Week 24 - Bed PC1 Planting

This bed was prepared as a single dug bed, but we placed an additional amount of chopped up sod at the bottom of the bed under the topsoil for extra fertility. We also added approximately 100L of reasonably decomposed horse manure to the bed. This manure had a lot of wood shavings that have yet to break down so we we only worked it lightly into the top few cm of soil. Once prepared we transplanted 4 squash and pumpkin plants:

• Red Uchiki Kuri Squash (1 five week old plant) - a medium size winter variety with brilliant orange, tear drop shape smooth flesh fruit with sweet nutty taste
• Ebisu Pumpkin (2 four week old plants) - a japanese variety producing green medium size fruit with deep orange flesh which tastes similar to a sweet potato
• Becky F1 Pumpkin (1 five week old plant) - a medium sized orange jack-o-lantern variety

In five stations spaced evenly across the bed we sowed clumps of:

• Golden Bantam Sweetcorn (8 seeds per station) - very good quality variety with a nice sweet flavour that grows to 180cm tall

We had planned to plant this bed with the "three sisters" which is a polycrop combining squash, corn and climbing beans, and will plant climbing french beans amongst the sweetcorn in a few weeks. We are a bit late planting this bed and it is questionable whether any of the crops will ripen before the first frost.


Two of the transplants, the lower image is of one of the Ebisu pumpkins which was slightly younger and less likely to be set back by the transplanting.