Welcome to our 2022 growing diary. So far this year everything is far behind last year’s start to the season. We have not been able to get into our patch yet, because it is too wet. Last weekend it was very close to being dry enough. We were able to apply a layer of manure. It was too wet last fall to do this so we had to do it now. Of course the rain came the next day.
Today we got several trailer loads of coco coir from our neighbour. He removes the used growing medium from a local cannabis producer. It is stockpiled and allowed to break down. The picture below shows part of the large pile. The fresh stuff is on the right and the decomposed stuff is on the left.
It works very well to loosen up our clay soil.
The picture below shows our young watermelon seedlings along with some bushel gourd seedlings. Hopefully, in the next few days we will be grafting the watermelon to the bushel gourd. This will be 2 weeks later than last year. We had a lot of trouble this year getting the BG to germinate. That set us back a little.
We plan to grow 2 pumpkins and 1 squash this year. We started these plants a bit later as well. We started the germination process on the plants below last Saturday (April 23). So they are just nicely out of the soil. We have a couple of our 1747.5 as back up plants. For pumpkin we are going with the same seeds as last year. The 2118 Barron has always given us a heavy pumpkin, is very heat tolerant and is a very aggressive plant. Also going with the 2200 est Geddes again. This was also a very aggressive plant with a lot of potential (we think). The squash we are going with is Harley Sproule’s 1507.5. Thanks for the seeds Harley. It’s been a long time since we grew a squash.
This next picture is a look at our cabbage plants. We started these mid-February. They are from our own seed that we harvested last fall.
Finally, we would like to encourage all the GVGO members out there to start a diary this year. We can all learn from each other.
Yesterday, I grafted our 7 watermelon seedlings to bushel gourd rootstock. Elaine took a video of the process.
After a very wet and cool start to the season things have quickly turned into summer like conditions. We planted our pumpkins and squash today. Because of the intense sunlight, we placed burlap directly over the top of the plants to protect from the midday sun. We don’t have shade cloth but we hope this will work. We checked all the heating cables before burying them and they were working. After burying them we found that one wasn’t working. It was on the squash plant. If the weather stays like this we won’t need cables very long. We still have to put up the hoophouse for the watermelon.
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We double planted this site with the 2200 est Geddes on the right and our own 1747.5 on the left as a backup
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Next the 2118 Barron on the right and our 1747.5 on the left
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Our only squash is Harley Sproule's 1507.5
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Out of the 7 watermelon grafts we only have 3 that survived. For some reason every one of the survivors is a 255 Mitchell. These are 13 days old (from grafting day) and are just starting to increase their growth after they were planted into larger pots.
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