Onions are in!!!!!

Okay, they have been for a while and I have just been a bit lazy getting around to blogging. Well, not so much lazy as busy...

Last year I posted about how we plant our onions. For many years we grew our onion starts in open flats and then the field crew would go through and lay them out on the beds about four inches apart and then go back and literally poke them into place in  the row. This has long been one of the most difficult and uncomfortable chores on the farm and we have been trying to come up with an alternative to the back straining job of setting this crop in the field.

One of the biggest challenges is the shear number of transplants necessary. You see, we grow somewhere between 80 and 100 thousand onions. We have always started them in open flats in four or five rows, and in doing so can fit between 800 and 1500 plants in a flat. We can not use our transplanters with these open flat grown starts; the one that can grip these plants can not plant them closely enough, and the one that can plant them closely enough can not grip the plants. Even if we did have a planter  that could handle it, our cell trays only hold 128 plants. A quick glance at the math says we would increase the necessary square footage in the green house by at least eight times and probably closer to ten if we tried to grow the onions in our 128s.

But after too many years of doing this by hand, and not getting any younger we compromised. We purchased new flats specifically for our onions. They have 405 cells rather than 128, so in theory we only double or quadruple the necessary square footage for propagation, then we reduced our planting numbers a bit expecting a better survival rate in the field. In short we wriggled our way into being able to use our transplanter.



One of the draw backs is the fact that these cells are tiny, and I mean tiny. They are about the size of a cocktail ice-cube. We had to adjust our planter accordingly, so all the slop that is usually acceptable in these simple machines had to be chased down and taken out. Then there is the fact that we like to plant onions no more than six inches apart, so our ground speed had to be reduced to a mind numbing .25mph. Logic dictates that the faster you go, the more important it is to pay attention, but I am here to tell you that there is a distinct bell curve to that paradigm. When you start traveling well under normal walking speed, about 3mph, things get dicey; the mind begins to wander.





So, here we are all loaded with plants. Because the starts go in so close, we also push the limits of the capacity of the tractor to transport enough plants to get to the end of the row and back before needing more flats. The bucket of this tractor is loaded as well, and we can carry eight flats on the carousels.

Despite all the sniveling, and the feeling that after twenty years of farming I can still fall flat on my face when it comes to doing something new, we muddled through that first day.

By the middle of day two we seemed to be getting things dialed in, and when it was time for our last set of seven or eight beds I think we were all comfortable, and the need to go back through and fill in or to find buried plants and liberate them from the soil, was all but gone.

The final result was a planting that was set better with significantly less fatigue than we ever thought possible.