Pretty drab view of an empty patch on a partly cloudy day, but there’s new seed under there! Spinach, radish, peas, beets, green onion, lettuce, went in a few days back, perfectly timed for the last couple of days of slow, steady rain to get them started. You can see the faint lines of the seeder. (In front, mulched with straw, this year’s garlic is coming along well.) Rain also exposes the many stones and pebbles in this ground. Thousands have been cleared away, and they keep pushing up. It may look like a lot, but they’re not a problem. Live and…let be rocks!
Veggies
Seeds under plastic
Plastic that looks like plastic adds its own surreal touch to any scene. I use sheets of food wrap to cover plugsheets trays until the seedlings push up above the surface. The plastic holds in heat and keeps the seedling mix moist, both of which the seeds definitely like. As soon as the seedlings emerge, off comes the plastic. Time to let the air flow. I reuse new sheets of wrap for a whole season. With use, they lose their clinginess and are that much easier to handle. The little things add up!
First up: garlic!
Clear away some straw and there it is, a garlic shoot pushing its way up to the light! It’s the first sign of new veggie growth in the field this season. Garlic planting happens in the fall. It spreads its roots for a while, goes dormant for the winter when the ground freezes, and wakes as the weather warms. That’s what the books say. Whatever it’s doing in the frozen ground is fine by me, as long as it shows up for spring. Which it always has. It’s been…reliable!
Bare root Brussels sprouts
Yep, a wonder of Nature, up close. Three days or so after folding up the pinhead-sized seed in a damp paper towel, we have Brussels sprouts! Of course, this is only step one of many before we get to the deliciousness of actual Brussel sprouts. (Halved, tossed in corn meal and sautéed in butter is one way to go!)
Bare root germination like this is good for at least two things. It’s a useful germination test to see if old seed is still good. It’s also a way to start seedlings: transfer the sprouted seeds to a plug tray or pot, wait a few more days, and up they’ll pop. Let the greening begin.
The bare root approach adds an extra step compared to putting the seed directly in the plug or pot. It’s a little more work. It can be good with hard-to-germinate crops. Or if the seed is old, with a low germination rate, and you want to be sure that every plug has a plant. That it’s fun to see what’s going on is also a fine reason!
A blanket of fresh new snow
The weather app was right: more snow! Fresh new snow piled high never fails to make me wonder what it must be like to see this stuff for the very first time…
On a snowed-under mid-winter day, pictures of veggies growing in the field don’t come to mind. Except, I do like thinking about the fall-planted garlic, tucked under a layer of straw, biding its time.
The only other overwintering crop out there is Jerusalem artichoke. Rather than dig it all up in fall and replant in spring, lately I’ve been leaving a good amount to come back on its own. The chokes can fend for themselves.
Summer spinach
Spinach in August is never a sure thing. Germination in the summer’s heat is a roll of the dice. Keep seeding, over and over, every few days, and the odds of catching the right conditions go up. When a seeding does take, the going gets easy! Here, a sprig of volunteer purslane has pushed through to share the sun.
Cherry toms and pandemic
It’s mid-August, the heights of summer, and the cherry tomatoes are doing their thing. I wonder if there’s an endless interconnectedness between all plants, a real, tangible networking, as with cellphones or the internet, and if there is (seems to me as likely as not), what these cherry toms might be hearing about our great pandemic… Here in the field, it all feels to me quite distant, nothing has changed except in my thoughts. I can only imagine cities. Empty stores and restaurants. Few cars. A scattering of people, masked and hurrying away.