Any farmer, conventional or organic, will tell you that weed pressure is among the biggest challenges they face. Organic farmers have fewer tools at their disposal to fend off weeds that compete with crops for sun, water and nutrients, but while we stayed at Colinwood Farm in Port Townsend last week we got to see a couple of innovative weed-control techniques in practice.

The first and most exciting technique is flame weeding (pictured above), which involves burning the fields with propane gas burners that are attached to the back of a tractor. The farmers burn the fields before planting, and they do it early in the morning when there's very little wind, so that the flames hit the ground directly.

The other method the farmers at Colinwood use is called plastic much with drip tape irrigation (pictured below). Dorothee and I spent the afternoon on Wednesday helping farmer Jesse Hopkins lay black plastic on one of his winter squash fields. Then, once the plastic is laid and tucked into the spoil, squash seedlings are planted in small, fist-size holes in the plastic, so that no weeds can grow nearby.

Jesse predicts that in the future, methods like plastic much will be banned from certified organic farms because the plastic is an unsustainable, petroleum-based product, but for now it's a valuable means of controlling weeds.

-Mark