Summer Sweat
Greetings, farm friends!
Finally, after a brutal stretch, it seems as though the heat wave is over. Our plants made it through and so did we, although I think everyone is going to require a bit of recovery time.
We’re at the point of the season during which the weekly tasks shift away from constant planting and into plant maintenance. Over the next two months, we’ll spend most of our time harvesting, weeding, and feeding our perennial crops. We’ll all take summer vacations and lean into the lighter workload before the chaos of pawpaw and wedding season sets in.
In the past, we’ve always relied heavily on landscape fabric to suppress weeds in our fields. Landscape fabric makes weed management a lot easier, especially on a small farm with limited labor available. Over the past few years, we’ve started to undersow cover crop in later plantings of annual flowers, rather than plant into landscape fabric. Undersowing allows us to get a cover crop in before it’s too cold to get cover crops established, and simultaneously helps suppress weeds in the crop.
This year, we’ve significantly cut down on our use of landscape fabric. When the heatwave began in June, we were finding that crops planted into landscape fabric were dying off soon after planting. We eventually realized that the black plastic woven fabric was essentially cooking the young seedlings, and we had to make a change. We started planting all of our summer crops without fabric, and we’ve somehow managed to keep up with the weeds and get healthy stands of dwarf white clover established underneath our cash crops. It’s been a great success during a challenging season, and I’m excited by the possibility of continuing to move further away from using landscape fabric. I think that fabric can be a great tool when you’re getting started, or growing in an area with a substantial weed seed bank, but I also believe that as farmers who care about sustainability, we should be making efforts to move away from using plastic wherever possible.
Harry, appreciating the dahlia harvest.
Swallowtail caterpillar. The butterflies and caterpillars are out!
We’re at the Baltimore Farmers Market this Sunday, July 21st from 7:00- 12:00!
We’re planning to bring bouquets, eucalyptus, snapdragons, rudbeckia, assorted bunches of flowers and Two Boots merch.
And, of course, the Build Your Own Bouquet bar is back!
Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the market!
Amelia & The Two Boots crew
Echinacea mellow yellow: the bugs love it and I do too!
This year’s eucalyptus crop is extraordinarily bountiful— we have a forest of euc!