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This Garden Had (almost) NO WEEDS
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May 21, 2024
This year, we were able to grow more than twice as many pumpkins as last year in the same space, in large part because we prevented weeds from growing. The weeds at this property have been such a battle, but this year we conquered (at least in the pumpkin patch). Let me show you how. Also, don't miss the reveal of how many pumpkins we were able to harvest from our pumpkin patch, and the winner of this year's pumpkin patch challenge! Here's the brand of landscape fabric we used. It came recommended by several landscapers we know and it's been fantastic so far! https://amzn.to/49sMtI1 Pantry Preparedness is a trademark of Income School LLC, an Idaho Limited Liability Company
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Today I want to show you how we grew this pumpkin patch with basically no weeds and grew almost twice as many pumpkins as we were able to grow in almost the exact same space just last year
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Hello, my friends, and welcome back to pantry preparedness. So we got to have a little bit of fun over the weekend. I know a lot of people think about harvesting is work. For us, it's a lot of fun. We love to see how many pumpkins we get. We love to see all the pumpkins. It's just a blast. So today I want to show you a couple of things. A couple of people. A couple of us, we love to see how many pumpkins we get. We love to see all the pumpkins. It's just a blast. So today I want to show you a couple of
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couple of things. First of all, we got to pick the pumpkins. This was a really good time with
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family. I was able to get my kids out there and put them to work. It's one of the reasons why
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we actually have this space to be able to grow plants as well as obviously, you know, food and
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stuff. From a preparedness standpoint, it's fantastic to have the land to do that. But for me
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it's not just about growing food. It's also about growing good kids. And so I like to put my
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kids to work. It's how I was raised and honestly I think it has a lot to do with the person that I
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grew into. So put the kids to work and here we did just a ton of work getting not only all the
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pumpkins picked and separated out so that we could tell you exactly how many we grew and let you know
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who won our challenge, but also so that we could get this cleared out and ready for the fall
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You can see our pumpkin harvest was was quite a bit. The number of pumpkins here ended up being a lot
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more than I thought it was going to be. Like I said, it was basically double what we grew last year
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And part of that was because we had a lot of these little tiny green pumpkins that are about
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the size of a baseball. They are starting to turn orange, and I think most of them will turn
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orange over the next couple of weeks. And whether they do or not, though, they're a lot of fun and
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they look kind of cool. They look like little watermelons. We're calling them, we're calling them
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watermelon pumpkins because that's what they look like, it's tiny watermelons. We had 120 of just
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those. And last year, we ended up with like 130 something. I'd have to ask my wife exactly
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where we landed. So how many pumpkins did we actually end up with? I'll come back to that in
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just a minute. I want to talk to you about the weeds. This garden space, in fact, this whole
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property, weeds have just been a huge problem. My parents have lived there for several years
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and just the weeds take over We get go all over the gravel And we get these huge tall We get fissils we get these weeds that grow these little seeds all over them and they get huge and they just blow the seeds everywhere We even get horseradish because apparently
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years ago, somebody grew horseradish nearby. And then when the previous owner took over the
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property, they ended up just kind of tilling up the field and what they do, they spread horseradish
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roots everywhere. And the only way to get rid of horse radish basically is to dig it up. If you know
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of a better way to get rid of horseradish, please let me know in the comments. You will be saving
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me like so much time. Because every year we find new little shoots of horseradish all over the place
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Weeds are a constant battle. We're always trying to spray. We're always trying to keep them down
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But unless you're on top of it early in the year and often in the year, it's just going to be
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just a huge mess. This was to the extent that last year, in our pumpkin patch, we would go over
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to weed. And my wife would do this sometimes during the day while I was at work. And she would
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spend hours, like every couple weeks over there just pulling weeds to try to get our pumpkins
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to grow better, right, so that they wouldn't be just fighting with these weeds like crazy
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So this year, here's what I did. First of all, what I did is I drove a disc over this whole area
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and just kind of broke up the soil a little bit. Now, you wouldn't think that would have a big
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impact on weeds. But one thing I noticed was that in order to be able to do that area, I ended up
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like driving it out just a little bit further past the edge of our pumpkin patch
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And for like the first half of the summer, the little arc right on the edge of this pumpkin
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patch had substantially fewer weeds, like in a perfect arc shape. For some reason, just kind of breaking up the soil just prevented a bunch of weeds
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Now, some of you who have more experience than me with like farming, you might know why
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I've grown up mostly with just a smaller garden, get my little family could handle that we
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didn't, you know, farm full time. And so I don't really know exactly
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why that is. Like I'm a chemical engineer by training and experience. I'm not a farmer by
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experience. So if somebody can explain to me why that works, let me know. But that was the first
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thing is I disked over the whole thing and that seemed to help a lot. The next thing we did
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is we decided to do landscape fabric. I know that that can be a little bit of a controversial
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thing for some people in the gardening space. But for us where we're constantly fighting weeds
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we had to go with landscape fabric Now the exact approach we took with our landscape shape fabric we actually got from a book It from Florett Farms Cut Flower Garden Floret Flower Farms they are another YouTube channel so shout out to you thank you for showing us how you did this
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I thought it was really, really awesome. So here's what we did. We got the landscape fabric
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Now, we did talk to some friends of ours who are literally landscapers, it's what they do
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and just ask them, what landscape fabric do you get? Because so much of what we find, what we buy
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ends up doing like nothing. It really, really sucks. And they said, you have to buy, do it
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Both of them said the same thing. Buy the DeWitt stuff and it's really good. So we bought these six foot wide rolls
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Probably for this space could have bought the 12 footers, but six foot wide rolls of this DeWitt landscape fabric
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And we rolled it out without anything else first. So we rolled it out in these straight rows
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And we just used some like landscape staples to hold it in in place
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And then this is really the genius thing that we got from floor flower farms. In the past, what I've done is I've cut slits like a little cross
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And then you end up with four little flaps. And you can plant your plants right in each spot
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The problem with a slit is that slit can continue to tear. So what we did is I made a template
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Now, their template was a little different than mine. What I did is I used a can of chicken, right
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So I just, you know, we buy canned chicken like chunks, kind of like tuna fish
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And I took one of those cans and I cut out the bottom. So the top and bottom were both open
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I wore a really good thick glove, like a welding glove, and I set it down in place
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and I took my blow torch, and I torched it. And what it did is it melted the fabric in a nice, like, almost perfect circle, and it was super fast
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So the other thing I did is I actually laid out the drip line, how it was going to be
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and then I marked using chalk, just regular sidewalk chalk, once every three holes in the drip line
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That's how often I wanted to plant a pumpkin plant. I didn't want them really a whole lot closer than that
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So I just marked a little X where each hole was, every three holes, and then I moved that out of the way
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And then I just went along and set that little can right on the top, square centered over the cross that I drew
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And then I took the blow torch and I torched it and melted a nice circle, perfect circle right in the fabric
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And it went super fast. It took me a few minutes and I had this whole area done
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Now here's the other cool thing. Now that it's the end of the season, I'm just going to roll this stuff up
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And that way I going to be able to take care like what I want to do this year because we haven done it in so long is I want to add some compost to this space and really till it in This ground hasn been broken up I mean I disced it but I mean I spent like an hour and a half over this whole
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area just disking over and over and over again and barely, barely broke the ground at all
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I then had to till straight rows where the pumpkins were going to be. And that took me forever
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It took me like three or four passes with a tiller. So this time I am getting a tiller for
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tractor and I'm tilling this area up like crazy and I'm going to till in some
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fresh compost maybe even some peat moss to just help keep that soil broken up
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Then next year we can roll it out, roll back out the drip lines and we're good to
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go. So you might think this whole process sounds kind of expensive and maybe really
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time consuming. It was a little pricey to buy that much landscape fabric. I'll
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agree to that. But it was a one-time purchase and when it comes to the time it took
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to lay it out, the time we spent setting that up once took about as long as each one-time
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time we spent weeding. And like I said, we did that about every week or two all summer last year
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just to keep the weeds from completely taking over. And as a result of having so much fewer weeds
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and getting to enjoy it a lot more, we also ended up, like I said, with about twice as many pumpkins
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And now you can see all these pumpkins that we got laid out. We sorted them in piles, made it a
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little bit easier to count that way. Actually, we had to group them in tens because we kept losing count. And in the end, how many pumpkins did we grow? The number was 357 pumpkins. So
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the winner of our pumpkin guessing challenge is at Big Ross. Big Ross, send me an email at info
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at pantry preparedness.com. And I am going to mail you your choice of pumpkin. We got some
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really, really cool ones. So, yeah, send me that email. You're going to get it as soon as we can
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possibly get it to you. So you can enjoy it throughout the fallen harvest season. and I know kind of a silly prize
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but I just wanted to spread a little bit of fall harvest cheer with all of you
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So thanks for participating. And I hope that that little tip gives you just something to think about
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If you're battling weeds and having to deal with that, it just made our garden so much more enjoyable
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I also hope to see you in our next video where we'll continue to talk about preparedness and all sorts of different skills and gear and things like that
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that are going to help us be more prepared. And I'll see you then
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