There are four beds in the trial area, each will be planted with a single crop as follows.
Bed 1 – Onions, (Centurian) 68, 10cm apart in offset rows. Planted 31/03/09. The pictures below show the onion sets before they were covered with soil. If the tops are sticking out of the soil our neighbourhood birds pull the sets out of the ground which they did this morning in the half hour when I left the garden.
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Bed 2 – Carrots, 68, 10cm apart in offset rows.
Bed 3 – Lettuce or cabbage.
Bed 4 – Dwarf French beans.
Update 15 July 2009
The beds are all growing well and we are taking enormous lettuce (Webbs Wonderful) from bed 3.
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The onions are growing well and bulbing up nicely. What I am expecting, based on last year’s trial, is a total weight of around 10kg. |
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The germination was not 100% so some ‘stations’ are empty. Having said that the carrots are growing well and will add to our successional sowing this year. |
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What can I say! We harvested one and it weighed 970gms. I used Webbs Wonderful because it is a variety my old dad used to grow. They were always big and crunchy but maybe not best suited to a square metre bed. |
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We had so much trouble with dwarf French beans this year I decided to plant up a wigwam of runner beans. There are 11 in total as that is the number of plants I had! There could have been more, say 12 or maybe 16. |
Update 22 August 2009
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The onions wre lifted today and are now drying in the polytunnel. They will then be weighed and stored for use over winter. The size varies from small (shallot) to a good size. The yield is very impressive for such a small bed. |
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There was about 80% germination which means that some stations were empty. Even so this is a good bed of carrots which is ready to harvest. |
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Bed resown with 9 ‘Hispi’ pointed cabbage. None showing yet and if germination is bad I will move some from another bed. |
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What can I say! We have harvested about 1kg of beans so far and there are lots more to come all from just 9 plants in 1 square metre of ground. |
Details of the harvest here – nearly 9kg per bed!
