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I’m unchangingly on the lookout for ways to pack increasingly crops in, get higher yields, reduce or at least spread the workload. All while nurturing healthy soil and organic supplies that people enjoy.
I wrote well-nigh Preparing your Hoophouse for Fall and Winter on September 28. I belatedly realized that in my hurry to publish the post I let some out-of-date info slip in. We don’t do our fall salt wash-down in November any increasingly – we prefer early October, while it is still warm unbearable for the plants to be improved by uneaten water, rather than drowned and miserable. We have switched from two days in the spring to three, as we think two days wasn’t quite unbearable water to get all the salt when deep in the soil profile. We had ambitions of doing three days in the fall as well, but I can tell you now, from experience, that we can fit in two days but no more.
I’ve described how we broadfork and rake all the beds in the fall, and the value I can do in one day (along with all the other tasks) is 1/3 of a 96ft x 4ft (29m x1.2m) bed. That human limitation, and the logistics of crop rotation and planting dates, leaves a small window between preparing the first three beds to get planted (9/6-10/6), and the remaining four (10/10-10/24). It really doesn’t work well to broadfork and rake saturated soil! It’s largest to have a few days for the water to soak in. So, we are satisfied with two days of salt wash-down in fall, for the time being.
Last fall I noticed that some areas of some of our beds were idle between stuff prepped and planting dates in November and December. I hate to waste prime real manor like hoophouse bed space, So this year when we planned our bed layout, we herded all the little late sowings into one bed with the intention of finding some fast-growing crops to put in that space first. We moreover managed a increasingly rational layout in each bed, planting the various crops in chronological order from the east end to the west.
Next, I researched what we might grow superiority of the main crop. There are some unknowns here. We have numbers of days to maturity for crops in platonic conditions (nice warm spring temperatures), but we are heading into colder temperatures and shorter days. So it might not work out as we hope. However, given our fondness for salad mixes, anything we have to pull up immature will still be eaten and enjoyed!
The bed in question was all ready to plant on September 30. The areas I could see for reservation crops included 11/9 “filler” spinach and filler lettuce, 11/15 tatsoi #2, 12/7 lettuce mix #2, 12/18 mustard salad mix, and 12/20 radish #5.
I decided to put the 16ft (5m) of areas for November 9-15 sowings (39-45 days to go) into 45day Tokyo bekana and the 18ft (5.5m) of areas for sowings without December 7 (79 days misogynist at that point) into 60day Cylindra beets. The Tokyo bekana came up very quickly, and I expect it will be destined for salad greens, which will be very useful as our outdoor lettuce is waning and we’ve just had a patchy frost (early for here) – the colder weather will slow crops down.
The beets have still not come up 9 days later, and the soil is 60F (15.5C). I’ll trammels then tomorrow. 10 days should be long unbearable with soil at that temperature. My niggling worry is that the salt wash-down has drowned the seeds. See Root Crops in August. If they are not up at 10 days, I think I will hoe the zone and resow with something quicker – perhaps tatsoi (45 days). I was disregarding tatsoi considering it will vendibles in January. Umm, but this is a reservation crop, that we’ll need to pull up in early December – January isn’t plane on its calendar!
Belle Isle Upland Cress from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Last winter we grew a small patch of carrots considering one of the hairdo really wanted to try them in the hoophouse. I wasn’t a fan considering carrots are so slow-growing and provide only one harvest (usually). But I am a fan of democracy and participation, so we grew carrots. We could have harvested them sooner than we did and planted something else (in my opinion), but there they sat all winter.
Oh yes, well-nigh that “usually”: you can eat carrot tops and I have used finely chopped carrot leaves as a garnish. A major trademark of crackers has carrot tops as one the herbs in their Herb Crackers. Read the small print!
This fall, as we planned our crops, I said I’d prefer not to grow carrots again, but I was out-voted, and hence we sowed carrots. Now those hairdo members have left, and I gave the evil eye to the carrots. I’d just read an interesting vendible well-nigh nutrient-dense vegetables, and learned that The 5 Most Nutrient-Dense Vegetables Based on Science are watercress, Chinese (Napa) cabbage, Swiss chard, beet greens, and spinach. We’re growing all the others, but no watercress. For the next-best thing, I wanted to try land cress/Upland Cress in our winter hoophouse. So I hoed off the little carrots and sowed Creasy Greens Upland Cress and Belle Isle Upland Cress from Southern Exposure. They take 50 days to maturity (in spring) and I note:
“The yellow blossoms help nourish ladybugs, syrphids, and other salubrious insects”
So I plan to let some flower in spring for the salubrious insects.
Last year, one of our trials was a hodgepodge of yearly flowers to vamp increasingly pollinators into the hoophouse. None of the ones we tried seemed to do much, except for one shingiku (chrysanthemum greens) which is still flowering! Readers suggested I’d do largest to just let some winter brassicas flower instead of growing special flowers. So upland cress might wilt part of our solution for that! We’re moreover growing a perennial, yarrow, to vamp beneficials.
The other hoophouse tweaks on my list are increasingly for spring and summer, so I’ll leave those for flipside post.
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