Burn Baby Burn!
Now that I have you singing the song (Disco Inferno by the Trammps), let me explain why burning has been the name of the game recently.
We have to jump back to Fall of 2025- it's frosted and the dahlias are ready to be cut back. We’ve made our decisions on which varieties will be dug and which will be overwintered. I’m always on a quest to reduce the amount of plastic we use on this farm so I thought- let’s try using straw to cover the beds and keep the weeds down this year instead of landscape fabrice/black plastic — we’ve used a combination of both in the past.
We cut down the overwintered rows, pulled any remaining weeds and covered in straw with such high hopes we were doing a good thing. Time progressed and around mid December I began noticing some grassy shoots in our rows and by early January the weed pressure was too much. So out came the landscape fabric and we stapled it down over the rows.
One of my dreaded fears had finally come true- we got the bad batch of straw that had too much seed in it. It’s always a risk but for years we’ve been successful. I wasn’t too worried though because I knew we still had 2 months until our dahlias would begin to sprout - plenty of time to kill off the weeds.
Enter the winter storm at the end of January- over 10 days under snow and ice. Very unusual for our climate to be that cold for that long. Then the recovery and clean up process that happens after a big storm and all the regular chaos of a farm in February (it’s surprisingly busy!)
And we come to early March…….
I knew it was time to remove the covers- we had 2 weeks of 60+ degree temps at the end of February. That’ll get those dahlias sprouting!
We arrived at our offsite plot to this view! Majority of our covers blown off and a very healthy crop of weeds growing! Now, I’ll admit- it’s my own fault. I didn’t go check like I should have in the chaos of February. We took all the covers off and because the dahlias hadn’t sprouted above ground yet, I began using a long handled propane torch to flame weed the rows.
The flame weeding process works well- it’s agonizingly slow but easier on your body to stand and flame than to be bent over weeding. Thankfully this was the only field that looked this way. The other 3 fields were pretty good- 90% of the covers stayed on.
So my goal of having nice weed free rows in the spring was a huge fail but we did manage to fix it before the dahlias began growing so that’s a win— timing was everything in this situation. Next year— Back to the fabric from the beginning!
