Weeds. They are everywhere.
It can be a shameful thing to admit for us farmers, we would much rather post a picture or share a story about the biggest, most gorgeous veggies we've grown and so we rarely share about these ever present foes. But today I wanted to give an honest picture of what the farm can often look like. In the feature picture you can see our interns in a sea of weeds yesterday afternoon doing the best they can to take down the weeds!
It's the time of the season where we get pretty lost in harvest and so most other tasks fall to the wayside. And then we add in planting and seeding and irrigating after that and all of a sudden the week is over... meanwhile the weeds are steadily speeding along on their way to seed. With weeding, timing is everything, and as we race to keep up with everything else, we seem to be one step behind the weeds this year.
In a regenerative agriculture system where we are choosing not to spray herbicides and (in half of our farm) not to till, the battle against weeds is rough and requires many hours of manual labor. Our team could weed 8 hours a day, every day of the week, and still not catch up with them all. Not to mention this year the weeds have been especially bad as the wet weather of the spring and early summer meant weeds were thriving and without heat and sunshine we could not kill them the way we normally would.
So this season we are doing the best we can, trying new methods out for suppressing weeds, and hoping the veggies can outcompete their advantageous weedy counterparts. It's one of the serious challenges of growing in a regenerative system, and we certainly haven't mastered it. But we will keep on fighting the weeds without getting too discouraged or overwhelmed, one patch at a time, and find ways to enjoy the process sharing in conversation or meditating in our own 'weeding flow state' as one intern called it yesterday.
This week we have many of the same exciting veggies from before going out in shares and most excitingly we will have our first carrots of the season! Carrots are one of our most vulnerable crops to weeds and we've spent hours in the fields caring for these guys and using every method we can from tarping, to flame weeding, to lots of hours up and down the rows pulling weeds by hand. So as you chop up or bite into these sweet carrots we hope you enjoy them thinking of all the loving weedy care that went into them!
We will also have our first flowers of the season this week! And will be offering single variety calendula bouquets as extras, so be sure to add some of those to your cart. Calendula is one of my favorite flowers, its smell is lovely and it's petals can also be dried as an herbal tea or added to a salad for a pop of color!
