Early spring garden
I put our pot
of peas on top of
the fridge, figuring that was the warmest spot inside during this
shoulder season when we're only running the wood stove now and
then. Just over a week later, the pea sprouts are up and growing
fast! I figure we'll be able to snip off tendrils to munch on
starting next week.
Meanwhile, out
in the quick hoop,
the lettuce bed has greened right up. I anticipate our first
spring salad by the middle of March.
(See that grass in the
background? That's the barley cover crop that didn't winter
kill. I'm going to have to figure out how to make it bite the
dust before I plant the March bed of lettuce.)
Rounding out my March baby
photos, the
onions I started indoors are so tall I'm starting to
wonder if they need to be repotted. This is the trouble with
starting seeds inside --- they look so cute and low-work when you drop
72 seeds in a flat, but what do you do a few weeks later when they need
more elbow room? I detest the endless round of potting up (and
the neighboring task of finding room for all of those larger and larger
pots), so I may choose to transplant these guys into the onion quick
hoop I plan to build next week. For those of you who start your
onions indoors from seed, how soon do you put your onions out in a cold
frame or straight in the garden?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Edward --- Well, when I transplant out of plug trays, I carefully transplant the whole plug of dirt, so root area isn't that important. What would get me in trouble, though, is if these hothouse onions weren't happy with cold weather. I may try hardening them off out in the (soon to be built) quick hoop for a while to get them used to chilly weather.
Maggie --- Thanks! I use the term "baby photos" because they're a bit gratuitous and probably only cute to me.
I can often tease them out. I let the soil get a bit dry, then slip a fork down the side, which lifts the whole mass of soil out of the tray.
Great ebook formatting service, by the way!
I recently found your blog and have enjoyed reading through the archives.
When I worked at a local greenhouse, our onion seeds were sown in a flat filled with 2"x3" packs. Every time the onion tops grew to 3-4" tall, we would give them a 'haircut' & cut them back to 2". As a result they developed thicker stems instead of getting long and stringy fast. After doing this 3-5 times, and hardening them off in cole frames, they were ready to plant. Each pack could have between 50-75 plants, and they were just the right size to separate and transplant.
I found them quite easy to work with in the garden and customers appreciated lots of onions for the $$.