Zucchini seedlings, nearing the end of another whole day outdoors, mostly sunshine, but it’s clouded over now (looks and feels like rain!) They’ve been outside enough that they’re used to the sun, and they’re big enough to go into the ground. For some unexplored reason, I think about veggie colors whenever the light is flat and grey. Leaf greens are dulled, lose their vibrancy, while bright colors like the oranges of carrots and radish reds become intense, almost luminescent. Transplant leaves are paler green, after an infancy spent mainly under the grow lights. After they’re set out to fend for themselves, it’s fun to watch for them to turn a whole range of deep, rich greens, a sure sign that they’ve settled in to the great outdoors—maybe like returning an animal to the wild, and seeing it later on, alive and kicking!
Year: 2025
Transplants love drab weather
Transplants, like these tomatoes, do well in mostly overcast, even rainy weather for the first two or three days. Funny the way things in life can turn in an instant. One minute it’s put them in the sun, the next, welcome some cloud cover. My transplants start out under fluorescent light, a weak imitation of the sun: putting them out for a few hours, for at least two or three days, and back in to weaker light of the grow rack every night, gets them used to the sunlight. Once transplanted, though, they’ve got more to adjust to than sun. Their roots have been exposed and jostled. The nights usually get pretty cool in May, 20°F below what they’ve been used to. Maybe they sense the general vastness they’ve suddenly found themselves in, with a plant version of, “Oh my.” Whatever all is going on, it’s an adaptation. Full days of hot sun add the stress of having to pump more water into their leaves to keep from wilting. Although they’ll generally survive that sort of thing—as I’ve observed firsthand…—it’s easy to see the difference when the first few days have a good amount of cloud cover, and they really get rolling, stems thickening, the leaves turning a deep green. There are all sorts of ways, often way closer to ideal, to start seedlings indoors. For my simple, low-tech, rough-and-ready approach, this is how it seems to work!
In the photo: The little golden brown blobs scattered around are alfalfa pellets, used as fertilizer. They start of as hard pill-like cylinders, and expand to crumbly little blobs after being wet, then continue to break down as they join the soil food web.
Tiny jungle
Hardening off seedlings on a mainly sunshiny day. I can see tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, Brussels sprouts, and bok choi. Some are for now, some a little down the line. I’ve been transplanting steadily bit by bit, rather than all out at one time, as a hedge against erratic weather changes. Same with direct seeding. It’s another experiment, and given our short season and the generally unpredictable weather, it’s risky. Then again, depending on the crop, I’ve seen plantings a week or two apart more or less even out. It’s always a gamble!
Cloning potatoes
What a difference a word makes. Planting potatoes sounds so normal, wholesome, so farm and garden. Call it cloning potatoes, and now it sounds…weird. Really, it’s nothing special, just another word for the same old thing. Of the common garden veggies around here, potatoes and garlic are cloned: no seeds, no bees and flowers and pollination, instead, plant a piece of the original. Put a potato in the ground and it’s off to the races: vegetative propagation, direct multiplication—so simple!
In the photo: Yukon Gold seed potatoes. They’re regular potatoes, just smaller, and they haven’t been sprayed with sprout inhibitors (unlike many/most/all supermarket potatoes sold through the winter and till the next potato harvests).
Plug sheet gamble
Starting green onions in a 72-cell plug sheet. I tried it last year and it seemed to work out. Instead of directly seeding green onions, then watering them for a few days on their way to germination, start them in plug sheets, where it’s easy to control conditions for good, quick germination, then transplant them. The tradeoff is in the extra time it takes to transplant, offset by the guaranteed good germination. The gamble is, as usual, on the weather. A day or two of gentle rain after direct seeding could be all they need for fast, even germination. A super-hot, dry stretch after transplanting could mean daily watering in for a bit. And so on, one little thing against another!
Spring seedling snapshot tradition
A pretty rough snapshot taken with my phone—its attempt to balance of sunlight and fluorescent doesn’t do the photo any favors—still fulfills the spring photo blog tradition of seedlings on the light racks. (More words to come…)
Wheel hoe underdog challenge!
It doesn’t sound like a fair contest, the wheel hoe going up against the tiny tractor, but that’s the experiment underway this season. With all the rain recently, weeds are primed to surge. So far, it’s mostly thistle and clumps of grass itching to expand, with pigweed, lamb’s quarter and a couple of other regulars starting to emerge. This area, not yet planted out, has already been hoed, but that haze of green won’t stay down for long. A matter of days… With the 48″ rototiller on the tiny tractor turned by diesel horsepower rumbling like a tiny tank, it’s easy to put things off a bit. The tiller will churn up whatever’s in its way in no time. This fine wheel hoe has instead only an 8″ blade and a lone human…pushing. Every little bit of growth makes the going harder. The time to get in is early, when the blade can more or less glide smoothly and evenly, and you can move travel up and down with fair ease. There are other things to consider here—time, fuel, effect on the soil…more on all that as the experiment goes on—but timing is number one!
IN THE PHOTO: The wheel hoe is facing a strip that has just been walked. It’s hard to see the line between hoed and unhoed, especially compared to the cleanly erased path left by a rototiller. The weeds are sliced just beneath the soil—like cut flowers, they still look fine. Give ’em a day, especially a sunny, hot day, to dry out, and the difference becomes clear. Weeds, gone!