38-26-King Edward

I left for the week for work tentatively as Monday was forecast for hot with low humidity and a severe fire risk. As evening arrived I was was feeling more at ease with no new fires seemingly reported in my area. Monday ended up reaching 38.1 degrees Celsius with humidity reaching a dry 12%. What is worse is I am the green thumb in the family and leaving beds with directly sown seeds which need monitoring in this extreme heat made me uneasy. My wife Genevieve has enough to do with 4 kids let alone check the beds on days of these weather extremes. Plus I am the only one who knows how to start the fire fighting pump which also waters the patch. I gave instructions on what and when to water (using valuable house water) however some of the seeds which I had sown still have not come up. The carrots have, but the brassicas have not. Strange as I was trying hard to keep the bed wet. Anyway, we win some and lose some.

Fortunately I also sowed some of these seeds in the hot house just in case the extreme weather and lack of rain caused non germination. These seedlings will be planted in the next week after they have hardened off a bit. The following day on Tuesday was our first rain of some note (over 10mm) since Dec 15th (13mm). We ended up with 26.4mm for the day which allowed some nice top up to the water tank and stress relief for the gardens. Hopefully we get some follow up rain to keep getting more moisture back down low in the soil profile.

Today I harvested the last of the main potatoes. The King Edwards did not seem to be as consistently large as last year which is most likely due to less rain in December and January. I have not weighed them yet as they are sitting in te sun for a couple of hours to dry off before storing in hessian bags. Originally I was targeting 150kgs, however it appears I will be well down on this forecast. If I have about 30 kgs of King Edwards with another 10kgs left in the patch, I will end up around 100kgs which is the same as last year yet I planted more.

I have decided that I will put all my spuds under soil from now on. When times are dry it seems the spuds in soil did better than the ones under hay. Again likely due to retention of soil moisture. I am not about to baby things when times are dry so will always pick methods which enhance yields without massive quantities of water required.

King Edward Spuds

With Autumn quickly approaching, now is the time to get some of your winter crops in. With some of my seeds not germinating, I now still have to get some seedlings in over the next and will be pumping the manures into the beds which will receive green manure (tic beans) over winter. This year I am freeing up more beds so I can get more green manures through them for next summer.  About half will be under green manure once the corn, pumpkin, tomato, capsicum are finished.