well break time is officially over we always take a little bit of a break
in the garden in august kind of just focus on our cover crops
rehabbing our soils for fall and now that we're at the end of august
the beginning of september here it's time for us to start getting some
transplants going it's time to start getting these plots
ready for fall planting which will happen
you know in about a month or so so today we're gonna start getting one of those
plots ready right behind me here so today we're
going to be taking care of this plot of iron clay peas here
this particular plot in the dream garden is one where I didn't plant
any fall crops last year I had peppers and eggplants here that we let go
to the first frost so this is going to be
a primary plot for a lot of fall production
this year these peas here still haven't bloom but they need to be taken down
because some of them got blown down by the wind that opened up some spaces for
some weeds to start coming in there as you see right there
so we need to go ahead and mow this down and then we're going to tarp it and talk
about the importance of that when you've got a
little bit of time between when your plot has been mowed or tilled
and when you're actually going to plant now if you didn't have some weeds
popping up in here if you didn't have winds and heavy rains
it kind of knocked some of it down and allowed the weeds to pop through you
probably could just you know let this thing ride right
up until you got time to plant for fall cut it down till it in you'd be good to
go in our case we've got weeds popping up
through there but we also want to kind of give ourselves a nice
low weed seed bank before we uh start with fall planting there and that tarp
is going to help us do that going to help kill any of those weed
seeds that are on the surface there we'll talk more about that when we do
the tarp let me go grab the push mower I'm going to mow this probably a couple
times mow it on high drop it down low scalp it and then we'll
tarp it
all right all right all right well I was gonna mow it twice but I think one time
it's gonna be good enough still some
stems and stuff sticking out a little bit there but uh that tarp
knocked them back and they'll dry up and die pretty quick as soon as we put that
tarp on there as I always mentioned when you're doing
this you want to blow this leaf material that's organic matter
all over the place you just want to chop and drop it
whatever kind of mower you got that will allow you to do that or weed
eater or whatever but you want to take that
green material and put it on top of the soil
not blowing it away from your garden plot so let me grab a 30 by 40 tarp
a few bricks let's get this tarp down
all right all right all right we got the tarp on we can still see it kind of
poking up a little bit there in the middle
where some of those stems are that weren't cut all the way down to the
ground but as this tarp does its magic out here
and this hot weather um kills that stuff off in there this
thing will suction to the ground be nice and flat
here in just a few days won't take long at
all now we have two different sizes of tarps on
our website we have a 40 by 50 and then we have a 30 by 40
which is what this is here and my plots here in the dream garden
are 30 by 35 so it works out almost perfect I could
cut this off here trim it off a little bit
but it works for some of my other plots not in the dream garden so for these I
just fold it over fold that extra five foot over there and we do include
sandbags with these when you purchase one well I have a
bunch of bricks laying around I didn't have any sand to fill any bags
had a bunch of old bricks laying around so that's just what I used to keep it
pinned down sandbags are nice because it doesn't
take as many of those they're heavier than the bricks are but either way you
want something to hold it down good on the edges there
and once this thing kind of flattens to the ground you really ain't got to worry
about it going nowhere all right so let's talk a little bit
about this process here this tarping process behind me
so this process we're doing here with the black tarp
is a process called occultation and so the concept here is
you put the black tarp on there it's going to kill
any living material there any weeds that are living there on the surface that are
rooted but it's also going to create a moist
environment there because you're trapping in
all that moisture that's in the soil we've got you know a half inch of rain
last night so a good bit of moisture there
it's going to force any weed seeds on the surface to germinate
but as soon as they germinate they're going to die because there's no light
there because that black tarp is blocking out all the light and this
is a great way to create what we call a stale
weed seed bed or stale weed seed bank before
planting now you also hear the word solarization thrown around a little bit
when it comes to tarpon and solarization as opposed to
occultation which is with the black tarp solarization is with a clear
tarp and so you take a clear tarp you put on
there and the premise there is that you create
a greenhouse effect so the sun is penetrating through there
but a lot of those gases can't escape and it's just like a little mini
greenhouse right on top of your soil now that will also give you a nice stale
weed seed bank a lot of people use that technique to
kind of sterilize their soil because supposedly that will
heat up your soil more than this black tarp wheel
this black tarp here won't really uh burn up a lot of your um
you know living organisms your soil biota all that you don't have to worry
about that with a black tarp with a clear tarp a lot of people will
use that intentionally if they've got some you
know issues with their soil and they want to just kind of
just fry it all and start freshening new so that's the difference between the
black tarp and the clear tarp I've never really
tried the solarization with the clear tarp
I kind of understand the principle behind it and
I really like the black tarp here it's worked well for us I've used it for a
couple years and there's several different
applications where you can use this and I'll talk
about those so the first application is exactly what we did today here we had a
cover crop planted we went and mowed that cover
crop we still have about a month before we're gonna plant anything in this plot
and we'll use that tarp as a placeholder okay so that tarp is gonna make sure
this plot doesn't get grown up it's gonna make it pretty much
maintenance free we don't have to do anything we don't have to
you know if we didn't have the tarp and we mowed that we probably have to come
out here and cultivate this at least once a week to keep it from
getting grown up so the tarp is going to just
become a placeholder for us make it nice and maintenance free
and so we don't have to worry about new weeds popping up on this tarp also going
to give us that stale weed seed bank it's going to kill any of
the weed seeds on the surface there while we're waiting
to plant this area so it works great as a placeholder like that
and you could leave it on there way more than a month
you know if you're a type of person that struggles with your garden getting
overgrown between say the spring garden and maybe you don't do a fall garden
maybe it's you know all the way the next spring it
gets overgrown or maybe it gets overgrown on you between spring and fall
and you just don't have the time or don't want to take the effort to
really keep it clean over that time period the tarp is a great way to go you
just put the tarp on top of the garden leave it there you don't have to worry
about it becoming real weedy and over time you're going to have a
nice weed free garden that's a lot easier to
manage so it works good as a placeholder like that it also works
good in no-till situations so if you're doing a no-till garden where you don't
want to cultivate the tarp is a great way to terminate
cover crops kind of like we did today so you don't
have to come in there and cultivate and turn them into the soil now this is
a little bit of a longer process than if you were to till it now here
what I'm going to do is a bit of a no-till situation my
intentions are to pull back this tarp in I'd say
two to three weeks and I'm gonna dump a heavy load of gin trash
compost on it and I'm planning on putting I'd say
two to three inches of compost on it and I want to put the tarp back on it
and hopefully after I put the tarp back on in a couple more weeks
I have transplants ready to go in the ground I can lay drip tape
I can cover that drip tape and plant right on top of it
and we can leave all those iron clay pea roots intact you know because they are
nitrogen fixers we want to leave them there leave all
that nitrogen in place so that's what we're going to
try to do here I think it should work pretty well
but we'll just have to see the final good way to use a tarp like this
is to establish a new garden area or just say you got a garden that's got
a lot of nut grass in there maybe a lot of bermuda grass in it
or you're starting a garden plot in an area that's got a lot of nut grass and
bermuda grass you can use what I call the tarp and
till technique to really get that area nice and clean
and weed free nut grass is tough bermuda grass is tough because they have
all those kind of underground rhizomes that are hard to eliminate
but I've practiced this myself I've tried it in certain spots
uh on other farms so what you do with this tarp and till technique
is you want to first go in there and cultivate the area where your garden
plot is going to be put the tarp on it let it sit for two to four weeks it will
depend on the time you let it sit the time it
takes to kind of burn everything there will depend a lot on
the outside temperatures this thing works a lot faster this time of year
than it does in the cool season so leave the tarp on there a couple
weeks pull the tarp back till it again that's going to stir up
any of those rhizomes that are down there
put the tarp back on for a few weeks till it again and if you do this about
four or five times even if you've got things that are
stubborn like nut grass and bermuda grass you will get rid of them and
you'll have a nice weed free garden plot now I will say
this one of the disadvantages about the tarp is that it will dry out your
soil over time because the breakdown of that
organic matter underneath that tarp all the biological activity that's going
on is consuming water so that is going to dry out your soil
over time and it's not getting any water from the sky because it's covered so
when you do pull it back from time to time it's not
a terrible idea to run a little overhead sprinkler and
wet that soil down that is also going to help the process
of getting those weed seeds to germinate and then they'll die because they don't
have any light now for this tarping technique to be effective the one main
thing you got to remember is that you don't want to pull the tarp off till
the area and then plant because each time you
till or you cultivate you're stirring up weed seeds from deep down below bringing
them to the top to the surface there so that's not what you want to do
you want to pull off the tarp and it be just
ready to plant right then so if your soil does need
cultivating maybe you know it's a little chunky maybe there's still some organic
debris in there you can't plant in there as easy as you
like if you know it's going to need cultivating before planting
plan ahead with that cultivate it a couple weeks
before you want to plant put the tarp back on it and leave it there as a
placeholder then when you pull the tarp off
you can plant you'll have a nice weed free zone but if you cultivate it
right if you pull the tarp off and then plant
you know all those weed seeds you've stirred up are going to
uh be able to thrive because they can germinate and they'll have sunlight
so just plan ahead a little bit with your tarping the only big disadvantage
besides you know having to add a little water these plots if you uh
tarp them for a long time is down here in the south
you will get a few fire ants every now and then that like to kind of
snuggle up underneath that tarp if you do the kind of tarp and till technique
I've talked about that's not as big of an issue fire ants
don't like disturbance if you disturb an area even a little bit
they'll usually move away so just kind of be aware of that
with the fire ants you could also we have a
fire ant solution with a spinosad in it on our site you could use that you could
put some of that down underneath the tarp
kind of take care of that issue as well those are the really only two
disadvantages there's lots and lots of advantages to using a tarp and if you've
never used one i would highly recommend giving it a try
and it will go a long way to making your garden so much easier
to use and to grow food in because you won't be fighting the weeds so much
you'll be able to go out there and just concentrate on your plants harvesting
and just growing clean healthy food I'll put some links below to both of our
silage tarp options so you can check those out
whether you want to use it as a placeholder
for just a month or so like this if you want to use it as a placeholder all the
way until next spring or use it to create a nice new weed free
garden spot if you enjoyed this video make sure to give me a big thumbs up
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and if you enjoyed this one check out these other two tarping videos
here we've done in the past I think you'll really enjoy those as
well we'll see you next time