We’ve been doing a lot of hoeing lately – fifteen hundred bed feet last Wednesday! I got the hoes sharpened on Thursday. My mechanic gets them razor sharp in exchange for lettuce! He deduced that I’m growing vegetables on the rockiest acre on the east coast.

I’ve no mechanized cultivating equipment, in large part because I’ve no place to store another tractor, but also because I can do without it for now. A flame weeder, a colinear hoe and a wheel hoe are the primary tools I use for managing weeds. I do dream about buying a little cultivating tractor. I’ll admit to many hours spent fantasizing about this tractor. It’s red. I picture myself sitting on it, high above the galen soga and pigweed. I drive up and down the rows of vegetables, sweeps, hillers, baskets and/or tines arranged just-so, wiping out millions of tiny weed threads with each tractor pass. I imagine the weed sprouts trembling at the sound of tractor’s engine.

In addition to a good crop of rocks, here’s what else is growing well: