Peaches and Weeds

Cloudy cum rainy.

Skies looked awfully bleak this morning on the ride in. Popped over to some of the lower fields for a check up before anyone arrived. The day neutral strawberries have hiked out of the plastic wrap and are looking quite legitimate. The 12 rows of snap peas are bulking up-- solid green rails across the field. Spinach and kale are inching out, the faba beans are creeping along- last year's strawberries are nearly bushes now. Futzing around I staked out some good photo locations for when I get around to remembering a camera.

Met the Boss by the main greenhouse and grabbed up a trench shovel-- out for a bit of berry weeding. He gave me a lift over to a far-out-there raspberry field-- it was in rough shape. Weeds had shot up all along the walking paths and into the berry rows.
(A little berry-aside: All our berries are growing along nicely at this point- Blueberries and Blackberries are trimmed/pruned taking out the weak flimsy growths and leaving the strong branches/canes. This way plant energy isn't wasted in superficial growth-- rather it's used to bear lots of berries. Raspberries are a bit different: all their rows have been mowed back to the nubbins, leaving maybe 2 inches of stick above the dirt. The roots remain and grow thick and pop out new canes each year. I could go on and on with the Boss's imparted knowledge of berries and berry mating rituals but I'll leave it for now.)

A little herbicide at this point in the season usually checks most weeds from becoming monsters, but 2 types in particular are resistant and need a shovel's edge to kill 'em dead. Goldenrod weeds grow in tight clusters, up about a foot, long fat grass like leaves with a slight jag to their edge. The roots grow thickly matted and you have to dig around them before pulling one cluster out. I had to beat them with a shovel to get all the soil loosened out- then flip them upside down on the dirt (otherwise these hardy guys have a habit of snaking their way back into soil and survival). Cockelburough is a demon carrot. Their leaves grow enormous, stealing valuable sunlight away from the berries- the roots are nasty. Even a small looking cockelburough weed can have an enormous root. They typically have just one meaty 3in thick root shooting deep down. I usually aim real low where I anticipate the root to go and kick the shovel edge through-- this way the roots are deeply severed from the plant (for good measure on big ones, I stomp my shovel straight down through the root chopping it into forths-- try to live now weed haha). It takes a more delicate and deliberate touch extracting these guys from a berry row without damaging the good plants.

All in all it took me until 11am to clear the 13 rows, then I marched over to join  Bah at another raspberry field at the hill top abutting the peach orchard. On the way up the path a big crane flew overhead, going from south to north. Second one I've seen this season. Up top there weren't as many rows, but they're much longer in length. It was much the same going-- hunting out the goldenrod and cockelburough, taking the odd shovel swing at stray dandelions. Poison ivy was creeping in from the field's edge-- I keep a healthy distance and left it for Bah. The light sprinkling turned into full on rain, so we hefted off for an early lunch leaving a few unfinished rows.

Came back from lunch for a little fertilizer/chemistry lesson. The Boss had picked up a Miracle Grow watering nozzle-- one with a chamber for fertilizer to mix with the water before spraying out. The Boss took a read over the labeling and stressed the importance of always checking the contents' percentages. This mix had 26% nitrogen, 8% phosphorous and 16% potash-- much too much stuff for watering the greenhouse sprouts. Maybe its common knowledge, but the Boss prefers using a 10-10-10 mix on the little plants (10% nitrogetn, 10% phosphorous, 10% potash). He wanted to use the nozzle though-- so I waded through the rain watering the grass with the nozzle until its prepackaged fertilizer was spent.

Met Bah back at the hill top and we finished out the remaining weeds. The rain had died down again, but the clouds headed our way looked terrible. We met up with the foreman in the peach orchard. He was busy pruning down all the peach trees and de-budding the young ones. We use an open-center plan for our trees- so their growth is checked at a little over head height, clipping all the center-ward growing branches. This forces the tree to grow out and wide, making the harvests of the future a lot easier. Most of the orchard isn't ready yet, but the rows of 5 year old trees are big enough to grow out maybe 1-2 dozen peaches per tree. Each blossom can become a peach, and trouble is- there were hundreds of blossoms lining the length of every branch. So Bah and I got to plucking and budding-- leaving only the flowers on heavy branches strong enough to hold a full grown peach without bending (had to space the blossoms carefully too, no closer than extended thumb-to-pinky no matter how big the branch).

Pulling flowers isn't exactly grueling labor-- but if Bah, the man of steel, has a kryptonite it is rain. As we went from tree to tree-- he checked the sky every other second, telling me each time that the next tree was his last. It had started to drizzle heavily- but something finally set him off. Mid-tree Bah bolted off, shouting back Goodbye, Home, Going Home. I kept going along, and ten minutes later (probably right when Bah made it to his car) the sky opened up and the real rain came. It was only 3pm, but the foreman said I could leave-- no way. We kept budding through the orchard as it came down. During one rough clouds worth we hid at the woods edge for soggy cigarettes.

The foreman is a pretty closed guy, and trying to talk about bullshit only gets you long pauses then more silence. On the other hand, once you getting him talking about plants he'll tell everything from genus to growing season. We puffed away, checking over my peach budding handiwork- he praised it as sufficient (which, coming from him is really something)- he then explained the finer details of open-center pruning and his plans for further developing the orchard. In good spirits, he called it a day and we ran down the hill to meet up with the boss.

Any hopes of getting dry were quickly shelved. Tomorrow the boss has some business with the Farmer's Bureau so we had to get everything set for his absence. The foreman will be laying down 12 long rows of sweet corn (if its dry enough) so we had to get the seeder functional. We slogged the new tractor over to the yard and hooked up the seeder-- driving it up to the barn. It used to be a double seeder, so that you could lay down a row of corn in one pass- but the boss took a tight turn last year and left half the machine sitting in a tree. Now it takes two passes per row. Sopping wet, but out of the rain-- we test ran the seeder. Last year the first crop of corn was too tightly packed, making for small ears of corn-- this year we're going to try 1 seed per foot to start things off.

I'm going to nerd out for a moment on the inner workings of this seeder, skip this paragraph if it isn't your thing. The seeder doesn't (surprisingly to me) need to be hooked into the tractors Power shaft. Start to finish- the seed is loaded into the bucket, channeled by a plate of steel with an opening sliced at the bottom, the seed pushes down against a steel rotating wheel with notches to catch one seed at a time. The caught seed is carried by the spinning wheel (dropping free the inevitable extra seeds on the way) to the top of the rotation, where it falls through a hole - tumbling along a shoot it is then dropped down the middle. Immediately in front of where the seed is dropped are two rotating steel harrowing wheels, they're angled to dig a trench for the seed to be dropped into.  Behind where the seed drops, one (there should be two, one is missing) hooked flat steel plates push the dirt from along the sides covering over the seed. All the mechanics of the rotating seed catcher are powered by a tire rolling at the seeder's end- its rotating drives a sprocket and chain which lead to another sprocket and the seeder wheel. The spacing of the catch plate and size of the sprockets determine how quickly or slowly the seed is dropped as the tire rolls along.


We could not get this thing working correctly. Firstly, the seeder needed to be calibrated to drop the seeds 1 per foot. This was done by measuring the circumference of  the seeder's tire, changing the size of the inner plates and  outer chain and sprocket ratio, and then spinning the mechanism really fast until what-seems-like-a-good-enough-number of seeds fell out. Satisfied, we quickly realized some of the plates were rubbing together in the bad sort of way which would cause stripped screws and seized seeders. We salvaged the parts from the treed-half of the seeder and tried again. We greased everything up, only to find we'd ruined a good 100 seeds by getting them choked and clustered in engine grease. Still, the plates kept tightening wrong as the seeder went along.

So we called it a day.


Tomorrow might be picture day. Once this is all posted I'll go rummaging around to find the camera. Don't know how many pictures I'll get, as I don't want to be obtrusive/obnoxious. We'll see!
Onward tomorrow!