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07/14/2009: "The Green Menace"

Well, the wheat is approaching harvest, but the last few weeks have seen the emergence of what I call "The Green Menace." It's the same old weed I have been fighting in the vegetable patch, only here I am more or less powerless to do anything about it: bindweed, which is a form of vine that I think is in the morning glory family. It certainly has the runners and the vines and the cute little pink-ish flowers. You can see The Green Menace in the picture mostly clearly by noticing that there is a golden periphery to the wheat patch (the good, unspoiled wheat), and a large green center where the bindweed has climbed up the wheat stalks to spread out across the top of the wheat plants. Apparently my seeding was not sufficiently dense to choke out the bindweed as I had hoped it would. Live and learn; another 30 bucks in seed probably would have made the difference.

To give you an idea of what this bindweed is like let me recount my tale of the first day I took the BCS two-wheeled tractor down to the farm. I had purchased an accessory sickle bar mower attachment to go with the tractor, and eagerly bolted it onto the PTO and fired it up. The south yard had not been mowed in several months, and it was thick with bindweed and a kind of wild chamomile plant that is endemic at the farm. I headed off into the weeds with the sickle bar chomping away. It cut the weeds all right, but the resulting plant mass was all connected together by the bindweed. I had a hard time keeping the mower pointed straight, as the weeds would pull at one side and try to knock you off-course. It was kind of like mowing into an 18 inch thick carpet that rolled up at you and wrapped itself around the machine's wheels. I felt like I was in some kind of cartoon world! I would go about 20 feet, and then have to idle the machine while I pulled the carpet out of the works enough to proceed. Then forward another 20 feet. It was slow, miserable going.

So, perhaps a third of the wheat is currently easily harvestable, meaning I think I can sickle bar mow it and then feed it into the thresher. The rest of the wheat still has good tillers, but harvesting it is going to be a [insert bad word here]. I'll probably try mowing it down with the sickle bar, and then letting the bindweed die for a week or two, and then see if the thresher can process it. The wheat is already dry, and if I can get the bindweed to the crackly stage where it will lose strength then it will probably work. If not, I'll have to write a substantial portion of it off as a dead loss, though Lou can probably feed his chickens for a couple of weeks on the stubble.

Here's an update on some of the other crops. The fava beans are also being choked by the bindweed, though I will probably be able to harvest them by hand.



They're setting a good number of seed pods, and the seeds inside are similar in size to what I planted.



A couple of weeks back I transplanted some Painted Mountain shelling corn starts into the cultivation plot; with the beans, the squash, and the corn I now have something similar to what Native Americans would call a Three Sisters planting. In a true Three Sisters planting the species would be interplanted more closely, with the beans actually climbing the corn stalks, but I'm growing dry beans which come only in a bush variety.



I had to get creative to beat the jays, who love to uproot corn starts to eat the sprouted kernel. I fashioned little chicken wire hats to put over the transplants by cutting chicken wire fencing into 12 x 18 inch rectangles, and then bending them around into a cone. This created two little ears that I piled soil on to anchor the hat over the corn start. Seems to be working; I haven't lost a corn plant yet to the jays.



Supposedly it is a bad idea to transplant corn; I think I can understand why. Corn is incredibly aggressive when it comes to sending out roots. I had started my corn in two-inch soil blocks, and within two days of emergence I was seeing strong roots poking out of the blocks. I transplanted the two-inch blocks into four inch soil blocks, and within another two days the roots had started poking out of those larger blocks! I got them into the ground before they were too much further into poking out roots, but it was quite a race to keep ahead of them. Most of the transplants are doing pretty well, though nothing like Lou's: he got his corn in early, and it was waist-high by the Fourth of July, not knee-high. At least his won't cross-pollinate with my corn, as mine is several weeks behind his.



The corn transplanting was a couple of weeks back, and on a subsequent farm trip I moved some of the wire hats from corn plants to newly emerging bean sprouts. It was just a whim; I thought that it was slugs attacking the beans, but I figured what the heck I'll try protecting the beans with these since the corn no longer needs it. To my surprise, the bean plants protected with wire hats were not ravaged by whatever it is that has been attacking them, while unprotected bean sprouts have suffered quite a bit of damage! I have since heard that there is a little yellow bird that loves to eat vegetable sprouts, and my protectors have been keeping them at bay. Live and learn.