Yesterday, we planted tomatoes and decided to try a different technique. Instead of just planting them in an open field where the weeds would soon overtake them, we would solve the problem with weed barrier.
We went down to our newly plowed and tilled beds and started laying down the weed barrier. The barrier was about 4 feet by 300 feet and the bed was 20 feet by 60 feet, so we laid four strips of weed barrier and that roughly covered the bed. After we did that, we started burning medium sized holes in the weed barrier. Why are we burning holes in perfectly good weed barrier? Well, the idea is that we burn holes just big enough to plant the tomatoes in so just the tomatoes could grow and not the weeds. How is also a good question. We bought a flame torch at our local hardware store. It was very exciting for us kids to watch the weed barrier get burned. It’s probably not as cool as we think, but at least we enjoyed it. We also measured were to burn the holes by using two tomato cages and putting them side by side down the row. We would later plant the tomatoes, but first we had to bring all the tomato cages! Which is a bigger job than you think. We had to bring all the tomato cages, plus make more to fulfill all the tomato plants needs. We had many flats of tomatoes with many plants in each peat pot. Then the tomato planting started, which went pretty well, except for the rocks, but we did eventually get them planted. We placed some tomato cages on top, and put rocks on the tomato cages to hold them down.
We are hoping this new technique will work, and help us with weeds. We will soon be eating ripe red tomatoes.
OK, OK, we could not wait. It’s fried green tomatoes for supper tonight!
