sod lifter

Mike Birch

Friday, July 11, 2008 at 8:00 AM

Hello,

The season is halfway through for us. We start seriously working on the farm in March and we run through the end of October. It is a good feeling to be halfway done with the season. I kind of relax a little even though we still have a lot to do.

Speaking of a lot to do, we're still running with our no-till vegetable farming experiment. It is a lot of work, as we do all of our bed work by hand. What does that entail, you ask? Well, we like to scrape off the top layer of weeds in the beds before we plant. In the beginning we used a glaser wheel hoe to slice off the top layer. As the weeds became taller and woodier, we've switched to a hand sod lifter, or as it was described to us, a grave diggers tool. It works out well. In our experience sour dock is particularly tough to chop down with the sod lifter, but most weeds slice down easy. The sod lifter does work better if the soil has some moisture in it. After taking out the weeds, we deep fork the soil if it has been compacted. Deep forking helps alleviate any hard pan. In truth, the whole bed prep process is hard and slow and tiresome. But, we believe it leaves as much soil biology intact as possible. More research is needed to make it easier. My brain keeps telling me cover crops are in the mix somewhere.

Onwards and upwards.