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.
There early melons and watermelons were transplanted on plastic tarp 23rd and 24th of May at 2 cotyledons stage. They settled well, started to really take off with the last days heat:
Then is the system I have conceived and applied on all the land: planted pieces of wood mark the sowing of cucurbitas (moschata, maxima, pepo) i.e. big plants with wide spacings, and in between 2 transplanted solanaceae and 2 other direct sowings of “small” cucurbits (i.e. melon, watermelon, cucumber, kiwano, etc.):
First what it looks like for most part. If you zoom in you’ll see the little seedlings:
The main plank give me the position for the transplants and the direct sowings with markings for sowing 10 seeds per final plant in order to do heavy selection on early vigor, at about 3 weeks post germination.
I’ll detail the projects later, but they are quite a few, and I got another piece of land at a friend’s place with other projects, all in transplants on plastic tarp, on 600 square meter or so (i.e. about 6000 square feet)
In all cases, it’s kind of fun to see as my builder’s skills were used: I did my spacings as I would have done roofing or dry wall stuff… but just on a bigger scale!
At the end of the day that gonna be a very crowded land, but enabling me to do a yield assesment and selection, which wasn’t the case in prior years due to the fact I was giving short spacings between the same species to get the maximum crosses. So everything was super intertwinned, was just basically impossible to do a yield evaluation.
Spacing (as the wood pieces mark) is 1,5x2meters (i.e. about 5x7 feet) and, as of today, I got a 1 meter (3,5feet) alley to walk in and weed mechanically like yesterday with my small rototiller. Simple.
What I couldn’t afford (and didn’t want to…) to evaluate and select on yield is, as you’ll see on that video, super large spacings (between plants of the same species and project), which means creating “deserts” in between, getting full sun exposure to the soil:
It’s supposedly how modern selection is done in most cases , and for some decades now : plastic “mulch”(!?!), everything grown from transplants, perfect nutrition (i.e. amendments), and huge spacings.
Also as some will get I’m not planting after a cover crop this year, hopefully next year.
Thanks! Yes it took me a while to imagine it, after doing some simple math to figure how much spacing I would need for each sub project and approximate a possibly replicable pattern that would work.
The only thing I would change now if it had to be redone is the spacing for the cucurbitas is too limited: should have been doubled to do a better job at early growth selection as they will be reallyon top of each other when I do the selection in 2 weeks from now.
Here some maximas:
My other fields at a friend’s place with some sub-projects including specially early types of moschata, maxima, a trial of a few new strains of moschata and maxima set apart of my main fields for now, there is also my winter pepo patch in that (with the best of the best of a really crappy tasting 2024 harvest, i.e. 5 fruits out of more than an hundred were deemed to go back to the field… Mixed with two new strains recomanded for their amazing taste), also a big patch of brown and green fleshed moschata (about 200 plants), another patch of striped skin moschata )I like their esthetic…) + a few minor things like a tomato cross from last autumn in Antibes, 2 melons and one watermelon I do seed increaseon…
Once again I see volunteers which are bigger than my hand sown cucurbits, this time in the Cucumis genera, but it’s about the same in Cucurbita.
To me it means that even without selection I could have already sown all of them at least 15 days prior to my date of sowing (15th of May), which is something that has huge implication regarding the profit those crops would gain from being already big when the sun starts hitting hard and days are long, so to say circa Solstice and weeks after: it would be so much better ton have plants and in particular roots well established by then… so before the soil drys out!
No one in here grows direct sown cucurbits and transplants are done post 15th of May, mostly around 1st of June. I’m quite sure sowings could be done between 15th of April and 1st of May, i.e. when people sow in trays. So the overall idea is that, avoiding transplantation shock, those direct sown crops would be huge and well established in the soil around Solstice, further reducing the risks associated with high temps when the soil runs dry… On top of that with a canopee which would better protect the soil.
So I will definitely go towards earlier sowing and a selection relating to that in future years, as it makes so much sense!
Watermelon (yes, not a Cucumis! But still a warm loving crop!)
Volunteer and direct sown next to each other, volunteer having 5 leaves, direct sown just 2
I’m not sure if the gain in size is the biggest advantage. From my experience those that you have have about 5 days growth advantage in good conditions. Even that might give them little edge accessing water, which makes them grow better, which improves access to water etc. That might not happen every year though. However, when you sow early you are selecting for tolerance of cool conditions and so you get more out of those days in the long run. Also years that you get heat early in the season those plants get an early start. With transplants there are risks both ways. It’s cool and you get transplant shock, it’s hot and you get transplant shock, it’s good conditions and you get transplant shock, it’s dry and you need to water them extra. Direct seeded tolerate most conditions and with diverse seeds something usually wins the genetic lottery. The earlier you are going to sow the more I would plan for failure. Like intersowing with corn is more likely to have better rate of germination. especially something like melons or watermelons might have fairly high casualty rates.
All you write is sound to me Jesse. I think there is globally a little more gain of the volunteers over the direct sown, but maybe those Cucumis or warermelon pics aren’t representative or am I exagerating a bit.
On the Cucurbita side I’m quite certain the volunteers popped up so much earlier that there is huge potential of doing super early sowings like 15th of April in here and so to say select on that cold emergence.
Here is a pic of one on the 14th of May with nearly 2 leaves:
Was the selection on early vigor today 11th of June, so a radical thinning from 10 plants to one at each point, took me about 7 hours to go over nearly 600 big plants: mostly cucurbitas (maxima, moschata) plus 20 gourds (lagenarias), and then 1100 relatively smaller plants (watermelons, melons, kiwanos, cucumber-melons, cucumbers).
It is over 33degC /90degF this afternoon so I started at aurora!
It’s not what I have seen overall. The major trend in differences of seedlings being from one plot to another, and secondly from one point of sowing to the next. Meaning that on one point of sowing the overall seedlings’ development was mainly characteristic of the fertility there, so meaning that the selection was quite consistent on early vigor on each point.
Also frequently it was easier to identify the 4-5 weaker/slower than to distinguish which one of the 4-5 remainings was the strongest/fastest seedling.
Just one thing: on the highest fertility plots and sowing points the Cucurbitas at 5cm between each seeds on the line were a bit overcrowded when I did select 20 days after sowing, so that was slightly favor the margins (end of lines) but that’s about all on that. But thay only for the best fertility places, so to say 10-20% of points of sowing.
Next time, I would tend to sow Cucurbitas at 20cm each on 2 lines in order to have no competition effect on best fertility plots, but also to be able to select later, at +7 days or so, so to say to reduce the fast germination advantage as the closer from sowing I select the higher the fast germination effect is, giving clear advantage to the fastest emerging, whereas if I wait a bit it would be a bit diluted in a broader “adaptation effect” - which is our real target - , so to say make this early stage selection encompass the early vegetation stage and not only the very early emergence which gives advantage to those fast sprouting. Some sprouting later may be a little bit better growing as I don’t know much about that, but I would need more time and space to evaluate that overall early growth stage without seedlings entering into competition mode. I.e. bigger spacings.
For melons, watermelons and kiwano there was nearly zero competition effect as the seedlings were still quite small. If I didn’t have to live on the 14th of June, selection of those (11th of June) could even have been delayed to something like 15th-20th of June.
Before leaving for a month, I did a last weeding day, and then - as I didn’t want see any bare soil during summer- I sowed a cover crop with big seeds between the rows (buckwheat, corn, sorgum, mung beans) which I rototilled afterwards at one inch deep (5cm), and then handbroadcasted on all the surface a mix of small seeds (phacelia, giant amarants, giant chenopodium, eleusine coracana, a.k.a. finger millet or raggi, chia (salvia hispanica) - the 2 last being huge soil restructurators, to be valued in any case - ).
Then I rolled between the rows using a water filled roll of the same size as the rototiller (60cm, 2 feet).
Then I irrigated.
Here is how it looked like after that stage (13th of June) - one can see the roll markings :
Great info. I love how scientific you are about the selection process. I’ve been wanting to do some selection for vigour this year as well. Where I am at least it can be very difficult to tell what conditions are environmental and which are genetic because on my plot there is a massive amount of variation in soil quality. in one point the soil might be excellent and just a couple inches over where the next plant goes there is a massive rock underground that stops root growth. But as you said, it does seem easier to spot the particularly lazy individuals.
Just to have a look at the restructuration power of chia and finger millet, on my sandy acidic soil:
A relatively young eleusine plant in the worse of the worse soil I know of - even more acidic than mine and with a HUGE compaction at 5-10cm/1 inch deep -, as of July 2024
In summary: those annual plants have huge root systems, of the fasciculated type, i.e. seeming a good way to mitigate compaction problems post rototilling for example. But they also have a huge microbial activity around theur roots which make them even more exceptionnal.
Plus eleusine is a nitrogen fixing cereal. Eleusine.pdf (2.5 MB)
Both are supposedly super food, and eleusine seed is known to be germinating up to 50 years
Day length sensitivity can be a problem to address, depending on strains, your project and location.
Relatively to day length sensitivity, I found finger millets doing the job in my place, but not chias, as the only day neutral I know is a very week plant compared to its ancestors from the Andes, growing up to 2 meters / 6 feet!
Chias and eleusines contrast a lot with amarants and chenopodes, which seem to make no soil aggregation at all as their pivotal roots are “naked” when you dig them up, which os also correlated with studies finding that they do not cooperate with the soil biology (reference : videos of and personnal discussion with François Hirissou, French agronomist).
Hello Thomas , very interesting these pictures of roots.
I picked some of your elusine seeds from the serendipity package (thank you), and sowed half of it on may 14, with a little hay cover. I have not seen germination so far. When do you sow yours ? do you know if it has difficulties germinating ? I sowed it on a plot that has been unable to grow my winter cover, except for a few oats and a lot of phacelia . Maybe some mineral blockage… any idea ?
