Circle Weeding, Thinning and Improving Mulching

    Hi....., on to the next class we go.

    So for this week, we mostly did some general maintenance on the farm bed. First we did some weeding on the beds. Weeding is basically us removing weed or other unwanted plants that grows on the bed. Circle weeding is as the name suggest, we weed out the weeds growing around our plants. For this, we manually remove them by hand. You should completely remove the weed up until the roots so that they don't regrow back. However, weeds are fast growing so you should always check it up and do weeding whenever necessary. Weeding is important as the weeds will take up the nutrients from the soil. This will causes our plants to only receive low amounts of nutrients as they have to fight for the nutrients with the weed. This will lead to slower plant growth and maturity.

    Another thing that we did was thinning. Thinning is the process where you remove excess plants from the bed. I forgot to mention this before but we did not have enough seedlings to plant in the beds. Therefore, we directly planted the seed into the bed. This pretty much causes overcrowding of the seedlings as there are too many of them. Same as the weed problem, this will cause the plant to fight for nutrients causing slower growth. When thinning the plants, make sure to remove the smaller ones and keep the larger ones. Ideally, you want around 2 to 3 seedlings per hole. Any more than that is not really ideal for optimum plant growth.

    We also continued to improve the mulching of the beds. Our previous attempt at doing mulching was not really up to standard so we added some more palm fronds and dried leaves to the bed. Also, some of my plants were eaten by insects, while some were near wilting due to the heat.

    

That's it for now, see ya later.