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| Laying out planting lines. Foreground: onions plants ready to go in. |
Field prep began two days ago, after my onion plants arrived from Johnny's. I managed to get one row planted (that is 1 double row of 120' in length.) Today I finished the planting of rows 2 - 4, so a total of 1,920 onions were planted, at 6" spacing in each direction. For fertility (added in addition to the layer of compost tilled into the soil a few weeks earlier), I added 7.5 lbs of Cheep Cheep (4-3-3) fertilizer in a trough between the two varieties of onions for each 120 row.
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| Onions are in! |
The study is relatively the same, except that this year, instead of studying Cipollini onions, I will be using red and yellow storage onions (Red Zeppelin & Patterson). Though the allure of the Cipollini onions really was hard to resist, my prior work done in 2012 on them revealed they may have been a tad too delicate for the onslaught of wet spent grain. This is not conclusive, though, because the land I was working on two years ago was significantly heavier than this year.
In a nutshell, I will be studying the Effects of Wet Spent Brewer's Grains (SBG) as a direct applied mulch for weed suppression. I will compare the SBG to the more conventional mulching material, Straw, and my control will have no mulch whatsoever. I will also be noting the quality and quantity of the onions that are harvested. Because SBG is noted for high levels of nitrogen and other nutrients, after harvesting the onions, I will be planting a second crop of Broccoli directly into the remains of the mulch.
There will be four replications, randomly arranged, as follows, and I will be weeding half of each treatment (20') and weighing those weeds as I go (Noted below with a W). At the end of the study I will weed the entire row and weigh all of the weeds, keeping the weeded sections and un-weeded (NW) sections to compare the weight of the weeds and labor (in time) to weed them.
A schematic of the layout is below. Details of the study can be found here.
| SBG-W | SBG-W | SBG-NW | Control-W |
| SBG-NW | SBG-NW | SBG-W | Control-NW |
| Straw-W | Control-W | Straw-W | SBG-NW |
| Straw-NW | Control-NW | Straw-NW | SBG-W |
| Control-NW | Straw-NW | Control-NW | Straw-W |
| Control-W | Straw-W | Control-W | Straw-NW |
| Row 1 | Row 2 | Row 3 | Row 4 |
Control=no mulch
Straw=Straw Mulch
SBG=Spent Brewer's Grain Mulch
W=Weeded throughout the season
NW=Weeded at the end of the season
The next step will be to mulch the treatment areas with Straw and Spent Grain.
