Carrots

I decided it was time to harvest the carrots that I planted in late summer last year.

At first it seemed like a great harvest, but it turned out that probably almost half of them were unusable due to either splitting open or having slugs and other critters eating out the middle of them. Still, I got about 1.25 lbs of good carrots.

The rest of the garden is making progress. The garlic and shallots that were planted last year are doing well, though the multiplier onions didn't fare nearly as well over the winter. About half of those died, and the other half didn't send up much in the way of spring greenery. I planted replacement bulbs in the spots where none came up. The instructions I got with the onions say that you can plant them in the spring, but you will get dramatically lower production. Here is what the Allium patch looked like as of last week(I didn't get around to posting this till now). Thats garlic on the right, shallots on the left, and some multiplier onions in between them.

Most of the seeds that I planted in the garden have sprouted. The timing worked out well as we had exceedingly warm weather for a couple weeks, which allowed the seeds time to germinate and sprout. We hit all kinds of temperature records, and some went so far as to say that it was a 4 or 5-sigma weather event.

Recently, the temperatures have dropped back down and we have actually had a week of below average temperatures. All the stuff I planted was cold-hardy and survived temperatures in the mid to upper 20's. It even snowed last night.

There were two things that didn't sprout, though. The kale and scallions did not come up. They were both older seeds, but I'm surprised that they didn't come up. The beauty of being able to plant so early is that I can just plant replacement seeds, and I will be right back on my original schedule of planting cold-hardy seeds around April 1st.

Indoor seed starts are doing well, and I'll have a picture of that for the next post.

Its Spring?

I had planted some broccoli, cauliflower, and scallion seeds back in February, but I planned to start the majority of my indoor seeds right around the 1st of March. Due to a vacation and general business, I just got around to doing that planting this weekend. In addition to the aforementioned veggies, I planted tomatoes, peanuts, okra, cantaloupe, cucumber, and 3 kinds of peppers. That should be all of the indoor starts. The seed flat now looks like this.

After last year's disaster of a spring, I didn't have any plans to start working in the actual garden till around the first of April. However, with recent warm days and forecast LOWS in the upper 40's and 50's for at least another week or so, I have changed my mind. I spent a couple hours out in the garden laying out this year's paths and beds and turning over the soil in the beds that will be used first. Here is what it looked like as I was just getting started. Note the small mound against the cement wall on the left side. That is the remains of the compost pile that had all my fall garden waste and leaves and stuff like that.

I found some interesting stuff in the remains of the compost pile. Here are a pair of stems still brightly colored. The purple is a kale plant that had been on top of the pile. The chartreuse green is a broccoli plant (I think) that was buried down in the pile. The picture doesn't do it justice, it really is quite shockingly brightly colored.

I was surprised to also find some baby brussels sprouts poking out of the compost pile.

The brussels sprouts plants didn't have time to mature last year and the buds got no larger than the nail on my index finger(at best), so come December, I cut the plants off at ground level and tossed them in the compost pile. Apparently the buds grew from the energy still left in the stems. Here is what it looked like after I gently pulled out one stem.

Rather than kill off such determined little fellows, I buried the stem in part of what will be my brussels sprouts bed. I tried a few google searches to see if you could grow brussels sprouts plants from the buds, but I couldn't find anything. We shall see what happens.

The garlic plants seem to have a good start going. You can see them in the picture below. They were planted in late October along with "potato onions" and some shallots. Those have not poked up through the leaves yet, but I peeked under the insulating layer of leaves that I piled on them, and they look to be just starting to grow.

Here is what it looked like when I was done. Not too impressive, but at least half of the beds have been turned over. I'm hoping to plant a bunch of cold-hardy stuff like arugula, kale, and rapini this week sometime.