Trying to catch the weeds early

These past two weeks our focus has been on getting thousands of plants into the field and now it turns to the weeds that have been growing rapidly.

We have a number of tools to help us weed but to get the weeds right up against the plants we do have to do some hand weeding.

Hand weeding takes the longest by a good amount but we are able to remove almost all the weeds that are there while most tools leave a few more behind.

Some of the veggies like the radishes don’t need to be weeded since they grow faster than the weeds and are harvested before the weeds take over.

For other crops like the lettuce we are able to do one big weeding on them when they are still small and then the lettuce leaves with mostly cover up any gaps in the soil preventing sunlight from reaching the weeds.

The first melons and summer squash got weeded yesterday to help the small plants that we direct seed have less competition as they grow.

We transplanted some cucumbers and one planting of melons which are looking great and growing well. Right after being planted they get stressed and focus their energy on building roots before they show any signs of growth with new leaves appearing.

It will be so delicious to be able to make a sandwich with cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce on it when the first two are ripe.

We are starting to see the beginning of heads of broccoli being formed in the center of the plants. The plants look very good so hopefully we will have lots of broccoli in the coming weeks as we’ve missed having it.

The cabbages are starting to form their heads as they grow quicker each day with the nice weather we have had and will continue to have.

We have started to harvest kale we planted this spring and should already have started picking broccolini since it is supposed to be ready quickly. That is in ideal conditions and in the early spring we have to use that number of days as a guideline which changed each year depending on the weather that is occurring.

While weeding and putting a string on the tomatoes we noticed the first green fruit. Of course it was a sungold cherry tomato.

That first unripe fruit comes just as we seeded our last succession of tomatoes for 2024 in the greenhouse.