The local lambsquarters, quinoas cousins has sprouted so its probably a good time to seed quinoa.
But first we must prep the land.
Preparing 1/3 acre of land for quinoa planting can seem like a big task when you're using hand tools. While we could use tractor to till the land and this would be faster its important to us to not break up the soil networks (fungi, bacteria). The wheel hoe only penetrates through the top few inches of soil in order to cut off weeds... In just half a days work, the two of us got it prepped. We decided to rack the weeds/stones into windrows this year, we'll see how that goes.
The green unweeded area is where we mostly grew quinoa last year. Its wetter there and we found the plants got tall and many fell over during a windy period. We'll be growing in the left hand side that has been wheel hoed and deweeded. We're trying out a windrow like technique of piling the weeds and rocks into rows that will parallel the quinoa rows.