“Pop” isn’t the most elegant, poetic word, but that’s what I thought the first time I noticed how plants can suddenly shoot up overnight. It’s feels like magic, especially when you’ve been obsessively focused practically hour by hour on their progress, as I was in my first year of farming. Crops are growing slow and steady, then you turn around for a minute and they’re suddenly transformed: bigger, more vibrant colors, next level! As if they POPPED into a new form, like in a cartoon. Plants can pop right through their growth, from when they’re tiny seedlings (some, like corn and pole beans, grow so fast in the field that you can imagine staring at them for a while and being able to actually see them grow). It might not seem like much to look at, but to the watchful eye, these lettuces just popped. Nice!
Veggies
Garlic: the bug’s eye view
Another cloudy day. The garlic is still the only thing to see as far as crops in the field. It’s looking quite happy and healthy. That’s good!
A day in the sun
I’ve been hardening off trays of seedlings over the last few days, a few at a time, taking them out from the under the lights. Today, they were all outdoors, some for their first taste of the sun. It’s a manual routine, walking back and forth from the light racks with one or two trays at time, then bringing them back in in the early evening. I like it: a clear, simple, straightforward task, and the most important thing to do when you’re doing it. This is also exactly the type of routine that’s perfect for automation, or at least, optimization.
To grow a fair bit more than this year, I would put seedlings out in an unheated greenhouse where they’d stay until transplanting. That brings more convenience and efficiency, and also a few extra concerns. Voles tend to burrow in and munch on greens, so checking the perimeter becomes a thing to do. Daytime temperature in the greenhouse shoots up to 40°C+ (104°F+) on a sunny day, so ventilation is a must. When you open the doors in the day, you have to close them at night against cold and critters, and open them again early the next day. If the forecast is for freezing overnight, row cover placed in the evening and removed in the morning can handle a few degrees below (in a more extreme cold situation, a portable heater fired up in the middle of the night might be necessary).
Then there’s the new super-high winds that started happening around here within the last five years or so, there’s extra concern about the whole greenhouse staying up—mostly not in your control, but you still think about it with every weather warning!
Nothing wrong with scaling up and improving efficiency, while every step to bigger has its complications!
Baby zukes
A little less than a month after germination, these summer squash—a variety of zucchini called Raven—seem pretty happy under the lights. They still haven’t seen the sun, which sounds a little weird when said like that. I’ll soon start putting them outside during the day, getting them ready for the field. (The “29” on the plant label at the top left is how I keep track of which seedling is what, in my recently revised and simplified seedling marking system…)
Garlic spreads its wings
Considering there was nothing to see six weeks ago, the garlic is healthy, spiky and coming along nicely!
Bare root lettuce transplant
Bare-root transplanting lettuce—separating seedlings and replanting them with more space to spread their roots—isn’t something you’d do on a large scale. At Tiny Farm scale, it’s manageable and fun in a simple, relaxed way, like making flatbread, or prepping veggies for cooking. Very up close and personal with the plants. My usual approach is to seed them where they’ll stay until transplanting in the field, which saves time. With this round of lettuce, I was starting five varieties and wanted to see how they all germinated, so I seeded a bunch of each in a single plug sheet, and today I divided them as needed. Some are still two or three together, so as not to tear apart the roots too much, to be thinned later on. It all works out!
Lettuce under lights
The first round of lettuce, five days from germination, under the lights. I could have started them earlier: two weeks, three, four? It all depends on the weather, when it seems right to transplant, and when you’re hoping for the first harvest. This year, hopefully young harvestable lettuce is ready by late June, so if I can plant them out in mid-May, great! Some years, I’ve started lettuce as early as February, for planting in April in an unheated hoophouse. This time around, it’s straight to the open field. We’ll see how it works out!