A DIY flame-weeder 8 times more efficient than the original design

I was introduced to flame weeding years ago by Norbert Kungl, a well-known organic farmer in Nova Scotia.  At first I thought it was outrageous!  Now after seeing the reduction in weeds on my own farm, I am a big fan.  Anything that can save time and effort in the market garden is worth considering.

To understand this technique, you’ve really got to see it in action.  Below I’ve embedded a video showing a flame weeder from Johnny’s Selected Seeds and how it works.  This flame weeder is the original design where the flame comes out of a metal tube the size of my wrist. Flame weeding is most commonly used on hard-to-weed, direct seeded crops like carrots.  You walk along the row, flaming the crop about a week after planting .  TIMING IS EVERYTHING.  You want to do the flaming just before the carrots emerge so all the pesky weeds are eliminated and the carrots can come up in peace.  Ahhhh….

To see a 2 minute video of this process, go to http://www.johnnyseeds.com/p-6000-red-dragon-backpack-flame-weeder.aspx and go to the bottom of the page.

David learned about a smart home-made flamer design that Andrew Giberson of Chestnut Acres Farm invented.  Andrew shared the design with David during the break at a greenhouse conference.  Never underestimate the power of the break at a conference!

The flame weeder Andrew made uses a shop heater from Princes Auto called “Mr Heater”. They usually sell for $299 but Andrew (and then David) got one for $99 on clearance at the end of last winter.

It has a ceramic element that creates a flame area about 15 by 4 inches, so more weeding can get done in one pass.  It is mounted on a 20″ wheel and is held  about an inch above the soil. Best of all, the ceramic element is very efficient, allowing the operator to do 8 hours of flame weeding on one tank of propane.  The “Red Dragon” torch type uses up a tank in only one hour.  Around here, one tank of propane costs roughly $30.  At that price, each minute of flame weeding costs about 50 cents.  With the new model, each minute of flame weeding costs about o.06 cents.  Just think!  Flame weeding on market gardens would use 8 times less propane.

We hope to use our new flame weeder a lot this coming season.  We’ll keep you posted!

For more information, there is a very good article about flame weeding called Fire your Weeds in Growing for Market.

Having a wet year causes several problems for weeding. When operating a large scale garden such as Saugeen River’s it’s necessary to use a tractor or horses to do some cultivating. This is where hoe’s are dragged along the garden beds to scrape up any weeds that are beginning to grow. Unfortunately when it is wet this fails to kill the weeds because although the weeds are unearthed the roots stay wet, allowing the weeds to reroot and survive. In a dry year the roots would be exposed to the sun and dry out.

Having a stretch of years where you are unable to effectively kill weeds means you get a build up of weeds going to seed, which builds the gardens weed pressure. Weed pressure is the amount of potential weeds in a garden space. Another big difficulty with weeding this year has been the lack of a cultivating tractor. Cory’s plan was to use the horses for much of the cultivation, but with all the difficulties with the horses (injury, equipment etc.) we haven’t been able to cultivate much with them. This has led to us having to do the vast majority of weeding by hand.

At first weeding a half acre of carrots, or onions, or cabbages by hand sounded insane and impossible. Well actually it still sounds insane, but it is possible. Most of the weeds we just pulled up from the ground by hand and then scraped the ground with a hand hoe. But some weeds were so established that we needed to use pruning shears to cut them at their base.

It’s amazing how at the beginning of July the weeds exploded from the ground with such vigor, and now, in the beginning of August there are no new weeds growing. We are free to plant and seed things without an invasion of lambs quarters, sow thistle, wild mustard or the dreaded bind weed. Part of me thinks we shouldn’t bother starting the garden till mid August. The other part of me likes Tomatoes.

(I’m not sure if these photo’s do it justice, but they are a picture of two 150 foot beds of carrots before and after weeding)

Last time I went on holiday back to Chesterfield, I found the whole experience mildly traumatic, and came back feeling rather unsettled and all confused about where was home. This time, somehow, it was very different. Seeing all my friends and visiting other farms and gardens has reminded me of a wider horizon, but also of why I am here; sort of put things in context. Right now Sturts Farm is my life, and pretty much fills my world, and this is where I need to be. I also know that I’m here for a time, to learn, so that I can go back out in to the wider world, hopefully stronger and more skilled, to continue some work in the world.

Anyway. That’s enough serious philosophical-sounding stuff for one evening. Basically, I had a really good time seeing lots of friends, felt inspired about all the future possibilities and opportunities out there, and then was very happy to come home and get back in to the routine again.

In Chesterfield I really enjoyed being part of the Inkerman Buzz, a sort of festival fete community sustainability event that my friends organised on the park behind the house where I used to live. The whole things appears and disappears within a day, all in marquees and gazebos on the park. There is music and morris dancing and stalls with local and organic food, fairtrade things, solar panels, community organisations, loads of bicycles, and so on. It was great to feel so instantly part of the community again, and remember the power and thrill and frustrations of working on Transition-type projects.

In Leamington Spa, or actually just outside, I visited Leasowe Farm, home of Canalside Community Food, and my friends Tom and Caz. Together with some other local people, they have set up a Community Supported Agriculture scheme which provides organic veg to about 120 households in the area. I was most impressed that they provide veg boxes right through the year, and that they don’t buy in anything at all. Most box schemes buy in veg, at least during the hungry gap in May, to supplement their home grown produce, but at Canalside they manage to keep all those people fed using only their own produce. Storing things properly must be very important, and apparently the right ratio of polytunnels to outside cropping is critical; ideal is about one large tunnel per acre of field crops. I was also really interested to see their shiitake mushroom growing in action, and two fields planted to nut trees and fruit trees.

En route to Oxford by bike, I got rather soggy in the rain, dried off, got rather muddy following a bridle path through a field of beans to escape the main road, was rather amused by a sign in a wheat field proclaiming it was ‘proudly grown for Weetabix’, and then had a very warm welcome (including hot chocolate) from my friends Ruby and Lutfi at Willowbrook Farm. After many years negotiating the planning system, whilst living at the farm in caravans and then a temporary building (with their five children and an ever-changing band of wwoofers), Ruby and Lutfi have finally got permission to build a cob house on their land. Which is very exciting, and which is currently under construction. When I visited, the thick clay-straw-and-sand walls were already above head height, and some seriously chunky wood was piled under tarpaulins ready to make lintels for windows and doors. I think it’s going to be a really beautiful building when it’s finished.

The final stop on my unofficial farm-and-garden study tour was to visit my friends Mark and Cyd at The Clays, just beyond Oxford. A few years ago they took on a field with some fabulous old fruit trees and soil true to its clayey name, and are really successfully growing veg and fruit to supply two farmers markets. Compared to what we’re doing here, and the growing at Canalside, it’s very small scale; they don’t have any tractors and pretty much everything is done by hand, by Mark and Cyd. I helped out with planting leeks for an hour or so, and it was really just like being back on my allotment again. That smaller scale and absence of big machinery does appeal to me in many ways; it feels more human and more manageable. Their clay soil looks very hard work, though, and a disadvantage of being so small is that you miss out on the jollity and community of having lots of people about. Future plans are to open a little shop and tea room in the nearby village, which will possibly add the benefit of having to eat up any cake that’s about to go past its sell-by date.

I should also mention here that beyond the Buzz and the farms, it was also fantastic to see so many friends in Chesterfield and Oxford, to be so warmly welcomed everywhere, and to be so generously fed and watered and taken out on trips and even lent pairs of shoes by my lovely hosts.

At home it’s surprisingly easy to fit back in to the routine, and a nice feeling to walk around catching up on what’s been happening with plants and with people. All the leeks are planted, all 16 beds. This weekend we push hoed them all with the offset stirrup hoe, and then the finger weeder, and then the big stirrup hoe for the paths. The maincrop beetroot is just coming up, so we also push hoed through them too. The bean fence still hasn’t gone up, and somewhat inconveniently the beans that were meant to be dwarf ones between the strawberries have turned in to climbing ones.

All the peppers in the greenhouse have been strung up, and today we finished stringing up the aubergines in the old tunnel; it is now a forest of pink and blue baler twine. Both peppers and aubergines are already forming baby fruits, and today we had some of the first Yellow Submarine tomatoes for supper.

The chickens have at least doubled their egg output, with over 25 eggs a day now (28 the world record set today).

The weeding marathon with the carrots and parsnips continues, with much-valued assistance from the farmers on Thursday and Friday mornings. At least we seem to be out of the main thistle area now, which makes the job much more pleasant.

I discovered a new machine for the tractor: a row rotavator. It’s a rotavator, but instead of one big piece of rotavator that chews up a whole bed, it’s two little piece of rotavator on either side, that can just do the paths between beds. Which turns out to be really useful for situations like the carrots and parsnips where the weeds in the paths have got so tall we can’t really push hoe them any more. This thing on the tractor just churns along the path easy peasy instead of sweaty, palm-blistered hours with the push hoe. Duncan, perhaps slightly over-confidently, sent me out to use the row rotavator without any real instructions, but after a bit of experimentation and some consultation with Sebastian I think I did an okay job with it.

Fortunately it rained quite a bit here, as well on one cyclist pedalling from Leamington to Oxford, so the soil is like soil again, not dust. That is a very good thing. I think we could still do with more rain, though. Other things that have been happening are planting out coriander, pricking out basil, eating the first corn on the cob, hoeing and weeding everywhere, harvesting the last of the first batch of fennel, the chicory just germinating, and a test dig of the potatoes. We’ll be harvesting the first ones this coming week. Visiting other gardens reassured me that though I sometimes feel like the weeds and general chaos are taking over, we’re actually not really any more weedy or chaotic than anyone else, so probably we’re doing okay.

Now it is time to put the chickens to bed, closely followed by putting myself to bed.

Holiday snaps to be posted soon.

On Monday, when I came to put the chickens away, I noticed a pile of white feathers just outside the run, on the edge of the forest. It looked very much like a fox had caught one of the chickens that had flown out of the run. The following day, I made a point to visit the chickens more frequently, and make sure there were none outside the run. That evening, I saw the fox, sitting outside the run, by the entrance to the forest. For the first time ever, I really experienced that fox as something dangerous and destructive; something fearful. The next night he was there again, but there was no evidence of further chicken casualties. On Thursday I didn’t see him (or, quite likely, her) at all, but was still being careful to check up on the chickens more frequently, and shut them away in their house as early as possible. Just pause the story there a minute.

On Friday night I went out. Not to the pubs and clubs of Bournemouth, but to visit Eden’s smallholding and pick valerian flowers. Eden is one of the houseparents here, and a very good gardener and fixer of everything, and also a proper local with strong roots in the area. He still has a bit of a smallholding a few miles away, and we went to visit the goat and see the seed growing plots and old water meadows. It was great to have a glimpse in to another way of working and living, and incredible to think that Eden’s humble little patch of flowering carrots will potentially provide the country’s whole supply of biodynamic James Scarlett Intermediate seed for the Stormy Hall catalogue.

Next we went on to the Breamore estate, in search of valerian flowers. Valerian is one of the compost preparations, and it is the only one that you spray over the compost heap (the other five you insert in to the heap as dry crumbly composty-looking substances). There was a particular meadow where Eden has observed valerian growing for many years, so we parked the car by the chapel, got out our bicycles, and cycled up a gravelly track through the trees and on to the downs. There is such an amazing landscape contrast around here; on the one hand you have the Forest, with heathland and bogs and gorse and grazing ponies, and on the other is rolling chalky downland and proper arable farming and big outdoor pig units. Just on this edge of the two landscapes, we found some fantastic unimproved meadows full of herbs and flowers and surrounded by woodland. At the top of the hill is the (apparently) famous miz maze, an ancient circular maze cut in to the chalk perhaps by monks for religious penance. Anyway, there was loads of valerian in the meadows, as well as yarrow and marjoram and meadowsweet and all sorts of other things. By the time we got there, the sun was setting and the nearly-full moon was rising, and it felt quite magical to be up in this fantastic meadow.

We each tied a big brown paper sack to our belts and started picking. The valerian we were picking was about waist height, in drifts through the field. The flowers are a pale pinky-white; quite ethereal looking, especially in the evening light. You should only pick the side flowers and not the main top flower, so as not to kill the plant. Picking the flowers was a slow business and for me (in shorts) also involved getting rather too closely acquainted with a host of nettles and brambles and other scratchy stingy sorts of plants. By the time we finished it was after 10 o’clock, and almost dark. Between us we had picked two and a half pounds of flowers (Eden weighed them later), which seemed like a rather pitifully small amount, especially in the big sacks, but was actually quite a good haul. Much to my surprise I survived the slightly terrifying bike ride back down the hill through the woods in the dark intact, and we got back to the farm at about 11 o’clock.

So, while I was out gallivanting about the countryside picking flowers, Henning was in charge of putting the chickens to bed. When I arrived back at the house, Johanna greeted me with a very serious face and broke the news that the fox had got in to the chicken house and killed five chickens. Disaster. There was nothing I could do at that time of night, and the story was still somewhat vague, being at least third hand by the time I was hearing it. The next morning the full details emerged.

Henning had been to the check the chickens earlier in the evening, and everything seemed fine. When he went back at about 9:30 to shut up the house, everything was not at all fine. There were chickens all over the place; outside the run, in the other runs, and feathers everywhere. A fox had somehow got through one of the weak places in the electric fence and there were five dead chickens lying in the run. One of the casualties was Small the cockerel, who must have died trying to defend his flock. Probably there was at least another one chicken killed and already taken away. After considerable efforts, Henning eventually got all the chickens back in to the house and closed them up for the night. When we went to see them the next morning, they were clearly in shock; all very quiet and not moving around much. We decided to keep them in at least for the day, and Henning set about trying to strengthen the electric fence. He’s now topped all the grass, and mowed all around the fences, and bought some new bits to improve the connections over the gates and replace some broken isolators. The chickens seem much happier again today, and we will hopefully be able to let them out again tomorrow.

That’s not quite the end of the saga, though. One chicken was wounded, so we took her out and put her in the special ark we’ve used before for nursing chickens. She was still walking and eating and drinking, but had a quite nasty wound under her wing and near her tail. On advice from my mum and Markus, I made up a spray of calendula and tea tree tincture to treat the wound, and otherwise we left her in peace to try to recover. We thought her chances were pretty good, though the more I looked at the wound, the bigger and deeper I realised it was. Then today at about lunchtime I saw that there were maggots in the wound, which was really horrible. I sat with the chicken for ages and tried to pick out all the tiny maggots, but there were so many millions of them it was impossible. The wound was smelling bad, and though the chicken was still able to walk and eat and drink, she seemed weaker than the day before. After many tears and a phone call to my mum (she used to be a vet) and consultations with several other people, I decided it was best to kill the chicken, rather than to see her slowly decline and suffer. So I asked Henning to kill her, and he did.

Apart from all that chicken and fox trauma, this week has been characterised by being very hot and dry. We’ve started the little irrigation tractor up and down the field again, which provides quite a bit of entertainment each time it gets stuck and someone has to run under the sprinkler to stop it and move it out of the mud it’s dug itself into.

The valerian story continues a little further as well. After picking the flowers, yesterday we extracted the juice from them. We used one of those old meat mincer contraptions that people used to have in their kitchens to mash up the flowers (disappointingly they go in as pretty pink flowers and come out as green mush), and a mini apple juice press to squeeze the juice out. In the end we got 500ml of juice, which apparently keeps for ages and should be enough to keep us going for a year of use.

Duncan, along with various other helpers, has been heroically slaving away in the new polytunnel planting out the last of the tomatoes this week. It is very hot in the tunnels and greenhouses, especially in the middle of the day and afternoon. The old polytunnel that I’m responsible has become rather like a jungle, with calendula and sweetcorn and a few weeds all spilling over the paths. I’ve started cutting down all the calendula, and in an experiment I’ve roughly chopped it up with a sickle and then put it back on to the beds as a kind of mulch. Unfortunately it seems that in some places the calendula was supporting the sweetcorn, so some of the sweetcorn started flopping over without the calendula to prop it up. I changed tactics a bit and just cut the calendula that was blocking the paths, leaving the stuff in the middle of the bed that is potentially an essential sweetcorn support.

We’ve had a couple of big weeding parties in Sunny Acres to try to sort out the carrots and parsnips. A team of farmers came to join us for the whole of Thursday and Friday morning, so we really made some progress hand weeding these long lines of small plants. It was great to work in a big team, and also to spend a bit of time working with people who I don’t normally work with. Hopefully they are coming back to help us finish off next week.

I’ve also been ridging the potatoes, mucking out the old chicken house, having a meeting, watering, push hoeing, harvesting the first shelling peas, and celebrating St John’s day with a fire and picnic on the village green.

Next week we have loads of planting to do, and we’re hopefully going to start transplanting the leeks. Plus all the normal harvesting and weeding and frequent applications of sun cream, and so on.

I have been doing an exceptional amount of tractor driving this week, which is overall a good thing, because otherwise I won’t ever learn how to drive a tractor (just remember I had never driven anything other than a bicycle before I came to Sturts Farm). Last Sunday evening, after I’d already written my blog, I went out with Henning to flame weed the carrots. Flame weeding is basically killing off the tiny weeds in two leaf stage using a sort of giant blow torch. It’s useful for carrots and parsnips, which have to be sowed direct, are quite slow to germinate, and are very tiny when they first come up. You do the flame weeding perhaps a week after you’ve sowed the carrots or parsnips, depending on the weather, soil conditions and weeds. There should be some weeds germinated (obviously) but no carrots up yet (also obvious really). The flame weeder is two big gas cylinders on a frame, with lots of nozzles that squirt out flames. It is relatively easy to use really, because most of the time you just have to drive along slowly in a straight line. But the knowledge that I was driving along with big jets of flames coming out of the back of the tractor is quite nerve racking. If you stop too long, the soil goes black. Also, our flame weeder is a bit broken and you have to wire it up to the tractor battery to make it go.

Later in the week, Henning showed me how to use the comb harrow. A comb harrow is kind of like a giant rake with loads of thin prongs on it. The one we’ve got folds out to be about three times the width of the tractor. Which means it’s got hydraulics in, which was a whole new thing to learn. The comb harrow is good for weeding small weeds out of quite tough or well-established crops, because it ruffles up the soil enough to uproot the little weeds, but isn’t so aggressive as to destroy the tougher crops like potatoes. You have to drive it quite fast, which is a bit scary, and you also have to be very careful when you’re turning around at the end of the field because it’s very easy to get this big wide machine with lots of prongs tangled up in the fence. I didn’t get it tangled up in the fence, but I did do some very wobbly lines all over the place to start with. We started with harrowing the rye (which is a green manure) but discovered, after quite a lot of fiddling about with the settings, that the harrow is a bit too bent up and cranky to do such a fine job. So then we moved on to the potatoes, which aren’t so fussy and which are much easier to work on because you just drive down the ridges rather than having to try to do a straight line on a flat field. In the end, I was able to go out the next day and harrow all the potatoes by myself, including adjusting the height and angle of the machine.

And then after that, I was tractoring again, marking out the beds for planting using the empty seed drill. The seed drill is good for marking beds because it has three mini rollers on the back that draw lines when you drive down a bed, at just the right distance for what we want. Henning is trying to teach me to look behind me while I am driving forwards, which I find very difficult, so I practiced that while I was drawing lines. They were fairly straight.

As you can tell, I find the tractor driving quite challenging, but I also quite enjoy it. In some ways I think it is dreadful and terrible that we are driving around burning up fossil fuels and destroying the soil (what does flame weeding do to all those beneficial bacteria and fungi and whatnot?), but I also have the feeling that I need to somehow master and understand these machines, hopefully so that I can work out how to manage without them.

So, enough about tractors. Back on the smallest scale, we’ve been doing quite a lot of work in the greenhouse this week, stringing up and pinching out tomatoes and cucumbers (both of which are incredibly slow and fiddly jobs), bringing in muck ready to plant more hungry plants, and potting on the tomatoes that can’t be planted because the broad beans are still busy making beans in the polytunnel. We’ve been borrowing a rotary compost sieve from our friends at the Lantern, and it’s been proving most useful. It’s a cylindrical sieve that turns round and round at a slight angle, so if you put in compost at one end, nice fine compost falls out through the sieve and all the lumpy bits and stones and rubbish fall out of the other end of the sieve. We’ve used loads of the beautiful sieved compost in potting on the tomatoes, and also stockpiled a few hippo bags full of the stuff before we have to return the machine next week.

In the polytunnel today I’ve been planting out the first of the aubergines. The normal routine for this kind of thing is that we remove the fabric mulch for the paths, and the irrigation pipes, then bring in a few barrow loads of muck, and rotavate it all in. Then put back the paths and the irrigation pipes and plant whatever tomatoes or something is going in next. I didn’t want to use the rotavator, though, and have a great belief in no-dig beds. So instead I used a push hoe to start breaking up and working in the muck that Owe and Caroline had kindly delivered for me, and also added a barrowful of compost to the mix. The muck is all on top of, or just in the first few centimetres of the soil, but the soil is not compacted, and I hope that the worms will pull the muck down in to the soil over time. I just planted the aubergines straight in, and the soil was loose enough that I could use my hands (rather than a trowel or dibber) to dig little holes for the plants.

In great contrast, we were planting a big batch of brassicas up in Sunny Acres earlier in the week; brussel sprouts, kohl rabi, and curly kale. It was so dry, and the soil is so sandy, it really felt like we were pretty much planting in to dust up there. Thankfully, wonderfully, it rained all morning on Saturday, so I didn’t have to water them all in by hand. And I could hide out in the propagation greenhouse sowing another batch of several hundred cabbages and kale plants.

Here’s where we’re up to with planting and harvesting at the moment:

We’re currently harvesting – broad beans, beetroot, fresh garlic, carrots, last spring cabbages last week, first kohl rabi next week, lettuces, spring onions, broad bean tops, chard.

And as well as that, we now have growing in the fields or tunnels – climbing and dwarf french beans, runner beans, summer cabbages, curly kale, brussel sprouts, calabrese, onions, garlic, squashes, parsnips, tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes, cucumbers, celeriac, celery, parsley, chives, sweetcorn, peas (mangetout and ordinary, dwarf and climbing), fennel, basil, and possibly a few more things I’ve forgotten.

Before I finish I just have to tell quickly about my guerilla flower gardening. Quite often when we are planting a 60m long bed of celeriac or beans or something, we end up with a couple of metres spare at the end of the bed. A few weeks ago I was chatting with Henning and somehow it came up in the conversation that we could use these spare endy bits for green manure or flowers. So now I am gradually working along, planting flowers in the spare ends of beds. We have quite a lot of snapdragons and some california poppies and a few other things that Caspar sowed and that don’t really have a home. I just do a bit of planting on an occasional evening or at the weekend, and no one really notices. I’m hoping that in a month or so, all these flowers will start flowering and be a nice surprise for us all.

It’s nearly time to shut the chickens in and I’ve written far too much again, so I better stop. There are quite a few new photos on my flickr page, which you might want to look at, and which you can find in the sidebar of this blog.