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Entry Date
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Nick Name
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Location
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Saturday, June 13, 2009
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Iowegian
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Anamosa, IA [email protected]
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Entry 27 of 91 |
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This is our main long gourd patch. Jacob helped me build the trellis using steel fence posts and 16' long cattle panels. The gourds can climb up tomato cages until they get tall enough to reach the panels.
The soil is Fayette silty clay loam, and being on a flat at the bottom of a hill it has real thick, black topsoil. We then built a raised bed with 2X10's and filled it with black topsoil from the creek bottom, and bagged topsoil and compost from WalMart and Menards. It had been a strawberry patch for a couple of years until weeds took over.
Last year was the first year for gourds and it had a lot of
manure added. We used some 10-10-10 and some Schultz water soluable tomato food last year. Last fall we added 2 wheel barrow loads of manure and several hundred pounds of giant pumpkin. The only fertilizer this year has been Espoma Bio-Tone Starter plus (all natural). It has received a couple of shots of compost tea. The only artificial fertilizer we plan to use is a foliar feeding that another successful grower recommended. I want to keep the soil biology intact.
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