The Zen of Weeding

You may think that spending some 20 hours hand weeding asparagus would be an onerous task, but only because you haven’t had to slog through grading a big stack of blue books or papers. I’d much prefer the weeding, though my knees and back provide a dissenting view.

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Farm Diary: Pruning in March

Most people know that pruning does not consist of attaching prunes to fruit trees and bushes, despite what Amelia Bedelia understood it to mean. But beyond that, I’ll wager that most folks who read Unpaid Field Hand only know that it involves some sort of cutting and thinning of fruit trees and canes.

Of course, you can learn all about it by going on the web and googling “fruit pruning.” But even after reading the 7,280,000 results available, you might be forgiven for still not knowing just how to do it. And for good reason. That’s because even the most knowledgeable experts sometimes give contradictory advice. Even Michael Phillips, whose book The Apple Grower is considered an authority to many apple cultivators, confesses that he hopes to know how to do it by the time he is eighty.

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Farm Diary: Seeding Fun in Late February

Seeding is a critical component of farming. No seed flats planted in February means no crops later. It is a laborious and painstaking, but oddly, satisfying task that I tackled two weeks ago. Here is how it works.

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Farm Diary: Late Winter on the Farm

Every occupation has its rhythm. The rhythms of farming are special because they coincide with earth’s yearly swing around the sun. January and February provide an opportunity to contemplate the prospects of the upcoming growing season. So my unpaid field hand’s diary for 2012 begins with news from winter.

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