Sometimes it feels like we're just farming weeds... but there are perks! Our celery is glorious despite growing in weeds taller than us. Traditional celery is blanched to force it to grow taller, reaching for the light. This can be achieved by planting in trenches and burying it as it grows, using paper tubes around it, and a number of other gardener tricks. However for us in the fields we've started mulching it. That way the only place for weeds to grow is right up around the celery stalk. Usually we would make it down to weed them, but somehow last week's bed didn't get weeded and wow they grew tall. However, that shade from the weeds actually mimicked the blanching that helps them grow nice, tender and tall! We ate through the whole planting, as we had to bunch up plants to get our target weights. I hope you enjoyed, and we'll have more again another time although I might not let the weeds get quite as big if I can help it ;)
On another note, a multi week process is finally coming to an end - the carrot patch for fall is almost fully weeded! It's a slow process, but it's definitely worth it. Frost sweetened carrots are only a couple months away. We did have an early carrot planting, as well as a mid summer planting, but sadly we lost both to the weed battle again. Our fall patch we tried using mulch to stale bed, and that worked beautifully to reduce the weed pressure and allow us to rescue them.
