Bolting

Many kinds of vegetables grown for their leaves will decide one day to stop growing leaves, and start growing flowers and seeds. As they do this, they often become tough and bitter, rendering them useless for eating. This is called "bolting". Plants like lettuce, pak choi, arugula, kale, and even radishes will do this.

Why plants bolt is a bit of a mystery, and may be a combination of factors. Most commonly I read/hear from gardeners that it happens when it gets too warm and these early-season plants see the heat of summer as their cue to flower. More reputable sources suggest that it is primarily triggered by either length of day or total length of daylight received (since sprouting), though some sites suggest that other factors like dryness of the soil also affects the timing.

Well, for whatever reason, my earliest plantings of greens have decided that it is time to bolt. I have bolting pak choi, rapini, arugula, and radishes(no bulbs). Since it has been such a terrible spring for growing, they are bolting while still tiny in size. Note that in the picture of pak choi plants below, even the tiniest ones with only two leaves are actually doing their best to make buds. Last night I harvested all the plants that were bolting, plus some lettuce, pea sprout, and onion thinnings. The first harvest of the year! All this together made well under 1/4lbs. Pretty sad, indeed. I sauteed them in garlic and oil, added a bunch of frozen spinach from last year, and turned them into pasta with beans & greens. Yummy!

Happily, not everything has bolted. None of the lettuce or kale has bolted. The later plantings of all the greens still haven't bolted yet (adds credence to the total amount of daylight hours received theory). Interestingly, I planted two different kinds of pak choi at the same time. Only one of the kinds bolted. It was supposed to be a very fast-growing variety, while the slower growing variety is still going.

I just realized I could check back on my posts from last year to find out when stuff bolted then. It was at the very end of May, and I planted stuff probably a week or so later last year, so that also lends support to the total amount of daylight hours theory). Looking back at that post from a year ago, the difference in size of the plants at the same time of year is amazing. What a terrible growing year so far...

Where's the Slingshot?

So after my last post where I was upset that I had to replant my melon seeds, I came home from work later that day, and they had dug up my cucumber seeds! I know its hard to tell from that blurry picture, but that is a small mound that had most of it dug away. Thats a smaller hole over on the left side of the picture.
Since it happened during the middle of the a rainless day, the couple of exposed seeds with their newly formed first little root were presumably killed by dehydradation. I planted more seeds, and decided that I wasn't going to let this happen again. My ineficient and inelegant solution can be seen below.

Thats a sheet of plastic over the two mounds and a clear plastic lid over the area the corn seeds were planted. It seems to be working as there haven't been any holes under the plastic in the last day or so. Unfortunately, this requires me to check a couple times a day to see if anything has sprouted. When it does, I'll have to remove the cover ASAP. I'm less worried about the seedlings after they have come up. The squirrels seem to leave plants alone, though they do sometimes dig near the base of plants, exposing some of the roots.

Arg!

I spoke too soon about the Squirrels not digging up the newly planted seeds. I looked over the garden this morning, and my melon mound was all dug up! There was a germinated seed lying amongst the loose dirt. I replanted the germinated seed as well as a few more. For some reason they seem to frequently re-dig holes that I fill in, so I'll have to keep my fingers crossed.

Jaime's Herb Garden

Jaime recently put up a post about her herb garden on her blog. It is obviously related to the Miller homestead, so I figured I'd at least put a link to it on this blog.
http://jaimelyn79.blogspot.com/2011/05/herb-garden-2011.html

Squirrels

For some reason squirrels always come into the garden and dig through dirt that I've recently planted or turned over. Sometimes its not a problem because I can just fill in the holes, but sometimes the squirrels dig up the seeds, either intentionally or unitentionally. This time they dug about 6 holes, but luckily they didn't dig up any seeds. This is one example hole.Muffin asleep on the job.

Seed Starting Lessons Learned

Now that all of my seedlings have been transplanted, it seems like a good time to reflect upon how it went, and what could have been done better.

1. The grow-light and heat pad system seemed to work very well. The plants were bigger and healthier looking than last year.


2. I need to plan a bit better about when to start the seeds. I didn't really think about it much when I started them and some should have been started later while some should have been started earlier. I kept track of how long each type of plant takes before its ready to transplant, so that should make the planning easy next year.


3. I need to do a better job of hardening off the plants before transplanting them. Some of the plants are more sensitive than others. The cauliflower seemed to be the most sensitive since they burned after only being in the direct sun for a couple hours the first day. The broccoli was also pretty sensitive. The tomatoes were mildly sensitive, and the onions and peppers seemed least sensitive.


4. The small seed wells dry out pretty quickly and need to be monitored every other day to make sure they aren't drying out. I almost lost the seedlings a couple times due to them drying out.

I feel like I should have had more comments, but thats all I can think of.

A Short Break In The Weather

The weather forcast says we'll get a whole 48 hours or so without rain (finally), so I took the opportunity to finish up the last significant work in the garden. I turned over the last areas of the garden that hadn't been done yet, transplanted the last of the seedlings, and planted a bunch of seeds.

The seeds were edamame, lettuce, corn, melon, and cucumber. The only seeds I have left to plant are succession plantings of corn and the pole beans that will climb the corn. I'm planning to give each of the corn plantings a one week head start before I plant the associated beans.

Things have still been growing very slowly, but I do have a few pictures. The potatoes are starting to come up pretty well. You can see some lettuce plants on the left side of the picture. The biggest ones are almost 8 weeks old and should be ready to harvest, but they still have a while to go.

The onions seem like they are doing pretty well, but I wish they were a bit bigger. They will stop growing in a couple weeks and start making bulbs. The bigger the plant is when it starts making a bulb, the bigger the bulb will be.
Those pictures are some of the better looking parts of the garden. Much of it looks more like the picture below. That is the broccoli/cauliflower patch. There are three broccoli plants and two cauliflower plants, plus a few radish plants interspersed. The cauliflower plants are in especially bad shape. They got sunburnt when I first put them outside and the slugs and bugs seem to like them more than any of the other plants.

Cold Comfort

Due to the abundance of vegetables that the garden produced last year, Jaime and I decided to not do a CSA this year. I haven't been getting emails from our old CSA, but for some reason I just got one talking about the farm and their first distribution of the year. I thought a few of the things in the email were interesting, and it reassures me that the terrible showing from my garden this year really isn't my fault. Here is the text:

Welcome to GVOCSA's 23rd year!

Many CSAs have postponed their first distributions this year because of the DISMAL weather we've had this spring. But we have decided to go ahead as planned even though the shares are meager. This is what there is to eat when it's cold and rainy!

Just a few statistics: April was THE rainiest month is Rochester's 141 years of recorded weather history and the third cloudiest. We could plant NOTHING outside during April (and if we had, it may have rotted in the wet, cold soil). We planted the hoop house more or less on time but even though it provides shelter, SUNSHINE is still required for the plants to grow. They began to size up nicely with the sun and warm temperatures last week and the asparagus finally began to put in an appearance but the return to rain and cold this week brought things to a screeching halt again. Most plants need temperatures to be over 50 degrees to grow. They literally stop growing and just sit tight on days like Monday with temps in the 40's.

The plus side of a cold spring is that crops that have over-wintered from last fall do really well. We have the nicest over-wintered carrots we have ever harvested. The watercress is NOT flowering already (for the past few years, it has gone by before the first CSA). Some spinach and lettuce regrew from last fall and the kohlrabi and rutabagas put out some tasty greens and flower heads that are delicious chopped and sauteed with garlic and onions over pasta or in beans and greens. There's not enough for everyone so these greens will have to be offered as a choice for full shares. Last year, the over-wintered leeks had begun to put up flower stalks by the first week of shares. This year, they are still growing, so we will let them size up some more and give them out next week.

Here's what's planned for this week's GVOCSA shares:

Fulls: carrots, watercress, garlic greens, 3-way choice of over-wintered spinach, lettuce or brassica greens (over-wintered kale for Newark shares)
Next week (with luck): carrots, leeks, asparagus, rhubarb, bok choi & lettuce from the hoop house

Partials: carrots, watercress, choice of oregano or over-wintered parsley
Next week: carrots, leeks, hoop house lettuce & bok choi

Random Garden Stuff

We had about a week of nice, sunny weather here. Some of the things started to grow a little bit, but most things are still well behind schedule. I had hoped to put most of the rest of the warmer weather stuff in the ground this weekend, but the weather has gone back to being terrible. Its not going to frost, but the highs for the next couple days will be in the 40's with lots of rain (average high temps are supposed to be upper 60's this time of year). Ugh. 40 degree temps aren't going to kill any plants, but some of the seeds won't germinate in cold soil. The melon, cucumber, corn, and edamame seeds will have to wait till next weekend to be planted. The pepper seedlings that had been hardened and were sitting outside ready to be planted are now back indoors under the growlight.

I planted 6 bulbs of ramps (wild leeks) last summer that I had gotten from the Adirondacks. I planted them in a shady area under the lilac bushes. 4 of them came up and seem to be growing well. I'm hoping that they start multiplying so I can harvest some of them in the next couple years, though I've read that ramps are slow to grow and spread. Along the lines of perrenial vegetables, I planted 4 or 5 aspargus plants. It appears that only one of them has grown this year. That makes me rather sad since I've decided that asparagus is my favorite vegetable. At least its starting to show up at the local farmers' markets around town.

After planting several different varieties of plants, I've noticed that even in the warmer weather, some of the seeds have not sprouted well. The peas, lettuce, and broccoli rabe all have had disappointingly low germination rates. I've had to buy new packages of lettuce and peas from a local garden store to replace the ones that didn't grow. Those three original seed packs (along with some others) all of these came from pinetree seeds (www.superseeds.com). They are a small discount seed company based in Maine. I'm thinking that next year I won't buy any seeds from cheap seed places.

Why Plant Radishes?

Because they're delicious fresh from the Garden!!! XOXO, Maddy

Its May Day

April is finally behind us. What a terrible growing month its been. Temperatures ended up being near average, but it was exceptionally cloudy and rainy. We had a record amount of rainfall for the month of April this year. According to the weather website I use most frequently (wunderground.com), there were a total of 6 days in April without rain. There were also 3 days that were "mostly sunny", 3 days that were "partly sunny", and the rest were all cloudy. Last April was a very good one for the garden, so I think I now have a pretty good idea of what a good April is like and what a bad April is like at the homestead.

The radishes should be the fastest growing thing in the garden. The seed packet says it they should be ready for harvest in 28 days. The picture below was taken 45 days after planting, and 28 days after they sprouted above the soil surface. They are not ready for harvest.

About the only thing that is growing well is the stuff that doesn't need the sun to grow (yet). The onions are getting their energy from onion sets (miniature onion bulbs) and the garlic is growing from garlic cloves that I planted last fall. The onions are the first picture below and the garlic is the second picture.