Just three years ago The Oak Tree farm was a conventionally farmed arable field. In the warm, wet weather we've had recently, maintaining that land as a market garden is a particular challenge.
Neighbours tell me the field was left uncultivated, and covered in weeds, a few years ago, and there certainly seems to be an endless supply of weed seeds in the soil. Conventional farmers use herbicides to control weeds, but we don't. We fear that synthetic chemicals may disrupt natural processes that are so complex that we can hardly hope to understand them. Larger-scale organic farmers use sophisticated, computer-controlled, tractor-drawn hoes, but we don't as we are seeking to reduce our fossil fuel usage, and in any case they would be way beyond the farm's budget.
What we do use are human powered hoes, and we use them a lot. The hand-held kirpi is my favourite garden tool. Like a blunt, miniature sickle it can be used to dig out couch grass roots intact, and to delicately remove weeds growing right next to vegetable seedlings. We use the colinear hoe, a long handled hoe with a razor sharp blade invented by organic market gardening pioneer Eliot Coleman, for delicate weeding at speed. The Swiss oscillating hoe is my personal favourite long-handled hoe. It has two sharp blades that cut weeds from their roots just under the surface of the soil on both the push and pull stroke. The conventional Dutch hoe is good for clearing fairly established weeds fast.
Our wheel hoe has a Swiss oscillating hoe head on it at the moment, and it is a fantastic tool for clearing the weeds between rows of young vegetables quickly. No market garden 100 years ago would have been without a wheel hoe, but now they are hard to find and ours was imported from Switzerland.
Joanne Mudhar runs The Oak Tree Low Carbon Farm in Ipswich, Suffolk. Click here to read more of her posts.
Bespoke Hotels competition
Congratulations to Sam Stewart of Scunthorpe who was the winner in our recent competition to win a gardeners' break at the Cotswold House Hotel and Spa.
