It Begins...again!

The beginning of my second shot at the NE SARE Farmer's Grant that began two years ago.  Still in Huntington, but on a different plot of land.  Due to space constraints, the plot for this second attempt is much smaller, so I have had to scale down the number of plants to plant and the row width as well.

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.

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.