Onion Planting, etc.

Yeah!  Pete and the intern crew just finished planting out the onions today.  There are now ten 100 foot beds planted, each with 4 rows with roughly 3 plants per foot = 12,000 plants!  This year we grew Copra, New York Early, Mercury, Purplette, Ailsa Craig, Gold Coin, and seed-grown Shallots.  Now it’s just a matter of weeding and watering.

I also just finished applying fertilizer to the next acre of ground.  I used a drop spreader to apply lime at 1 ton per acre and soft rock phosphate at 1/2 ton per acre.  I then used a manure spreader to apply composted cow manure at 10 yards per acre.

I get this cow manure locally, and I’d like to use just local fertility.  The chicken manure that most farmers use has to be trucked from some distance, and is really a byproduct of industrial poultry farming.  If all our poultry was raised on pasture, there’d be very little manure piling up.

But ...looking at some of our first plantings I realized that our nitrogen levels were too low.  So, in a pinch, I bought pelletized chicken manure to suplement the other fertilizers and used a spin spreader to apply it at 1/2 ton per acre.

My longer term goal is to grow more fertility on site, and I plan on keeping two of my six annual crop acres in a year-long cover crop in any given year.  Right now, though, that other two acres is still in pasture grass, and I’m not sure when I’ll get to it.