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Posted on June 15, 2015 @ 09:50:00 PM by Paul Meagher
The conditions were right today to start planting out some vegetables. I have a handful of yellow beans and I'm getting ready to plant them into mounded rows on the right that I prepared for them.
The mounded rows on the left are where I planted Spanish onions.
Me and my brother also planted out some potatoes. Here is a strip till that is prepared for planting a long row of potatoes. Strip tills were plowed a couple of years back and rototilled each spring. The trench is dug and the potatoes need to be laid in the trench and then covered over again with a rake. Later they can be hilled to create more growing area and cultivate around the plant. I have a hiller attachment that I'll be using when that time comes.
Here is some of the equipment used to plow the furrow and transport the potatoes to be planted. My brother directed the plow as I drove. Worked ok but would only work right if we plowed from the bottom of the hill to the top and not from the top to the bottom. This is a small plow that I had for a walk-behind tractor that I attached to my farm tractor.
Each year I have a friendly competition with my father-in-law on who will get get the best yield of potatoes. I've had some low yield years using hay-based growing media (still experimenting with it) but this year I'm also going old-school but using a strip-till approach. Planted 75 lbs in the strip-till so we'll see what my return on investment is.
The final veggie I was able to plant today was some romaine lettuce. I like romaine because it doesn't bolt when it gets hotter and I can keep harvesting through the summer. With one packet of seeds I planted 3 mounded rows each 5 feet long (stick is 4 feet long for comparison). 15 feet of romaine will produce alot of lettuce.
I did some funky earth mounding around the romaine bed to help retain rain water and dew.
Tomorrow I plan to plant out some sweet corn, green beans, snow peas, beets, and carrots. I also have a few experimental plantings I want to try (confrey, diakon radish, fenugreek).
The guru of market gardening, Elliot Colemen, made a remark that I carry with me as a would be farmer. He said something to the effect that you should only become a market gardener if you know what you are doing. It takes a long time to figure out how you should grow various types of vegetables but each year is a new chance to test and refine ideas. I'll be sharing some gardening results as the spring/summer wears on.
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