Salanova® Red Butter Lettuce
I order a lot of seeds from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, they’re located right up the road from me. Supporting local businesses is important, as well as supporting businesses like Johnny’s that are employee owned. Johnny’s is a farm supply place, so their offerings are sometimes different than what most consumer market seed houses provide. One of the products I’ve been noticing in their catalogs the last few years is Salanova® lettuce. It’s designer lettuce seed to be sure and comes with the price to prove it. This year I finally took the plunge and ordered one pack of seed. One packet of seeds costs $5.45, it contains a minimum of 25 seeds. Yes you read that correctly, 25 seeds. Of course they overpack, so I ended up with roughly 40 pelleted seeds in my pack.
So far I’ve planted 12 of the seeds and had 100% germinate rate. The pelleted seeds are nice because it’s super easy to plant one seed per soil block. The result is that there is zero thinning. The plants are super uniform in size, which makes complete sense since they’re geared towards commercial production. I noticed that each plant grows at the same rate and is very consistent in shape and size.
Overall, I’m a fan of this type of lettuce. I’ll keep you posted on how well it continues to grow, what it looks like at harvest, and most importantly….how it tastes!
Share this:
Lovely Hepatica (Hepatica acutiloba)
Two years ago I purchased bulbs for hepatica (Hepatica acutiloba). They were planted in the potager until I found the perfect spot for them. Last summer, I decided they should live in the new garden area under one of the century old apple trees. Last weekend, I noticed that one of them was blooming. It’s pink, which surprised me, from what I’ve read, pink is a rare color.
It’s quite a lovely little flower, so delicate and small. I’m hoping it will love this new spot and spread to provide much needed early interest in this area of the garden. From what I read they can spread quite rapidly, which I’m looking forward to. Knowing that it’s native to the eastern woodlands also makes me happy.
What are the first things to bloom in your garden? Have you incorporated any native wildflowers to your space?
Share this:
Planting Onions
I’ve been starting all my onions from seed for many years, but this year I was a little too busy and purchased onion plants instead. They arrived last Thursday, which meant that Friday afternoon was spent planting onions.
Since I purchased plants, I’m only growing two varieties of onions this year: a yellow storage (Patterson) and a red storage (Redwing). Generally I grow six different varieties, but options are more limited when purchasing plants instead of packets of seed.
There were around 1000 plants, way more than I need as storage onions, but I planted them closely in order to have green onions throughout the summer. I like to have around 600 onions in storage for the winter, this is enough for us if we augment with other alliums, like leeks, green onions, shallots, etc. It will be interesting to see how these plants perk up and grow, I’ve never really grown onions from purchased plants before.
What’s your favorite kinds of onion?
Share this:
Friday Unfavorite: Wild Turkeys
We have quite a population of wild turkeys in the area, the flocks seem to get bigger and bigger every year. Which means they eat more and more. Of course vegetable gardens provide a delicious smorgasbord for wild animals and a flock of 25 or so wild turkeys can do some damage rather quickly.
This year I’m finally breaking down and putting metal fencing around both edible garden spaces. It won’t be a permanent structure quite yet, that will happen in 7-10 years. In the mean time, I need something to keep the birds out. Last year I lost a good amount to the turkeys. We have no summer broccoli because they ate the entire first and second plantings of it. Our Spring lettuce crops were decimated as well. At the moment, I’m protecting tender plants with low tunnels and plastic until we can get the fence up around the garden. Hopefully this will help deter the turkeys from eating the vegetables.
What’s your worst garden pest?
Share this:
Experimenting with Potting Soil Mixes
One of the things I love about gardening is being able to experiment. I’m always planting different varieties to see the difference between them. While I was at the feed store a few weeks ago, I spotted their Pro-Mix potting mixes. I’m a big fan of the 512 Mix from Johnny’s Seed and have been using that for quite a long time, but I decided to give Pro-Mix a try.
So I made a flat of soil blocks with each of the three mixes. As far as soil blocks are concerned, the Johnny’s Mix and the Pro-Mix Premium seemed to form better blocks. The regular Pro-Mix has a lot more perlite in it, so the blocks don’t seem to form as well or be as strong.
I seeded three different seeds in each type of potting mix to watch germinate and watering rates.
The seeds are just starting to germinate and so far they’re pretty even across the board. The Johnny’s mix definitely retains water much better than the other two varieties. Pro-Mix Premium is in second place and the Pro-Mix is in last place, it’s drying out much more quickly than the other two.
What experiments are you doing this gardening season?
