0:00Last week we started talking about weeds, primarily prepping beds before you plant. How to kill that that weed

0:07bank, the weed seed bank in your soil and get ready for a successful crop that you're not going to get overrun by weeds

0:14after you've already planted. Um, this week we're going to be talking about cultivation. So, you've prepped, you've planted, and you're most likely going to

0:24well 100% you're going to have weeds that come up. And then how do you deal with them working around your plants,

0:31crops that are already growing? And so we're going to talk about cultivation.

0:37Yeah. And Elliot Coleman is I I consider my mentor through his books and he he says you don't weed, you cultivate.

0:50And so I would just distinguish between weeding. Weeding is dealing with wellestablished weeds. If you can grab onto it and pull

0:59it out, it's a it's gone too far. It's weeding. And that's that's where, you know, a lot of farm kids um decided they

1:09wanted to leave the farm. It doesn't take long on your hands and knees pulling weeds. They had to do that all day. But cultivating is something totally different.

1:20And the key here is understanding that if you can dispatch the weeds, if you

1:28can get rid of them before they're even half an inch tall, it is so simple. But

1:37if you wait, and this is what happens too often, especially with with new gardeners or new market gardeners, um

1:46you know, there's so much to do on the farm that it's like, "Oh, well, we'll leave that for later." And what happens

1:54is the weeds get established and then you've got a real problem on your hands.

2:01So, you got to schedule time for cultivation. Ideally, every week you're

2:06cultivating. And so you're again, if if you can do it on a a sunny day when the

2:16soil is is fairly dry and all you're doing is just trying to

2:23disturb the the top half inch layer of soil. The beauty of the colinear hoe is

2:32that it's it it's not work. Um this this was designed by Elliot Coleman and it's

2:39designed he he compares it to to shaving the ground. So this is your this is your

2:46razor blade here and you're just putting it parallel with the with the ground and you're standing upright. You have your

2:55thumbs up as you're holding it and you're just literally stirring the soil.

3:02And you'll notice, see, we're getting rid of all the weeds here. Weeding concrete is really easy. But,

3:10um, the point is,

3:14you're not bent over. You're not hacking at weeds. You're just literally It's almost like sweeping. Yeah. sweeping or

3:24um he compares it to to dancing. This is your partner here. Says you put on a

3:32Strauss waltz and weeding has never been so civilized. That's what he says. Yeah.

3:38Leave it to Elliot to come up with something romantic.

3:42This works with your beds where where your soil is loose. You know, we've talked about compacted soil. This does

3:51not work well on compacted soil, but once you've loosened your beds, this is a wonderful tool. And you're again,

4:00you're not trying to hack weeds with this. You'll break it if you do that.

4:05But for just stirring the soil, and that's all you have to do to get rid of those tiny weeds, the colinear hoe is

4:13hard to beat. Of course, they have wire weeders. Now, there there are a lot of variations, but I'm just showing you kind of the two basic tools.

4:22And then this is a stirrup hoe. There's different size heads for the stirrup

4:28hoe, but the stirrup hoe works best on harder ground or larger weeds. So, this

4:37one you have to have your thumbs down and you got to be bent over to put some real effort into it. But you're you're

4:46just going back and forth with the stirrup hoe.

4:51And so it's 100% efficient. A standard hoe, you spend most of your time with it in the air, which is not very efficient

5:00at all. But this is 100% efficient and ideally work your way backwards down the

5:07bed or down the aisle. So, we use this on our aisles where you're you're walking and it's going to be more

5:14compacted or for those times when you haven't been able to stay on top of the cultivation

5:23and the weeds are larger, this will deal with with larger weeds much better.

5:30But again, just to emphasize, if you can cultivate before the weeds are even visible,

5:40you know, just know that they're germinating under there. So, just stirring the soil once a week will do

5:47wonders uh to to keep weeds from ever becoming a big issue. Yeah. Cool. So there's a lot

5:56of different techniques for for dealing with weeds. So we're just talking about a couple here. Couple of your favorites.

6:02So the sturupo and colinear hoe that you use come comes from Johnny's. They can be purchased there. And uh there's a lot

6:10of places you can get them, but those are good quality ones that we've used for 27 years. So um you know, you have to

6:18replace blades and replace one every once in a while, but they they hold up good. Um, the other thing that's worth mentioning, you know, with cultivation,

6:26we're talking about terminating weeds. But the other way to do it is just through some sort of mulch, whether that's a landscape

6:33fabric, quick plant fabric that we sell with holes already in it, or, you know, some people are using paper products,

6:39you know, a paper mulch that blocks the weeds. So, I mean, as a rule of thumb,

6:45preventing them is better than having to deal with, you know, getting rid of them after they've already, you know,

6:53sprouted up. So, whether that's, you know, just being really proactive with your cultivation, flame weeding is another option. Again, there's too many

7:02options to really discuss right now, but hopefully this has given the viewers a little bit of a perspective on how some effective ways to deal with cultivation.

7:11And hope this has been helpful. If you have questions like this, feel free to submit them and maybe we'll discuss them in a future conversation. Until next time, happy growing.

7:21[Music]