- The usual breaking up of the soil.
- Raked it flatish.
- Used hand to break up little chunks on the surface.
- Used spacing square tool, used its orange "stick" to mark out 16 holes per square foot.
- Used finger to deepen/widen the holes. (At first used the dowel, but it compressed the soil too much so I stopped and used finger instead.)
- Sprinkled amendments into each hole: A mix of ~3 parts mrp, ~2 parts kelp, and ~1 part azomite (zero alfalfa).
- Put some vermiculite into each hole to leave a shorter hole and provide an easy-to-grow-through medium.
- Used corn starch gel method to place a few seeds in each hole. I really liked this -- with a nice small cut in the bag and a nice firm gel it was easy to control the amount.
- Covered up with more vermiculite.
- COVERED WITH BURLAP (one layer) before watering. Used bricks/rocks to hold down the burlap.
- After covering with burlap, then watered. Do not water without the burlap because then soil ends up covering over the vermiculite which ruins the whole thing. (I did it that way for the first bit at the east end of the bed before realizing it works way better with burlap on top before watering.)
That's it. I used only one layer of burlap because (a) the forecast is very cloudy and rainy so not much sun to dry things up and (b) I didn't have a lot of burlap on hand.
So here's hoping this works!!!! A one-and-done for carrot sowing is my goal!
BEETS: This is another challenge for germination in recent years, so I used almost the same carrow-sowing technique noted above. The exception is I didn't have the beet seeds in the gel (also didn't pre-soak them because they become annoyingly hard to handle when wet). For some of them I put a dollop of plain gel and then put the seed on or in the gel; for others I didn't. But for all I used vermiculate under and over.
And today I put in the rest of the red onions to fill out the east part of the leek bed.
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