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.