The Weed Free Farm and Garden - Part One

[Music] hey Conor of everything farm here and today I want to talk about the wee 3 part it's incredibly important to me it's something that I feel passionate about that every farm can achieve that concept and I want to tell you how but first let's talk about what that means now there's no such thing as a true weed free farm it is on every farm that seeds everywhere they are in every piece of soil and every hoop house so what we're actually doing is managing them but the goal in mind is for no weeds you know that's always the goal and what does that mean well that means that it's part of everything we do every day on the farm is managing those weeds and making sure that we're keeping them so that you don't see them so that you have the appearance of being weed free because not letting weeds go to seed is in a system right it's not a management program hand weeding is not a management program it can be part of it and it's certainly something that no farm can avoid it's definitely there but it needs to be attacking the problem at its base the weed free farm is that when you achieve the appearance of no weeds when you look around and you don't see them and you have to look for them this affects everything on your farm affects harvesting it affects crop quality it affects your size of your crops that affects all your different management practices across the farm it affects your bottom line and how much labor you're gonna need turnt you know how long it takes to turn over beds it's gonna affect so many things it really just comes down to profit never sing farm is it we're gonna want the reason to successful is you know because it's efficient and has systems and I use those efficiency and systems to try to keep things weed free and that's why the farm is so successful you know how do you get there you know what what what does it look like because if you're stealing staring at a field of weeds you know it's hard to imagine and and I've been there you know when I started farming that's what I'd be doing I'd be staring at a field of weeds you have to start by removing all of them and this is the hardest thing for people to to grasp because they're looking for an easy answer and there isn't an easy answer to starting weed free you can tar pit tarping is something that's not involved in an ever sing system in the sense of weed control because it actually doesn't work it's not going to kill your weeds it's time-consuming it's heavy with all the rocks it's it's just not a system that works very well I understand it's very popular but it's not really a weed management system it is a pause button that you can put pause on a field and say I'm not going to deal with it for a while and then it will just put the pause on things germinating things may germinate you know a week you know or two after you put it down but after that things aren't going to happen and once you pull it off wait a couple of weeks and the weeds will be back so it's really a pause button so it's something gives you for very long term but for your regular management practices it's not part of it but to start to clear a field and make sure that you don't have any weeds you can put a tarp down but you have to leave it there for an incredibly long period of time depending on where you are and that's one of the methods for removing all of the weeds you know the other thing is just pulling them out and make sure the roots are coming out because if you don't do that they're just gonna continue to come back you know I do get questions like well I burned the grass and it just keeps coming back it's going to come back because no management program is about getting rid of perennials that's something has to be done upfront and what you're doing is you're managing that state of being perennial and large weed free once you get back into that state of having large weeds and perennials then you've got to put the hard work and getting back to the weed free state so that you can manage it once again because it's all about managing that state so if you if you're at a farm and they have big weeds they're not actually managing weeds all they're doing is just holding it at a threshold and just pulling them out and tilling it in and the rest of it you need to have it weed free in order to manage it right that's the starting point because it's not weeding what what weed management is all about is about precision cultivation not about weeding there's some hand weeding in there that's you know manageable on a smaller scale you know maybe after you turn over beds or you know a few here and there when they went that they weren't gotten through cultivation but it's not the whole system right precision cultivation is what it's about your goal is to disturb every square inch of soil and to do that fast right you're gonna have heads that fit perfectly within between those plants right where the word precision comes in right that's where it's precisely fitting in there so that you know you obviously want a little bit of play but you're using these precision heads right which are the wire the collinear to get every square inch of soil and that's really what precision cultivating is about it's about getting every square inch of soil I'm not bad and disturbing it so that all weeds that have germinated in to that thread stage are killed and died and when you do it at that stage you're gonna kill 99% of the weeds right as they get bigger the percentage of how many you kill goes down that's why you want to hit it early and the other important thing about precision cultivating is it has to be done regularly right it doesn't mean it has to be on a schedule but it has to be part of your system right needs to be something that is considered every week just like harvesting or planting or seeding you need to be able to do that fast and the way to do that fast is by having straight rows that are planted straight that the distance between each plant is equal so that you can you know walk at a really fast speed down the road just holding your cultivator in the right position and dragging it along and then if you're doing the cross hats you're just coming like this so straight rows evenly planted and then having an assortment of heads so if you're using coal in ears you have a different assortment of Wiss okay and four wire hoes which are really the best precision cultivator there is this wire you know I never need sharpening it's it just works really really well and then you just have different widths so that you can fit it in between your straight rows and how far apart they are and just boogie down the row and then just switch out as you're moving along for the different crops that you have on a small-scale farm right with this tool you know you're just carrying them all with you as we go I'm using a tool like this for all the beds right I only need a set of wires and I need some coal in ears which can go under drip tape if you have it or can go under the canopy right you have two lettuce heads can go under the canopy a bit so Collini instead of that set of wire wieners and that's going to do all of the regular bed cultivation that you need beyond that there may be some spot cultivation where you're just grabbing like an offset head and that's just really finishing it up you know before you hand weed right you want to walk around with maybe you know upset and that's just going to be instead of cultivating all the ground you're just gonna go and kill all the small stuff you missed with the offset which has one inch and then a four inch so you can get everything and you're just walking around and looking for them then the final thing is hand weeding and you're obviously avoiding that because you're trying to do everything beforehand right your your precision cultivation before and hopefully you're getting 95 to 99 percent of your weeds and that you're hand weeding becomes very minimal and that's really the goal right you're not gonna avoid it all together and you don't want to avoid it altogether because you can't let weeds grow right like what I said before about not letting weeds go to seed is in a practice because isn't a good management practice because every weed seed will germinate every little weed will grow into a big weed and every week big weed will go to seed it's just inevitable so just leaving it there to say well let's just hope it doesn't go to seed it's gonna go to seed managing that weed free state is really really what's important so I'm using the wire the colinear and then for the paths that's the only place I'm using the wheel hoe I've tried to use wheel hoes in many different circumstances into the in the beds but unless you're growing you know a lot of the same crop you know half an acre of one crop or an acre of one crop I find it's just not as fast on a small scale as it is using a a long handle tool where you're just walking really fast down the rows because you can switch things out faster you can adjust quicker with it you can you know manage every circumstance on a bed better than you can with a wheel hoe the promise of the wheel hoe just doesn't pan out I think but for the past it's really ideal and if you have a lot of the same crop let's talk about the tools I don't use for cultivating and and why and I think they give a better understanding of what precision cultivating is the primary one is like a scuffle hoe right and I have one right people love this thing right and that's because it's very heavy-duty and is less of a cultivator and more of a wieder right because you have it at an angle from you and you have it far away from you right and that enables you to put a lot of force on where you can almost rip up grass with it and I think that's what people do with it right like they're just getting big weeds and chopping them up right but that's not precision right I'm already in one spot for a while trying to chop up some weeds right I'm not running back and forth down beds like this right one wrong move and you're going to pull out your plants which is why it's not a precision cultivator this is like an emergency tool to kill big weeds it's really what it is the only place I use it on my farm is as a reach tool if we have to reach and get the edge of the greenhouse from inside right here's the bed along the edge and I need to get along the edge right but you can still do that with a wire reader but in precision cultivation on a weed free farm when you're trying to maintain no weeds this isn't the tool it's just it's not the right tool for that it's more of a wieder but remember every time you cut weeds that are big the roots live and you'll be back again with this so it doesn't end your work right you just mow in the lawn you got to mold them on every week because you're not killing the grass right you're just cutting it you just cutting it at the soil surface so it's it's not a precision cultivator and it has very little use when it comes to keeping a farm weed free even though it is popular it's just not a very good tool in that sense I use the wheel hoe with the 12 inch blade for the paths my paths of 14 inches you know one thing you know when when we show a lot of pictures of the farm is there's not a lot of weeds and it's something I do do well like I certainly do not the grass spinach or you know best tomatoes or you know who knows right but certainly keep the weeds down and very successful at earning a really nice profit in a small space and part of that is keeping the weeds down using wheel hose inside beds on a small-scale farm like mine is it's just not ideal especially if you have 50 foot beds you have a lot of different crops different spacings it just doesn't work well it's just not I mean you have to have everything set up perfectly and get that thing set up and then you can maybe go down the few rows that you have you know if you have a lot of you know these rows and rows of kale at you know medium growth stage then yeah you know certainly but is it worth the money when you can just you know use something like this I don't think so we've experimented with it and just haven't found a place where it really really makes a lot of sense you know certainly it works it's not that the wheel doesn't work but I don't think it's necessary to be efficient and managing a weed free farm but one thing that is important and that is straight rows because if you don't have straight rows it doesn't matter whether you have a wheel hoe or you have a precision cultivator you're not gonna be able to do it fast they have to be even and I always use I used to use a rake but I didn't find a rake with it was very slow putting the grid out for it there's diddlers we have to change stuff and that's very slow and I need something that I can give to workers so that it's quick and easy and just they they can roll it and that's where the gritter comes in so the gritter is just gonna have perfectly straight it rolls straight it has the same spacing all the time whether it's in between the rows or in between the plants within the rows it's always the same so that you can cultivate super super super fast because it's just unbelievably straight and that is incredibly important for precision cultivation is that it's fast you know we've tried a lot of different stuff whether it's rakes or diddlers and all of that and just nothing seems to work quickly and efficiently and very easy to communicate to a worker without having to explain it every single time you can have like a bed roller that has dibbles in it but then you take the dibbles out to be a bed roller and I use my bed roller every day so who's taking the dibbles out who's you know I do they have to put them on then take them off and put them on and they come off and what's the pattern it's just it drives me crazy so I like tools that are specific for one purpose so that we can move fast right instead of a wheel hoe I'd rather have a way to mark out my bed nice and straight so that I can use something easy alright so part of the weed free system when you're trying to maintain your weeds maintain that weed free beds yeah you know I think that the primary weapon can be the flame reader because this is when you're hitting blank beds right you're doing precision cultivation on beds that are planted but when they're not planted or went before the seed germinates the flame waiter is really the best tool right it's worth every penny you invest in a flame reader because I use them weekly any bed that's empty or been seated but it hasn't been germinated yet I'll just move this up and down the bed kill all the weeds and the nice thing about this one is on a small-scale farm I have you know an empty bed here and then a full bed and an empty bed and a full bed and I just need to sneak in the middle and this one I can just carry around the farm and and get it into all those spots and be able to flame weed whenever I want a wider version is better if you have a larger space to do lots of rows then it makes sense but for small-scale it's just nice to have one that's small and gets in between but this is really you know and again this is going after thread stage tiny little weeds right this isn't about burning big weeds that you see those have to be pulled out this is about getting the small ones but instead of cultivating the bed what this is going to do this you can get the whole bed itself and it's much faster right because all you're doing is rolling it along you don't have to cultivate everything right so this is use blank beds and seated beds for sale seed bedding and precision cultivation is done once you have a crop planted right but every bed is done regularly right so you go get all the blank beds done with this then you go back grab your mutineer go in there cultivate all of the beds with plants on them grab the wheel hoe do all the paths regularly all the time just to maintain that weed free farm

Channel: Neversink Farm

Views: 318,776

Keywords: Neversink, neversink farm, conor crickmore, organic farm, organic farming, farming lifestyle, vegetable growing, gardening, vegetable farming, vegetable, growing vegetables, No till, no till farming, market farming, market farm, market garden, farm, farming, sustainable, agriculture, farmers market, farm business, small scale farm, biointensive farming, farm life, how to, hoop, greenhouse, vegetable gardening homesteading, homesteading, farmertainment, weeds, cultivation

Id: jCVSIlanSvI

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2018