A quick post to mainly talk about getting your kumara in the ground. We know there are people who live where you can’t grow kumara, but just remember all the wonderful vegetables you grow better than those of us in the warm north!
I have been saving a little patch for the kumara which is looking wonderful and lush. There’s a cabbage in the bed which has another week or two to go on it, but I’ll save some plants and put them in a bit later in this space.
Firstly I forked through the bed to aerate it and since we’re putting a root crop in, it’s important the soil is fluffy. I’m pretty sure I can see the roots of the guava tree next to this bed encroaching which is a nuisance. It will be fine, but just annoying. To the soil I added some of our vermicast, our new Morganics fertiliser and some compost and worked that in all together.
Then super carefully I extracted the slips from the mother kumara. The first one came off as a single, but then I managed to get a good clump off in one go and I separated them after that. While kumara is really hardy and can grow from almost no roots, the more roots there are, the better.
Simply pop in the soil, water and net until they get established.
While we’re just finishing Full Moon and a focus on root crops, I turned my attention to the onion bed, which has been a bit neglected!! It has been under Mikroclima and to be fair, I didn’t notice how bad it was.
If you’re watching ‘Nadia’s Farm’, you’ll have seen her success at growing garlic limited by allowing the weeds to grow around the plants. Alliums and weeds are not good bedfellows. This onion bed has had its struggles this year, due I believe to the enormous amount of rainfall we had during the winter. Not that the roots rotted or anything, just that they got battered by the rain. Anyway finally the bed is getting a good weeding and the job is made joyous with the use of my trusty Niwashi.
Gave the plants a feed of liquid seaweed and will do that weekly now till they’re fully mature. I kept re-planting during the winter as I experienced losses, so you can see how there are onions of all sizes in this bed. I reckon I won’t be doing a big harvest all in one go this year.
Other root crops you can sow or plant or thin or feed up at this time of the year are carrots, spring onions, radishes, baby turnips, Florence fennel and beetroot.
Our ‘Feed the Birds and Bees’ sunflowers are flowering. There was a bird on one just as I arrived to take the pic, but without a long lens on a camera, you can’t get those shots unfortunately.
Have a good week in the garden!
From Jan and Rob
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8 Responses
Had same onion problem
Good to know John. We’ll have a relatively decent harvest, but not as good as it could have been.
I love your monthly newsletter – thank you.
Can you tell me where you get your hoops from please.
Thanks Penny. Sure, we make the hoops ourselves. It’s not complicated, honest… https://organicediblegarden.co.nz/2017/02/16/17-february-2017/
I noticed you said you’re getting the kumara into the ground but mine were already in the beds throughout winter inside glasshouse. They just sprout up from the last season. I’m in Dunedin. Do I leave them till after summer to harvest? I’m confused.
Hi Janet We harvest our kumara after 5 months of their being in the ground. You could carefully dig one plant up now and see how big the kumara are.
I just realised , after reading some local Facebook post, that my onions were planted too deep. Yesterday, I started digging around each to remove as much soil as possible. There were hardly any bulbs formed. Would they resume growth normally now? I always thought onions, garlic and spring onions are root vegetables so should be underground. Was I wrong?
Hi Janet Have a look at Rob planting onion seedlings here… https://organicediblegarden.co.nz/2017/03/08/10-march-2017/ Yours may still pull away. They plump up reasonably quickly at the end just before harvest. Weekly applications of liquid seaweed will help.