Suddenly Salads
I have had people ask why I take the time to start lettuce from seed under grow lights. This is why:
I’ve been harvesting salads from the garden every single night for the past three weeks. It’s been fantastic to have freshly harvested greens. My direct seeded lettuce is still tiny.
For me, I save a lot of money by spending fifteen minutes seeding a flat of lettuce in March. I also love planting already established lettuces because they grow much quicker and shade out the weeds much faster, which means less work weeding for me!
What are you harvesting and loving from your garden right now?
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Crisp & Tidy
AH, I love a crisp edge. In my gardens in Ohio I always made sure to edge all my flowerbeds each spring. It’s a little like spring cleaning in the garden, everything just looks so much neater afterwards.
I realized this weekend that this might be the reason I feel like this garden is a little unruly. So I started edging a new garden area that I’m making.
Last year I found this fantastic vintage edger at Liberty Tool. It’s perfect for this task, much easier to use than a shovel and much nicer than other edging tools I’ve tried to use. It’s worth far more than the few dollars I paid for it.
You know, it worked. Instantly the garden felt a little less unkempt and things really look much more tended. I’ve got my work cut out for me edging around the two apple trees in front. Hopefully I can get a big truckload of beautifully black compost to use as mulch and then the gardens will look completely new.
Do you like the edge your garden beds?
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Planting Onions
When you first begin gardening you follow the recommendations on the seed packets and in the gardening books. Then you read books that give different tips and you see different methods while visiting gardens.
I remember when I first started growing onions, I carefully planted them with the proper distance in between bulbs. Then I saw where someone planted them closer, just like Johnny’s Seeds does at their research farm in the photo above. I started planting them closer, and closer, and closer with no loss in size of quality of onions.
Then I read in Charles Dowding’s Vegetable Course to plant them in clumps of three. GENIUS – I though to myself and I started using this method. They grow just as well as when planted individually and it’s so much faster to plant them this way then in individually. They are also much easier to weed since there aren’t individual plants to weed around.
Yesterday I planted 60 seedlings each of 9 different varieties of onions. Onions are one of those things I love to grow, I could definitely get them cheaper at the farmers market, but I love the process of starting them from seed in February, planting them in the garden in May, harvesting them in July, and eating them all winter. There’s something about growing onions that I love.
Have you discovered any interesting planting methods that went against the normal recommendations?
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Friday Favorite: Phenology
Phenology is the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors (such as elevation).
I’ve always been fascinated by the old rules of when to plant things. Yesterday I noticed the first dandelion blooming in the lawn.
It’s funny because I was thinking to myself not five minutes before that it was getting to be about time to plant potatoes. The old saying is that you plant your potatoes when the first dandelion blooms. If you’re interested in this like I am, here’s a great list of Phenology that relates to vegetable planting.
Do you have any rules for planting vegetables that you use?
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Sapling Trellis
On Monday there were a few questions about how I connected my sapling trellis together, ropes, nails, etc. The truth is I didn’t use much of anything. When building this type of trellis you weave the saplings through the upright posts and this creates a very strong trellis. You can see blow how the saplings are woven in this fashion. I try to alternate thick ends with small ends so that there aren’t spots with lots of the smaller tops coming together in one section of the trellis.
I like to use saplings that are decently sized, nothing too tiny or it wouldn’t be as strong. I don’t tie the horizontal pieces to the vertical pieces. The strength of the saplings is enough to that by themselves. When possible I try to leave the saplings as long as possible so I can use the very thin tops to connect them together if necessary.
On occasion if I have two sides meet and there’s not enough space to weave the ends around each other I will tie the small saplings together. I only used two pieces of twine on this pea trellis.
Hopefully that gives you an idea of how this is built. It’s quite an easy process, the harvest part is cutting all the saplings. There’s quite a stand of them out back, I could build fences all around my garden if I wanted to, which I might if I get some extra time.
I took this idea a step further and built a small wattle fence around my 5×5 Challenge garden. I’ll try to get better photos of it someday, I just snapped a quick picture with my phone the day I built it. There is no rope on this little sapling fence, it’s quite amazing how they stay together and are quite strong.
What do you use for building trellises and plant supports?
