Well - after the traditional long gap while the seedlings get themselves established in the greenhouse I have a near 100% success rate for the 1st time meaning that I will definitely not have enough space to plant out every single one! I will, however plant out all the 16 Galician Original plants as I really want to see what that variety can do in my climate and soil ... the young plants have a distinctly different leaf to the Silver River and Bolivian Criollo Black ones - a much more bright green, slightly thinner and a different shape. Apparently they turn in to a monster of a plant, but we'll see!
My beds were prepared in the winter and are yet again 4.5 ft strips of hilled up earth (now with wood chip paths) The only preparation was to hoe off the remaining weeds and mulch with a thick layer of cow manure to allow the worms time to bring some of it down in to the soil leaving a mulching layer on top to prevent many weeds this season. All varieties are in and spaced about 2 foot apart in a 2, 3, 2, 3 ... repeating pattern of staggered rows down the length of the bed.
I have a similar bed of N.Rustica variety Mahorka Stalingradskaia - most of this is from my saved seed (last year) and may be cross contaminated ... but I have 4 labelled plants raised from the few original seeds left that came from GRIN and I fully intend to bag and save seeds from the best of these specimens.
I have only given the Galician Original my customary slug and snail defence of copper collars as I don't really have enough of those ... and so far, despite the rain we've had, it doesn't really seem to have made much difference. Fingers crossed
