Eleusine are slow starters but they should have germinated already. Last year and 2 years ago I did sowings of amarants, chias and eleusine together in trays in greenhouse around 1-10th of May, then transplanted in beginning of June.
After first successes of making a small harvest in 2023, I also did direct sow in 2024 by hand broadcasting on bare soils at 2 different places, around 20-25th of June, and then turned the irrigation on. Results were contrasted, germination was good, but sowing seemed to be far too late for plants to get properly established during the summer droughts and heats, so that they survived but were all dwarfed.
At your place, maybe it was too cold by then for eleusine to germinate as it’s a crop coming from tropical regions. I could imagine that.
Ok cool! Enjoy your visit Isabelle! And me I’m actually going to the US (New Hampshire / Vermont) with also a 5 day trip in Quebec in beginning of July, there catching up and making connections with seed networks of gardeners and market gardeners already invested in Adaptation Gardeningbor trying to make their way through. Before that I plan to go visiting the University of New Hampshire Cucurbit breeding station, a major one in the US.
Take off in 5 minutes! Talk to you on the other side
Updates of my fields as of today 25th of June with that mixed cover crop I’m gonna have to weed hard hard when I get back as it developed so strongly, especially in the alleys where I rolled the just rototilled ground post sowing the cover crop… I guess it’s mission accomplished as I wanted a protected ground for the summer… But I hope the cucurbits are sufficiently developped to now dominate this cover crop. Matter of sowings timings and temps mainly… That should work in most places but I’m doubtful of some.
We’ll see… Weeding will correct cover crop growth excesses if needed.
I’m starting doing heavy weeding these days but, even it is not obvious from those pic where the cover crops and especially buckwheat and amaranth dominate, the crops are doing well!
Finally: in plain fields melons and watermelons are slower as expected, squash are doing ok, even if it really look like most plant delayed their female flowering with those heats : few set fruits around fifteen days ago, then none or so for a week and now they are preparing again female flowers. Some kiwanos prepare their flowers too, kind of disreetely. And eventually tomatoes have loads of tomatoes and I’m havesting the firsts, some eggplants and physalis look very robust and peppers too.
Last but not least: my cucurbita in the field at a friend’s place, with plastic tarp and zero irrigation plus a very compacted soil, look badly injured by the heat a week ago: so very small and… Dry. Still alive though. There’s a chance they will have recovered greatly with last week’s rains.
The only thing surprising there was seeing moschata setting fruits BEFORE maxima, like if they could stand higher temperatures. Maybe due to a slight difference of time of flower opening during the day like when it was 40°C/104°F (and even more in plain sun!) or so every minute counted for pollen and embryo to stay viable: I can’t tell right now what’s the difference but maybe it’s moschata, coming from more arid regions, which open first.
your experience at your friend’s land confirms what is happening here too, in clay soil and without watering it becomes complicated to have healthy plants that produce fruit.
For the tarps, same observation… my father had made a strawberry board and they ended up in dust completely decomposed by the high temperature!
I think that cultivation under shade will become the norm in our climate!
can be under vines trellises, chayotte, climbing bean, kiwano…
I have a much different take on that: timing is essence
: I never had problems with plastic tarps in 4 years, except at my friend’s place where he litterally killed his soil after 10 years of yearly shallow tilling… Soil being REALLY hard like concrete 5-10 cm under the surface.
Since 2022, alll my crops did well with plastic tarps and no irrigation - even if when super hot suffering too much reflexion - : the reasons to me being that first I kept water IN the ground and second that there was no competition with other plants. But I put the tarp either in winter or in beginning of april max like this year, when the soil is really moist. Watermelons in particular love it.
Then on the shade side of things I agree but with some limits, because I can’t grow anything where root trees are, i.e. a little further than where are their branches, at vertical, in most cases.
My cover crop in plain field this year (on 1800m2 out of 2100 at my place!) is still a trial to get rid of those plastic tarps that I don’t like for micro-plastics I’m afraid of… Even if those farmers just give me before they would send to recycle, that doesn’t change it’s plastic … But this plain field mixed main crop / cover crop system would not work without irrigation unfortunately: cover crops beeing too strong compared to our cucurbits. Or I would need to find more dwarfed cover crops, or go towards perennial cover crops so many are trying these days.
Agronomically speaking, I keep in mind just 2 principles :
try to get the soil covered all the time : best case with living plants, then with dead plants (like a rolled “winter” cover crop, with rye and fabas for ex.), then with any kind of mulch like straw, wood chips, and then only if none of those with … a plastic tarp! It’s the worse case option, but has to be put early, or at least in my sandy soil, to keep the water in the soil.
then, and on the long run, increase soil organic matter by every means, as it’s litterally what makes most of water retention, and especially if associated with clay (I don’t have any clay in here though!). For that I favor all types of cover crops and especially those having a powerful root system which litterally makes a good soil structure (in my place rye and soghum, maybe corn, and more marginally chia and eleusine being the best candidates for that purpose). The problem with “heavy mulching-only”, without any intervention of a rototiller or something of the sort, being the progressive loss of soil structure, and life, as all living things depend on living roots.
Then… those are complicated matters! And soils and climates are so different from one place to another! If I said to sow a winter cover crop to friends in Quebec they would just laugh at me!
gronomically speaking, your analysis is interesting!
But I’m faced with issues that are leading me down a different path.
Covering the soil with crops, but edible ones… How can I maximize vegetable crops so I don’t have to use green manure, which takes up too much cultivated space for too long.
Covering crops and stacking them to save space… A permanent structure such as a pergola that can support a crop on top in the summer seems like a good idea to me… It’s also very effective when hail falls several times a year, as it has this year in the surrounding villages (you lose the crop on top but not the one underneath!).
Don’t depend on imported organic matter; try to balance the garden by recycling and composting lightly on site. Heavy mulching in clay soil is bad because it insulates the soil too much from the sun in winter… the soil stays cold too long and the garden starts too slowly…
Vegetables do not like having a root temperature of 12°c 54°F when it starts to get 25°c 77°F in May!
The only use I’ve found for tarps that I think is great is :
-not having to till the soil or weed…when the seedbed is ready and the grass starts to grow, a few days under a tarp kills the seedlings before clearing the way for crops.
-A black tarp left on an uncultivated area for a few weeks in winter raises the temperature of the clay soil, which takes a long time to warm up.
To avoid microplastics, I plan to invest in thick, sturdy black tarps that can be handled for these basic uses.
Also about timing: if I had direct sown everything like last year on the 5th to 7th of June plants would have had a really hard time from 15th of June to 15th of July! They would gave veen just emerging, so very very susceptible to drought. This year I anticipated all plain field cucurbits sowings to 16th and 20th of May, so they were much much much bigger when the heat wave arrived, including taproot and root system in general which I’m sure help them very much to access water underground.
That’s one of the reason why I intend to do some really intense selection on cold emergence from next year on, i.e. cucurbitas direct sown around the 15th of April and melons arounds 1st of May.
And also, on the tarp I’ve put the melon and watermelon plants in the ground at two cotyledons stage around the 15th of May, so that they were well settled early in season too.
This approach also seems essential in clay soil…
Find plants with strong roots that break up clumps and grow as quickly as possible before the arrival of the heat in June.
But how can you select based on an invisible criterion? Keep all the seeds and then pull up the plants, measuring the roots (which will break…).
If actual root length is important, wait for fall, pull the plants as gently as you can after harvest, and measure root growth then. Keep your primary seeds from those with good root growth.
The best survivors will probably have deep roots by default. Whether taproot or expanded rootball will depend largely on your soil and water. My dad once had a zucchini with a rootball three feet deep and two feet in diameter, in soil largely made of sand and rock. In clay (my experience) the survivors tend to have a deeper root system rather than spread out.
Clay is complex because in spring here it is cold in the soil and the roots remain on the surface… then it becomes very hot and dry and the roots haven’t had time to grow deeper to found water.
You’re right, when you think about it, you just need to keep the plants that don’t suffer from drought, which is likely to mean that the roots have grown deeper… as Thomas suggests, early direct sowing is certainly a good indicator too.
no need to send out the moles out as scouts to check it out.
At the end of the season I coulf dug up roots of the highest yielding or seemingly best looking plants and other looking weaker, just to establish that correlation. But I imagine it is correlated, especially if you have a challenging environment.
I’m really overwhelmed these days but here is a good excerpt from this year growing season.
This morning harvest: should be around 550-600kg harvest of watermelon on this 170-180m2 piece of land, so about 3,5kg/m2. Plastic tarp, non irrigated. Planted around 20th of may at 2 cotyledons stage. 2 modalitues: 2 and 4 plants per square meter.
Weeding had been kind of crazy in worst places, as you can see from pictures, took me a week to terminate the cover crop and weed around my plants, but anyhow I’m very happy because the soil has been protected from the heavy sun (approaching 40degC, 100+degF) by this trick and now all my cucurbs are sprawling in every direction, maxima, moschata, kiwanos, and so on.
Also some eggplants in f2 generation do good this year, same for some hot peppers (thanks @JesseI !) so it’s kind of a telling selection year and I’m over happy over all.
Also I’m doing a 200+ tomato plant trial on Late Blight resistance. I still found no time to look into the varieties but thay’s gonna be interesting. Plenty of fruits already…
… But this plain field mixed main crop / cover crop system would not work without irrigation unfortunately: cover crops beeing too strong compared to our cucurbits. Or I would need to find more dwarfed cover crops, or go towards perennial cover crops so many are trying these days.
