One thing that farmers like to do to have fun is help out other farmers. It's the perfect way to learn from each other and socialize while also getting work done.
Getting work done is the main thing that farmers like to do.
Recently, a Beginning Farmers group has started meeting up in the Keweenaw area. Yesterday we got together at Wintergreen Foods and everyone was kind enough to lend us their hands. We got a lot of work done.
In fact we filled 85 trays like the one above, which means we planted over 6500 onion seeds.
We finished the project (which would have taken Scott and me a good 3-4 days to complete on our own) in about 6 hours.
Thanks everyone for coming out to lend a hand!
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| Sara gives Jake and Ashley, from North Harvest CSA in Calumet, a quick soil mix tutorial. |
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| Making soil blocks. |
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| Matt, Lynette and Katie planting onion seeds in the blocks. |
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| We ate lunch outside in the snowy parking lot. It was warmer out there than in the unheated building. |
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| Cold as it was, lots of good play happened :) |
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| We brought the trays home and loaded them into the greenhouse. |
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| After shoveling a bit of snow. |
That's a lot of onion trays! Good to see you got a lot of community help. Names Andrew we met at the food summit. Anyway I just thought I'd share something I did because I love onions and wanted to grow a couple thousand but don't have much grow space for really early starts. Have you guys looked into multiplanting? In Europe they plant a lot of root crops in soilblocks with multiple seeds per block and space them by multiplying how many seeds in each block and the recommended spacing. It makes it easier to weed and you save soil block mix and space too. I put 5 onion seeds per block counting on one not germinating and it worked great for 4 per block and they size up real nice as long as you plant them early enough. I talked to another successful organic farmer from the summit that showed me how he plants 1000 onion seeds per 1020 flat and he said usually 800 to 900 germinate and he just carefully submerges the flat in water till the soil rinses clean from the onions and plants em out and his onions size up really nice too. That's like 7 trays for the amount of seeds you guys planted. Anyway I'm trying that method out this year and the trays look like wheatgrass lol. We'll see how the seperating the onions out of the soil goes though. Kinda worried about that. I like that soil blocks have very little to no transplant shock. Anyway good luck with the mysterious weather LOL
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