I love it when experiments work out!! Well, this wasn’t exactly a planned experiment, but it still worked so I thought I’d share it. Back in July, I planted carrots in my bone-dry soil, just as our drought was starting to take hold. The bed I chose had grown peas but the weeds were doing a number on it since I couldn’t get around the pea stems without accidentally pulling up pea plants.
So, by the end of June, the peas were all done (I’d planted them back in February), and so I pulled everything by hand. But rather than throw them on the compost pile, I left them on the side of the bed. I raked in some organic fertilizer, and then seeded my carrots in 3 rows. Drop irrigation doesn’t work very well to keep soil moist for seedlings to germinate so I hand watered all the rows. Then, in order to keep the moisture in the soil from evaporating, I moved all the pulled pea plants + wilting weeds over the bed again.
Carrots are notoriously difficult to germinate at the best of times. The seeds are really quite wimpy so they can’t be buried too deep in the soil. That makes them very susceptible to drying out if the weather is warm. By using the pea/weed detritus as a mulch, I was hoping to trap all that moisture and allow the seeds some chance at coming up.
About 7 days after I seeded, I lifted up the mulch and voila!!! Carrots seeds were starting to come through already! That was by far the fastest germination I’d ever seen. However, I could also quite clearly make out the first leaves of chickweed coming up alongside the carrots. I can see chickweed growing from 100 ft away, I swear.
I knew that although my germination experiment had worked, I still had some crazy weeding to do. So what does a good farmer do at a time like this? I ignored it and covered the whole bed in Remay. You see, as much as I hate weeding, I hate carrot rust fly even more. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn’t have enough pins or rocks to keep the floating row cover down. About a month after they germinated, a wind blew the cover off and left me staring at a carrot/chickweed mess.
So what did I do? I ignored it. I never even bothered to put the cover back on! In August! The absolute worst month for rust fly populations. I guess I figured that the fly had already gotten in so I’d just as well salvage what I could come harvest time.
Fast forward to the end of September. The carrots have been in the ground about 60 days – time for harvest. I was kind of dreading pulling them up but I had a back-up pickling plan in place if I had to do a bunch of chopping to cut out infected areas. I pulled up about twenty pounds and then went over to wash the dirt off. That’s when you finally see what kind of damage you have.
And what did I find? Some of the most rust-fly free carrots I’ve ever grown!!! I don’t know quite how this happened. My theory is that the chickweed infestation through the carrots was so thick that it prevented the flies from landing near the carrots and laying their eggs. Whatever it was, it worked!
-30-
