Ordering seeds and Planting seedlings

For those not active in farming full time for a living I can say that it is a daunting task.  One needs self motivation talks every day just to get out of bed and go to work.  People think that one can go and do this sort of thing day in and day out with complete ease. Maybe I am wrong but think that folks forget that sore muscles and aching backs come with the job description.  One never can find the job description before getting the position.  As  the  Big Boss over Nothing I find myself complaining to the complaint department and never hear back about it. I guess talking to ones self and complaining will only fall upon deaf ears.

In order to spare you the boring details of reality  I will tell you that things have been moving at a steady pace. Our first attempt at pulling worn out plastic mulch imported from China was a dismal failure.  The  brother-in-law came over for a few  hours to help out and left very tired. Another friend  Alex  came and helped but the weather was miserable and it was  a rainy day with showers so only a few rows were lifted.

  My son decided he wanted to help so he lifted a few rows.  Not enough rows left over from last seasons crops have been lifted as several farm projects  needed working on.

Our "Chook Majal" has been worked on with the gutter installed and a cage built on the inside to hold breeding stock and the baby chick  area was worked on.  With that part done an attempt was made to work on the  roosts  but a debate on issues relating to that are not finalized.

In the meantime a debate over the costs of seedlings erupted and seeing how the price has doubled in the last six months required  some drastic measures to be taken.  I did some research on my fave  Internet channel to find out ideas for a seeding machine.  After much viewing and search engine searching it was decided to build our own.  We now have one vacuum attachment that will place seeds into seedling trays  for us at 128 seeds at a time.   The next project started but not yet completed is  the seedling house where to store these  new seedlings.  We have several thousand in the little greenhouse but they need to go out  to make way for the next seedling planting.

Seedlings arrived and in the shade of the giant pine tree

 

 

Seedlings loaded on the tractor for the trip out to the paddock

Close up view of water trans-planter wheels

Overloaded with liquid fertilizer mix of seedlings, humates and fish emulsion; all that is missing is the people.

More work and never enough hours in the day is all that was running through my mind at the time.

Final results with the first planting of onions,shallots, and Italian flat onions

  Only two weeds were detected in the entire amount so I was happy with that turnout.  24,000 seedlings of various onions. Our Red Torpedo Onions were the largest amount  planted, Shallots, Red Flat onions and Flat Brown ones.  Because of the delays  in planting them they sat around for almost a week waiting to be planted.  Rain along with  some hail delayed the planting and getting the ground ready for them was a bit slow.

Well I am here to tell you that with a huge push we planted them in one and a half days worth of planting time.
In between that work, some harvesting of our current crop of purple torpedo onions took place and an order for 50 bunches was delivered to the local fruit and veggie shop.

The final product Purple Torpedo Onions  ready for delivery

All in all after long hours  of work we are moving forward with Spring planting.  New  seeds arrived and after looking all over this country for Orange Thai Chili seeds that will replace the ones that were discontinued we have finally been given 54 seeds to do a Trial plot of them by a local seed company.  This is good news for our Favorite small Business Owner  Susan  from Twisted Pickle     www.twistedpickle.com.au   in Rockingham.   She makes a Orange Sweet chili Sauce  from them which is delicious and full of flavour as well. 

Since our last blog with the long list of veggies we plan on planting we are adding a few and taking away a few . A shipment of seeds was removed by WA  AQIS  as rejected and so  we are planting around them.
We are adding a few different varieties of Tomatoes and baby romas, Pink Grape tomatoes and a orange grape tomato.
 

In addition to that we are adding more Gem Squash to the line up as they are popular with the kids on the table and they last a long time with storage.  They don't do too well with the powdery mildew but that can be helped along.    We are trialing three different versions of them. Two are Hybrids by two different seed companies and one is an OP  version  that we are adding to the list.  Two types of Paprika  are being added to the list . A red long Paprika ( Susan at Twisted Pickle makes a supremo tasting Sweet Paprika Salad Dressing with them) and a Yellow Long Paprika.    In addition a small squash called Sunburst  is being added to the Zucchini seed areas.

Due to the fact that we are trialing  the Orange Thai Chili we will not be growing the Yellow Thai Chili that we thought we wanted to grow to replace it.  Oh well these things happen. Until next time thank you for reading this far on what we are doing.