Saturday was a beautiful day of sunshine. I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to spend gardening, but I think I made the most of what little time I had.
I pulled up the remaining carrots. There were slightly more than three dozen, all with varying sizes. In retrospect, I need to do a better job of thinning the carrots to 2″ apart. Most of these were just too close together and it limited how big they were able to grow. They had incredibly long tap roots, but they just didn’t fatten up and fill out like they should have due to space restrictions and probably less available nutrients. Still, there were several good-sized carrots. I went ahead and worked the soil well and planted five more rows – three of the Danver’s half-long and two of the Big Top. (For the record, the three rows closest to the lettuce and marked by wooden sticks are of the Danver’s variety. Last time I couldn’t remember what was what after they grew!) In the fall, I think I’ll dedicate the 3’x3′ broccoli bed to carrots. The broccoli needs to be rotated, and I need more room for carrots. So far, they seem like an easy crop to grow and, as I’ve mentioned before, they are a common staple at our house. It makes sense to have a bigger bed that I can successively sow seeds in.
I transplanted about six more lettuce plants and then cut three more heads down for our use this week. I have another half dozen transplanted into cups, which are growing under lights in the garage. I’ll pull up the roots of the heads I just harvested, plus I think I currently have space for a couple more in the bed, so that should give me room to transplant the remaining plants. That will probably conclude my lettuce planting for the year. Oh, and I still have many sprouts of the organic lettuce blend coming up, which will need to be thinned out after they’re a couple inches tall. The blanket of snow we received last week did absolutely nothing to the sprouts, luckily.
It was also time to start the rest of the veggies for transplanting at the end of March. I’m going to try the zucchini, cucumbers and squash again. Because I had half a pack of seeds of each leftover from fall, I decided to go with the same varieties: Black Beauty, Straight Eight and heirloom Yellow Crookneck. I have eight seeds of each sown. I started eight containers of Tendergreen bush beans, but I also need to do another eight or so Bush Lake Beans here in a couple of days. To get a jump start on the sunflowers, I started them in large paper pots – I started about half a dozen Russian Mammoth. These seeds are all sitting in a sunny window covered with plastic until they sprout. Finally, I sowed about twelve chives. These need darkness to germinate, so they are sitting in a closet for now.
The cayenne (4) and bell peppers (5) are now 3-4″ tall. They weren’t growing very fast out in the garage due to the colder temperatures. I moved them indoors to the sunniest windowsill where it’s at least 65 degrees. I placed them into a recycled, clear-plastic Baby Spinach tub and then used binder clips to attach another tub on top. This created a mini-greenhouse. As it sits in the sun, the entire container warms up and gives the pepper roots the warmth they need to grow. Since doing this, they’ve grown at least 2″ in the past week! Mental note: next fall, purchase a couple of heating mats for germination and seedlings. This will accelerate growth and I’ll have healthier and bigger plants to transplant.
In addition the all of the above, I have a dozen or so Sweet Alyssum, four Mexican Mint Marigold, six Verbena, twelve Black-Eyed Susan (just starting to germinate!), four Calabrese Broccoli and one Bloomsdale Spinach plants growing from seed.
A Round Rock Garden 