvements and learn new things so yesterday we went to a University of California Cooperative Extension talk on weed management in organic farming.

It was very informative and there were also some demonstrations of new pieces of equipment that some farmers are using.

Managing weeds is one of the key priorities on organic farms since we do not use herbicides that would kill the weeds quickly but also kill the soil.

Every farm has a slightly different way to control weeds depending on their size, what they grow and what they have learned from other farmers.

We have been buying some small tools to help with weeding and the talk showed off some small hand powered tools all the way up to an electric weed killer that attaches to a tractor. It is over $100,000 for that piece of equipment.

For us the most interesting tool was an small electric robot called amiga from farm-ng. It is an unmanned small vehicle that has lots of technology on it to guide it from weeding to harvesting and seeding.

An added benefit is that it is electric which is always nice to help reduce the amount of gas and diesel that is being used in farming.