Over this past weekend, I finally transplanted all the seedlings that I grew. Unfortunately I ran into a bit of an issue, since almost all the seedlings developed a bad case of sunburn on their leaves. Guess I shouldn’t have given the seedlings full sun right off the bat, since I put them out for the full day on Friday the 14th.
Last year my issue was “damping off” (see here & here), and now this year sunburns. Man if it isn’t one thing its another.
For the last couple of weeks I was on the fence (literally) about whether to add some more space to the garden, another 8′ by 16′ to be exact. Well I finally pulled the trigger on the idea, but I ended up executing the idea a little bit differently than the last time that I added onto the garden.
Usually I would take my pick/maddox and grub all the grass off the surface, which is a very time consuming and labor intensive task. So as I was looking at the space an idea popped into my head out of the blue, burn out all the grass out with my propane flame thrower! I was only able to get about 1/2 the plot done, since a rain storm ended up rolling in on Saturday afternoon. And last I checked, propane and lighting don’t mix. But for the half that I did end up getting done before the storm, it only took me about 35 minutes to get it done and that was even with the grass still being slightly wet from the rolling rain storms.
With just a little bit more burning to go this week, I’ll finally be able to plant up all the seeds for the sweet corn and the beans/snow peas in the ground.
You can really see the radishes in the backyard and the Swiss chard in the front yard coming in nicely. Also I’m starting to get a little bit of growth action on the lettuce.
From the way that the main rhubarb plant is growing, it looks like once again I should be able to get two very robust harvests out of the plant. I’m not so much worried about getting stalks out of the other four plants, so those are basically the “in case of emergency” cuttings for friends and family that might want a rhubarb plant.
Once again the centennial is doing gang busters when it comes to vine growth, a couple more days and I’ll finally have to run the new diagonal trellis system to support the centennial off the ground.
I also cleared out an 8′ x 8′ patch of the garden and planted up two kinds of radishes (French Blush & Sparkler), three kinds of beets (Detroit Red, Moneta & Golden) and two kinds of lettuce (Bordeaux and Outredgous.)
Talk about quick turnaround time. When I got home from work last night, I had a little cardboard box in my mailbox from Johnny’s. So now I’ve got to lay out my seed starting calendar for the next couple of months. The plan so far is to start all the herbs and pepper seeds (jalapeno, aji limo, bell, etc) this week, and then some time next week I’ll start the seeds for all the tomatoes. And then in about two weeks, I’ll start the cucumbers & zucchini inside as well as sowing some of the seeds that need direct sowing (carrots, beets, lettuce, corn, peas, beans, etc.)
When I reviewed all the seeds that I ordered, I noticed an interesting trend with a large portion of the seeds that I ordered. In that maybe two thirds of the seeds that I ordered, are seeds that need to be directly sow into the ground. So really the only seed starting that I’ll need to do this year are for the herbs, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini and cucumbers.
One little tool that I picked up this year, are two seedling heater mats. We’ll see if they are any help in germinating my seeds, since I keep my house right around 63F, so any extra heat to get the seeds off to a strong start is a bonus in my book.
Well I finally placed my seed order with Johnny’s tonight, and here is what I ended up ordering for $50.35 (shipping is included in that number.) Each packet of seeds ranged from $1.00 to $2.95 each, with a couple of the salad mixes being a great deal with 5,000 to 17,000 seeds for $1.50 a packet. Continue reading