It finally feels like spring is around the corner after what felt like the longest winter on earth. I’m so grateful to wake up to birds chirping at my window and days when t-shirts feel like acceptable attire.
We’ve been hard at work on the farm and it shows. During the flurry of valentines the baby lisianthus arrived and after all the love day hustle the focus turned to getting them tucked into their new home, House 4.
First, we made sure the new house was well furnished and outfitted with a fresh load of compost mounded to perfection. Next, we planted the crop with a presoak (think spa treatment for these plant babies) in Rootshield.
Rootshield is a root inoculate of mycorrhizae. Mycorrhizae are like naturally occurring ninjas that latch onto the roots and defend the plant against different pathogens that they come across. Pretty cool right?!?
Our beloved lisianthus sure do make us work for them and they tend to have lots of enemies to battle along the way, most being soil-born diseases. For this reason, we use Rootshield but we decided to take it a step further this year to safeguard the lissies.
While planting we always space the crop super close around 6 inches by 6 inches and sometimes closer. The roots don’t grow much beyond what they come with and they tend to grow straight up so tightly spaced helps them hold each other up without too much issue.
However, when a soil disease shows up it can quickly take out an entire bed when the crop is all spaced so tightly so this year we amended that setup. We chose to keep our 6-inch spacing but we left a 1ft wide gap between each new variety as a buffer in hopes that if a variety shows issues it can quickly be caught before it spreads to the next.
Luckily it didn’t cost us too much space and all 7,500+ lissies have been tucked into their home for the season now we just wait for summer and all the blooms to come.
XOXO, Jess
