AdAgrA 2014 Conference

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Home Gardening

Edwin Dysinger

2- Balancing the Home and Garden

Paul Dysinger

3- Seeds, Starts, and Bed Preparation

Stephen Meyer

4- Steps to Productive Soil

5- Organic Weed Management

6- Pest Control: Natural Remedies for the Garden

Darryl Hosford

7- Seed Saving for the Home Gardener

Father in Heaven, we thank you that in this work of gardening we're simply cooperating with you.

And that you'll teach us how to make Garden of Eden conditions and production, even in this world of sin.

And even as we look to a better world where there won't be any weeds or anything like that.

Give us your wisdom here, I pray in Christ's name, Amen.

Okay, usually you know you can control things better if you have a good relationship with them.

So many times we have a negative relationship with weeds, but if you think about weeds, they're actually just plants, of course, you know, plants out of place.

They're good plants that are, God has put them there to heal the land to cover the land there's a plant for every scar of nature that we can put on the land And many times weeds are actually your teachers.

They can tell you what's wrong with the soil.

You know, here in the southeast, if you see, just drive by on the road, you see broom grass on the hillside, that tells you it's worn out, low pH soil.

I remember 1 time I was driving on the freeway, 70 miles an hour down the freeway in Florida, looked over on the hillside, it was red with the sorrel that was going to seed.

And so I just knew that was acid soil over there.

I didn't have to stop my car So, you know you can learn some of those things that Weeds can teach you and also of course the weeds are like I said healing the land They're concentrating nutrients and bringing them up from down deeper.

1 example is lambs' quarter is concentrating phosphorus and maybe collecting it that's not readily available to other plants.

So that's why landscore is really good greens.

In fact, in my handbook I have some charts of wild greens compared to domestic greens and salads.

It makes growing regular lettuce, makes it look like a waste of time or you you know why eat that when you can eat things like arugula Have so much more food value And of course wild greens way on up there, just many times more food value.

My mom would just want to let them grow and say, hey we're gonna have enough lamb's quarters even after we're all done.

But, and there's a whole study of how the, you know, sort of understanding what weeds tell you about soil imbalances.

And I haven't been able to get rid of all the weed by balancing soil, but it may make some weed problems easier to deal with if you not as much pressure if you balance your soil.

And of course, how much weed pressure you have depends on the amount of weed seeds in your soil.

So you're very careful not to let the weeds go to seed.

I think it's called shaggy Shaggy soldier and that grows so fast.

It goes to seed fast too, so you have to be careful.

But you can cycle that and till it under many times during the season.

So it's God's ready-made green manure there for you.

And by the way, the definition of a green manure is just a plant that you till in to improve the soil.

But 1 of the best ways to reduce the weed pressure in your crops is to have the hard to weed crops come after the easy to weed crops or several years of the easy to weed crops.

So the hard to weed crops, well you just, you know, whatever you think of as hard to weed crops, you try to have those come after the ones that you're really good at weeding.

So usually carrots and beets and things like that, slow germinating vegetables, are the ones that are hard to weed and the ones that are easy to keep weeding just because they're easy to cultivate and cover the weeds are like potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes.

Some people say squash is in that but especially in Alabama it seemed like by the end of the season, my squash patch looked like a disaster area.

I was trying to let the squash ripen, but weeds, I didn't have a good enough cover there of weeds, squash weeds.

And so, for me, that wasn't a good, you could say, clean crop.

But you'll find if you have grown these kind of, you say, sweet potatoes, they just vine over and corn, very easy to cultivate.

You had a couple years of that, then you grow your carrots.

You'll have a lot less weeds Coming up usually okay, and then if you do a rest year Which will show in our slides how you can cycle into that with a perennial green manure.

That's 1 that you don't just plant in the spring and grow it over the summer.

You usually have a lot of weeds in a green manure that you plant in the spring.

If you plant it in the fall and it gets really well established, It has a real climax stand there and it precludes those spring weeds that come up.

And so you've really had a weed-free year before you till it up the next spring and grow your crop.

And that will help to get the weed pressure down.

Can you give an example of a perennial like that?

Yeah, perennial, 1 of my favorites is a sweet clover.

Yeah, and I like it because even if you plant it in the fall until another, the next spring, it will go from being all burned down during the winter to jumping up and producing a lot of organic matter faster than just about any other legume.

Now rye will jump up faster, but I need to get my green manure growing and get it tilled under and have time to decompose before I plant my crops.

And so I want something that gets as much organic matter grown as fast in the spring as possible.

It could be red clover, it could be alfalfa, Just anything that's a perennial that will give you a good, you know, not just some little subterranean clover that kind of, you know, is real low growing, the weeds can grow through it easily.

Okay, even after we've done that rotation and that kind of thing, we still have some weeds to deal with, and so then we want to have the right tools.

So as I was listening to the panel this morning and they were asking about How do you get young people interested?

I've had that experience working in various school farm situations.

And if it's just out there, you know, beating your brains out, hoeing weeds with a cotton hoe, it is kind of, you know, it seems like that drudgery kind of thing.

But if you get the right tools where they can see, hey, you're applying some brains to this idea, see, to make it easier, it gets to be exciting.

So if somebody just, you know, is not at all interested, they may still be not able to cut it.

But here are some of the cultivation tools.

Is a stirrup hoe and a wheel hoe cultivator and then a flame weeder.

Okay and so I'll just show you some of these.

Maybe we'll just get the stirrup hoe there.

Yeah, the stirrup hoe, if we can get it someplace where it's up here, we can just kind of show it where the camera will see it or whatever.

But I wouldn't do without this stirrup hoe because it will just slice right under the soil and real close to the plant.

This is a Swiss made thing and you can get American made ones but they usually the blade goes straight across.

It doesn't work as well this you can go right next you can just nudge the side of a carrot plant okay and you're just going you know just barely under the soil here but between the rows it's going deeper and so you know you're getting good good cultivation and plus it it wiggles back and forth show how it goes back and forth there on the soil and that way it can go both directions and it kind of pops the weeds out out of the soil yeah and this is I've used all different kinds of stirrup hose, but this 5 or 5 and a half inch 1 is the 1 I have I like the best For you know general purpose Gardening and then there's A3I didn't bring the 7 inch 1.

There's a 7 inch 1 For most people it's a little bit big you hit a lot of rocks or something knocks it around And then here's the 3 inch 1 for going between you know narrower Rows in a bit.

It's really nice a Nice 1 as well I actually toured the factory over in Switzerland of the man that makes these, William Glosser, and they're really quality made things.

This is a hoe that was developed by Elliot Coleman called the Collinear Hoe and it is really nice for beds of lettuce because if you're trying to hoe lettuce that's starting to leaf out with this stirrup hoe it'll be tearing the leaves okay but this will go in under the leaves and you know it's really nice really nice tool it's called a collinear that right collinear yeah has something to do with the angle or something linear has something to do with that and then there's this other little 1 which I made my own just well a little piece of metal on the end of a broken off hoe but you know For getting in between real narrow rows sometimes I plant a whole bunch of narrow rows on a bed And so this is really nice for getting you know in between those or in between plants in the row so really If you don't have a stirrup, you know you just really need 1 of those.

And these others are really nice to have.

And you can buy, thank you very much, you can buy just in regular garden centers, you can buy the regular old cotton hoe.

But then there's another 1 which I was going to bring with me also.

It just kind of has a thinner blade on it, but not as thin as these.

When you're hoeing down a row, do you want to like hoe in front of you or behind you?

Yeah, okay, well, yeah, I usually just go like this.

It's nice if you're tall, especially to have a nice long handle.

Especially if it's not too rocky, you can hoe as fast as you can.

Unload the roots or weeds off, but you just zip right on down the row if you're a coordinated person.

This 1 here, nice classical music, you can start down the row like this.

It's true, you get into a cadence about it.

You know about it that thank you for asking.

Okay then there's also a push stirrup hoe that has a wheel on the front.

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Series

Home Gardening

5- Organic Weed Management

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Country Living

Food Grows where Water Flows

53m

Health Evangelism- A Teamwork In Action and How To Start

1h 17m

Morning Devotionals

The Sabbath

29m

No Longer Alone

45m

The Great Reset: The Love Factor

01 The Great Reset: The Love Factor

56m

An Appeal to Christians

46m

What to Do When People Let You Down

42m

Women A High Calling

The Glory of Man

52m

Promises

36m

Overcoming Addictions (Evening Meetings)

Gaining the Victory

50m

Medical and Dental - Brainstorming for practical application

24m

Breakout Session 3

Weed Management

1h

Sound Doctrine