Big Planting Day

Rain is forecast for tomorrow afternoon so it's time to get in the field!  The lower area are too wet to work, but to the East of the garlic the ground is ready.  This is slightly off plan, since the prime area is actually to the West of the garlic (right side of below photograph).  But that is the old oats and peas strip which is still contaminated with quack grass.  The East strip was daikon radish, but it is quite clean.  However, the only N it received was compost last year and compost over the Winter.  We'll see if that's enough.

Note also in the picture the garlic, which is coming up strong, and the Spring wheat just to the left.  The Spring wheat was planted April 1 with medium red clover in between each row.  It looks like the red clover has been planted too heavily.

Both strips (daikon and oats/peas) were worked with the spring tooth, as deep as it would go.  I had the disc ready but it was not necessary.  The soil is much improved over last year.  These strips had been plowed a couple weeks earlier and the rain had smoothed them down a bit.  The spring tooth dug up the quack grass very well.  The team strained to pull it , but never balked and did an amazing job.  To finish preparing the daikon strip for planting we went over with the spike tooth 2-3 times.  I was very happy with how the soil broke up and the seed bed smoothed out.  I did not spike tooth the West strip so that the quack grass clumps would stay up high and die out.  I also walked the strip and threw a bunch of clods towards the fenceline.

So I made 5 rows at 2' increments, going East from the spring wheat.  From West to East, it's peas in row 1, carrots in row 2, lettuce and spinach in row 3, radishes and beets in row 4, and onions (sets), swiss chard, and kale in row 5.  I will give the lettuce some help with hand watering but otherwise the plan is to wait for the rain to do it's thing.  The forecast is for rain and cloudy days next week, so I think it will go well.

The Earthway seeder ran well but had some weird problems with the peas.  They were jamming in the seed plate and getting flung out like a slingshot.  But the seed went somewhere and I'm sure I got something in the ground.  I'm so excited!