One Row at a Time

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

I have decided to give a million dollar course on how to grow things, as all of you are too head up your ass ignorant to know how to survive in the real world.  Sure you can grow things in your little raised beds, your roto tillers and your fenced yards, but what kind of agrarian are you when it comes to making food where you are stuck in the Great Tribulation?

The plots I am gardening this year are a hard pack where tractors used to be parked in draining oil, 8 foot tall rag weeds etc... The other is a slough of clay and a feedlot which is  so full of weeds it makes weedy patches look non weedy.

The reason I am focusing on the weeds and the bad ground is I dumped goat poo in the tractor spot, which if you are not ignorant, means the weeds were covered up to an extent in suppressing them. I still have weeds, but they pull easier......but you can not get the soil too deep or it will dry out and then if wet, the high manure content will make your plants not capable of absorbing all of those rich nutrients.

I am not writing this to make it sound hard, but to explain how to do things when you do not have heavy machinery to haul things or deep till the ground.

The feedlot is full of burdocks and nettles. That part I dislike as satan put a thorn into my eye, and that took God a few days to heal that scratch and isolate that sticker. The nettles are so rooted in a network that it is a nightmare, and will wear your asses out in trying to dig them out by hand.

Pick your ground you are going to farm or you are going to kill yourself by overwork.

Now comes the lesson in weeds, and this is important.

Work your ground deep as early as you can for late crops. Then leave it set. Leaving it means, you let it rain on it, and sprout a huge new crop of weeds, to which before you plant your corn type crops, you till it up again for a good seed bed, and then you have given yourself a chance to get ahead of the weeds.

For the reality in this, you are going to have to weed your garden at least three times. You will have the quick cultivating, then the row weeding in pulling weeds, and then a second skimming between the rows for new weeds, and a final finish up of weeding.
IF you do this, and IF it does not rain a great deal and cause a new sprouting, you should if you get your land clean of weeds by July 4th, not have to deal with weeds too much, as the dry months of July and August suppress weed sprouting.

You have to get your garden weeded early, because soil has  a way of being loose in the spring and it tightens up around the middle of June, making it hell pulling weeds out or trying to till them out with a hoe.

Are you paying attention to this million dollar knowledge?

This is all ONE ROW AT A TIME. You do not till a field, you do it one row at a time, and in no time it will be done........but it will be hot, it will be mosquitoes and it will be sweaty work. Killing weeds is  good  catharsis though in it makes you a better citizen in not trying to kill people who piss you off.

You will not have crops like Oscar Will in taking a hatchet and chopping in sod, and planting his corn and leaving it. There are those varieties but most will not respond to that type of neglect.
In Theodore Roosevelt's Winning of the West, which was the Ohio Country, the first pioneers there, took a bag of corn with them, cleared some forest, and planted the corn around the clearing and left.
I do not understand this, as I usually have problems with bunnies, bugs, deer or cattle, but these early settlers along with the Indians apparently never had problems with deer, elk, bunnies or coons eating their corn off.

Set and use a  box trap to cure your problems in the little predators.........I never mind bunnies in I just frown at their loss......if they got too much, I would eat them by shooting them.

As you can see the weed patch I am growing in, is a nice corn patch. I do spray with the LV series of 2 4 D herbicides. They help, but grass which does appear does make hell on tilling things up too.
I like leaving some weeds as all plants have a purpose. They also slow down some creatures from dining on my crops.

So it might be smart to lay in a supply of herbicide and even pesticides. I use Sevin very sparingly and perfer natural methods. Sometimes though with selective use on areas, you have to use the extreme to get a crop.
Like my idiot neighbors a mile away were too cheap to spray for potatoe bugs, and they flew in and infested my crops. They finally got ate out of a garden and sprayed, which got rid of the bugs.......all the same here is a good natural scorched earth herbicide.

1 gallon vinegar
1 box espom salts
1/4 cup liquid soap

The basics are till your soil and weed, weed, weed. You can turn absolute horrendous weed patches into nice garden plots. I have loam soil too acidic, I have clay soil too acidic and I have sandy clay too acidic, but it is working in what I am doing, because you have to weed, and in the tractor location I do have to water...........wetlands are nice until it floods out, so plant in the lowland and move the entire row further out, so you get beyond the flood line if some 6 inch rain has you thinking you should be growing rice.

As a mention here, I was busy spraying a path in the weeds..........a path means a place for predators to travel so I can snare them, and I accidentally sprayed some baby maples which had sprouted........I was gone last year and did not realize the trees had seeds on them. Any way, I took water right away and washed them off. They did revive and were not killed.

It is one thing to garden when it is the superpower doing all your work in and it is another horror  trying to garden when it is your weary muscles. The key to all of this is deep tilling, retilling, cultivating and weed pulling. Doing that, and you will barring satan's nature wiping things out, probably get you a crop to Glorify God with.

There is a great satisfaction in taking a horrific weed patch and making it look not like a jungle, but something orderly in crops in a row.

It is all one row at a time. What people do in gardening and farming is nothing of the sort any more. Any damn fool can grow things now as they muscle it in the richtard way. Good gardening means knowing your soil, knowing your weeds, knowing how to manipulate land and nature to produce with God's help.

You have to find a way to dig deep which will not wear you out physically, make your seed beds smooth and then  weed.......and hopefully not water, as there are no hoses in the Great Tribulation......that is why you farm the  lowlands and not the sloughs.

That is about 10 million dollars in knowledge.

Nuff said

agtG