We have problems with western pocket gophers…. they eat the roots and stems of our cactus plants…. they can go down a row of cactus taking out a new plant each day…. to trap them I often have to dig up several plants nearby in order to effectively place the traps…. I don’t keep figures because it would make me sad… but I suppose we lose a couple hundred plants a year… and the accumulated production of those plants in the years they would have been productive….. so even though I think these are amazing little creatures, that I have a GREAT deal of respect for….. I cannot abide them roaming around the plants…..
Our onion patch
The gophers also cause us havoc with our home vegetable garden….
The photo above is our onion bed…. the onions will soon be enlarging as the sun reaches its zenith and beyond…. until then we can pull an onion on occasion for use in salads and stews…. that is unless a gopher eats them….
Take a look above… and notice one onion second row from the bottom… far left…. it’s been pulled down into the ground by a gopher!
Note also the plethora of gopher holes and soil distortions caused by gopher soil movement.
An onion pulled into the gopher hole
I say that I like gophers… and it’s true. I admire anything that can get by so well and easily…. these gophers will often come up from below a plant they want, and eat it from below, pulling it into the ground as they eat it… or in the case of some of our large cactus, they will actually burrow up into the heart of the cactus, living in the protection of the plant while they tunnel it to death….
Bottom half of the onion eaten off
Here I’ve pulled the onion from the ground, and we can see that this is probably a days worth of food for a half kilo animal…
Digging into the gopher tunnel
Here I’ve dug into the spot where I’ve seen recent gopher activity. There are two main types of tunnels… one is access tunnels used to find food sources, and the other is the deeper transit tunnels they use to move from place to place safely…. those tunnels will often be used by generations of animals…. the feeding/access tunnels are used to access temporary food sources…. these may not even be connected to the main tunnels…. I suspect this critter is going to come back to this area if I open this access tunnel…. he’ll feel the draft and will want to plug the damage…. but I will have to continue digging until I’ve gotten past the ”plug’ of soil he’s put into the access tunnel to block it off while he sleeps through the day deeper down…. I’ll often dig down trying to find the plug… it is usually a bit softer than the surrounding soil…. if the animal is planning to return, he’ll not pack it too tight.. I found this one easily enough…..
gopher tunnel grand opening!
Once I find the opening and get past the plug, I try to clean it out and open it up using a stick, so I don’t get human scent all over the opening… also I don’t want an angry gopher biting my fingers… they are vicious little animals with HUGE yellow ugly and scary teeth!
At this point you set the trap, and then press it hard against the sheer wall created by the shovel… you then cover the joining of trap and soil with more soil to exclude ALL light except for the tiny hole open at the end to lure the animal to investigate.
The main tunnels will give better success… but they can be so deep that they require a larger hole, destroying more plants… for now… I want to just stop THIS gopher from eating onions. I’m not on a warpath to eliminate all gophers… just the ‘problem animals’ that are causing us verifiable damage.
we had to destroy the onion patch in order to save it
During my digging to find the hole, I had to dig up a couple of neighboring onions…. I used to try to save plants by not removing them… sometimes that meant I did not place the trap as I did not want to destroy plants… but the gophers would eat them later anyway…. so I’ve learnt to just destroy anything I need to to kill them when I get one I can trap. Mostly though, I am sure the snakes, cats, bobcatrs, foxes, owls and hawks kill hundreds of times more than I kill…. I only bother with the ones that are in something I don’t want them to eat…. like food and cash crops. They can eat the landscape plantings and such…. that doesn’t cost us money or food….
trap set and baited
I use these new-fangled box traps…
If the animal has been predating on crops… I like to place something he’s easten by the trap opening…. this will hopefully be an irresistable lure… make sure you cover all light from enetering except for the tiny opening at the end, by the onion. The idea is the gopher will want to plug the opening, and will go the the light to plug it from there….. if there is any light near the entrance to the trap (where I have it covered) they will plug the tunnel from that point…. that will just plug the trap, not trap the gopher.
onions removed in order to set the trap
Here’s a couple of the onions I pulled when I set the trap… if I didn’t take them out to set the trap, the gopher will likely eat them soon anyway…. this way I get them.
we have moles also.. but they don’t eat crops, and their little tunnels don’t bother the plants… so I don’t worrry about them….
an onion half pulled down
Unfortunately the gopher plugged that trap (happens to me perhaps 1/3 of the time)…. and the next day he ate this onion… so I dug it out and placed the trap there…. then he plugged that one, and ate another onion.. and another….. each time I rest the trap in another onion hole….. day after day.. then after about five days… I finally got one of the most wily gophers I’ve had troubles with… if it was indeed the ‘problem gopher’..
half an onion
Yeah, gophers…. he ate a few onions of this size.. and a couple smaller ones…..
One of the days that I was trying to get him… I heard him chewing on an onion in the morning…. he was underground.. but I grabbed a shovel and plunged it into the ground around the onion… but still missed him… they can back through a tunnel as quickly as they can go forwards…. a most amazing and specialized animal.
After posting this, a new product was brought to my attention… and I think I will give it a try.
Lettuce is one of the best home crops for the family garden. Lettuce can be hard to get fresh at times, and the price may be high, but lettuce can be grown in many conditions. Even unprotected it can take cold down to the low thirties. It can grow well in cool temperatures, even in snow conditions if in cold frames.
The best way to get them started is indoors.. this will allow you to get them off to a good start. It will help keep the seeds warmer to sprout quickly… a set of lights can be kept on them until they have been up for a couple of days, at that time I take them outdoors daily, to sit in the sunshine or breezy conditions. The idea here is to give them some sunshine so they will grow quickly… but when it’s dark or cold outside, have them under lights indoors so they will grow quickly and be strong.
Start with quality seeds, and don’t store them more than a couple of years…. once germination gets spotty as they age, it becomes sad to see just a few weak plants…. a healthy seedling needs to set out a root quickly and be able to help the leaves spread, taking in nutrients and converting them to energy. A healthy strong root is a good beginning to a healthy strong plant that will grow quickly rewarding you greatly for your time in growing them.
Use a good high-quality potting or seedling mix. I use our own home made compost made from cactus. I’ve not found anything that grows seedlings like it will… but it has weed seeds in it…. the scientists would say to sterilize it to kill pathogens and weeds.. yet I think that would also kill the good critters in the soil that make our soil so healthy….. so I start with the knowing that I WILL have weeds… so I encourage you.. most folks are better off paying a bit for a bag of seedling mix…
I like to start with a single small pot. This allows me to use the least amount of space under the lights… for the first week or so, they will take hardly any space.. . fill the pot to near the rim and press it down, add water, letting the entire soil-mix get a good amount of water. When it is fairly well saturated, let it drain for a time, then press the mix down with your fingers.. firming it to remove all air pockets. Then I take the seeds and sprinkle 25 or 50 of them over the surface of the soil. I use a mix from Johnny’s Selected seeds that is a mix of four varieties of leaf lettuces. I then sprinkle a tiny bit of the soil mix over the top of the seeds.. you barely want any soil….. 1/4 inch or so… and it must like all the rest be nicely screened. Then cover the pot with plastic wrap or a saucer and set it in a warm spot for a few days. The photo below was taken eight days after the lettuce seeds were placed into the small square pot. Once they start getting their first true leaves, it is time to ‘prick’ them out and put them into individual containers. You can see there are green and red lettuces in the mix.. and two nettle seedlings among the lettuces, those came from the compost.
These seeds started sprouting and exposed themselves above the seed mix four days after being seeded. These first few photos are the seedlings 8 days after sowing… they now have their first true leaves…. but they are too close together to grow for long in this small pot. They cannot ever grow to maturity, and are prone to disease at this close of a spacing.. so we now need to transplant them into planting packs that will have individual planting cells.. this will make perfect spacing in the garden easy. The tray to the left has the new cells that the plants will be placed into. It is filled with the same compost we used in the planting block… our own screened compost.
8 days since-seeding lettuces, ready for transplant into new cells
To get the seedlings out, you invert the pot into your hand sliding the cube of soil out, and then you gently split it into two pieces.. lay one half aside and work on the one for now… never let the sunlight hit the roots if you can help it. Also, minimize root exposure to the open air.. the more air and sun they get, the more they can become injured. Never hold the stem of the plant nor the leaf stems. Hold the plants by a leaf.. this is a good handle, and your fingers will be able to more easily grip it without damaging it. While holding a leaf you can pry the soil from the roots.. and gently remove a plant from the cube of soil.
lettuce seedlings being separated for transplant
The photo below show a lettuce seedling being dropped into a hole drilled into a transplant cell using a pen. Let the root go in.. you will have to shake the plants sometimes…. maybe even push soil down pushing the roots down gently as you lower it. This photos shows how hard the healthy seed has worked to make a huge root… don’t hurt it. Firm the soil around the seedlings after you press them in.. and then water from below, just to make sure it’s all moist.
setting lettuce seedlings into individual growing cells
The photos below shows our light set-up. we’ve used the same tubes and fixtures for almost 20 years. They cost about $10 a set when we got them….. we had to replace a light bulb for the first time this year. We only use them for a few months in the winter/spring, and occasionally for a few weeks in the early fall (lettuce doesn’t like high heat for germination,so it works easier in the summer to germinate it indoors so it’s cooler.) From the time they germinated they were taken outdoors to sit int he sun every day… so they’ve been getting about 6 hours of good sunshine.. so this 18 hours of relatively weak light is adequate to make very good conditions.
lettuce seedlings under lights at night, outdoors in the daytime
Here’s a sample of one of the soil tests we’ve had done on our soil. It’s from years ago, but is a good one as it has the notes I put in while determining what to do to improve the soil health for plants.
The notes give what is considered the ‘optimum’ results you would want… so in some cases we’re spot-on.. in some we’re low or high either good or bad. One great things about a test like this is it lets you know where you need to pay attention to help the soil along, and where you don’t need to improve it any. For instance, we are high or very high in Phosphorus and Potassium… so we DO NOT need to add any materials to increase those nutrients. We are overly high in Magnesium, and a bit low in calcium.. both of which point to a serpentine soil. We’re low in sodium which is very good. We want to be below 100 ppm.. we’re at 58.
In essence, all we need do is to renew the soil regularly by tilling in the grasses, or just mowing them, but never letting the soil stay bare and open to the sky.
LightBrown Apple Moth is a dreaded noxious insect that has been found in our county. Due to this the government has installed monitoring traps on each nursery in the county that ships items out of state.
Light-Brown AppleMoth Trap
The government inspector came by today to reset the trap they placed on our little cactus farm/nursery. He’s a good fellow, and I enjoy chatting with him for a few minutes when he comes by. He’s a wealth of information on new insect pests that are a threat to local crops. He told us today that some of his traps in a vineyard halfway across the county have yielded evidence of a localized infestation of the Glassy-Winged sharpshooter. Mediterranean Fruitfly is another insect causing local worries.
Insect trap being placed into an oak tree
If these invasive pests become established in California they will damage the agricultural industry in California. Much of our food would become infested and unmarketable… the cost for fresh undamaged food would go very high. So the efforts of the USDA and various state and local agencies that try to reduce and eliminate insect pests are worth their costs in funds.
When a regulated insect is found, traps are set in a series of circles around the localized find. These traps will show the source and/or spread of the target insect. Once the spread is determined the best method for control can be considered. In the case of one insect nearby, the ag department placed twist-ties impregnated with female bug pheromones all over an area of many miles. These ties were twisted onto tree branches and fence wies in an effort to infuse the area with female scent. The poor little male bugs spent all their time buzzing from one twist-tie to another and didn’t run across too many receptive females. Another method will be to raise up male insects of te target species. In many species the sex of the creature is determined partly by environmental factors such as temperature… so one needs to keep the eggs in the proper environment, they will mostly be males. they are then raised to maturity, run through an x-ray type machine that radiates them enough to become sterile… then they have a mark of fluorescent paint affixed to them to mark them as sterilized males. They are then released in the target area where it is hoped they wil mate with the local wild females, resulting in infertile eggs…. and one female out-of-commission for that breeding cycle. Usually these methods must be used in several series of applications. This will in time eliminate the target pest from the local environment.
We’re very proud that we’ve helped out with three different insect research programs. The USDA has bought cactus from us a number of time. Purchasing their insect feedstock from us assures it is free of systemic insecticides that might kill their breeding insects. These are of course insects that are damaging to cactus. So the fact that we can help out with research, and still make some honest money by selling cactus is a double pleasure.
We’ve been oranically certified since 1993….
This is one song that runs right into and through me…
All I want to do is grow cactus, and live in this beautiful, quiet, remote canyon.
Jason Aldean
‘Amarillo Sky’
He says
“Lord, I never complain, I never ask why…
please don’t let my dreams run dry” On his knees every night he prays
“please let my crops and children grow…”
’cause that’s all he knows
Timing is everything….
The best times for roto-tilling vary on location, soil types, prospective crops, cover crops and local weather conditions…
In this area, we get most of our rain in the winter… and the temperatures in winter are usually pretty decent.
Most of the native forbes growth here is in the winter when the rains enable growth, and the nice temps encourage lush growth. I like to let the winter-time native weeds and grasses grow through most of the winter. They can form a nice dense carpet of green that I can then roto-till into the soil… putting that nourishment back into the soil, while simultaneously adding a huge amount of green matter to the soil. This will in time break down into that soil-building material called humus. An abundance of humus is usually characterised by a dark soil, with excellent friability (workable, breaks apart easily, has air/water pore spaces). These same characteristics enable easy penetration by roots, and a flourishing soil micro-fauna/flora environment…. this is the true key to building soil. You need to get those little critters that are in the soil to high numbers…. they will secret enzymes that help plant growth, and further break down the natural soil particles, freeing the good minerals for the plant growth.
Soil must not be tilled when it is too wet, nor when too dry… it is something you have to learn for your own soils…. if you really must till today for some reason, but your soil is too dry, you should have watered it a few days beforehand, tilled dry it can turn into a powder that repels water, and when still dry can easily blow away. If it is too wet, you will beat it into a mass much as a potter expels air from clay.
Treat your soil right…. if you don’t, you’ll lose harvest. Your soil will also be harder to work… weeds will be harder to pul out….. and you’ll have more hard or powdery patches where nothing good will grow.
This is one of our terraces…. it has not been tilled for nearly a year… and the native nettles (a really excellent green food source full of minerals) have grown pretty rampant at this end…. the other end of the terrace has more shade, and the chickweed (another wild edible green) have grown heavily at that end. This is a good stage to till them into the ground… they have not yet set seed, but are just now starting to open flowers… so the top growth has nearly as much nutrients as it will ever carry, and it is still no risk at all of having viable seeds that will mean a quick resprout.
There are many schools of thought when it comes to agriculture….. and since it is one of the oldest professions with a history of some ten thousand years, you can be that almost every option has been tried at some time or another.
Oddly, in that ten thousand years, some of the greatest advances in ag have come about in the last few hundred years… the advent of the ‘Green Revolution’ was greatly heralded in the sixties. Yield-per-acre has been increased due to new varieties, new advances in technology and equipment…. and (I hate to say it as an organic grower) new advances in chemicals. Sometimes philosophy and practicality rub shoulders, and sometimes they seem diametrically opposed…. but sometimes that latter is influenced by your preconceived notions and biases.
“When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change”
Wayne Dyer
So much of human thought is stuck in ruts…. agriculturalists are perhaps better at being in ruts than other people…. something that’s been done ‘such-and-such-a-way’ for thousands of years is hard to want to change. If a change can mean no food production, it makes one loath to commit full resources to change. It’s probably not by accident that most farmers and ranchers are conservative in thought process… even the organic ones. In fact, it is not a bit of a surprise that organic growers are conservative, they are carrying on traditions rooted in thousands of years of hard-won experience. Even when they abandon the synthetic farming of their parents, they are embracing the organic methods of their great-grandparents.
Still, even organic growers that were raised on synthetics and went organic are going to have some pre-set biases that might require years of ‘working through’ to accept…
Here’s my lay-down on the three main systems of ‘weed management/Ground Cover Issues’
Clean Cultivation
For much of the last few centuries the most common method of weed-cultivation was called ‘clean cultivation’. This is nothing more than making sure there are no plants growing in the area other than the desired crop plant. This method used to be accomplished by flame-weeding, or hand weeding with hoes or by hand, and sometimes with grazing animals such as fowl. With the advent of chemical herbicides these tasks were accomplished with much less labor, and the amount of land a farmer could manage increased. But clean cultivation has many drawbacks. It is much more susceptible to soil erosion by both wind and rain. It can lead to dirty produce as raindrops and overhead irrigation might splash dirt upon the crop. And if a grower wishes to be organic, they are pretty-much relegated to hand or flame cultivation if they wish to have clean ground.
clean cultivation in a cactus patch
Organic Mulch
For growers wishing to be organic, an organic mulch is often recommended. Such was our choice for a few decades. Four inches of oak-leaf mulch on our soil makes the ground below moist several months into the dry season due to it’s shading effect. It also keeps most weeds from growing well…. most seeds below a thick mulch will be unable to grow through it. Most weed seeds that fall onto the surface will not grow a healthy root through four inches of packed mulch… those that do are VERY easy to pull up when you see they are growing. An organic mulch is also great for the soil and the microbial population due to the decomposition that occurs. The mulch will slowly break down over several years…. after a few years the layers nearest the soil will be very dark and starting to turn into humus. The actual process of creating humus can take decades….. we have had our humus levels tested at nearly 14% in some areas. This is due to the tons of ground trees we used to bring in as mulch material. Just as there are drawbacks to clean-cultivation, so to with mulch inputs…. these thoughts operate on two levels… practical and philosophical. The practical thought process goes that one never really knows what substances were on the trees that produced the leaves…. so bringing them onto an organic farm is a bit of a risk. I can understand this train of thought and it is the main reason we have brought no mulch in now for three years. The philosophical argument says that since the world is a closed-loop, so too should each farm be. Each farm should use frequent ‘fallow-crop’ intervals such that the soil is constantly regenerating itself and replacing the nutrients lost due to harvest. This is a bit of a fatuous argument however… because while the earth is a closed-loop system, any particular portion of it is usually losing part of itself, or gaining something from somewhere else due to the usual ups-and-downs of the earth and all the associated system therein. And no farm should be seen as an entirely closed loop since you are continually (hopefully) selling your crop. Those nutrients sent out do need to be replaced….. but MUST it be solely from outside inputs?
Nopal with a chipped wood mulch
Living Mulch
This brings us to the third system of weed management, the one that was probably pretty much in heavy use until a few-hundred years ago… that of a living mulch of plants. This system works quite well under many plants that have some vertical space under the leaves, for instance an orchard. In this system a native or a planted crop will be grown between the rows of your cash crop, or perhaps underneath the very leaves of your cash crop. A field of corn might be planted also with a clover, the two plants will grow together, the clover able to survive under the corn leaves, covering the soil, and after the corn is harvested, the clover will die over the winter. Any corn material that returns to the soil will accompany the many pounds-per-acre of nitrogen the clover will give the soil, not to mention the extra bio-mass which will largely decompose into the soil, increasing that ever-precious humus level. There are disadvantages with this system also… and they also split along both philosophical and practical concerns. The philosophical side accepts the age-old wisdom of ‘enterprise’ and ‘labor’…. having ‘weeds’ growing in your fields is a sign of sloth…. ‘weeds’ are often accused of ‘stealing’ both moisture and nutrients from the cash crop. They can act as a shelter for bad bugs, and they can act as a bridge or ladder for ants or other pests to easily access the structure of your plants. All of these accusations are valid to various degrees, but they can also be ameliorated to some degree by some small planning and effort. And this will ALL depend on your own circumstances.
This is Opuntia robusta, two year-old plants growing in the native grasses in California.
This is at the beginning of the dry season, the annual grasses have all died.
This is the same area after mowing. You can see the cut-down native grasses do a good job of shading the soil.
The soil is also greatly protected from erosion…. and the grasses will eventually rot into the soil.
For us for instance, the native grasses are allowed to grow between the large cactus plants. They will take advantage of the winter rains just as in nature. Over the winter they will actually keep the soil from being too wet which would injure the cactus. Once springtime comes and the grasses set seed I mow between the rows, and use a weak weed wacker between the plants (a weak one so it won’t cut through the plants if I accidentally touch them). The grasses will form a straw mulch over the ground, shading it and eventually decomposing into the soil the same way an imported mulch would have done. So in this way I have put our own home-grown mulch onto the ground without having to bring in material from off the farm like before. I used to think I saved a lot of time bringing in mulch… my thinking was each hour of mulching saved three hours of weeding, and put humus into the soil… well now, I don’t bother bringing in material, it grows in-situ and merely needs to be mowed down. This is a lot less labor than I had before. One downside is that in the springtime, I have a lot of little spiky grass seeds in the cactus areas… these get caught in your clothes. But seriously, in the three years or so we’ve been doing these large plants that way, we’ve had no downside other than the stickers in the grass.
For the small plants we still do a clean cultivation. The plants are very low to the ground, and we don’t want anything growing that will overwhelm the small plants. So in that instance, I’d prefer to have mulch. I may start collecting it from beneath our trees. For the short-lived perennials, one good thick mulching will last for a few years.
That which you cannot change,
you must bear with
Mexican Proverb
Someone asked me recently whether having to stop bringing in mulches to comply with the new Federal Organic Laws was a problem for us. My reply is this article…. so often in life we have to make adjustments based upon expectations of others. When these things happen all we can do is find the best option to allow us to continue. Sometimes we are caught in ‘The Traditional Way’ to do things, other times we are hampered by a need for the approval of others…. for us, the hardest thing is getting used to ‘letting weeds grow’… but oddly, I’ve found that this method is actually very well suited to our large cactus plants. They grow just fine this way, and we don’t have to work hard driving a large truck into town to pick up mulch and bring it back, so our fuel costs are lowered (I only put 400 miles on the big truck last year). So perhaps all-in-all, this will probably turn out to be a good thing.
A closed mind can keep you from new opportunities,
yet you don’t want your mind so open that it falls out when you tie your shoes.
After some five or six months with no rain, we got a two day gully-washer
that dropped some five to six inches on the area.
This was the largest October storm system to hit the state in 45 years.
The combination of warm temperatures and moisture has led
to an explosive growth of weeds.
The photo above was taken only five days after the rain started. Very fast sprouting!
Keep in mind, when I say ‘Weed’, I merely mean a plant that is growing where I do not want it.
These plants in the photos are right in front of our house where we want nothing growing so that we have no flammable vegetation near the house. We’re better off having the ground bare and clear all around the house to lower wildfire risks.
We could have a lawn there, but that takes a lot of water, water I’d rather use to grow food, both to sell and to eat.
The plants in the photo are the types that need to be growing on the hillsides where they can help to bind the soil reducing erosion.
It is when plants are in this young and tender stage that they are the easiest to kill. A simple swipe with a hoe will scrape them from the soil surface, slicing them from their roots and leaving the leaves to dry in the sun. A nice day that will be sunny is said to be the best to scrape these weeds from the ground. The sun will hasten their demise. A rainy day might allow them to get their roots going again.
If you let the weeds grow, they will set their roots firmly in the ground, and you will have a harder time removing them, if scraped with a hoe, the roots might set up a new stalk…. you might have to pull them from the ground by hand.
Take care of your weeds before they get out of hand.
“A stitch in time saves nine” Old Proverb
deer path weeds
This is a deerpath in the wilderness, the photos taken the same day as the one above.
We can see that even though the plants are different, they have the same germination speed, although perhaps a lower rate of germination due to the rougher soil.
There are several factors we can learn form in the two photos….
Notice the deerpath has a lot of debris on it… leaves and duff from the nearby bushes.
These have lowered the germination rate.. perhaps some weeds were under a large leaf that did not allow the small sprout to grow properly.
When you hunt an animal you have to learn its habits….
when you have weeds, you should learn how to control them
by knowing their growth habits, and vulnerabilities.
A seed is a marvel of life…
it has the accumulated nutrition and energy given to it by its parent for its early life…..Just as most humans and animals will do anything for their young, so too did the parents of these annual weeds sacrifice themselves for their progeny.
The parents of these annual weeds grew during the moist winter in our mild climate… they waxed through the winter. And when the springtime came and the rains stopped, the plants, programmed to seed at the beginning of the dry season, took every bit of energy they had in their roots, stalk and leaves and packed every bit of this essence and energy into the seeds they carried. This is why seeds are so nutritious. Every bit of fat, protein and carbohydrate the plant can manufacture is given to the seeds, so that they will have a good chance to grow in the next generation.
So now we are left with a seed that has lain in the ground for five or six months, waiting for the right environmental conditions to sprout.
Plants are grown and adapted to their area….. the plants here ‘know’ they should not sprout before the rainy season has began. In order to make sure that a stream of urine from a passing deer or a short unseasoable sprinkling in July will not cause them to sprout, the seeds are coated with a hard ’seedcoat’ that will keep out short-term moisture.
When it has rained for a couple of days the moisture will seep into the seed itself.
This will start the seed’s germination. To germinate too soon would mean death for the seedling, nature sets these effects in place to ensure enough plants grow to continue the process.
It is when they are newly growing that they are easiest to destroy…. if you have a space in which you don’t want any new plants growing, this is the time to take care of them, when they are young tender seedlings that have no large root system, nor copious leaves to cause interference.
~Lao Tzu~
Chapter 63
Accomplish the hard task while it is still easy.
Handle large affairs while they are still small.
For even the most difficult and large of tasks and affairs
have a point where they are still easy and small
Here we see a photo of a large hoe being used to scrape the newly-grown weeds.
What means you use to destroy these young seedlings depends on your resources.
One method used for nearly a century is ‘flame-weeding’.
Some tractors are adapted with systems that shoot a flame
onto the ground beneath the crop plants.
Just a second of heat from the flame will cause the moisture in the small leaves to boil,
rupturing cells and resulting in dessication and eventual death.
You can also purchase hand held flamers that will run from a small propane bottle.
I prefer using mechanical means….
if the ground is not covered with a mulch,
I use a hoe, gently scraping along the soil surface,
scraping the plants from the ground.
This does not require hacking if the plants are young enough….
gently scrape the plants from the ground in a space a foot or so…
then push the scraped soil back to cover the ground.
This results in what the old-timers used to call a ‘dust mulch’.
The broken soil will reduce the wicking action of the soil surface
and act much as a mulch of leaves would…
covering the soil with a blanket of soil shading it from the sun etc.
If you have a mulch of leaves, straw or some other organic material, you can use a rake and be able to kill the weeds trying to grow on top of the mulch.
These are the weed seeds brought onto the mulch by wind or animals.
If left unchallenged, they might possible be able to grow through the mulch and enjoy the same healthy conditions you desire for your crops plants.
weeds scraped from the ground
Here we see the ground scraped across the entire photo.
The left-hand side is scraped, and the right-hand side is scraped
and the removed soil put back onto the soil as a mulch.
It is generally seen as better for the environment overall to keep the soil covered with plants.
Plants cover the soil keeping the nearby areas cooler. Bare open ground tends to be hotter, and much more susceptible to erosion by rain or wind. Here in the summertime we often see ‘dust-devils’ on open fields, and even on our own clean scraped driveway.
~Lao Tzu~
‘Chapter 48′
Common learning consists in doing something new each day,
In pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped.
Day after day something else is not done,
until one reaches the point where one is able to do much by doing nothing.
Less and less you work and desire, until you reach the state of non-action.
By not striving to control the world, it offers itself to you.
You cannot master the world by trying to enforce change on it.
Unless there is an overwhelming need for clean-cultivation, I argue against it. We remove all vegetation from near our house because of the high fire danger in our area. We want no organic materials next to the house. Clean and open rocky ground is what I want… the small pebbles are unlikely to blow away with the wind. We also have some garden area that is clean-cultivated. Some of our cactus species are small, and would be overtaken by allowing other species to grow with them.
Most annual gardens do well with clean cultivation… before you plant, prepare the soil in the usual way…and then water as if you had planted… in a few days you will see weed seedlings sprout… rake the soil to kill the emerging seedlings, and water again. Within the next two weeks, water and rake four or five times…. you will kill most of the weed seeds near the surface…. then when you plant, do not dig the soil again, you will bring up seeds from deeper…. just make your tiny seed plantings, and cover them…. hopefully you’ll have very few weeds growing when your vegetables emerge.
It is hard for many people to not do all the work at once… but there are times it pays to do less now… and take much longer, doing a little bit here and there… don’t rush nature, she usually doesn’t rush much… and you can’t push her hard.
“When you throw Mother Nature out the window,
She comes back in the door with a pitchfork”
There’s all kinds of different needs for water around the world. What we take for granted in the USA is something of a rarity when you look the world over. A friend of mine from Mexico told me that in his village the cheaper houses are at the tops of the hills…. there is no water there, and the people must tote it from the bottom to the top to use. The people who can afford it are at the bottom where the springs and fountains are, they don’t have to carry their water as far to their house. No one in his village had running water indoors when he was young. And they all had hard packed clay floors.
Due to our level of hydrology management, system of government, and relatively abundant water resources we have relatively cheap water in this country. This has caused us to be a bit wasteful and overindulgent. So the first thing to do when contemplating your outdoor water needs is to determine how much water you actually do need. A large water-intensive lawn might be the wrong thing to have in most of Southern California… better on many levels is the large garden with plants from the ‘Mediterranean Climate’ areas of the world. Similarly, in most other areas it would probably be a good idea to use plants adapted to the local climate. This in itself will mean you don’t have to ‘baby’ the plants as much.
Group all plants of similar water needs near each other. This will mean any mechanical means of water-distribution can be handled easily and efficiently on one line of pipe. They can then be on the same watering schedule.
You will also have to have water for any livestock you may have. Cattle and horses and all other animals and fowl take a lot of water, and you want pipes they will not accidentally knock over and break, yet you want them close enough to the pens and yards so that it will be easy for you to care for the animals well.
A garden should have its own pipe to it always under pressure, from there you may want several standpipes with hose bibs and garden hoses for easy watering of different crops in different seasons.
Make sure that the areas you plant are in the appropriate conditions that suit those plants…. even though we get little frost, I have difficulty with broad-leaf tropicals such as ‘Elephants ear’ since they take so much water in the summer. If I cared to water them a lot, they’d grow, but I don’t want to coddle plants that are not well suited for this warm dry climate.
Once you have your planting and distribution areas determined, you work from the individual sprinklers upstream… figure what kind of flow you will want, and what your water pressure will be…. this will give you the size of pipe you will need…. there are a series of formulas in this all….. and the flow of water and other fluids through pipes is an interesting science (hydrology). There are issues such as friction from the inner walls to consider, so the larger the pipe the less this causes issues…. yet if you go past a certain amount you waste money on pipe that is large but does no better for those emitters than a size or two below that (the law of diminishing returns). So the formulas and theory of this should be researched…. They say “if you can’t explain it to your granny so she understands it, you don’t really know it that well”…. and “if you want good info go to the master of the trade”… in this I elect a fellow named Jess Stryker. Jess Stryker’s pages on sprinkler design are very good.. I use his formulas for my own work.
I’d also recommend rural people locate their storage tank high on a hill if possible, this will give you a stable water pressure, and water even when the power is out. Without such a system, you’d need a generator for water if the power goes out. With our two tanks on the hill, we have water for a week or two if I don’t water plants.
When you are considering the initial sprinklers or other water-emitting-devices, you have to consider the root characteristics of the plants you grow. The flow rate of those devices and their numbers will determine the sizes of pipe you will need. In general, you should use the most efficient water emitting devices you can… but there are difficulties and limitations with each kind.
Sprinklers of any type can be hard to adjust to odd-shaped areas. Sprinklers can also have much of the water lost during sprinkling due to wind… and some plants can become more susceptible to mildews due to the leaf moisture. For most plants, drip systems can work better. They can be supremely adaptable, and easy to change to fit different plants that you move in or out. They emit a constant drip or tiny stream of water onto one spot, it can then soak deep into the soil… this can usually help greatly in reducing water usage. Deep watering can encourage deep roots, and those deep roots will be nice and cool on hot days… the deep water in the soil will be shielded from evaporation by the layer of topsoil over it. Since the water is more ‘targeted’, it is not used on areas that don’t have landscape or garden plants… those areas might be less likely to grow rank with weeds due to not getting watered as they do by the ‘overspray’ or ‘drift’ from conventional sprinklers. All-in-all, drip systems work well for most people.
Again, knowing your plants is important. Cactus is in general a lot different from other plants…. you’d think they’d have a big taproot, but they instead tend to have a lot of roots spreading out like the spokes of a wheel. They run only a few inches under the ground… they are designed to catch up the quick two hour rain storms many parts of the desert have. When the ground gets wet a few inches deep, then the storm ends, the sun comes out and bakes the ground again…. plants with roots just below the surface will be taking in water for the few days before the ground has fully dried. For this reason we use sprinklers…. but for efficiency, we use micro sprinklers… they are tiny little sprinklers that spray some twenty feet across and are fed by 1/4 tubing to the 1/2 inch tube that is hooked to hose bibs.
So the very first thing is to consider the needs you will have for water, and design from that point all the way to the water source which is your well, tank or water hook-up.
We use the small ‘micro-sprinklers’ for most of our irrigation on the cactus.
Cactus is drought-tolerant, but the plants prefer to have regular watering.
There’s a big difference between being tolerant of something, and flourishing.
We do want production, and we want our leaves to be the very best in taste and texture,
so we water to keep the plants and leaves at a high level of quality.
It makes the plants happier to be regularly cared for.
We also have a larger water system,
but we rarely use it as it is not as efficient with water use as the micro sprinklers.
We use the big sprinklers when frost threatens the leaves,
the relatively warm water from the ground @64 degrees
will keep the leaves from sustaining too much damage from the cold…..
as long as I am sure to wake up and monitor the system, LOL.
