Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Rambling: Blah de blah de blah. And onions.

Look! It's me! Writing another post!

About. Something.

Something or other.

A thing.

Um.

Oh! Hey! The onions came! Copra onion seedlings. From Territorial. Five bunches, at "4-6 dozen" plants per bunch. So, 240 to 360 plants. That's a little alarming.

Let's continue the math. Territorial's recommended spacing is four inches apart. If we're assuming that's in both directions, that would be sixteen square inches of ground per onion. I plan to, instead, plant four plants per hole (you can plant multiple seedlings per hole with onions, which is handy for minimizing holes in the weed barrier) in holes eighteen inches apart in each direction.

That would give me eighty-one square inches per onion, or five times the recommended spacing. That seems good for the dry farming thing. Except Gardening Without Irrigation says that summer-grown onions need "abundant irrigation." Hmm. Dang. Now, one or two websites suggest that you can dryfarm onions--one suggests a six to eight inch spacing, and I'm providing more space than that. And another website says that Copra is more drought-tolerant than other varieties. So we'll see. Would cutting to three plants per hole (108 square inches per onion) improve my odds?

I have enough onions to experiment with both dry farming and irrigation. At twelve holes per six-foot planting block, four onions per hole, 240 to 360 plants is five to seven blocks. I could irrigate roughly half and dryfarm the other roughly-half.

I wanted to grow my own onion seedlings this year, but revamping the farm took too much of my lazy-gardener gardening time. Maybe next year.

Um.

That is all.

No comments:

Post a Comment