New/updated @ eXtension

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Ron Morse. Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA. 

Rotational Tillage Option

There are two options to rotational tillage. One is to either purchase a no-till drill or borrowing or renting a spading machine. They are very effective in incorporating residues without disturbing the surface. They do leave a relatively good seed bed that would allow you to get a good stand.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3298

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Ron Morse, Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA. 

Rotational Tillage

After the vegetable crop is grown, you will lightly till your no-till bed to enable you to produce the next cover crop, get a good stand, and also incorporate the residues of your vegetable crop, which often times will improve disease management. Here we’ve taken a rotivator and tilled approximately two to three inches deep to loosen the soil and also incorporate residue from the last vegetable crop. It’s really a compromise; by doing what we’ve done, we’ve probably reduced somewhat the soil organic matter. On the upside, by tilling it, we’re able to get a very nice cover crop, which will enable us to pour in a lot of biomass. Often times, you need to lightly till in order to get a good stand of cover crop.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3297

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Ron Morse. Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA. 

Weed Management

High residue mulch, living or dead, improves weed suppression by capturing growth inputs, particularly light. We want the plants to basically germinate very quickly and close the canopy. Drip irrigation is also a very useful weed control strategy. Placing water near the roots of the vegetable crops and not irrigating the adjacent weeds, we have found it to be very efficient. In some cases, you have such a serious weed infestation, that before you enter into a no-till system, it’s probably beneficial to spend a year or even two years to grow cover crops that are known to minimize weed pressure. Two of the crops that we have used successfully are sorghum-sudangrass and also buckwheat.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3296

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Mark Schonbeck. Virginia Association for Biological Farming. Floyd, VA. 

Compatibility
Another important thing that we’re looking at is what I call compatibility. And that is that any cover crop and its residues are going to affect the next vegetable in a number of different ways. One is how cool do they keep the soil and how moist do they keep the soil? Is this favorable or unfavorable. Another one is allelopathy. Any crop residue has a specific set of chemicals that it gives off, that it will favor some plants and it will suppress others. And finally, there’s a microbiological effect that’s becoming more and more well known. Every plant species puts somewhere between 10-30% of its photosynthate, its solar energy converted to biomass, goes out into the soil as soluble food. And that’s feeding a range of organisms and different species of plants favor different ranges of organisms. That is partially responsible for the rotation effect.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3295

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Mark Schonbeck. Virginia Association for Biological Farming. Floyd, VA. 

Mow-killing or roll-killing requires a fairly precise time, you have to wait until the crop has bloomed, but hasn’t set mature seed. Whereas these crops, we don’t care if they’re vegetative or if they’re flowering, or if you can roll them or not. The old man winter is going to do it. And we have two strategies. One is to plant a really tender, fast-growing, tropical, heat-loving crop in the middle of the summer, and at the first hint of frost, it’s dead.

Semi-hardy Cover Crops

Another strategy is at the end of summer, plant crops that are semi-hardy, things like black oats and purple vetch. These two cover crops will fairly reliably frost-kill at twenty degrees. One of the things that has happened is that farmers in Virginia and some of the warmer climates and even as far north as Kentucky, have observed that when they plant oats as a winter-kill crop, that some of it will come through and be growing in the spring when they wanted a dead mulch. These two are just a little bit less frost hardy than the spring oats and the Lana vetch, which have been our standard cool-season semi-hardy crop. We’re going to look at them in comparison and see if these are more reliable about forming a dead mulch.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3294

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Mark Schonbeck. Virginia Association for Biological Farming. Floyd, VA. 

Winter-Killed Cover Crops

What we have here are some cover crops that were planted in the middle of July, with the objective of growing a lot of biomass and then allowing it to frost-kill. The advantage to this is that it leaves a mulch in place at the end of winter, so that a farmer can plant early spring vegetable crops without tillage. So many of the systems that have been studied and researched and developed and utilized, involve either an over-winter cover crop, which is suitable for May and June planting of vegetables, or an early summer cover crop, which is mowed or rolled about this time of year for late summer and fall crops. And what this opens up is the possibility of planting no-till peas, onions, spinach, lettuce, early broccoli, early cabbage, in the early spring. Another advantage of this system, is you’re not depending on being able to mechanically kill. That means farmers who are operating on a small scale with limited resources and only have a limited range of equipment, don’t have to worry, “How am I going to mow or roll this thing down so it won’t come back?” because the winter will take care of it.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3293

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Ron Morse. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

What we do, we plant different cover crops in strips to accommodate the need for nitrogen as well as weed control. In the center and also on the two borders, we plant a grass crop, Sudex or sorghum-sudangrass. This is a type of crop that grows very tall and produces a large amount of biomass and is known to control weeds very effectively. Then next to the Sudex, we planted sunn hemp or Crotalaria and this sunn hemp is a leguminous crop and produces large amounts of nitrogen. One of the disadvantages of sunn hemp is the seed is very costly, up to $4 per pound. Other legume crops that could be grown are cowpeas or forage soybean. In this particular system, these are summer cover crops and they will winter kill and leave the biomass for the following spring.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3292

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Ron Morse. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

Cover crops can be and normally are crop specific. One is cereal rye bi-culture with hairy vetch. This can be used successfully for fruit crops like tomatoes, peppers, and pumpkins it is widely used. Another combination is foxtail millet and soybean or foxtail millet and cowpea. Other people have used different millets. I tend to use foxtail, but other people prefer Japanese and some even pearl. The millets work really good, they produce a huge amount of biomass in a short time. They work really well as summer cover crops in preparation to receive fall broccoli or cabbage. Another thing that I found is crimson clover and barley. You can get huge amounts of biomass and nitrogen from crimson clover and it will come in earlier, like 3 weeks or more earlier, than hairy vetch. So you can use this for your early summer crops and we’ve been very successful.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3291

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Ron Morse. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

Proper selection, establishment and production of high-residue cover crops is the key to organic, no-till. An ideal cover crop is moderately priced, easily established, you must be able to establish it without difficulty; highly productive, which means, a lot of biomass or residues produced; easily killed mechanically, which of course is required by organics, and lastly, is not allelopathic to the cash crop. It’s fine to be allelopathic to the weeds, but it can’t be allelopathic or interfere with crop growth.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3290

This is a Weed 'Em and Reap Part 2 video clip.
 

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Ron Morse. Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA. 

It’s an interesting thing for me how I got into organic no-till. I’ve been doing what I label sustainable no-till for 26 years, but about 5 or 6 years ago, I started to become very much aware that many people who attended my talks were intrigued because of the weed control I was able to get with these high residue systems. If you get enough tonnage, 2-3 tons is kind of a minimum, you can suppress weeds. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be any weeds. But there is a concept that is very important and that is this minimum weed free period, which is the time that the field needs to be relatively clean before canopy closure. And with these heavy residues, we can achieve that. Especially with vegetable crops that have a quick canopy closure like broccoli. A major reason why high-residue systems are being used is it tends to amplify or enhance all the benefits of low-residue systems. Key examples would be weed suppression and the build-up and improvement of soil quality.

Proper selection, establishment and production of high-residue cover crops is the key to organic no-till. An ideal cover crop is moderately priced, easily established, you must be able to establish it without difficulty; highly productive, which means, a lot of biomass or residues produced; easily killed mechanically, which of course is required by organics, and lastly, is not allelopathic to the cash crop. It’s fine to be allelopathic to the weeds, but it can’t be allelopathic or interfere with crop growth.

Cover crops can be and normally are crop specific. One is cereal rye bi-culture with hairy vetch. This can be used successfully for fruit crops like tomatoes, peppers, and pumpkins it is widely used. Another combination is foxtail millet and soybean or foxtail millet and cowpea. Other people have used different millets. I tend to use foxtail, but other people prefer Japanese and some even pearl. The millets work really good, they produce a huge amount of biomass in a short time. They work really well as summer cover crops in preparation to receive fall broccoli or cabbage. Another thing that I found is crimson clover and barley. You can get huge amounts of biomass and nitrogen from crimson clover and it will come in earlier, like 3 weeks or more earlier, than hairy vetch. So you can use this for your early summer crops and we’ve been very successful.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3289

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Tim Miller, Washington State University.  Mt. Vernon, WA.

Tim Miller’s Tips

Stale Seedbed
We have tried using this technology, using a scale seedbed concept. The idea on this with our annual crops is we leave the soil after our final seedbed preparation, leave it alone and let the weed seeds germinate before we actually plant either seed of our crop or transplant into it. That gives plenty of time for the weed seeds to germinate that are up close to the surface. These are up then at the cotyledon stage of growth and we can use the flamer to remove those weeds either after we’ve seeded or just prior to transplanting.

Optimal Weed Size
Optimal time to really hit these weeds with this type of technology is at that cotyledon stage of growth; before we see true leaves start to show up. This small seedling is called smartweed. We have two cotyledons, it’s also a broad leaf plant, so the growing point is located up here at the top. This would be a prime candidate, right now, to control with flame technology.

If you look on the side, you can see that we have a pretty extensive root system, even on a plant this small. We’re down probably two inches to where the bottom-most roots are located in this soil. If you look next door to it, this is a common groundsel, another winter annual, it looks like 5 or 6 leaves, and its also starting to spread out, you can kind of see that here, amongst this soil, and a lot of these roots are well down deep. You can also that see we’ve got a pretty good mass on that stem, which is another indication that this plant would probably be able to survive the flame operation.

It’s very difficult to get control of grasses using the flame technology. The problem is that the soil is a very good insulator, and we just don’t get the heat that we need immediately around that crown to really cause those cells to desiccate. We can kill the top part of the plant, but we don’t really kill the bottom part.

Flaming Blueberries
We’ve used the flamer pretty effectively in blueberry production for instance. We’re able to get right underneath the crop itself, which is pretty effective. It does a pretty good job of actually removing the top growth of some pretty tough perennials like Canada thistle, horsetail, curly dock, things like this that are growing out in the field. We’ve found that this has worked pretty well for us. Obviously with a perennial crop like that, we are going to get re-growth, and we always do get re-growth, but we just plan on using the technology many times during the course of the growing season and we end up getting a pretty good level of control, or at least suppression of that perennial weed out there.

Now we do have to be a little bit careful, particularly in blueberry culture that uses sawdust and wood shavings out there in the row, to do this at a time when we’re not going to be setting the field on fire. I kind of joke about it but, we’re very careful to make sure that we have nice wet conditions in the sawdust. So springtime and after fall rains have started are when we really like to use the technology.
 

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3286

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Louie Murgg, Forevergreen. Langley, BC, Canada.

Audio Text

These two machines are designed and manufactured by a company in Holland called Hoaf. They do not have ceramic plates, however, they have a jet system, which heats the tile and has an apron in here and with the reflection of the flame you create also infrared heat which is being used the same as a ceramic tile machine. However they are noisier and they do use more fuel as compared to the tile machines. The next larger model is a Hoaf 75, approximately 2.5 feet wide. It has 8 jets in there and its quite an efficient machine. You use approximately a tank like this in 45 minutes. Its designed for walkways, driveways, interlocking brick, and where you have a smooth, flat surface. Hoaf also produces machines on a larger scale, which can be mounted on a 3-point hitch or in front of a Bobcat attachment for agricultural use. 

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3288

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Louie Murgg, Forevergreen.  Langley, BC, Canada.
Brian Maupin, Washington State University. Mt. Vernon, WA.

Audio Text 

Louie Murgg:  The infrared machines are designed to work with a very low amount of propane fuel which usually goes through a tank like in here, through the regulator, through the holes and through a ceramic plate where it's being ignited. The ceramic plate is very thin and fragile and that’s where the mixture of air and fuel goes together, being ignited and creates the heat down here.

The application is also a surface application. The heat penetrates approximately 1/8”. It does not disturb the soil in any kind of way. The consumption of the fuel is approximately 1 pound an hour. A tank will last for approximately 7.5-8 hours of continuous work. The commercial machines which are going to be developed for agricultural use are designed to make really precise row applications and very easily adjusted without tools anywhere from 6 inches to 16 feet in width. Also a protection shield can be mounted on the side so you do have the ability to touch the crop on this side without doing any damage to them.

Brian Maupin: The biggest advantage of using an infrared versus an open flame is the consumption of the fuel, the precise operation and also the low noise. By using an infrared in a method like this, it will reduce the use of fuel by approximately 80%.

This was burned about 18 hours ago in very warm, sunny conditions, very optimal. If it was wetter, more rainy, it would take a bit longer. This is what we find is really good results. All the above ground matter is dead. These plants are a bit large, so there might be some re-growth. It certainly has knocked them back a bit. Coming in 10 days to 14 days, if we do get re-growth, we will be able to flame that again and really knock it down.

These weeds were a bit large, for this sort of technology, but it definitely has stunted them a bit, another treatment or two would probably remove them completely. This is where the unit did not get through, along where the plant row is, and you can still see a few plants that are alive.

When using this unit, I was very careful to not rub the side of the unit up against the stalks of the broccoli. Although, the top of the unit did move the leaves across and as you can see, there is no damage. All of the heat is focused at the ground, so it doesn’t really affect the leaves as you push across.

Ten Days After Treatment

This plot was treated with the burner about 10 days ago. As you can see, we have real nice control of the young weeds. Here’s a plant that was a bit larger when it was treated, so there is some re-growth, but the broccolis are doing just fine and we actually have fairly decent coverage right up close to the plants.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3287

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Joel Reiten, Bejo Seeds. Cottage Grove, OR.

This is a Hoaf infrared flamer. It’s a little bit different from some of the open flamers that you might be used to seeing in the past. This particular unit is manufactured in Holland. It was specifically developed for organic agriculture there. What makes this unit a little bit different than some of the open flamers is the contained heads that have a high-efficiency burner and then they have the polished chrome deflection plates that deflect from the flamers down towards the ground. Even though it’s called an infrared burner, it’s somewhat of a misnomer. It’s infrared from the standpoint that it is using reflective technology to reflect that heat back down to the ground.

This is so that it can trap that heat in a very specific confined area, not let it out. It saves heat, makes it more efficient and brings the temperature underneath this hood up more rapidly and keeps it at a uniform high temperature throughout the use of the equipment.

This is basically “the brains” of the equipment with the automatic ignition; it’s really a safety factor. The grower can sit at his tractor and control the amount of gas that’s going in as well as controlling the ignition system, which turns the flame on and off. It’s much safer than going back with a lit match and try to light your burners.

We’ve got three different lights here to monitor what’s going on. The failure light comes on when any of the burners would shut off. Then just the ignition green light and the gas green light to just ensure that both systems are working. We initially looked at this technology to destroy foliage on top of young plants in the fall for a disease control method and then we have started to use this for weed control in the spring.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3285

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Rob Heater, Stahlbush Island Farms. Corvallis, OR.

These are a couple flamers that we’ve built for row flaming. They’re a hooded flamer, just simple, steel hoods we’ve built with a thermal weed control propane head in each one. It boxes in the heat, and it lets you use a lot less gas, go faster, and we only flame the stuff that’s emerging, we don’t try flaming once the crop is up. It does a pretty effective job of killing the first flush of weeds that are really there to compete with your crop.

You only need to provide enough heat, just a flash heat. Just like on my skin, the cells on the epidermis on the leaf, you’re trying to basically boil the water in those cells to where it ruptures the cell walls. When plants are very tiny and quite fragile yet, you do that kind of surface damage, the plant just hemorrhages and dies just within minutes behind you, and it doesn’t take that much heat or gas to do that.

We wanted to not have a big heavy steel propane tank so we went with aluminum. They’re 10-gallon, upright, propane tanks all manifolded together. Typically when we’re flaming, we can go about 6 miles of flaming between fill-ups. We usually have the guys in the 4-wheelers just set the trip odometer, so they kind of know when to expect they’re going to be running out of gas. They can usually go around 6-7 miles, which is quite a few acres.

We’ve got an electric winch on the back that’s wired to the four-wheeler. We have a winch control on the handlebar. We can raise and lower the hoods. We have an electric solenoid valve that switches it from pilot to full burn, so when they get to the end of the row, they flip it to pilot, and the gas shuts way down, its just a very small pilot stream that keeps the flames lit. We typically run either three, four, or five miles an hour depending on how many weeds are there, how cloddy the ground is, and if there’s any grass types or broad-leafs. Grasses are much harder to kill, so we typically go slower. We usually run the gas pressure anywhere from 25-35 psi. On average, this costs about $5/acre to flame and that is including the fuel and the person driving the four-wheeler, their wages, so it’s very, very cheap.
 

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3283

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Ray DeVries, Ralph's Greenhouse. Mt. Vernon, WA.

What we’ve got here is our weed burner. Weed burners simply work that if the weeds are little enough and the flame is hot enough, the weeds go away. This is something that we built. You buy the parts as a kit. You’ve got a propane tank, you’ve got a frame that holds up your burners, and you’ve got a shield to cover your burners. With no shield, too much of the heat goes up in the air. We’ve got a shield down here, burners down there. These burners can be adjusted in and out, up and down to go wherever you need them to go.

A lot of times it’s a stale bed and you plant or you burn before the plants come up. It’s all a matter of timing things. There are some crops that can handle the heat and you can burn the things after the plants are already up. Corn works like that, leeks work like that. It’ll set your plants back a bit, but you can get rid of the weeds. So we only burn whole fields if the field gets away from us and the two choices are burning or disking it under.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3284

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Carol Miles, Martin Nicholson, and Lydia Garth, Washington State University. Vancouver, WA

Carol Miles: The objective of this trial is to look at paper mulch as a replacement for the plastic mulch for weed control in in-row cropping systems.

Lydia Garth: These six different mulches were assessed in two different ways. First of all was the longevity or the aging of the actual mulch that was done on a one-to-five rating scale. Most of these papers, as well as the plastic, are holding up very well.

Carol Miles: In work that was done down in Florida, in their systems, the paper lasts a good, forty-five days and sixty days with good management. We planted this trial one-month ago and basically we see no differences in terms of the different treatments that we’ve put on. We’ve put on different oils to try to preserve the paper and we didn’t put on any oil. There’s no difference at all in terms of longevity out here. There’s no difference with the drip-tape or with the overhead. So really we’re thinking that right now, this is looking like a pretty good viable option here as a replacement for plastic. Our major objective is weed control: weed control in the bed and in the row. It looks to be doing a pretty good job.

Martin Nicholson: It’s pretty much a standard mulch layer. The only change we really noticed we had to make was that the row widths are fifty-two inches versus, I think a lot of the plastic was forty-eight so we had to widen everything out, but that was easily within the adjustments of the machine. One thing we noticed that was a bit of a challenge with the paper versus plastic was you have to drive really straight. The plastic seems to be quite forgiving if you get off-line and you straighten yourself up again, the paper isn’t. As soon as you get off-line, if you turn the tractor a little bit and straighten up, it just rips the paper, there’s enough tension in there.

Carol Miles: If you weed when the paper is wet, it does tend to rip. If you weed when the paper is dry, it doesn’t appear to rip. There’s a management recommendation there, which is: don’t touch the wet paper.
 

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3267

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Rob Heater, Stahlbush Island Farms. Corvallis, OR.

We’re taking clean wheat straw; we make sure it’s free of any annual ryegrass seed; we’re buying that and applying it with a John Deere HydroPush  manure spreader. It ends up being between a five and seven inch mat of straw we put down. Just after we harvest the rhubarb on the summer pull, as soon as that’s done, we’ll put some chicken manure compost down, put a new batch of straw down as a weed block. We’re finding that lasts almost a year. It’s starting to get weedy out here now, but this field has been relatively clean the last eleven months. In that eleven months, we’ve only had to hoe it three times. Two of them were really, really quick: four to six people, four hours going across 8.5 acre field, just pulling a weed here a weed there. We’re trying to keep stuff from going to seed so we don’t put weed seeds back into the field. We like the fact that the straw mulch is providing a lot of organic matter as it breaks down. It is feeding the soil and all the organisms in the soil, along with the chicken compost we put down. Normally we have to spray the rhubarb fields in the winter, like December, January, or February with Gramoxone (not allowed for use on organic farms) to burn all the weeds down. We didn’t have to spray this field, there weren’t any weeds.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3278

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Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c47QxFIVIq4

Jeff Falen, Persephone Farm. Lebanon, OR.

This garlic field is an example of weed control without any kind of machinery at all, using a straw mulch. This was planted late last October and immediately after we planted it, we took several big round bales of ryegrass straw, and rolled them out on the field and spread it around a little bit so that there was about six to seven inches of loose straw on top. The garlic comes right up through the straw about a month or six weeks later. For the most part, it stays pretty clear over the winter. There are some weeds that have moved in, but this field, at least in this area was not hand-weeded at all. We’ve found this to be a really effective control. Before we started doing this, we just had bare ground over the winter with our garlic. It was too wet to cultivate. We had to just weed it all by hand. It was just an absolute nightmare and we didn’t get very good garlic yields out of it. This has totally changed our garlic cropping system, so we’ve found it to be a pretty effective method.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Weed 'Em and Reap Part 1 video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1K6W2p1qHU

Ray DeVries, Ralph's Greenhouse. Mt. Vernon, WA.
 

What a wiggle weeder does, it goes in between the plants. If it does hit a plant, it’ll shortly be off the plant, so then it becomes no problem. The wiggle weeder, it will be used maybe one to two weeks after we transplant. The roots of the weeds are still in the white root stage, that’s when you want to get rid of them. The depth that we use, two inches would be the absolute most, because all you’re trying to do is just disturb the top little layer where the weeds might be germinating.

It would work for transplants that are firmly rooted. Things like strawberries, because that’s originally what it was designed for, but also things like broccoli, cauliflower, anything that’s well rooted. We use it for our leek transplants. It will not work on things like carrots or beets, because it’s going to knock out too many of the carrots and beets.

If you decide you’re going to build one of these things, the part to remember is this machine shakes a lot and wiggles a lot and so everything shakes apart if you weld it.
So the main frame that the teeth are mounted on, you weld together and from that point on, you bolt everything else together because the welds are too solid and the vibration will shake them all loose.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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