Saturday, March 6, 2010

AM project: removing tyfon cover crop

It was a busy day at Scaredy Cat farm.  This morning I laid down a soaker hose for my fruit bed then started the transformation of my  "weed bed."  The first task was to remove all the tyfon cover crop I planted there last fall.  Previously the bed had been covered with landscape fabric and beauty bark.  I picked tyfon as my renovation crop because it has long tap roots to break up soil and it is edible (though I wasn't brave enough to try more than a few leaves.  The bottoms are supposed to be like turnips but something seemed to have gotten to mine first -- see this January post.)
There was a lot of work to do so I enlisted all the help I could get. 
And while this looks like lots of work, it wasn't.  What started as an Indiana Jones adventure morphed into the German Army, into being farmers, into a fourth of July celebration, into pirates. (Tyfon is that easy to pull.)
The kids and their neighborhood friends did a great job.  As you can see, they razed the lot before losing interest.
Which left me with just the devastation to deal with. Unfortunately, despite the tyfon I still had a thick mat of weeds.  I started to remove them -- first individually to make sure the really bad weeds were dealt with appropriately, then with a hoe to mow down all the annuals. 
I still have work ahead of me (more hoeing and covering the area with compost), but with any luck this bed will get seeded for wildflowers as a draw for beneficial insects tomorrow.

2 comments:

  1. That is a great spot to convert to edible gardening!

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  2. Maybe next year! For now it is too far from the house to get much attention from me.

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