Today we're going to continue along with our allium plot here, and we're going to plant some shallots
and I'm going to show you a really really
Cool way to make sure you get even and precise spacing on your shallot
sets. If this is your first time on our channel
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So last week we got started on this plot right here where we're going to put all of our alliums
Our onions our leeks our shallots and our elephant garlic and we planted two rows in
That video we planted a row of the Savannah sweet onions
and these guys are starting to take off starting to grow so we'll be hitting those with some
20-20-20 pretty soon and then we also planted a row of these Matejko leeks and
One of the commenters on the video said that I didn't plant the leeks deep enough and he's probably right
Supposedly the deeper you plant them the more of that white
Piece you get which is what everybody wants that's the kind of edible portion of the leeks
So I'm probably going to take my single wheel hoe and come in here and throw some dirt
On top of those guys and hill them up a little bit. So we get a
longer
white portion on those leeks and like I mentioned on that previous video, we're not
Preparing this whole plot at one time. We're just going to
Prepare a little piece at the time as we slowly plant all of these alliums in here.
So we've still got some of this Sorghum Sudangrass growing and I want you to look
At how much this stuff has grown in just a week. So on that last video
I had just mowed it and this stuff has just grown back really pretty really nice
I'll probably have to mow it again pretty soon
It's amazing how great the stuff just keeps growing and keeps feeding the soil
So for our shallots, I've got four rows
Intended here for shallots I've already got the drip tape laid you can see there 1, 2,
3, 4 rows of drip tape we're going to put in 4 rows of shallots.
So I cultivated this area a few days ago put my drip tape down and
today, I'm going to show you
How we can do some really nice
Plant spacing with this Wheel Hoe attachment here
This gnarly-looking little attachment that we call the Dibble Wheel. So if you've never grown or planted shallots before
we plant them from these little immature bulbs here we call sets
and shallot sets can come in several different shapes and sizes. We have one called ambition, which is more rounded
I don't have that one here with me today. And then we have these other two. This one here is called Monique
It is a semi long shallot, so it's a little bit rounded
But it has an elongated shape and then we have this other one here
Called Roderique and it's what they called banana shallot. I kind of like these elongated ones here because they're a lot easier to slice.
Now shallots are kind of like what we call a cooking onion
So they don't get as big as Iike a Vidalia onion or a traditional onion, but they get pretty decent-size and
They have a milder sweeter flavor
They're really really good in sauces and soups
And stuff like that, so well overwinter these just like we do our onions
We'll plant them now and then harvest in early spring. Now
Let's talk about this cool little attachment here
That we call the Dibble Wheel and I'm particularly fond of this attachment because I kind of helped design it
And we'll go over the parts of it's pretty simple and there's a lot of customization that can be done with this attachment here
So you have this little bracket arm
That attaches to the wheel hoe frame right there and it extends back
When there's an axle right there that runs through that bracket arm
Now the neat thing about the way we designed this is you can use one of these Dibble wheels at a time you can use
Two like I'll be doing today for a double row you can use three or even four.
The standard axle length that we provide is
15 inches long
But we've had customers call that wanted a 30-inch axle and we can easily cut one for whatever size you need
What do you think tiger? That's pretty cool ain't it.
So in our kits we include these little lock collars right here and that allows you to lock the wheels in place
Along that axle so you can get whatever row spacing you want there. If you're doing multiple rows or you can put that Dibble wheel
anywhere you want to along the axle and lock it in place
With an allen wrench. Now, these are the same wheels
That you see on the front of the wheel hoe there and you can use this with the double wheel hoe, the single,
Or the high arch it works with all three
but it's the same wheel 15 inch diameter and
We just have holes drilled in them there and then we have these aluminum dibbles there
With a little nut that screws into that hole
So these dibbles have a bolt installed into them and then they attach
Through the wheel just like that and you can control
The plant spacing you want here. I've got these on a four-inch spacing.
So the circumference of this wheel is
48 inches and
We include 12 dibbles here so that puts them 4 inches apart
But you can change that you can take these dibbles and turn them inside or just remove them completely.
So you can get 4 inch spacing and get 8 inch spacing lots of different spacing options
There you can go with now
The recommended spacing on shallot sets is about 4 to 6 inches. So I've got them all the dibbles in place today
and they're like I said, they're four inches apart on this wheel, but when that extends out
it actually ends up being closer to a
six-inch center when you're planting with it, and so these things just poke a nice little hole in the ground
It does work better if your soil is a little moist.
So I installed this drip tape like I said a few days ago and let the water run
So the soil will be nice and moist
So it
So it'll poke a nice hole in the soil there
If your dirts real fluffy that hole might cave in on you so it works better in firmer soils or if you have real fluffy
soils just wet it down a little bit before you use the Dibble wheel.
So what I'm doing today with this setup
I have my drip tape buried there where my row is going to be and I'm using this double Dibble wheel setup to basically
straddle that tape and
poke holes on each side
of that tape now these wheels do rotate independently so you can set it up and
Stagger them if you want to in this case, I'm not really worried about it with the shallots
We'll just let them run how they're going to run but you can set it up to where the holes are
staggered or opposite one another
Along the row there and this attachment not only is it going to work really great for these shallots today
But you can use it for transplants as well
You might have seen some previous videos where I showed
using it to put in some beet transplants you could use it for
About any kind of transplant you want to we designed these holes to fit really well with the cell size in our 162
seed starting trays
but you could even use it for seeds if you wanted to plant squash or pumpkins or
Or corn or beans or really anything if you wanted to mark really nice
Evenly spaced holes to put seeds in the ground. This would be a great way to do it as well
So I'm going to run along this row here and use this Dibble wheel to mark my hole locations to put my shallot sets.
I can see
See that little kind of split in the soil there
That's how I know where my drip line is. So even though it's buried I can see where it's at
So I make sure I straddle it. I don't want to run over it with those dibbles because that would puncture it and
Then we'd have to patch a leak
but I can see that little line there that crack in the soil where that drip tape line is expanded and
That lets me know where to run my wheel hoe so I don't puncture that.
Alright, alright alright check that out now, isn't that cool look a there.
all those nice little
evenly spaced
Planting divots there along this whole row here
And all we got to do is just put those shallot bulbs
In that little hole there and maybe squeeze a little dirt around them
but it doesn't get much easier than that folks. You just walk down the line
And it does all the work for you
Now you could easily do this
If you wasn't using drip tape
you can put three or four of them on there if you were planting on a 30-inch bed and
mark as many holes as you'd like
or if you just want to do one row at a time you can do that, but
That design I used today works awesome for straddling that drip tape and doing a double row
on the tape.
So I told you guys a story earlier, I do have some of these round these ambition shallots
I'm going to plant some of those too. They were just hiding and I couldn't find them. So these here have more
Rounded bulb on them, this is a more traditional shape shallot
And when we put these in the hole here, we want to orient them a certain way we can see there's a root end
to that shallot there
And then this end right here is where the vegetation or the stem is going to grow
and we basically just want to sit them down in the hole like that and
Put a little bit of dirt around them.
Now I learned this last year kind of on accident when I was planting them because I had one fall in a hole
Just I accidentally dropped one in the garden like this and it grew
Really well as opposed to my others when I didn't completely cover them, so I'm not going to completely cover these guys
We're just going to put them in the hole like this
And put a little bit of dirt around them
Like that there and they should be fine and then we should start seeing some green vegetation growing
pretty soon right there and
That's all there is to it all we got to do is just scoot along this row here and poke them in these holes.
Alright, so we got one
row down
Three more to go
got those ambition shallots planted on this first row here
you can see those stem ends kind of poking out a little bit there and
Those should start growing
pretty soon from my best
Estimation on a 40 foot double row right here. It takes about one and a half to two pounds of
Shallots, there's about a 100 shallot sets per pound. So between one and a half and two pounds
Per 40 foot double row. So now all we got to do is take our Dibble wheel
mark off these other three rows punch our little holes there and
Plant the rest of these shallots still got to plant some of these Monique and some of these Roderique banana shallots.
Alright, so we got our four rows of shallots planted there.
I put some plant labels down there so I can remember what they are
I've got two rows of the ambition or the round ones a row of Monique
or the semi-long
and a row of Roderique
which is the banana shallot.
I don't think I mentioned earlier, but I got these
Drip tape lines two feet apart. That's kind of my standard spacing on all these alliums
And then within the double row
Those plants are probably about five or those sets are probably about five to six inches apart now
I'm no shallot planting expert by any means
This is only my second year growing them
But I did learn a few things from last year's planting and been able to kind of apply that here.
I'd love to hear from you guys out there, who are
Experts in planting and growing shallots if you got any tips or tricks
put those in the comments and let me know as far as our water and fertilization on these we're going to treat them just like
Onions those shallots are heavy feeders as well
So that's why we use the drip tape we can give them plenty of water, give them all the water they need
And we can also use that drip to inject our fertilizer in there
So we'll give them some 20-20-20
At the beginning to kind of encourage root development and then switch over to just some straight nitrogen to really get some
Vegetation there. So we're not quite one third of the way through
filling this Allium plot here still got a good bit of stuff to go. We've got elephant garlic, which will probably be next
and we've got some more onions and leeks that I've grown in the seed trays
We've got some Texas legend and some Tadorna leeks that I grew in the seed trays, we need to get in the ground.
We've also got some onion plants from Dixondale ordered, they should be here pretty soon.
We're going to try there 10:15
onion this year
It's a sweet onion and also their white onion and it's going to be interesting to see to kind of compare
The onions that they grow in the field and then sell to us as plants
Versus the ones we grow in the seed trays and see if there's any difference between the two if one grows better than the other
If one makes a bigger bulb than the other.
I'll put some links below
to our shallot sets
so you can pick up some of those if you want to plant some of those this fall and
Overwinter them like we're doing I also put a link to our Dibble wheel there, you can check that out
Like I said, we've got a single wheel a double wheel and a triple wheel version lots of customization
there. If you enjoyed this video give us a big like, give us a big thumbs up, and we will see you guys next time.