Seed Orders December 19, 2018 @goldenoakfarm
Wednesday morning my intern was coming so we were going to get the seed orders done. Because we will be adding onto the house next year, I am not planting much in the gardens. So seed orders would be small.
The first thing we did was put the Walla onion rows on the Big garden plan so we would know how many plants we needed. I decided to do three 38’ rows for about 225 plants. The west end of the row will not do as well, due to shading by the apple tree, so there are more onions planned than I will need, to compensate.
We looked through all the catalogs for organic Walla seed. It came down to seed from Fedco, not organic or from High Mowing , organic. Price difference:
• Fedco: 1/16 oz = 400 – 600 seeds $1.90
• High Mowing: 1/64 oz = 100 – 125 seeds $2.95, and I’d need 2 pkts
Guess which I selected?
Next we had to find cover crop for the rest of the Big garden and all of the Small garden. This meant my intern had to do math, not one of her favorite things. The cover crop I wanted to use this year was buckwheat, after reading @walkerland’s and others’ posts about it.
She determined that the application rate was 80 – 120 lbs/acre. I took the middle road and used 100 lbs/acre. Big garden is 6% of an acre so it needed 6 lbs. Small garden is 2%, so 2 lbs. After price comparison Fedco, organic this time, had the best price. The range for 10# (can only buy 1# or 5#) was $24.00 for Fedco, up to $47.00 from Seeds ‘n Such.
The other cover crop I wanted to use was Phacelia, as it is a soil conditioner too. After more math, she determined the seeding rate was 12 lbs/acre. The Big garden was .72 lb, the Small .24 lb. So 1 lb would be enough. This time High Mowing had the best deal, as there were very few offering it, not even Fedco. It was $17.00/lb.
The last cover crop I wanted to try was Baker Creek’s Takane Ruby Buckwheat. All the flowers in both veg gardens would be white only. I wanted some other color too. Even though the price for a packet of 75 seeds is $4.00, pretty steep, I would order 2, one for each garden.
That took care of the vegetable gardens. We moved onto the New Herb garden. What we had to determine first is what would die over the winter and how much space it had been allowed. We determined there would be 87’ linear feet of bed open in the 7 rows of the New Herb garden.
Next we calculated how much linear garden space would be disturbed by the new construction: 56 feet. So we had plenty of space for moving plants and some space for the few things I’d want to grow for feeding the chickens in winter and some flowers. These would be:
• German chamomile 6’, 15 plants
• Borage 4’, 4 plants
• Yellow toothache plant 4’, 4 plants
• Sweet Annie 4’, 2 plants
• Snapdragons 2’, 3 plants
• Stocks 2’, 3 plants
• Canterbury bells 4’, 4 plants
From the inventory, we knew I had chamomile, Sweet Annie, yellow toothache plant, snapdragons, and stocks. The borage, organic, would come from Fedco, and the Canterbury bells from Pinetree Seeds. Done!
I have been drawing house plans for nearly a year now, trying to work out the best way of planning first floor living and utilizing what we had and not getting too close to existing utility lines or large trees.
My intern has been very interested in this process and wants to help with the house building also. So after lunch we hauled out the plans and tried again to fit what was needed into what was available.
We drew out room sizes (small pieces on right) and the basic outline to fit them into. The left side is the existing construction, the right the new. We also considered putting a bedroom and a pantry off the back on the far side of the old construction.
We have not been able to sit down and put a good amount of time into this, but we will need to soon, as we must finalize the plans, find a contractor (this will be the first construction not done by us exclusively) and get on his queue for the year. He will only be putting up the shell. We will do the finish work, except electricity. We have to find an electrician and get on his queue also.
Wednesday afternoon I worked on the Christmas puzzle for a while then watched a Christmas movie. Then I made cheese stuffed chicken burgers for supper.
Source:
Ruby Buckwheat: https://www.rareseeds.com/takane-ruby-buckwheat/
