End of Month Number Two in a Four Square

These images were taken last week. You can see the carrots starting to really tower over the surrounding beets. When I water them, they completely flop over the beets on the west side of the bed.

In this photo, you can see the beautiful color of the Bull's Blood leaves. I think the beets are about an inch in diameter after 9 weeks. (They were planted on May 3.) That's one tiny carrot on the edge -- about an index finger-size. I've since pulled three more -- each getting to be a respectable size of about 6", although still a small carrot.

Here you can see the state of the leeks -- still pretty tiny. I have leeks planted about two weeks earlier in the ground at the community garden and they are about the size of a scallion now.

In this one, you can see the White Triumphs beginning to vine after just about 4 weeks in the ground.

Planting the sweets

This is the east bed, soil being loosened. Note around the edges a bunch of potsherds that somehow made their way into this bed! This soil is amended every year with about 4" of City of Ypsi compost.


Meet the White Triumphs. These came in a dessicated bunch wrapped in formerly damp moss in tissue paper. I didn't have time to put them in on Saturday when they arrived, so I stuck them in a glass of water overnight. Seems to have done them good. (The first year I ordered sweet potatoes and received those dessicated stems, I stuck them directly in the ground, tho they barely had a root on them. I was positive they would yield nothing--but I dug up about 15 lbs or so of potatoes in the fall.)


These were much better rooted. In fact, I managed to break up some of the rooted stems in such a way that I ended up with a few extra plants. These are planted 6" deep on 9" centers, according to Jeavon's charts for double-dug soil.


Here's the bed with 19 plants in place, all watered in.







And here's the bed with about 20 leeks squeezing in beside the sweets. The variety is Lancelot. This is the suggested method of planting from Johnny's Select Seeds: make a 6" deep hole, drop in the leek seedling and do not firm up the soil. Rain and wind will slowly fill in the hole, allowing the leek to blanch. Seems to have worked the past few years.

More fancy Four-Squares!

Lisa, here. I'm the garden steward at Recreation Park Community Garden and have an 8'x16' plot there, plus I have an herb garden, native medicinals, edible landscaping, and a lot of containers at home.
I've designated two of my roughly 4'x4' containers as my Four Square beds. This one is my west bed, containing St. Valery carrots and Bull's Blood beets, both heirlooms from Seed Savers.
I admit, I've gotten a little obsessive with this bed. As you can see on the right, germination was spotty the closer you got to the fence. So I spent many damp days gently prying out carrots from the soil and moving them, evening out the spacing.

There's about 180 carrots in this bed on 2" spacing. The beets had better germination on 3" centers around the edge.

The east bed is being planted in White Triumph sweet potatoes and leeks. The leeks were started from seed in lil greenhouses made of plastic blueberry containers. (I still have quite a few leek starts remaining, if anyone wants some.) The sweet potatoes are from Pinetree Garden Seeds and they are an ancient east coast variety that's actually a close relative of a morning glory!

This is my first blogger post ever, so please forgive clunkyness. More pix of the sweet potato planting next time!