Posts Tagged gardening

Today, I thinned a bunch of seedlings that I had direct-seeded in the garden near the beginning of April or the end of March. When it’s lettuce that I’m thinning, the seedlings become salad. They’re not always very big, but if you get enough of them, it adds up! I pulled a total of about 20 oz of lettuce from the garden.

When thinning, what you’re supposed to do is get rid of the smallest, least-developed plants, leaving the larger ones to grow. This can be difficult with direct-seeded plants like lettuce, which can grow all on top of each other, and where there can be lots of them in one place. The plants can be so tangled that it’s hard to tell which one is the biggest.

What I have learned to do is gently move the plants aside so that I can see their stems, down near the ground. Then, I look for the plants with the thinnest stems. Unlike the leafy tops, the stems are always easy to distinguish from each other. The thin-stemmed plants are the ones I end up cutting out, even if their leaves are as developed as other plants in the group.

When possible, I like to transplant instead of just cutting of the thinned plants. Often, a few plants will grow in a group with an inch or so separating them from the next-nearest plant. Instead of just pulling them out of the ground and throwing them away, I transplant them to another row in the garden, hopefully preserving them, while still accomplishing the goal of thinning the row.

After I do this, the seedlings usually wilt and look like they are total goners, as you see above, but they often recover. If they end up dying, well, I was going to thin them one way or another, so nothing lost, really. Still, I do think that for most plants, I prefer methods that involve growing the seedlings separately before transplanting them to the garden bed, as that allows for less thinning, and less waste.

Here are some radishes that got thinned. They are just starting to plump out and look like radishes. Although they’re small, they’re very peppery-tasting!

In general, the radish bed seems to have done okay with direct-seeding. I couldn’t say how many seeds failed to germinate and/or got eaten by bugs when they were tiny plants, but the resulting bed has not-too-many radishes in close proximity to other radishes. I had to pull very few.

There is a lot of use for a rake or a hoe, but there is no substitute for plopping your butt down on the dirt and getting your face at plant-level. There’s always a new weed or two that you missed with the hoe, and sometimes you notice small, important details! While thinning out the radishes, I noticed a bunch of weeds, all the same type of plant, and all growing neatly in a row. Oops! Those are the parsnips I put in the ground weeks ago.

Parsnips can take forever to germinate, but the neat row tipped me off that they were not weeds. Also, the distinctly carrotty shape of the leaf. And finally, the definitive carrot flavor when I pulled just one and chewed it up and held it in my mouth for a few seconds.

If you look closely, you can see a couple of basils that have sprung up just behind the parsnips. I either forgot the parsnips were there, or I gave up on them, and put in some basil seed next to the tomatoes. I think the parsnips and the basil should get along okay, because parsnips dig down deep, and basil is relatively shallow-rooted, but I’ll have to pay attention. The parsnips definitely get priority. As much as I love basil, it grows so quickly that it’s not much of a priority in the garden. Parsnips, on the other hand, won’t be ready until fall most likely, and some of them may still be in the ground come next spring.

While working with the radishes and parsnips, I noticed another “weed” growing where a tomato plant had been. The tomato had died after transplantation. Well, I introduce to you the Zombie Tomato! If you look closely, you will see where the original leaves fell off the main stem, and then instead of giving up the ghost, the plant grew out new stems and is giving it another go! Honestly, I suspect that the stress of having to make up this deficit will put the plant too far behind to make it very fruitful. My first tendency was to pull it out and give that garden space to something else, but I have plenty of space, and given the hurdles it’s overcome so far, I’m willing to give this plant a chance.

Speaking of tomatoes, here is the first tomato blossom of the year. I don’t know which variety of tomato this is (roma, slicer, cherry, or tomatillo), but all of this one that I’ve planted have started to put out flowers. It seems very early and they seem very small, but I guess they know best. I’m going to look up, however, and see if there would be any benefit to pinching off the early flowers to encourage more stem growth before fruiting, for a larger overall crop. I know that’s commonly done with strawberries.

The sage plant has really rebounded from the winter. I cut it back aggressively to keep it from shading out the oregano, which is still recovering. This whole bunch is all new growth. The leaves have changed shape in the second year. They’re bigger, with wavy edges, and some of them have “tags” or “ears” at the base, like sheep sorrel. I still have a bunch of dried sage from last year, so I gave this bunch to the neighbor.

Corn has popped up its head. Now that I see it, it’s easy to tell from grass. For one thing, it comes up much bigger. For another thing, it has a curled blade that grass doesn’t have. Soon these plants will be tall enough that it will be time to plant beans or peas next to them. Later, squash will be planted on the ground in the traditional “three sisters” setup.

These peas seem to be doing well. They were supposed to be green beans, but I accidentally planted the wrong seeds. I’m not doing any pole beans this year, so I decided to plant climbing peas with my corn instead of beans. Both of them are nitrogen-fixers, so they should be compatible with the three-sisters configuration. I guess we’ll see. Anyway, I’m still going to plant peas with the corn, but of course I didn’t pull out the peas that I mis-planted, so I will hopefully have a ton of peas.

Onions and leeks are tall enough and stiff enough now that I went ahead and mulched around them. They’ve still got a long way to go before they’re ready to harvest, but they seem to be past the very-fragile stage where the littlest thing kills them off.

Ah now, these are the green beans that were supposed to be planted where the snow peas are. They had a spectacular germination rate near 100%, and fortunately are a big and distinct enough plant that direct-sowing wasn’t much of a disadvantage. They came up through the ground so tall and large that thinning and mulching around them will be a piece of cake. The only problem is that I hate to thin them when they all seem to be doing so well!

Here are some tomatoes and radishes. The tomatoes seem to have settled in, with the exception of two of them that died almost immediately after transplanting. The next step is for them to get big and start producing fruit! Two years ago, I had a tomato plant on my porch, and every single blossom that formed ended up falling off without producing fruit. I never did figure out what the problem was, but I hope it doesn’t happen again.

Next to the radishes, I also direct-seeded some carrots, parsnips, and kohlrabi, but they didn’t seem to do so well. Of course, those veggies can take a while to germinate, so there may still be some hope, but I think the whole thing is probably a loss. I thinned a few of the radishes recently, and they taste amazingly radish-y for being so small.

The broccoli in the north bed is really doing well. I have high hopes for it.

Here, you can see various lettuces, cabbages, collards, bok choy, and spinach, planted behind the broccoli. They are in various stages of growth. The romaine were started indoors, but everything else was started outdoors, and frankly, they’re somewhat the worse for it. There’s a definite balance between starting plants indoors, where they’re safe from all the bugs and such, and starting them outdoors, where they don’t have to be hardened off, and I am still finding that balance.

No pictures, but a few melons have just poked their heads out of the ground, and also the cucumbers. The chile peppers and jalapenos have been transplanted, and many of them are not doing so well, but a few look like they are going to make it. Not sure what went wrong there, but there you go. Perhaps they needed a little more time to grow before being put out in the big mean world.