Happy Friday y’all!

Well, the rain has returned by golly. My 10 day forecast doesn’t have one rain free day in it at the moment and we’re good with that. We’ve been busting hump getting the fields ready for the dahlia planting that starts today, and it’s been hot and dry out there. You know you’re gonna be feeling it for awhile when it’s 8:30 a.m. and your shirt is already soaked through with sweat.

To accentuate the weather a bit, Mandy and I have been flame weeding this week. We do it in all the beds and aisles to reduce the weed pressure on the dahlias. Our climate is too hot to use landscape fabric on our dahlias (it burns them), so encouraging weed seed germination, then killing the sprouted weeds shortly after, is a pretty successful technique.

We’d like to mulch with straw, but about 10 years ago we had a nasty experience with the realities of persistent herbicides that hay growers often use. We lost all our crops in the same field for 3 seasons because a neighbor’s horse ate a little hay that was sprayed with the stuff. We had composted it well and spread it lightly over the field, but that didn’t matter. It’s persistent through the digestive tract and can kill or deform your plants even after 10 years in a compost pile. It only takes 10 parts per billion to effect sensitive crops. Fortunately for us, we had extremely heavy rains for months on end after that 3rd loss and our problem disappeared. So did our desire to use straw or manure and risk a repeat.

I highly recommend against using horse or cow manure in your garden, or straw mulch, unless you know very well what those animals ate and what it was sprayed with. Professors at the University tell us they get countless stories of this from local gardeners who went organic and are trying to find out why their garden died. All they did was add a little manure and now they wonder if organics itself is bad.

It’s not the manure. It’s powerful synthetic chemicals. Anyway. Tangent over.

Back to hot stuff. We finally bit the bullet last year and invested in a rolling cart that straddles our beds, carries a full tank of propane, and glides just above the surface of our raised beds and evenly flames them. It does nothing for the aisles though, so we still have our archaic homemade Ghostbuster style backpack flame weeder made out of 2x6s, bungee cords, and old truck straps that we’ve been using for years to do all the beds. We lash a full propane tank to the wooden raft on our backs and slowly walk up and down each side of seemingly endless beds, shooting fire and catching embers in the face, until our back and shoulders start to seize up and we frantically work to get the pack off without falling over. Rest on the ground a bit. Curse a little. Catch your breath. Force yourself up on your feet and slowly work out the knots while walking up to the house to drink a quart of electrolytes. Breathe deep. Self pep talk. Start again.

This rain is gonna be great for our seedlings but will bring a lot of new weeds too. We’ll end up flaming the aisles again, but will have to hand weed the beds or risk burning our dahlias. There is some angst that too much rain will increase probabilities of rot in newly planted tubers, but our drainage is really good this year, so hopefully that gives us an advantage. It’s really a Goldilocks proposition growing dahlias in the South. It’s either too hot and dry, or too hot and wet. The former burns the plants to death and the latter is prime conditions for rot. Some years are easier to navigate than others, but raised beds, good soil, and proper drainage are to your benefit for sure.

I should delineate. Seedlings (grown from seed and have no tuber) will be very happy with all the rain, so we’re planting them first. Tubers, though more hardy with dry spells, are more susceptible to rot. We’ll plant them later next week after some of the bigger storms have passed.

For all you farmers who use a bed shaper, you’ve likely got issues with water pooling up at the ends of your beds and drowning your plants. It’s just a function of how that implement goes into the soil and comes out of the soil…it creates a natural depression at the ends, perfect for holding water.

Tired of shoveling and pick axing in standing water during torrential rains year after year to try and improve drainage and tired of losing countless plants to anaerobic soil and rot, I was eventually struck with an idea. I tried it 3 or 4 years back, and it worked incredibly well. I do it every year now with great success.

The technique is this: I use the bed shaper to cut a perpendicular bed at the bottom end of all our growing beds.  It forms a drain trough that carries all the water away instead of forming little lakes in each aisle.  You just need a little slope in your beds for it to work.  If our beds slope one direction, I just do the bottom.  If they are parabolic, I do both ends.  It does require a little bit of clean up shoveling once you’re done, but that’s small potatoes relatively speaking, and it works great all season.  We’ll post a video to our Instagram stories later today if you want to see what I’m trying to describe.

In other farm news, the rooted mum plants are doing great! We're continuing our 25% off sale on select varieties of our rooted heirloom mums and unrooted heirloom mums. It made our entire team happy to pack up so many boxes of mum plants to send out to you all this week. If you haven't already checked out the sale, be sure to take a look and get your orders in while we still have a nice selection of varieties available.

Wishing y’all a wonderful weekend!

Steve