2022 MacKenzie Diary
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.
The weigh-offs are over for us this year. Now comes the dreaded garden cleanup. When the soil conditions are right I like to use the tractor to removed the vines. I use the manure bucket and let the tines pull the vines out like a giant rake.
They are all shoved to one end of the garden. It even works to pull out most of the weeds.
Here is the garden after the vines are all shoved to the far end
We removed 5 trailer loads for disposal
Next we applied 10 spreader loads of manure
Ploughed it in
We were able to get the garden seeded down with fall rye right before the rains started. We expanded the patch for next year because things were kind of tight for us this year. We are up to about 13000 ft² for next year.