Finally done with Tomatoes!!!

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Had a friends and family day at the garden today. Finished planting tomatoes and peppers: Totals are about 450 tomatoes, and 270 peppers. No wonder I'm feeling like the only thing I have got done since my last snow on May 26th is plant tomatoes... After I finished transplanting I felt inclined to weed again, and with the weeds tamed I could take a picture to share with the group.


That's turnip blossoms in the foreground.

Here's a photo of what I was harvesting today.


Next week I expect to continue/start planting the warm weather stuff: beans, cucumbers, pumpkins, luffas, melons, casaba, gourds, squash, etc... and to continue planting more for my sweetcorn breeding project.

I planted about 300 row feet of Astronomy Domini, not for a breeding project, but just to see how well it will do as a market crop. I expect to plant an AD X se+ breeding plot in a week or two. Also planted Michael's White Midget sweet corn.

The Long Island Seed Project's "Ashworth X se" sure came up well despite the cool temperatures. Not as quick as Painted Mountain, but much better than the standard se+ varieties that I planted on the same day.

Regards,
Joseph

[grunt]

Looks good Joseph. I have some Portuguese Couves doing what your turnips are doing. Only one plant made it through the winter.

[Penny]

Wow......that all looks great., well done.

[mnjrutherford]

I'm bringing in potatoes (a few at a time), beans, beet greens, deer eaten onions. I'm letting the peas go to seed at this point and some of my bean, spinach, and broccoli.

How do you get your rows so weed free without any mulch? Even with mulch I'm having a heck of a time with weeds. Who invented grass anyhow?

[bluelacedredhead]

Looks great! Continued success with your garden, Joseph.

[bunkie]

awesome looking garden and harvest joseph!

[massachusett4hills]

All that work
And still time for posting ?
thanks joseph
..............

[galina]

Joseph, This looks just great, such a huge space and such wide paths too. Looks as good as a demo garden. Snap! on the flowering turnips. What did you do to protect your turnips over winter? The turnips here were sown during July and wintered under a blanket of doubled-up fleece/frost cloth cover and they all made it, although we had a grim winter.

Grunt, I am sorry the couve were so frost tender and you ended up with only the one.

[grunt]

Petra: actually, I'm sort of surprised even the one survived. We had an "open" winter = it would freeze for a couple of days, warm up enough to rain a bit, then freeze, maybe snow a bit, thaw, and repeat endlessly, with a few sessions of -10C (14F) thrown in for good measure. The couves and collards had no protection at all, just standing up in the cruddy weather. I also managed to save a Green Glazed collard, which is also going to seed = it unfortunately lost a few blossom branches to a roaming cow last week.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Thanks for the kind words.

Weed free? Giggles. That's only due to the low resolution of the photo, the weeds don't show up very well. Ha!

But seriously, weeding is pretty easy for me because I weed most every day and have spent a lot of time thinking about the ergonomics of weeding.

In general, I do most of my weeding with a roto-tiller. The rows are spaced far enough apart that by the time I run my tiller down the center of the row, and a hoe along the row right next to the plants that I have weeded the whole garden except right in the row an inch or two wide, and a few tough weeds that survive along the center-line of the tiller. And then I like to space the plants far enough in the rows that my custom built 4" hoe can easily weed between the plants.

There are a few wide rows... like the cabbages, and the peas, and the onions, where I plant multiple rows side by side, but I space the plants on 18", or 8", or 6" centers, so I can run a hoe one direction and then in the perpendicular direction. So most of my weeding is done while standing/walking... There are some plants too close together to weed with my current tools, so I end up crawling along the row and weeding a little bit by hand. I think I'll make another even narrower hoe, and get one of those dandy-lion cutters with an five foot handle.

My tomatoes are planted in a grid on 3' X 5' centers so I can till in two directions.

I also minimize weeds by tilling once or twice in the fall after harvest, and in the spring once or twice before planting. I also normally till an hour before planting.

My weeding is greatly eased by not having to deal with rocks.

I have several patches of what we call "Johnson's grass" which is a very robust rhizome forming grass that pretty much survives any amount of tilling, so if I want that gone I have to pull it up by hand, or plant something like squash or corn on top of it that competes well.
[Of course I avoided including those areas in the show photo I took for the group.]

Here's what a Johnson's grass patch looks like: overwhelming the potatoes. My true potato seedlings were planned to go in that spot next to the tuber-started potatoes, but the grass was too bad for such tender starts so I moved them elsewhere.


Oh, I almost forgot one of my most important anti-weed strategies... I welcome my friends and family to visit the garden, and I'm glad if they do some weeding and take home some vegetables. I want to get an old grill so I can do something fun like offer hot-dogs and hamburgers every Wednesday evening.

The paths look wide now... By fall I'll be lucky to be able to walk through many of them.

I protected the turnips overwinter by digging a pit about a foot deep, placing the turnips in it along with Swiss chard roots, and carrots, and covering it with soil. Most of the Swiss chard, and about half of the turnips didn't survive the winter. They would have done better if I had used sand to cover them instead of my clay based soil. I'd rather leave them in place and mulch, but I've made a decision to till the whole field every year, so no perennials or biennials are allowed. The carrots survived fine.

Regards,
Joseph

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Many of my blooming turnips blew over in the wind... The roots had rotted inside, and were not firmly anchored into the ground. I'll hill up the remaining to see if we can keep them alive long enough to set seed.

Regards,
Joseph

[galina]

Jun 10, 2010 16:45:50 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

Many of my blooming turnips blew over in the wind... The roots had rotted inside, and were not firmly anchored into the ground. I'll hill up the remaining to see if we can keep them alive long enough to set seed.

Regards,
Joseph

I hope so too. Mine are tied together a foot off the ground and a second time higher up and tied to tomato spirals to keep them from breaking and flopping everywhere in the wind and still bits break off. Fingers crossed yours will be fine.

Yes I have read with great interest about your methods of keeping weeding manageable. Also I am recovering from a bout of sciatica at the moment and have been struggling with these chores :-) Because I plant much closer together, almost everything needs hand weeding or careful weeding with a hoe. Probably less really is more - and I should be thinking of fewer plants. Thank you for the push to 'think weeding' at the garden planning stage.