Week 2: 9/4/24

Second week of the CSA project!

Checking on the plants from last week part 1! This tray contains carrot, banana pepper, and jalapeño seeds. The carrots have started germinating, but the peppers still haven’t emerged. We’ll be comparing direct-seeded and transplanted carrots in the plot, so we’ll have to transplant these carrots while simultaneously sowing carrot seeds in the field.




Checking on the plants from last week part 2! This tray contains pumpkin, cucumber, and tomato seeds. Each of the plants show some degree of germination from the seeds, with the pumpkins being the most developed and the cucumbers and tomatoes following. We should be ready to transplant these into the plot next week.


Here, us and the other groups are watering the plants. It's imperative to refresh the soil with water to ensure the plants are adequately hydrated at field capacity; if the plants drop to their permanent wilting point, they can’t recover from the effects of dehydration. These include cavitation (air bubbles in the xylem), root hair damage, and high, toxic ion concentrations in cells.


We’re seeding more trays with seeds we didn’t plant last week; these include corn, bunching onions, and more carrots. Similar to last week, we’ve labeled wooden stakes with the plant names and planting dates, made holes in the soil with smaller plastic stakes, and placed the seeds in the cells.


We’ve finished seeding our tray with the seeds for the additional crops! This is what the finished tray looks like, with the stakes labeling the cells by the seeds they contain. Next week, we’ll monitor this tray for germination and transfer transplant-ready seedlings from our other trays to our plot.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who are the Five Peas?

Image
Hello, we're the Five Peas! We're so excited to bring you updates on our community supported agriculture project this fall semester. We'll be posting content on everything from seeding to harvest on this blog, so stay tuned!  Left to right: Mark J., Amitha K., Sam P., Madeline C., Lindsey F.
Read more

Project Objectives

Before getting into our weekly entries, here are the objectives we're going to examine over the semester with our community supported agriculture (CSA) project: What changes are observed in direct-seeded vs. transplanted carrots (added to our plot at the same time) with regards to growth, development, yield, and other characteristics? Do the growth, development, yield, and other qualities of banana peppers and jalapeños change if they are planted together vs. planted in two separate beds? If so, how? How do the plants in the plot interact with each other? Specific examples: Does nitrogen fixation from snap and snow peas help the adjacent corn, pumpkins, and cucumbers? (inspired by the indigenous Three Sisters method of planting corn, beans, and squash together) Do certain plants inhibit each others' growth? (root competition for water and nutrients, leaf competition for light, etc.) How do the plants in the plot respond to various management strategies? Do horizontal vs. vertic...
Read more

Week 1: 8/28/24

Image
First day starting the CSA project!  To start off the CSA project, we first divided up our 25 x 25 ft plot of land to figure out what crops we wanted to plant and where. We’ve placed the pumpkins on the northeast end to minimize shading and maximize sun exposure, and we’ve placed the trellised peas and cucumbers near the top as well to keep them together. We’re hoping the nitrogen fixation from the peas will benefit the adjacent crops. We’re also using the carrots as a buffer between the peppers and the two different Brassica plants (bok choy and Chinese cabbage). We’ve tried to minimize competition for light, water, and nutrients in our layout.      Here, we’re examining the seeds and learning about the best planting depths/numbers for them. The smaller seeds need to be placed closer to the soil surface (to sense that there’s adequate sunlight to sustain themselves with photosynthesis once they germinate). We’re also planting 1 seed per cell for larger seeds, and...
Read more