Solarization and Summer Sights

Our summer crops are growing by leaps and bounds. As fast as we can get water onto them, they are sucking it up, growing and putting us in a situation to water them yet again!

Tomatoes are as tall as I am, their dark green vines speckled with yellow flowers midway up through the top. Below the midpoint, the yellow flowers have set into small, green tomatoes that are getting larger by the day.

The summer squash field was erroneously planted by the creek, which has led it to be the deer’s main dinner course. I learned a long time ago not to plant watermelons and strawberries in that field because the deer love them. I just learned that deer love zucchini too!

They walk down the field at night, taking one bite from a perfect little zucchini then, take a bit out of the next perfect little squash. How I wish we could make an agreement with the deer: I like feeding you, but please finish one squash completely before starting on the next!


On the other side of the farm we are preparing for our fall plantings of carrots and beets. These crops are slow to germinate, and it is very important that we plant them into fields that don’t have weeds. We organically control weed seeds for this crop by solarizing beds.

The solarization process starts with preparing the beds, putting the sprinklers on them for eighteen hours, ensuring all of the soil is wet and then putting a thin layer of clear plastic over the bed.

As our beautifully hot summers arrive, the energy from the sun is captured in the beds and the top couple of inches of soil heat up to over 140 degrees, which is too hot to keep seeds viable.

The little weed seeds die before they ever get a chance to germinate. When planting time comes we pull the plastic off, plant our crops, and they grow with no weed competition. The fields that are being solarized are very warm right now. 

I went out and checked one evening with the kids and could feel the hot beds beneath the plastic, but as you can see, they were not too warm, just right in fact for a little evening dancing, twirling and crawling.