Here’s the ground prepared. Couldn’t do a cover crop last autumn (international gathering and stuff… Too busy…) so I went for rototilling the weedy land (11th of April), followed by one whole day of rotovator yesterday, i.e. 14th of May.
Today I’ve spent the whole day implanting markers (wood pieces) to help me with all the different projects I’m gonna locate in there. In total about 2000m2, of which 250m2 will be covered by a tarp for some special early melons and watermelons experiments.
More on that later! Everything from melon to squash kiwanos cucumbers and watermelons will be direct sown!
PS: I have also about 700m2 in a friend’s place that as well will be covered in plastic tarps (used for silage, that I intercept before they go to recycling). With tarps I’m just making holes in them and plant, or sow and never water the plants which seem happy with that (2022, 2023, 2024 experiments).
But… The solanaceae I didn’t detail (toms, eggplants, peppers and physalis) will be from transplants of 4x4cm soil blockers, i.e. very small compared to the usual transplants. They are about one month old.
On top I’ll do some direct sowings of f2s and f3s from @JesseI mainly (toms and peppers).
On the early melons and watermelons patch (250m2) covered in plastic tarp, I’ll use transplant at 2 cotyledons stage (in 4x4 soil blockers). My idea with that was to speed up the process a bit, and was needed because it’s my most demanded selection AND the smallest in quantities originally, so I cannot do my usual oversowing: so I will do another round of seed increase (with the usual earliness and taste selection) to be able to do a direct oversowing of these early types next year.
So, to sum it up, overall:
cucurbits : 90% direct sown
solanaceae: 90% from small transplants
surfaces: 3/4 cucurbits 1/4 solanaceae
And -apart from those on the plastic tarp, planted densely- I’m planting in a way that allows yield and overall plant growth selection by putting each plant of one species sufficiently far from the next, interplanted with a bunch of other species specimen. Designing that and getting the figures right, on top of allowing the right surfaces to each project, was the biggest work.
