On Weeding, Watering, and Organic Certification
Oregon, 2018
This is what I love about flowers. Wherever possible, they just grow; in between the weeds … so confident of their short-lived beauty.
—ASMA NAQI
Even once they’ve irreversibly launched into planting what they want to grow, farmers love to second-guess their plans for the plants that they might not want to grow. In Oregon in 2018, it was Edgar’s uncle Randy who brought up weeding protocol.
Randy was our A-team tractor driver, and at that moment was revving the vehicle’s engine loudly to get it unstuck from a patch of midfield quicksand. So he asked me, in what you might call his outdoor voice, if I agreed that the previous week’s foot-deep tilling of the interwoven pasture grasses, prickly lettuce, and clover that had been lining the field for two decades was the right way to go.
“Yep,” I screamed.
That was a specific answer for a specific field. The core weeding question to research and answer before you head into planting day in any ecosystem is, Should you think of all plant species other than your hemp as enemies? Or are some of them more “sister crops” (or even “companion plants”) than “weeds”? For regenerative farmers, another way of posing this question is, Do you assiduously yank or chop anything that might “compete” with your hemp following planting, or do you rediscover the benefits of polyculture?
Overall, I’ve had best results by implementing the latter philosophy. In Vermont in 2018, our monster Samurai plants—some 12 feet tall—were surrounded by milkweed, which helps sustain our root zone biome. In many rows that year, you would find a dozen or two of the foot-and-a-half-tall podded crop oozing milk and silk on you as you cartwheeled by. Sometimes they were packed in tight clusters—virtual forests of milkweed. The hemp plants loved these friends, obviously. Plus we humans benefited from the age-reversing practice of dodging drunken monarch butterflies all season.
Out on Colorado’s Western Slope, similarly, the Salt Creek crew encourages tiny clover forests to cluster in the shade of its sinsemilla hemp crop. These nitrogen fixers have the three-tiered role of (1) feeding the soil, (2) attracting bees, and (3) distracting grasshoppers from the hemp plants. In Aaron’s words, “We were the only field on the Slope that I know of that didn’t have grasshopper issues last season.”
Some folks are into permaculture principles, which I encourage. I’m going to sidestep the “till versus no-till” discussion except to say that while I try to treat soil gently, in my experience, true no-till techniques will only work well in healthy soil. If your soil is stressed, your crop is going to want as much help as possible.
My New Mexico home soil being healthy and the acreage small, for instance, I hand-planted on the ranch in 2019, barely moving the crusty soil culture except as necessary to midwife a seed a half inch under the surface, to be babysat by worms. As I examined the horehound’s forking maze of omnidirectional roots in that soil earlier today (my fingers are still horehound redolent as I type, mixed with a little globe mallow), I was grateful for its work aiding my family’s well-being by aerating the soil. That’s free interior decorating for beneficial microbes.
Let’s not get too dreamily crunchy about the weed discussion, though. Farmers have to be pragmatic. (That might be the one-sentence summary of this book.) For generations, professional farmers like Dan Townsend in Washington have lived in abject fear of the region’s prolific if beautiful yellow-blossomed mullein stalks getting ahead of the money crop. Listening to Dan and his brother talk about mullein is like reading about pre-revolution Russians speaking of wolves. Legends of Were-Mulleins scare Pacific Northwest children around campfires. And they do have amazingly durable, extensive roots.
Closer to the equator in Hawaii, each time I joined Kimo Simpliciano in his moringa fields, I relearned that agriculture in the subtropics can require not just daily, but twice-, sometimes thrice-daily weeding.
“Your target crop grows into trees in the subtropics, but so does everything,” Kimo taught me. It’s true. Nearly everyone in Hawaii has a fruiting, 11-foot papaya in her yard from a seed she tossed over her shoulder four years ago.
It is borderline terrifying to see how much plant mass can accumulate over the course of an afternoon. One time before his fire, I actually took a morning and afternoon photo in Kimo’s field to prove we had weeded the field earlier that same day.
Vigilant weeding is particularly vital when your plants are still keikis, which is the Hawaiian word for young kiddos of both animal and plant species. The Ogham language, similarly, uses plant- and tree-based orthography even in its word for people—both in this case derived from the same linguistic root. I wasn’t aware of either of these historical tidbits at the time my sons were born, but we gave both of them plant middle names.
That’s all very nice and on theme, but I still feel for my colleague Melody Heidel, the coordinator on a University of Hawaii project for which I served as an affiliated researcher, who was in the field every day, boxing guinea grass and morning glory.
“With no real cold season at our latitude,” Heidel said, “potential competition from weeds can be continuous, so we have to keep them check a bit, especially when they’re keikis.”
Plant your seed and the race is on. The phenomenon occurs not just in the subtropics, and not just with weeds; by August both our Oregon and Vermont crops were growing an inch and a half per day, almost visibly. This is more daily growth than some adult humans experience emotionally in their whole lives. Once you get into a sort of alpha state from the bee symphony, staring at the plants midseason is like watching a minute hand.
I suggest making hand-weeding at least part of your strategy, even up to 10 or 20 acres. For one thing, once your hemp is established, it proves a dang solid weed suppressor itself. Meaning, the work is most intense early in the season, when you’re fresh and the visibility is better. You’ll be in the field anyway, per Bill Althouse’s advice. You might as well do some isometric bending. Weeding is relaxing—another excuse to be outside a little longer.
In addition to weeding, farmers also like to overthink and tweak their watering strategies. This is perhaps to be expected. A plant, like a human, is 60 to 80 percent water. We sense the importance of having a watering plan, but we tend to be helicopter parents. Once perhaps three-quarters of a field is planted, the farmer mind starts leaping ahead to everything that has to be done once it’s 100 percent planted. Of course, how (or if) you want to water should be dialed in well before planting day. But that doesn’t mean you’ll ever stop debating how to keep those roots moist (but not too moist) after planting.
By this point with various projects, I’ve used just about every watering mode, from sprinklers supplied by a well in Oregon to acres-long pivots raining Columbia River water on Colville hemp via huge, rickety old pumps. In New Mexico I’m running a solar-powered, gravity-fed drip line with supplemental hand watering as necessary in the plants’ early vegetative (preflowering) stage. And I’ve dry-cropped every year in Vermont, but that’s like saying Alaskan ski resorts don’t use artificial snow: It’s wet enough from the sky.
Planting, unlike harvest, can take place in a light rain. It won’t sink your tractor. But it feels like supergood karma when it rains on the day after planting, as happened two years running in the Green Mountain State. Knowing this, you tend to finish up planting days by doing the same rain dance farmers have done for 8,000 years. Be sure to conjure steady, moderate rain to facilitate germination, not millennial floods.
Hemp likes moisture at germination, but doesn’t need a bath. Just dampness at that magic moment of seed-soil contact. After that, it doesn’t want its feet too wet. Especially once flowering begins. But even at germination, more folks, myself included, tend to overwater than underwater. In short, drop the seed in the ground, moisten it for a day or two, and the hemp will know what to do. If it’s good seed and decent soil, it’ll come up.
Flowering is stimulated in a hemp plant after the summer solstice, when the days begin getting shorter. Once your keikis are up and established, the best course for watering throughout the vegetative stage (or veg if you want to sound hip) is once again to follow Bill Althouse’s counsel and carefully watch the crop. If the leaves are drooping a bit, the plant is thirsty. In some climates this will be almost daily. In some, much less frequently. It can depend on the time of year too. In Colorado, fields need much more water in July than in June. Just one state south, in New Mexico, it’s the opposite, so long as our monsoon rains come on time.
Back in May 2018, at planting time, Edgar had a few last-second thoughts about where Chris had positioned the sprinkler heads that were mounted to fence posts at various points in the field. So, with minimal whining, we repositioned a half dozen of these just when the seed drill and tractor were, for the moment, working. On average, we wound up watering that field about every third day.
That Oregon hemp canopy kept the crop shockingly moist even during the peak of the 2018 wildfire, when the rest of the region was panting. I learned this around midseason, when Edgar grabbed my arm one afternoon while I was trying to determine the gender of a plant and said, “I’ve got something for you to feast your fingers on.”
What he was showing me was how wet our soil was, compared to the ground exposed to the flame-parched world outside the range of our crop. In fact the very air was easily 10 degrees cooler at ground level inside the hemp field than outside it.
In an aerial photo taken this day, I can see how dry everything around the field was. In fact I can actually see the wildfire smoke in the background. Our soil stayed moist the whole season, long after the leaf canopy prevented the sprinklers from getting much water to the base of the plants. The hemp was protecting an entire ecosystem, including us. Right through harvest, Edgar, Chris, and I used to crouch down in the lush field just to get a break from the smoky haze.
Outside of water and weeding protocol adjustments, a third important element to keep in mind before planting day is organic certification paperwork. Usually a large part of this is documenting your field’s planting history and soil amendments. For that first organic certification in Vermont, our field had no history of amendments or planting, which made things a lot easier. Generally speaking, organic rules mandate that prior to certification, three years must pass since any nonorganic pesticide or herbicide applications.
Each state has its own mode for organic certification, and there are also third-party certifiers who will travel to you if you want to go that route. Start with your state department of agriculture website to find out how to get rolling. In some states the paperwork can be a pain (it was relatively easy in Vermont), but it’s worth it.
When it comes to applying anything to soil or plants, without question, cultivate your hemp in an organic fashion from your first crop, regardless of whether you go for USDA certification. I recommend you do: On top of the value the certification adds to your harvest, organic products are better for all critters, microscopic and macroscopic.
Without delving too deeply into the legitimate debate about the viability of any federal standard designed by lawyers to fit 300 million consumers, at least organic certification means you are avoiding some of the more disastrous chemicals designed for monoculture over the past century.1 As Nutiva’s John Roulac reminded me recently, industrial agricultural runoff is the number one polluter of oceans.
Something that becomes clearer to me every season and might be helpful to keep in mind as you approach your final weeding, watering, and organic soil prep strategy is this: You’ll learn your own field. It may take more than one season. But you’ll probably still get a decent harvest the first time out. Think soil health, work with a sense of gratitude that you’re not in an office, and the plants will follow.
As a midwife, I’m the kind of guy who likes to thank the plants, verbally, for all the oxygen I’m breathing, all the carbon they’re sequestering, all the good health I’m enjoying while tending to them. But it’s not much of a stretch to say that as an outdoor hemp farmer, you deserve some thanks too.
Edgar, as usual, said it best a few days after the 2018 Oregon planting, when the first keikis had appeared, our winter-atrophied muscles had turned their groaning down a notch, and we had retired to the pond adjacent to our field.
“Well,” he observed, feeding a handful of hempseed to the koi. “That’s another milestone in our caps.”
Whether you account for your plants as individuals or by the hundreds of acres, every hemp crop is sacred. It builds you while you build soil. Heading back to the Funky Butte Ranch following four 2018 plantings that spanned 70 degrees of longitude, I felt physically strong and mentally healthy. Which is to say, ready for the next series of problems. The midseason ones.