Exciting News! We’ve spent the last few weekends up at the property getting the garden ready. Now, let me explain why this is such a HUGE undertaking.
We discovered after we bought the property that the previous owners spent the last couple years hiring someone to cut our fields for hay. This wasn’t a big deal to us, until we found out that the hay-cutter had been spraying Grazon over the field to get better hay. We got the typical “We do this on our own fields. It’s perfectly safe.”
Grazon is a very common herbicide used on grass crops. The problem is that its designed to kill plants other than grass, and hits nightshades particularly hard. These are plants like the infamous tomato, peppers, and beans. All of which we want in our garden!
So after some research, which is kind of hard to find since this is not a widely discussed topic in conventional circles, we made a game plan. Now, Disclaimer: this isn’t a How To blog on Grazon remediation, because this is obviously the first time we’ve ever done this and I have no scientific research whatsoever to backup my theories. I’m using the anecdotal stories of those who have gone before and the posts of a seemingly well informed Extension Office. So this is all a giant experiment.
What we’ve seen offered as a solution is an initial till, followed by the planting of certain crops known to remove herbicides or other toxins quickly. We don’t want to “chop and drop” these crops, as the toxins are stored in the plant. So no composting this material.
We went up a couple weekends early to tarp the area. We started by mowing the whole thing, which was an ordeal in and of itself because our zero-turn mower doesn’t have a bagging attachment and the grass was too tall for our push mower! So one pass on high with the zero-turn, and then multiple passes on scalping-low-level with the push mower, bagging and trashing all the grass clippings. Then we added the tarps! Those were fun because they kept trying to blow away. We haven’t quite got the weighting system figured out yet. It seemed so simple…
Then we went up and tilled the area. Let me tell you how awful I think tilling is… I knew it would be hard, but wow, that was DIFFICULT! The grass wasn’t very dead, and we may have rented too light of a tiller (live and learn, I suppose). Then we planted potatoes and sunflowers, both on the list of good Grazon removers we saw.
Did we get to the whole garden we were planning? Nope. But we’ve decided to take it in stages, because that space is really big and the tilling was really hard on Bryan’s arms. But I’m so happy we got things started!
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