On Thursday last week (2nd May) we finally began planting Sturon onion sets in the new maincrop field (where the chickens and pigs were last year). We have recently bought a two-person tractor-driven module-planter, which we rigged up to plant onion sets using some water-pipes to feed the onions into the ground. Two of our wonderful wwoofers, Carlos from Spain and Yaran from Switzerland, were the first to try the new device, and by the end of Thursday they had planted almost half the onion sets.
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| Carlos and Yaran loaded up with onion sets. |
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| Feeding onions into the water-pipes for planting. |
Unfortunately we couldn't work out how to alter the machine to allow us to plant 4 lines of onions in a 1.2m (4 foot) bed, so the other two lines were planted by hand in the traditional way. We finished this task on Monday morning, again thanks to our wonderful wwoofers, so now all this year's onions are in the ground. Here's hoping for a good growing season and onion harvest, not more of those little picklers we got last season!
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| Helen, Lisa and Yaran planting onions by hand. |
We calculate that we have planted 1700 square metres of onions, being 67kg of sets, or approximately 10,000 onions. We have 8kg of sets remaining, if anybody wants to plant them themselves please get in touch with us as soon as possible, it's already getting late...
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| The tea-fairy appears for a welcome break. |
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