Here and Gone

Ask any gardener what they think of weeding and they might respond in an upbeat way with a quip like "it's like meditating." These words are seldom uttered by a farmer, or at least a market gardener who is growing organically, on VERY fertile soil.

I heartily agree that the the adage, "one years seed equals seven years of weeding" is so appropo!  And by the looks of this little plot, there was more than one year's seed in there.

Weeds on 6/24

The weeds on this plot of land are absolutely prolific, and I tackled it head on in two days and a little over five and one half hours, not including the two and a half hours it took me to weed the paths a few days earlier.

Of interest was the variety of weeds that grew in each treatment.  Here is an inventory by treatment:

Control:

• Pennsylvania Smart Weed
• Pigweed
• Lambsquarters
• Galinsoga
• Purslane
• Grasses

Straw:

• Chickweed
• Galinsoga
• Cover
• Pennyslvania Smart Weed
• Lamium
• Grasses
• Plantain

Spent Brewer's Grain:

• Pigweed (1/4" diameter stems!)
• Galinsoga
• Lambsquarters
• Pennsylvania Smart Weed

While the variety between the control and SBG sections was similar the size of some of the weeds appeared significantly larger in the Spent Brewer's Grains.

Also significant was the difference in the color density of the weeds among the different treatment groups. Unfortunately, my camera wasn't able to really show the difference, but those weeds growing in the SBG were certainly "greener" than those in the Straw or control treatment patches.

Tidy again, but for how long?

Mulching Part II.

Applied the balance of the Spent Brewers Grain (SBG) today.  A total of 457 lbs was laid down on Rows 2 + 3.

Now all I have to do is wait for the weeds to show up...to start the real fun of the study.

The Flip side of Fertile Soil

Turn your back on a field for a few days, or in my case a few weeks, and the weeds can get ahead of you.

The onions have been in the ground for over a month and have (presumably) set their roots and are now ready to be mulched.  But not before I weed once to create the clean slate I want for my study.

So I spent a few hours doing that before beginning the process of mulching.

Straw mulch was put down a few days ago on the areas designated for that, and because the space is much smaller than I originally planned for, I used only three full sized square bales for the entire area needing straw as compared to the 10 I thought I'd need.  This resulted in a mulch depth of about 1 inch.

Straw mulching is great, but it does takes time and money, too.  The hope of every would-be mulcher is that the time and money put in now will pay off in spades later. 

Straw Mulching

Then the less glamorous mulch, the Spent Brewer's Grain (SBG) went down today.  SBG has on the plus side of the equation that it is:

• a nice price tag (Free to any taker)
• good levels of nitrogen, potassium and micronutrients

On the other hand, it is:

• Heavy, wet & messy to handle
• Stinky (if held for a few days before applying) 
• Hard to calculate how much you'll need for a 1 inch application

A total if 165 lbs of dry grain will result in 297 lbs of wet grain. (That calculation is based on a homebrewer stating that 10 lbs of grain will absorb 1 gallon of water, which weights approximately 8 lbs.).

Though it seems like a lot of grain, it only actually covered two of the four treatment replications (Row 1 + 4) to a depth of 1".  Luckily the brewer I am working with will be brewing again next week, so more will be available then.

Spent Grain ready to become Mulching Material

Mulch of Straw (Foreground) and Spent Brewer's Grain (Background)

It Begins...again!

The beginning of my second shot at the NE SARE Farmer's Grant that began two years ago.  Still in Huntington, but on a different plot of land.  Due to space constraints, the plot for this second attempt is much smaller, so I have had to scale down the number of plants to plant and the row width as well.

Laying out planting lines. Foreground: onions plants ready to go in.

Field prep began two days ago, after my onion plants arrived from Johnny's.  I managed to get one row planted (that is 1 double row of 120' in length.)  Today I finished the planting of rows 2 - 4, so a total of 1,920 onions were planted, at 6" spacing in each direction.  For fertility (added in addition to the layer of compost tilled into the soil a few weeks earlier), I added 7.5 lbs of Cheep Cheep (4-3-3) fertilizer in a trough between the two varieties of onions for each 120 row.

Onions are in!

The study is relatively the same, except that this year, instead of studying Cipollini onions, I will be using red and  yellow storage onions (Red Zeppelin & Patterson).  Though the allure of the Cipollini onions really was hard to resist, my prior work done in 2012 on them revealed they may have been a tad too delicate for the onslaught of wet spent grain.  This is not conclusive, though, because the land I was working on two years ago was significantly heavier than this year.

In a nutshell, I will be studying the Effects of Wet Spent Brewer's Grains (SBG) as a direct applied mulch for weed suppression.  I will compare the SBG to the more conventional mulching material, Straw, and my control will have no mulch whatsoever.   I will also be noting the quality and quantity of the onions that are harvested.   Because SBG is noted for high levels of nitrogen and other nutrients, after harvesting the onions, I will be planting a second crop of Broccoli directly into the remains of the mulch.

There will be four replications, randomly arranged, as follows, and I will be weeding half of each treatment (20') and weighing those weeds as I go (Noted below with a W).  At the end of the study I will weed the entire row and weigh all of the weeds, keeping the weeded sections and un-weeded (NW) sections to compare the weight of the weeds and labor (in time) to weed them.

A schematic of the layout is below. Details of the study can be found here.

SBG-W	SBG-W	SBG-NW	Control-W
SBG-NW	SBG-NW	SBG-W	Control-NW
Straw-W	Control-W	Straw-W	SBG-NW
Straw-NW	Control-NW	Straw-NW	SBG-W
Control-NW	Straw-NW	Control-NW	Straw-W
Control-W	Straw-W	Control-W	Straw-NW
Row 1	Row 2	Row 3	Row 4

Control=no mulch
Straw=Straw Mulch
SBG=Spent Brewer's Grain Mulch
W=Weeded throughout the season
NW=Weeded at the end of the season


The next step will be to mulch the treatment areas with Straw and Spent Grain.