Saturday, March 12, 2016

New Garden Spot

New food production site --
I featured this new gardening site in my succession gardening post. 


Along the rock wall I opted to plant some vine type crops. There's already a bit of a fence there (to keep the farm dog from jumping the rock walk). It could work out to be a good trellis. So in went some seeds for pole limas, pole beans, and indeterminate tomatoes (yellow pear, this time). I still have a goodly section available for planting, and I'm considering trying pole type snow peas. 


It hasn't taken long for the beans to sprout. 

Further out from the rock wall I've planted seeds for a landrace variety of winter squash. I'm currently searching for something that has decent resistance to the pickleworm moth, which can make growing certain crops here difficult if not impossible. For this experiment, I'm using a Mexican Chihuahua landrace squash seed I got from Native Seed Search. 

It only was less than a week and the squash seeds germinated. 

Across the driveway from this patch I'm sowing seed for another landrace winter squash. This one is a Taos variety. So well see which one grows better in our upcoming drought this spring. 

I also needed a spot to plant some taro plant babies that I recently harvested. So I'm using the space between the squash plants. By the time the squash vines reach the taro, it should be tall enough to easily compete. I've interplanted taro with sweet potatoes before and everything did fine. So I'll see what happens if I interplant taro with winter squash. 

After I planted everything I top dress the soil with a light amount of horse manure. Over top this I mulch with about two inches of fresh grass clippings. Once the clippings dry, it will only be 1/2" thick. So I will need to add more layers in the future. Perhaps some compost, chicken litter, chopped weeds, more grass clippings, chipped tree branches. Plus dustings of coral and lava sand, bone, ash, biochar. 

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