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06/22/2009: "The Weekly Hoedown"

The word "hoedown" means to lay down one's hoe, and then have a dance. I'm using the word in another sense: every week I've been getting the hoe down in the dirt for some weeding in the bean and squash patch. The time it takes varies; I can usually get the patch hoed in about an hour. If the soil is wet it takes more time as the hoe accumulates mud that I have to periodically scrape off. Then it's slow going! But, if the soil is dry, and the weeds haven't gotten too widespread, I can knock them all out pretty quickly.

The hoe that I use (pictured above) is called a Dutch hoe; I bought it from Joel at Earth Tools in Kentucky. It's a little different from a traditional American hoe; an American hoe requires a chopping, scraping motion, where you pull the blade over the ground with the blade roughly perpendicular to the ground. American hoes require a lot of muscle to keep the blade in contact with the ground strongly enough to uproot the weed that you're trying to eradicate.

The Dutch hoe, on the other hand, is used with the handle nearly vertical; you work on a small area in front of you, with the blade nearly horizontal. You pull the blade through the ground just below the surface and neatly slice off the weed with a pinpoint sort of control. It really is a joy to use a well-designed tool. My daughter was helping me weed a little bit this past weekend, and it was hard to convince her that the best way to use the hoe was to stand up and not bend over and hack at the dirt.

Actually, there is one thing I've learned that I don't like about the Dutch hoe: it is awkward to sharpen. Any hoe that gets used gets dull, and must be sharpened. It's tricky to get the Dutch hoe clamped in a vise with the blade up, and trickier still to apply a file to it in a way that sharpens the edge. I was able to do it last week, and I was partly through with sharpening when I slipped a little and gave myself a nasty slice on my thumb. Ouch. I think that the hoe that Elliot Coleman designed is similar to the Dutch hoe in geometry, but it has a removable blade that probably is easier to sharpen.



The photo above shows what the bean bed looks like after I've sliced all the weeds down. Our dominant weed out in the pasture is a type of bindweed; it grows from runners that go down deep in the soil, and it covers the ground quickly. I have no illusions about eradicating it; at best, I'm holding back the tide each week. I can't even say that I know my enemy well, which is a mistake; I suspect that the instances that I'm cutting off each week are quite possibly just the visible portion of a much larger plant network underground.



Some of the beans are getting eaten, presumably by slugs...



While others are thriving:



The same is true of the squash; some are looking a little sickly and yellow.



While others are really starting to turn dark green and take off!



I think that the yellow leaves on the squash are not very serious, as the plants seem to be shaking it off gradually and greening up by themselves.

This past weekend I had a little extra time (and extra help from the daughter) so I went above and beyond the call of duty... we not only weeded the beans and squash, but I also rototilled a portion of the garden that was going pretty far into control by the weeds. That area is visible as the freshly tilled portion beyond the end of the irrigation hoses. Late in the day I seeded the tilled area with a couple of pounds of buckwheat; I might get a small crop of buckwheat out of it, but mostly I wanted to get something in there to compete with the weeds. Steve Solomon says that if you get buckwheat in by the solstice you'll have mature plants in 5 weeks. Well, I just made it, as the solstice was this weekend. We drove home just as a little shower hit the windshield of the truck... just what you want to see after raking in some cover crop seed. I could have kissed the rain.

I went to bed with my brain flashing two messages: Exhausted (from raking in the seed and wrestling the tiller) and Sore (ditto). Exhausted... Sore... Exhausted... Sore... bzzzzt.