Posts Tagged Vegetables

Back in late July, two progressively demanding trends occurred to cause this blog to fall silent: my laptop hard drive started dying just as peak season kicked into gear.  By the time my hard drive crashed in August, I had no free time to worry about getting it fixed quickly, and so the farming season swept me into a whirlwind of activity that has only just started to settle down — now that the bitter winds and blowing snows of winter are making their appearance.

I’d love to be able to go back and fill in all the gaps for you, but honestly, I don’t remember everything I learned in my last three intensive months at the farm.  So in coming days I’m going to try to review some of the highlights, just to wrap up the year.

In August, most farmers’ markets are awash in color as summer produce hits its peak, so it’s no surprise that August proved to be a prolific and profitable month at the farm.

An abundance of heirloom tomatoes, ready for market

Heirloom tomatoes make up one of the three major crops at Dave’s farm, and he has collected and saved seeds over the years in order to have a rich variety of tomatoes over the season.  Varieties shown above include German Pink, Cherokee Purple, Moskovich, Sunkist, Jolly, and Yellow Pear, but later in the season we also had pints of Sun Golds, flats of Amish Paste, and many sunrise-brilliant Hillbilly tomatoes.

Green peppers put on their summer growth, while kale takes a breather

The peppers — both green bells and Hungarian wax — got off to a slow start earlier in the year, but by August we were starting to harvest them.

Second planting of cucumbers in field #6

Early heat in the summer meant that some summer crops, such as the two varieties of cucumbers shown here, produced early and vigorously, then tapered off in enough time for us to plant a second round.  The second crop didn’t yield quite as much, but it extended the season and brought in extra income, so it worked out well.

Second crop of squash, settling in nicely

A second planting of patty pan, yellow straightneck, and zucchini squash — even in a smaller field — added significantly to the season’s yields, and I harvested from these plants well into October.

Beets and leeks, going strong

I planted successive crops of beets throughout the season, adding new seedlings whenever old ones were cleaned out, so I would guess that this ended up as our most consistent, if not highest-yielding, crop.

Nothing to see here in the greenhouse

The intense heat of August — with many days in the 90s — caused us to empty the greenhouse, despite the need to keep seeding flats for fall crops.  Had I left flats in here, the seedling would have easily been fried, even with twice-daily watering!  (It got to the point when I would take flats, potting mix, and seeds out under the trees and work on flats in a cool breeze — anything to avoid this heat trap.)

Relocating flats for better temperature, sunlight, and water

Instead, we set flats out on the picnic table (and, later, the deck) where we had easy access to water and could keep an eye on the growing seedlings.  For fall, I continued to seed flats of beets, lettuce, kohlrabi, radishes, kale, and pac choi.

Our peak season continued into September, and I put in a very full Friday evening before Labor Day helping Dave harvest and prep for his big Saturday morning market.  By that point, we had all of the aforementioned crops ripening, as well as onions, more potatoes, loads of basil, eggplant, and even pears.  A busy time!

In my own gardens, August represented the trailing off of most summer crops, a superabundance of basil, the complete neglect of the bean and grain patch, halfhearted efforts at seed saving, and a complete panic about starting and planting seedlings for fall.  In short, a mess.

When peak season hits, you just have to hang on — it may be downhill from there, but boy, will it speed along!

The big garden on June 26 -- picture perfect!

Summer is well and truly here, as seen in the explosive growth in the gardens.  I’m happy to report, though, that not all the growth comes from the weeds (though there are plenty of those!).  Care to take a look around?

Going clockwise:

Chamomile, started from seed, in its first bloom. I smell tea!

For such a girly-girl cabbage, "Frigga" is coming on strong, even with all the ruffles

Sweet sugar snap peas, begging to be picked! (Yes, I did -- and I ate them on the spot.)

The flint corn is still struggling with weeds, but I'm working on the situation

Finally getting some weeding done in the oats, too -- they're looking good!

Salsify, lentils, and rutabagas (which, believe or not, were thinned!)

The carrots have been thinned, too, to allow the roots to plump up a little more: so far, so good!

The pac choi (left) still dominates, but the golden chard is growing nicely

Celery plants have filled out, though I'm not sure what to do next -- prune a little?

The cucumbers and dill have been basking in the heat --- look at them grow!

I worked in the garden both yesterday and today for 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a time, weeding a few more rows in the grain patch.  But each day I was rewarded with fresh produce: snap peas, radishes, Hakurei turnips, pac choi, chard, dill, lettuce, and chamomile blossoms.

And just look at what we have to enjoy later!

Garden #3, grown glorious!

All the rain we’ve had lately has not, of course, stopped my work at the farm, but it has given me plenty of excuses not to check on any of my gardens.  Those excuses ran out yesterday afternoon, so I visited both garden #1 and garden #3 to do a little work.

Garden #1, closer at hand, needs more work than I was ready to give yesterday, though I did harvest a large bundle of lavender and planted a Black Cherry tomato seedling as well as a few basil seedlings.  I’ll have to get back there some evening to tackle weeds and plant more seeds.

But garden #3, shown above, provides a glorious contrast, thanks to the faithful daily work of my fabulous friend Jen.  She tells me that she likes to begin the work day with her cup of coffee and about an hour of soothing weeding in the garden.  She took the time recently to mulch most of the beds after her husband mowed more of the lawn, and the difference from how the garden looked three weeks ago gave me a frisson of delight when I stepped into it.

So let me give you a tour:

Root crops, 6/11/10

The root crop bed, site of our first harvest, is looking much better with a thick grass mulch and clear lines of vegetables.  We have harvested several radishes and Hakurei turnips (top two rows), so Jen has planted more of each, and those new seeds are springing up already.  The rutabaga (bottom row) are coming on strong, so I have hopes of having a nice little harvest of those for once.  And I think my mother will end up having a bit of her long-desired salsify later this year, too.

Tomatoes, 6/11/10 (with basil and peppers, fringed by marigolds)

Although we’ve had to replace a couple of spindly tomato seedlings, all in all the plants are looking robust and beautiful.  Jen had to find bigger stake-type material in the brush pile out back in order to keep tying up the tomatoes!

Carrots! 6/11/10

At the edge of the tomatoes, a line of carrots bushes out, well nurtured with both grass and coffee-ground mulch.  It will be a while until we harvest these, but I am already salivating!

Broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, onions, 6/11/10

Looking at the patch of brassicas, it’s hard to believe that less than a month ago they were small, spindly seedlings.  Apparently they are very happy in their new home, and the recent rains have provided them the nourishment they need.  The onion crop is looking good, too, and if I get any kind of yield out of this bed, with crops I’ve never had luck with before, I will be thrilled.

Cucumber patch, 6/11/10

Slowly but surely, the cucumbers are coming into their own, with faint fringes of dill joining them.  The butterhead lettuce (bottom row) that had looked so pathetic coming out of the flat has rebounded beautifully — I think we may have to pick some this coming week!

Potatoes, 6/11/10

Potatoes!  Wow!  The first blossoms are ready to open, and it won’t be long now before we start harvesting new potatoes.  I hope to leave some in the ground (especially the Red Golds) for a later, larger crop to keep over the winter, but I am definitely getting hungry for some smaller ones.

Bean and grain patch, needing weeding, 6/11/10

The back section, where I planted dry beans and grains so recently, needs far more work.  Knowing how much work Jen has already put into the garden, I assured her that I would take care of this section, so I spent time weeding in here after wandering around the garden.  If I can get some mulch laid in here, too, that will help, but for now I am determined to keep the ragweed and other invasive plants from taking over.

Flint corn, 6/11/10

With all these weeds, discerning the crops amid all the greenery can prove difficult, but at last I found my flint corn seedlings, sturdy and surprisingly well-protected.  Granted, weeds are hardly the best way to “protect” crops, but given this plot’s tendency toward mud and the number of corn fields I’ve seen under water recently, I wonder if the extra growth — sinking their roots into the soil to keep it from moving more freely — hasn’t helped more than hindered at this point.  Still, this will be the next section to weed, perhaps later this weekend.

Lush greens, 6/11/10

Finally, the greens.  Truly, I think they have benefited from the recent rains more than anything else to grow so thick and lush.  In fact, the broccoli raab, beginning even to bolt, provided me with so much delicious greenery — more than either Jen or I can eat or preserve right now — that I harvested a pound of the very best leaves…

First produce for market: broccoli raab

…washed and packaged it, and took it to the market.  Yes, my first produce to sell myself!  This has been a momentous week!

Now I will have to keep a closer eye on the gardens — and keep working on them more regularly.

This week, I started to get into a serious summer schedule at the farm.  Now that school is out for summer, Dave welcomes me coming to work earlier (since he doesn’t have to take his son to school in the morning) and staying as long as need be to get the work done.  That meant that on Monday I put in a seven-hour day, and Tuesday stretched to eight hours.

If you wonder how I held up, I’m pleased to say that despite minor injuries and regular aches, I did very well.  But then, we had an exciting week.

Room for more tomatoes, but not for ours

We still had tomatoes left after I planted the last patch last week, and we still had the lower third of one bed open for tomatoes.  But these wouldn’t be ours.  Instead, Dave had agreed to be part of a tomato-grafting trial this season, research being done at the OARDC here in town, and he left this section open for the Cherokee Purple tomato seedlings that the researcher would bring.

Grafted and ungrafted Cherokee Purple seedlings from the research station

On Tuesday, Michelle showed up with a flat of 40 Cherokee Purples — 10 ungrafted, with the rest grafted onto three different strains of hardy rootstock.  The goal of the research is to find out whether this grafting process for tomatoes provides enough disease resistance and general hardiness to make the time-consuming grafting worthwhile.

Can you imagine grafting something this small?

See, on fruit trees and other perennials, grafting makes sense because you’re investing a comparatively small amount of time on plants that will be around for decades.  But tomatoes, an annual crop, with such small stems and thus more delicate grafts?  Well, apparently the technique has met with success in Japan, Michelle notes, but these are early days for the method here in the States.

Note the graft (the "V") well above the soil and even the mulch

Michelle gladly answered our questions and shared ideas as well as her own questions about the farm — she’s enthusiastic about the farms she’s visiting for this project.  We talked while Dave’s daughter and I planted the seedlings (Michelle laid out the seedlings the way she wanted them to be arranged), being careful not to sink the plants so deeply as to cover the grafts.

One question I had was whether the seeds saved from the fruit of these plants would then carry the characteristics of both the rootstock and the Cherokee Purple strain.  (I don’t know much about grafting, so this may be a silly question.)  The research, however, is new enough that she wasn’t able to give me an answer — they simply haven’t thought yet to consider that aspect.  The seeds will produce Cherokee Purples again next year, but whether or not they will produce plants with increased hardiness remains to be seen.

Cherokee Purple trial patch, marked for different grafted rootstock varieties

In the meantime, we will watch this patch and see how things go.  (Since it’s the lower part of the bed, I suspect we’ll see some problems with excess water, but I hope it won’t be too bad.)  And when it comes time to harvest, we’ll be keeping special records on yields, resistance, and whatever else is notable.

I rounded out my work Tuesday with replacing other tomato seedlings that had succumbed to root rot, clearing out the old kale bed, harvesting garlic scapes for market, helping Dave lay the rest of the drip lines, and planting melons and winter squash.  Since we planned to spend time Wednesday preparing for a farmers’ market, we wanted to push through the field work while we could this week.

Wednesday morning greeted us with low skies and a steady rainfall that had me soaked through shortly after we started harvesting produce for Dave’s Wednesday market.  But the unofficial Post Office motto of “neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night” applies to farmers as well, so we persevered and harvested kohlrabi, turnips, beets, radishes, kale, mustard greens, and snow peas for market.

Everything for sale is weighed and packaged with care

“There’s an art to preparing for market,” Dave asserted as we started the day’s work.  From making clean cuts to harvest the produce to cleaning off unsightly leaves in the field, from washing produce thoroughly and cleaning off more problem spots to bundling produce together for sale, he demonstrated his techniques and explained his desire for the best-looking produce display.

Nope, not quite pretty enough for market

For example, turnips that looked perfectly good when pulled from the ground had to be reevaluated once cleaned — and these, sad to say, did not make the cut.  (They did, however, make it into a bin of seconds for me to take home.)

Bundles of turnips, ready for market

By noon, we had prepped all the produce he intended to take to market, laying bundles of root vegetables carefully in plastic bins and tucking leafy greens into plastic bags (stems all down, bag bottoms snipped to allow drainage).  And with that, my day’s work was done.

As we head further into farmers’ market season, I expect my weeks will follow more of this pattern — long days Monday and Tuesday, morning harvest Wednesday, and possibly another afternoon of harvesting later in the week.  So it’s good to get some of the basics of that process down now.  And I look forward to learning more about the art of farming.

The greens at the new garden are about ready for picking

These days, we’re pushing to get crops planted.  Now that the cooler weather seems to be passing, we dodge the rainy days and get as many seedlings transplanted into the ground as possible.

That holds true for the home gardens as well as the farm.  Once we pass that “frost-free” date of May 15, a mad rush ensues as we release seedlings from their plastic prisons and give them room and water and sunshine and fresh air so they can stretch up as well as sink into the ground.

Tomato seedlings from my seeds and from Jen's father-in-law

I spent a couple of hours at the new garden this weekend in order to get caught up on planting.  A couple flats of seedlings had been lingering on my doorstep, getting hardened off, and it was definitely time to move them into the plot assigned to them.  The tomatoes took up one entire plot, between the Rutgers and Amish Paste seedlings I had brought and the variety of heirloom seedlings contributed by Jen’s father-in-law. (Jen also tucked the small basil starts in between the bigger tomatoes.)

Covering the new onion starts with grass mulch

I planted the small onions — Red Cipollini and Clear Dawn — that I had started earlier this year.  Tucked in between rows of broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cabbage, they settled in under a light blanket of grass mulch.  Here’s hoping they prosper.

Hoe, hoe, hoe: mounding the dirt around the potato plants

While Jen weeded other areas of the garden, I hilled the potatoes, just as Dave had shown me at the farm.  Knowing that those have grown so quickly gives me a sense of hope for this plot this year — these six rows should provide a good crop.

Extending the garden to make room for my staples

I also extended the garden plan into the back section, which was not as well tilled.  This area, designated for my grain and bean and seed crops, has already seen an invasion of weeds as well as alternated between mud and caked soil.  I’m not as thoroughly optmistic about this section, but it won’t stop me from trying.  At the opposite end from the oats I planted a couple of dry bean varieties (Jacob’s cattle and Soldier), a winter squash, millet, and flax — still to come are flint corn, more dry beans, sorghum, and buckwheat.

Radishes, turnips, and more are coming along nicely

In the meantime, older crops continue to grow and start to flourish.  The greens, shown at top, are ruffling out their little leaves more each week, and the root crops may need thinning fairly soon.

Everything needs to be mulched, of course, which we will work on as we are able — depending on weather and how much grass gets scooped up.  Jen has already developed a morning habit of heading out to visit the garden and do a little work for a while, though I still need to work in more regular visits.

Planting will continue, especially over the next couple of weeks.  We have loads of seedlings still to plant at the farm, and given my big box of seeds at home, I’m sure I can keep going in the gardens.  And now that the gardens are greening up with fresh produce coming in, the joy of homegrown food really begins.

First big harvest from the 2010 gardens

Thanks to an early start — both in seeding and transplanting — I’ve just harvested the first crops of the year in mid-May.

Last year's chard, back for a second round

I spent Sunday afternoon at garden #2 in town, clearing out weeds and preparing for more planting.  Some of what I cleaned out, however, came from last year’s crop.  What you see here is the golden chard I planted last season and left to overwinter in place.  It bounced back to the point that I was able to fill a gallon storage bag with the leaves as I picked on Sunday — not a bad deal.  It wanted very much to set seeds and carry on further (as did some of the pac choi plants I found), but I had other plans for the space.

Before all the hard work began...

The lower bed looked completely overgrown when I first eyed it: two-year-old green onions gone to flower, enormous weeds (also flowering), a scattering of pac choi on the rebound from last year, leafy radishes, and the start of this year’s cilantro crop.  Cleaning up here took more time since I needed to sort out what went to the compost pile, what went into bags to take home, and what could stay in place.

The same lower bed, now ready for this year's growing season

But what a difference!  After cleaning up, I was able to plant four Rutgers tomato seedlings and a Peacevine cherry tomato, along with rows of bush beans, peas, and spinach.

Potatoes, garlic, and herbs coming right along in the upper bed

The upper bed didn’t require too much cleanup, though I did need to hill up the potatoes.  I planted more greens — lettuce and chard — along with radishes, cantaloupe, zucchini, and nasturtiums, a surprising favorite with my young nephews. At the end of three hours of absorbing work in the warm sunshine, I headed home with plenty of chard, pac choi, stinging nettles, cilantro, dill, and onions to add to my meals for the week.  What a treat! We’ve been harvesting at the farm lately, too, in time for Dave’s first farmers’ market of the season.  His early offerings included radishes, kale, lettuce, and pac choi, and he reported that he sold out of everything on Saturday.  A good start to the year! Unfortunately, the wet weather has encouraged the proliferation of slugs and snails in the pac choi beds, and at the beginning of this week, he resignedly told me to rip it all out.  The slugs had turned many of the leaves into green lace, and the crop was no longer market-worthy.

A few holes, but still good!

Sadly, I complied, but I managed to peel off layers and layers of tattered leaves and salvage six bins worth of greenery that could still be eaten, if not sold at market.  Dave sent me home with two bins’ worth, a bounty I’ve been turning into dried and frozen pac choi for winter eating as well as into meals for this week.  The rest will be for his family’s eating, and the scraps got tossed into the chicken pen.  (They’ve already increased their laying in thanks!) In its stead, I’ve been transplanting radish, beet, lettuce, kale, and more pac choi seedlings for the next round of harvests.  And around the new pac choi, I’ve sprinkled crushed eggshells (with Dave’s blessing) in the hopes that that will discourage the slugs from feasting on this crop. So here begins the harvest season, with an early bounty and early difficulties.  May the coming harvests be sweeter and less problematic!

Just one of many sacks of potatoes to be planted this year

Life on the farm has started to settle into a rhythm of late.  When I rumble down the gravel drive and park my now-dusty red pickup, I sign in and generally head to the greenhouse to water the flats of seedlings.  If it hasn’t rained recently, I’ll follow that up with watering fields #3 and #5, where the bulk of the early vegetables are planted.

After that, I’m likely to follow Dave and the tractor hauling bags of potatoes out to the field, girding my loins — or, rather, my knees — for extended sessions of planting.

More than a fingerling -- it's a whole handful of potato!

Dave has planted many,  many pounds of potato seed each year, with ever-increasing yields on the many varieties he takes to market.  He is rightfully proud of his success in growing spuds, and he likes to remind me — with a smile that I find myself returning — that these potatoes pay my wages.

As far as I’m concerned, the bruised shins, aching knees and back, and increasing layers of sunburn are a small price to pay for doing work that on the surface is repetitive and dull — but that actually offers me an extended lesson on reading the soil, the weather, the water situation, and much more.  Because when I’m on my hands and knees, clawing holes in the dirt with my gloved hand, I’m noticing the varying degrees of tilth in the plots, seeing what weeds persistently pop up, chasing earthworms back into the cooler depths, and even occasionally looking up and seeing the beauty of the day.

Sure, when I stand up, my knees are wobbly and my head a little woozy, but though my back aches at the end of the day, I do feel as though I’ve completed a satisfying round of very important and invigorating work.  (I can even say this knowing that I’ll be doing more this week — we’re only about 2/3 through the 1200+ lbs of potato seed.)

New garden, layered with compost and marked out for specific crop beds

So perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that after a week of planting potatoes, I would spend a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon off helping my friend Jen get our garden started — with more potatoes.

My friend Keith and I had dropped off a truckload of compost for Jen to spread across the tilled plot on the Friday before, and she marked out the beds as we had plotted them on paper.  I showed up on a windy, grey afternoon, with seeds in hand, ready to help her get started on this year’s experiment.

Marking the next row for planting

I had found Dave’s row-marking technique — two metal stakes linked with a hefty length of rope — to be so effective that I made my own row-marker to use on this garden.  And as Jen pulled weeds, I marked rows and planted potatoes.

New potato bed, planted

It didn’t take long to plant three rows of Purple Viking potatoes and three rows of Red Gold — nearly the rest of what I had bought for the year.  And after that, we moved on to plant roots (carrots, radishes, turnips, salsify, rutabaga) and greens (lettuce, pac choi, broccoli raab), as well as a patch of hull-less oats for me.

The new garden, all laid out (with the back plot reseeded for grass this year)

After about two and a half hours of work, we had made a good start on this year’s garden — plus had a good visit while we worked (one of the joys of gardening with others) and sat down for an icy cold drink afterward.

There’s more work to do — there always is — both in this new garden and at the farm, including planting more potatoes.  But it’s good to celebrate these small details along the way.

Kohlrabi and other seedlings, rarin' to go

Now that April is here, everything is picking up speed for the growing season.  The seedlings in the greenhouse are growing lush in some cases and slightly more delicately in others, and it’s time to start planting, whether by seed or by seedling.

That means, it’s time for some serious physical labor.

Once the soil started to dry out two weeks ago — with sunshine and warmer weather aiding in the process — I started some heavy duty (for me) work at the farm.  It started with cleanup: Dave wanted me to clear out the seedbeds in field #3 to prepare for tilling and the first seedlings, and I cleaned out all four beds of leftover kohlrabi, leeks, beets, and other rotting goodies.  Before that day ended, we cleaned out a couple rows of stubborn kale plants in field #2 — truly a back-aching effort.

Feeling the pinch of the sciatic nerve and some serious aches and pains after that day’s work, I headed home for stretches, relaxation, and either a solid dose of ibuprofen or a drink.  The next day, I had a bit of a respite as we pruned grapevines, but I was pleased to note that even before we started work, my back felt a good deal better than the day before.

Future garden space in the new garden #3

Once the weekend arrived, though, the physical labor piled back on again.  I had agreed to work with my friend Jen to create a large garden at her place this year — partly to get her started gardening and partly to have a large place for my own crops.  She had plenty of room and a couple of weedy patches that had evidently served as garden space before, but we needed to clear out the brush and the weed trees first.

Not me, but the same kind of back-breaking tree-uprooting that I did

At first, it wasn’t much out of the ordinary.  Bending over to scrape up brush or to pull dried weeds, carrying bundles of dead organic matter to a brush piled, I felt slight pulls in my back, but nothing too horrendous.  Then we turned our attention to those accursed weed trees.  Jen’s in-laws tackled the larger ones with tow chain and then tractor, but we also labored to dig up and yank out the smaller ones.  That — and a tumble or two onto my rear end when the release came unexpectedly — definitely left me sore.

So what did I do?  I headed to garden #2 and dug trenches to plant potatoes, then sowed seeds for beets, peas, lettuce, radishes, and pac choi.  Yes, after that, I headed home, did my stretches, nursed my back a little — and then went out dancing that night.

The next day, I took grapevines to the Farm and bent over for two hours planting, backfilling, watering, and mulching them.  At least by this point, my back muscles were becoming more accustomed to the work, and the pauses and stretches that I included in the work helped me to avoid having my muscles bunch up too much.

First two rows of kohlrabi seedlings planted at the farm, April 5

“No rest for the wicked,” they say, and I must be a terrible person because I went from hard work all weekend to three days of planting seedlings back at Dave’s farm.  This allowed me to kneel or sit while I planted, but even so, I ached at the end of each day (though a little less every day).  By the end of my three-day work week, I had planted seedlings from about a dozen flats of kohlrabi, two flats of turnips, four flats of radishes, and perhaps half a dozen of pac choi, filling field #5 and the better part of field #3.

Each day it feels like I’m getting a little stronger — or at least balancing the physical labor with better stretches or more sensible breathers.  Each evening I have less significant back pain (or any other pain: neck, shoulder, arm, hand, wrist, thigh, calf, foot, you get the picture) and rely less on either pain relievers or a relaxing drink.  I’m nowhere near ripped and perfectly toned — but on the other hand, I’m not the cream puff I thought I was.  It’s satisfying to know that if I can pace myself and adapt my movements to what works best for me, I can work hard and get quite a bit done without feeling completely wiped out or racked up in pain at the end of it all.

It’s early in the season yet, and there’s plenty more physical work to be done.  I’ll be juggling increased hours at the farm, a day and a half of baking and delivery, work in three gardens, and heaven only knows what else, so I don’t expect to put my feet up and relax my way through summer.  But so far, I’m meeting the challenge and finding a way to adapt to a more physical way of life.

That may turn out to be my proudest achievement this entire year.

Cabbage and brussels sprouts -- sprouting!

After some damp, chilly weather earlier in the week, we’re back to sunshine, temperatures in the 60s, and utter springtime bliss.  It’s a great time to be a farmer.

I spent two more days in the greenhouse this week, seeding flat after flat after flat… almost ad infinitum.  Almost.  We were running low on shelf space by Wednesday morning, so while I seeded a couple of flats of onions — small seeds, 5 to a cell, 48 cells on a flat, oh my achin’ neck and back — Dave built a small shelf unit that fit just right into the aisle at one end of the greenhouse, giving us room for another 13 flats.

By the time I finished my work on Wednesday, we had a total of 110 flats in the greenhouse, most of them seeded by yours truly.  Again, Dave noted, we had set a new record — the most flats this early in the season.

Now, of course, we have to wait and hope that the weather in early April will cooperate with us for planting.  A neighbor told him that the Farmer’s Almanac predicts a snowstorm for us for the first week of April, which is when we should be planting the early greens and root vegetables.  We will see what happens.

The beauty of all this work in the greenhouse is that I’m already seeing results.  When I stepped in Tuesday morning, several flats greeted me with slender pale green stems waving delicate pairs of first leaves.  Nothing quite gives you hope that spring is on the way as those first shoots.

And back at home, I’ve been enjoying a similar scene.  The sprouts shown above are the cabbage and brussels sprouts I planted late last week.  I’m also seeing some green popping out of cells of onions, chives, thyme, and wild bergamot.

Granted, I’ve lost a few seedlings already to mold, thanks to too much water retained in the flats.  And the red cipollini onions are getting leggy, so I’ve had to move them around a bit and will need to work on some reflectors this weekend.  But it’s a step in the right direction overall.

The weather is expected to remain warm and lovely this weekend, so I am hoping to get out to my gardens to spruce things up.  Why stay in?  I want to get outside and enjoy this breath of spring while I can.

This past week I spent two five-hour days working with Dave in the greenhouse, planting flat after flat of seeds.  He filled the pots while I kept going with the tweezers and seed bowl, and by the end of my shift on the second day, I had set a “new record” for his farm: 27 flats seeded in one day, bringing us up to a total of 64 flats ready to grow.

“I wouldn’t have gotten that much done on my own,” Dave commented — the verbal equivalent of a friendly slap on the back.

Turns out, it’s exhausting work sowing seeds in flats.  You might not think so, but standing all day in one place, leaning over the flat, and meticulously popping one seed into each cell can be a real pain in the back.  On the other hand, it’s very absorbing work — though you can certainly carry on conversations or sing along to the music while you work and not lose your place — and it’s satisfying to know that so many plants will grow from such simple work.

So it’s no wonder that after two days of this in the greenhouse, I was eager to get more of my own seeds started at home.

Organizing all the seeds by type and variety

In organizing my seed box this year, I took the extra step of entering all the information — variety, source, year bought/harvested, starting and planting specifications — into a spreadsheet so that I knew what I had and could tag what needed to be started early.

That extra bit of organization helped me pull those seeds needing an early start, and seeing the first flat of onions sprouting well over the past week encouraged me to try more seeds.

I pulled out more onion seeds — this year’s choice of Clear Dawn open-pollinated onions, reputedly good for storage — as well as a selection of herbs, and sowed another flat of seeds.  Later in the week, after picking up a couple more flats and more pots, I planted yet more herbs (including cumin, a new one for the spice garden) and the first brassicas (broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage).

Keeping track of what gets sown

Then I started a secondary spreadsheet, following the record-keeping style Dave had me use with his seeds: listing the date, the type and variety of seed, the source and lot number, the quantity, and which flat the seeds were planted in.  Since my first seeds were already sprouting, I added a column for the germination date (so I can compare to what the seed packet tells me) as well as columns to use later in planting.

Overboard?  Not really.  So often my enthusiasm has gotten me to plant, plant, plant — and then forget what I had planted and where.  This system should keep me on track better this year.

Of course, now that I’m more confident about starting seeds properly at home, the impulse is to start even more seeds.  At this point, I only have one flat left, and I’m running out of space by the window, so either I’ll have to stop soon — or farm out my seedlings to other places (like a flat of tomatoes and basil to my parents for safe-keeping).  Not having a greenhouse at home is starting to cramp my style!

And this also means I’ll likely need to find more room to plant more seedlings…