The War of the Weeds

What’s so wrong with weeds, anyway?  Aside from the fact that they end up making the garden look shaggier and more unkempt than a final-round contestant on Survivor, that is.  Mainly, we execute them for crimes against healthy plant nutrition - for stealing the nutrients our cultivated crops need.

To keep weeds from growing in the first place, we planted a lot of our widely-spaced plants like tomatoes and cabbage on plastic.  We rolled out four-foot wide IRT plastic rolls of plastic, then cut holes ever foot or two to plant the baby plants.  In addition to keeping weeds from growing (lack of sunlight will do that to you), the plastic has the added benefit of keeping the soil more moist.  Of course, now the south end of our garden looks a bit like a giant Hefty bag, but hey – you can’t argue with success.

For the close-together plants that we grow in rows from seed (like beets, carrots, and the various greens and lettuces we’ve been harvesting over the past few weeks), plastic isn’t really an option.  Our drip-tape irrigation system certainly helps – because we’re only watering a couple of inches on either side of the row, weeds further out than that tend to lack the water to thrive.    

But despite all the preventative measures, somehow the weed party always gets started eventually.  And there’s just no substitute for good old fashioned weed pulling.  We try to do a little every couple of days to stay ahead of it, but life is life after all, and sometimes it just gets away from us.  So we have days like today, when we spent a couple hours bending over row after row of small plants, pulling weeds with both hands until we filled the wheelbarrow!  Tomorrow we’ll bring out the grand-daddy of all weed whackers, the rototiller, to take care of the weeds in between the rows.   Tonight’s much-needed soaking rain means it will be easier to disturb the roots of the weeds and bring them to the surface where they can dry out and die.  Weeds, you’ve met your match.  Until next week, anyway.

Absentee Farmer’s Market

We’ve filed this this under “learning by doing” and “obvious in hindsight”:  our last couple of weeks at the farmer’s market have taught us that lettuce, spinach and kale do not hold up well in the heat of an asphalt parking lot on a Saturday morning.  They crisp up nicely again after a nice spritz of water and some time hanging out in the fridge, but they just look so droopy and sad after sitting in the heat.  And it’s going to be 90 degrees on Saturday!  So we’ve decided to take a couple of weeks off from the farmer’s market, until we have a larger variety of vegetables and a better plan for keeping them perky in the heat.

But that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on your Kopp’s Crops vegetables!  Check out the sidebar on the right for a “Fresh Garden Basket” you can pick up at the farm for $10 (limited delivery available – just ask if we’re going to be in your area).  A la carte veggie purchases are also available – just email us for pricing.  And yes, we’re in the chicken business now – reserve a bird (or five) now!

Our Littlest Livestock

We took a little after-dinner walk as a family last night, and discovered that we look at flowers differently now that we raise bees.  We used to just look for pretty flowers along the road.  Now we look for flowers that will make tasty and plentiful sources of nectar for our littlest livestock.  But all the nectar-rich flowers in the world don’t mean anything if we don’t have a bunch of worker bees out there collecting.  So the past month or so, we’ve been repopulating our hives - our "Littlest Livestock."  We’d sacrificed six of our colonies last fall so that the other four had enough food to make it through the winter.  It almost worked - three colonies survived.  And thanks to the mild winter, we didn’t have to give them any supplementary sugar water like we did last year – their stores of honey saw them through. 

Our new queens, in their little "Bee Kennels"

This spring, we bought four “bee packages” to start building back the six empty hives – each package contained three pounds of bees, mostly worker bees (they’re the ones with the little hardhats) & nurse bees (wearing comfortable shoes, of course), with one queen and a couple of drones thrown in to get the party started.  We had been hoping to split the three colonies that survived the winter to populate three additional hives and save on bee replacement costs, but they were weak with poor queens.  So we decided to replace all 3 queens.  We brought in younger, more productive queens who would lay more eggs to build the colonies back faster.  Thank goodness the queens can’t sue us for age discrimination!  

This Week at the Cambridge Farmer's Market

It’s time for our farmer’s market debut!  This Saturday, May 26, we’ll be at the Cambridge Farmer’s Market from 8am-noon, selling radishes, leaf lettuce, spinach and Russian kale.  Hope to see you there!  

Cutting Out the Chemicals

We’ve always tried to limit our use of chemicals on the crops of Kopp’s Crops.  After all, one of the great joys of raising a garden is being able to eat vegetables right off the plant, still warm from the sun.  And our girls do much of the in-garden munching!  But in the past we’ve used a little chemical fertilizer, and when all natural pest-control methods failed on our cabbage, we resorted to a quick shot of pesticide.  We’ve called it being “practically organic” – organic when it was practical.    

But this year, we’re committed to raising our crops using only organic practices.  Our biggest challenge in going chemical-free is getting enough nitrogen into the soil to provide a healthy growing environment for our plants.  Isanti County has extremely sandy soil, so even with a few loads of nutrient-rich black dirt, three years’ worth of chicken manure applications, and this year’s double-dose of alpaca dung, we knew we needed more nitrogen.  So we fed the garden some nitrogen-rich meals.  Three meals, to be exact.  Soybean meal is essentially just ground-up soybeans in pelleted form for easy application, and contains a healthy 7% nitrogen with a bonus 2% phosphorus.  We first we broadcast-spread the soybean meal and some alfalfa meal ( alfalfa-based pellets that contain 2% nitrogen & 2% potassium)  over the entire garden for a nice all-over nutrient base.  Corn gluten meal is the heartiest nitrogen meal (10%!), but it inhibits seed germination (which is, incidentally, why it works so nicely to rid your lawn of crabgrass), so we can only use it to “side dress” our crops, applying it directly to rows of transplanted or partially-grown plants.  Hopefully these three meals will give our garden the balanced nutrition our plants need to grow "big & strong!"

2012 "Limited Edition" Syrup for Sale!

You could call it “Reserve,” “Small Batch” or “Limited Edition.” We just call it a bummer of a season (Cue the trumpet blats:  wah, wah, waaaah).  Due to the maple sap-zapping side effects of our unusually warm winter this year, our total maple syrup output this year was approximately 85% lower than last year.  But the small amount of Kopp’s Crops 2012 Pure Maple Syrup that we did manage to eke out is now for sale!  For our Facebook friends & blog followers outside the Twin Cities, please order online from the sidebar at right.  For local pickup or delivery, email us at koppscrops@gmail.com to reserve your bottle now!  Each 8 oz. bottle of Grade A Medium Amber is $7.00 (plus shipping outside the Twin Cities) – first come first served while supplies last!  Can’t you just taste the pancakes now?  J

One Season Ends, Another Begins

As the maple syrup season dries up, the next season begins:  we’re gearing up to garden.  Friday we hauled in three loads of alpaca manure from our friends at Foggy Bottom Farms, just up the road.  Saturday found us running circles around the garden with the tractor, using the blade in the back to spread nutrient-rich fertilizer evenly around the whole garden, sort of like an alpaca poop Zamboni.  Normally, we’d let the manure mellow on the ground and compost for a few weeks, until we were sure we’d seen the last of the snow & freezing temperatures.  But having missed out on the bulk of the maple syrup season this year, we are taking no chances with the garden.  So today we put the main irrigation line in place and hooked up our first twelve rows of drip tape.  Then today, March 18, we started planting the garden.  Did we mention that it’s March 18 in Minnesota, and we’re planting?  But it was also 80 degrees today, so we decided to be optimistic and plant most of our cold-weather, early-season crops:  two rows of spinach, two of radishes, two of leaf lettuce and one of iceberg lettuce. 

We’re also experimenting with two rows of onion seeds this year, since the frost is out of the ground so early.  Normally we buy small onion plants which have been grown from seed in a greenhouse.  We could also buy onion “sets,” which are small onion bulbs that were produced last growing season; sets are cheaper, but the onions don’t grow as big.  Onions respond to the change in daylight and completely stop growing when the days start getting shorter.  So plants give us a jump on the short onion growing season.  We’ve already ordered ours for the year, so if our little seed experiment doesn’t work, we won’t be crying about it.  At least not until we dice up our first pungent fully-grown onion!