garlic looks good, and community gardening musing

Last fall I planted 80 heads of garlic out of a pile I got from my farmer Chris Yoder at Vanguarden Farm.  I like his garlic because it’s got big cloves, not so much peeling.  Back in the fall I was feeling behind schedule when I didn’t have my garlic in the ground by early October like my neighbors up the street did.  I think I didn’t get mine in until almost the end of the month. But we had a really really warm winter, and their garlic sprouted and then got killed off by frost.  Mine survived - probably some combination of my late planting and the thick bed of mulch (just leaves) I laid down over it.  Actually, probably the most important factor was that this is a hardy hard-neck garlic meant for colder climates.  I think theirs was soft-neck braiding garlic.

Anyway, here’s what my garlic bed looks like today after I pulled back the mulch and added about 2 inches of compost where the mulch used to be.

Looks good, right!  Well, just so you don’t go thinking my whole garden looks like that…  Here’s the rest of the garden (this is the one at Oakdale St), with the garlic way in the back:

Yikes!  I didn’t do a very good job cleaning up last year.  Actually I didn’t do any cleaning up last year at all.  The stems of my mostly failed brussels sprouts crop are still there.  That stuff that looks like grass is a diabolical weed called Star of Bethlehem.  It actually kind of looks like baby garlic, with a soft little bulb underground and grass-like leaves.  I tried eating some, it doesn’t taste good.  Too bad, because I could practically live off of the stuff that’s growing in my garden.  It only grows 6 or 8 inches tall and makes very pretty little flowers, but as you can see it spreads like crazy.  Each bulb surrounds itself with a ring of little bulblets.  The bulbs can be a foot down in the soil and will still send up leaves and flowers.  If you just pull out the leaves and not the bulb this stuff just laughs at you.  I did that in one section just a few days ago and today there was more than 2 inches of new growth on those plants.  You have to dig out the whole plant, and often when you try to, you sever the leaves from the bulb, or when you pull the bulb out it just scatters its little bulblets around and laughs at you again.  This is a genius of a plant.  Actually, the garlic patch is also full of it, I have not been taking this stuff seriously enough in my garden the last couple of years.  I really should have combed through it before I planted the garlic, getting every last weed out.  Now all I can do in the garlic patch is pull at the leaves, since digging down to excavate the weedy bulbs would destroy my garlic patch.  That’s going to be pretty challenging.  I am not a great weeder. 

I am actually a pretty bad gardener all around, despite my enthusiasm for the subject.  Last year I also grew garlic, but I didn’t go cut the scapes off when I should have.  They got all tall and straight and woody before I finally cut them, the result being that I couldn’t eat the scapes, and I got really small heads of garlic.  This year I will do better, I swear.  How could I mistreat such a good-looking garlic patch?

The difference between my two community garden plots is also pretty apparent to me.  At the BUG garden, there is this ridiculous abundance.  We have a gigantic mound of compost.  I probably moved more compost in my garden plot at the BUG garden than the whole pile that was delivered to Oakdale.  My plot at BUG is nearly three times as big as Oakdale, and it gets full sun, where the Oakdale garden is shady for half the day.  My BUG garden plot, like all the many plots there, has its own little water spigot, which is an unbelievable luxury to me.  At the Oakdale garden, we use a hose off a neighbor’s house.  We have to walk around the block to turn the water on and off, and there’s only one hose, which you drag over to your plot to water.  Someone in the BUG garden even left behind a pile of soaker hoses, which I had been planning on buying from Gardener’s Supply (they’re a co-op).  They were just sitting around and I asked if I could use them and the answer was sure.  I was about to spend maybe 60 bucks on some of those!   The other day the Food Project was looking for a place to dump their extra spinach and cilantro seedlings and where did they go?  THE BUG GARDEN.  There are five trays of seedlings, hundreds of plants, plants people actually really want and like to eat, just for the taking.  The BUG garden has a clean and tidy tool shed stocked with multiples of lots of tools, while the Oakdale garden has a janky little shed with doors you can barely open, there are lots of tools in there, but most of them are not the ones you need.  We don’t even have a wheelbarrow, we borrow one from a neighbor, or move dirt around in 5-gallon buckets like I was doing today.  BUG garden has like 5 wheelbarrows and only one is broken.  Not to mention the social life over there. 

I have been thinking a lot about the difference between these two gardens and what makes it so.  Seems like the very biggest factor is scale.  The Oakdale garden has only 10 or so garden plots, and each one is small, so there are fewer gardeners, and each one has less work to do and spends less time there.  The BUG garden must have 30 or more plots, and most of them are pretty huge, so you have to spend a lot of time there taking care of it.  Most of the time in the Oakdale garden I am the only one there, while at BUG there’s always someone else, often many people.  There are also multiple places to hang out, and a play area for kids.  This is all about scale - all of this is only possible because it’s a bigger site with more room for more and bigger plots, and more gardeners paying dues ($25 per year at each site) to pay for things like 2 dumptruck loads of purchased compost!  Unthinkable! 

Argh, I feel so bad for shit-talking my community garden at Oakdale Street!  I really love it, it’s a magical place that I feel really connected to.  I got my plot there because one day, years ago, I was waking by with a friend, admiring the berry bushes and grapes.  Tracy, the garden coordinator, was there and offered to put my name on the waiting list.  I put my name down but she didn’t call me for two years!  I had moved out of the neighborhood (only some blocks away but not as near as before) but still wanted to be a part of this amazing garden.  I thought I was the luckiest person ever.  Now I feel terrible because the new garden has all the things I love about the Oakdale garden, just bigger, and with more of everything, and more space for everything.  It seems obvious that I should give up my plot there and let someone else have it.  But I also want to help make Oakdale a really awesome, well-functioning community garden too, and have a place to grow a lot of garlic, of course.

video about my roommate and my seedlings

Here’s a video of my roommate Nicky describing her efforts to comply with my “leave the bathroom shade open” request. The only sunny spot I have in the house is the bathroom window, where I’ve built shelves to (just barely) accomodate all my emerging seedlings. Problem is, this window is also right next to the toilet, so if you don’t want the neighbors to have a wide open view of you as you use the john, you have to close the shade, then remember to open it back up again when you’re done, so the plants can get some light. It’s an annoying thing I’m asking my roommates to do. They are really quite nice to accomodate this request, and most of the time the shade does get left open.

Here you can (just barely) see my tomatoes, basil, peppers, and eggplant. Nicky uploaded this on April 23. These plants were planted on March 23. Even with the shade open, they don’t really get enough light, and this is about as good as it gets for a window. It faces directly south and is bigger than a standard modern window. So the plants are all tall and leggy. But actually I’m not too worried about this, because most of these plants are things that I can plant deeper when I put them in bigger pots. They will root along the stem.

Below maybe you can also see my two big basil plants. These are overwintered from last year. I’ll have to mow them down soon because I need the pots they’re growing in for other things. They’re not really making many leaves anyway, they’re putting all their effort into making flowers, which I keep mercilessly pinching off.

a problem with the broccoli

One of my broccoli seedlings looks kind of bad:


A fuzzy photo, but maybe you can see.  The leaves have been turning purple and dying.  The stem of this plant turned purple, then rotted out at the base. 

The other three plants don’t look as bad as this one, but I can see their leaves are also starting to look sickly.  I have been trying to figure out what’s wrong, but I have only guesses right now. 

First guess is that this is some kind of fungus.  Apparently there are a lot of different funguses that broccoli can get.  And I did use some soil from last year that had sat around and got waterlogged, so it could be something kind of nasty grew in there.  I potted up the three better looking plants (the one above is too far gone to save) and did a little experiment.  Assuming there is some kind of fungus in the soil, I shook all the old dirt off the roots and rinsed them off.  The best looking plant I re-potted in my homemade compost, the theory being that the multitude of beneficial bacteria and microorganisms in there will outcompete the damaging fungus and the plant will get healthier.  The other two plants got potted up in some organic potting soil out of a bag that PK gave me, the theory being that it presumably has no funguses or bacteria in it, beneficial or otherwise.  Hopefully, one of these strategies will work and I will have some broccoli this year. 

After this I went back to the interweb and tried reading more about broccoli diseases.  And realized that the other thing that could be happening is some kind of mineral deficiency, namely phosphorus, which apparently turns the leaves and stems of plants purple.  So I broke out the ol’ fertilizer bucket.  I don’t usually use any kind of fertilizer on my plants, I have this romantic idea that my super duper compost has everything any plant could want.  I got this "natural" fertilizer from my farmer friend, so it must be OK.  I put some in the dirt with the potted up broccoli, and now we wait and see how they do. 

Today I also planted some new peas.  The ones I planted last month didn’t come up - either the seeds were too old, or the weather was too cold for too long.  The new ones are freshly-purchased this-year’s seeds that I soaked overnight, so I’m sure they will do great.  I just hope I get some peas out of them before it gets too hot for them, it’s a little late for planting peas. 

Feather beds for the onions

On Monday I moved approximately a shit-ton of new dirt into the BUG garden.  It was a very hot day, 86 degrees, they say.  I drank more than a gallon of water, and got a pretty mean sunburn.  Plan was to go spend a few hours in the morning, then go to work, but I ended up staying there all day, and into the night!  I didn’t leave until 9 pm.  Alexander was nice and kept me company.  The new garden is a very sociable place, so many people to talk to I was having a hard time getting my work done, for a while there. 

 
This photo was about 2 pm.

While I was there a delivery of compost came from Apple D’Or, which happens to also be the place we take our wood scraps from work for recycling.  This was some good dirt!  It helped with my second wind. You can tell how much I built up and leveled the garden by comparing it with the fence.  The ground level used to be parallel to that bottom horizontal span on the fence. 

This is about 7:30 pm, after building the onion beds.  I have one more bed, on the left, to build up.  That one’s for beans.  I didn’t want to wait any longer to get those onions in, they are little runts and have a long way to grow before the solstice.  In the near bed are clear dawn yellow storage onions.  In the far bed, shallots on the left, and red onions on the right.  This is a huge investment of onions, considering I’ve never really grown them that successfully…

These photos are thumbnails, you can click on them to see the details.  That took me a minute to figure out, I’ve never had one of these, how you say, "blogs" before. 

First day in the new garden

Last night was cold enough that I had the heat on in my room.  Today was warm enough that I opened up the windows.  I worked all day in the BUG garden today, in this amazing summer weather, after two weeks of rain and sleet.  I actually left home wearing the same flannel-lined carhartts that I’ve been wearing since October.  I had to turn around and go back for some cutoff shorts. 

The plan was to remove the railroad ties from only one side of the garden, since removing them all would be a ridiculous thing to try and do all at once.  I was going to do the ones along the back fence, which are the ones disintigrating the worst, and come back for the rest one year at a time.  But I got there and the job immediately got twice as big.  The railroad ties were completely rotted, meaning composted,  hardly even there at all, (meaning leaching arsenic into the soil!),in the east corner of the garden, which is also the lowest part of the garden, which makes sense.  Water was collecting there and rotting them.  They were nailed together with these huge 8" nails, and fastened down with 2 feet of rebar.  Which was fine for the rotted ones, but made the intact ones really hard to get out.  I ended up doing two whole sides of the garden instead of one, pulling up railroad ties in varying states of decomposition, and replacing them with cinder blocks that I scavenged from around the garden.  I also decided while I was there to try and grade the whole garden flat (which is a ridiculous thing to try and do).  I built up new walls where the railroad ties used to be, except about 8" higher, which is a lot closer to grade with the West corner of the garden.  Where the RR ties had decomposed a lot, I had to shovel out a lot of dirt that had little shreds of PT, into trash bags to get hauled away (we assumed it was contaminated.) 

I took soil samples today from three different places in the garden: one from where a disintegrated RR tie used to be (if there’s arsenic contamination, it will be there); one from right next to a fairly intact RR tie (to see if they’re leaching arsenic even if they’re not breaking down); and from different spots throughout the middle of the garden, just to see how the soil’s doing overall. 

I was really hoping to be done today, with my garden all prepared and onions and fava beans all planted.  But even after a long day’s work, there’s still a lot to do.  There is one last RR tie that I can’t get out without sawing it (they didn’t have a good enough saw at the garden, I will have to bring in my own), and I still have to bring in a lot of dirt to the garden to grade it and get it ready for planting, lay out new paths, and plant those onions and favas before it’s too late!  Hopefully I will get help with this stuff tomorrow.  I have no reason to believe anyone is actually reading this, much less anyone who is available during the day tomorrow to help with some back-breaking labor.  But just in case you are, want to move some dirt tomorrow?  I’ve got some vegan gluten free rosewater pistachio cupcakes I could share! 

I got the plot

I’m now plot number 19 at the Southwest Corridor Community Farm.  Laurel picked me out a sweet sunny spot, right next to a really inspirational super-gardener named Cathy.  But there are issues. 

The garden is great, it’s 12 ft by 13 1/2 (huge, by my standards), with its own water spigot in the corner, what a luxury!  But the whole place was built, long ago, with pressure treated railroad ties that are now deteriorating and leaching arsenic into the soil!  Argh!  I’m told not to grow anything for eating within 6 inches of these borders, and to take them out if I’m up to it and replace them with stone pavers, which is a lot of muscle work.  If I’m going to do that I should do it before planting anything, or before loading in all the compost it can use to build up the soil.  Which means I’d have to do it now.  And I’ve got a lot of onions who are very anxious to get into that dirt.  Hmmm. 

So now I get to do the most fun part, planning out the garden and what will go where.  I geeked out at the garden, measured out how big the beds are in there (the previous occupant put down a kind of inefficient pattern of brick paths and I think I’m going to redo the whole thing (more muscle work) to make just a little more space for all the veggies I want to stuff in there.  I’m now consulting all my sources, trying to decide how many onions I can squeeze into every 9 square feet.  Does each one need 6 inches?  7?  8?  I might even give them 9, at least the yellow storage onions.  I want them to get big: we eat a lot of onions at my house and it’s more efficient for us to have big ones - less work chopping them up. 

Peas have not come up yet.  I’ve brought them back inside hoping they’ll sprout where it’s warmer.  Wish I had done that in the first place. 

More tomatoes have come up, peppers are up, still waiting on those eggplants!  I’ve got one spinach plant that survived whatever little fungus was killing off the others. 

Below is an email I sent to a friend in response to a question about moldy seedlings and damping off.  I love to hear myself talk about gardening, apparently:

Stacey Cordeiro wrote:

I’ve
actually given up on those 72 cell seed starting things, and the mold
and damping off were one of the reasons.  Usually I’d have 6 seeds
starting of 12 different kinds of things in one of those trays, but the
problem is 12 different plants are all going to sprout at different
times.  And once a seedling sprouts it doesn’t need the same things as
a seed under the ground waiting to sprout - that is, it doesn’t need
quite as much heat and humidity, it needs to have its cover come off,
so the leaves can dry off and not get moldy.  Also, those 72 individual
little trays dry out really quickly, it’s hard to keep the dirt "evenly
moist" like you’re supposed to do, which stresses out the plants. 

I’ve
switched to starting seeds in 3" pots as recommended in one of my
favorite gardening books, The New Victory Garden by Bob Thompson  -
depending on the plants, I put somewhere between 3 (tomatoes) and 100
(onions) seeds in one pot.  I keep a little water tray under them
(usually a shallow plastic hummus container) and a plastic bag on top.
As the seeds sprout, I can take the plastic bag off the top right when
they need it.  And when they get big enough, I separate them out of the
3" pots.  Thompson recommends transplanting them into individual seed
cells at that point, but I don’t see why - mine go from sharing one
three inch pot to each seedling I want to grow inhabiting it’s own 3"
pot.  Either that or they go straight into the ground, like the onions
will (hopefully) do. 

I’m
not actually sure damping off and the mold you have are exactly the
same thing, but I do know damping off is a kind of fungus.  Most dirt
has a multitude of funguses and mold spores just waiting for the right
conditions to grow.  A lot of places will tell you to sterilize
everything in your seed starting kit - to wash your seed trays and pots
with bleach, use only sterile soil-less starting medium, but I think
that’s kind of dumb, actually.  I start my seeds in the same soil
they’re going to be growing in when they’re grown.  I think the logic
they’re using is if the seedlings grow up in a sterile environment and
then get transplanted into some dirt all full of funguses and bacteria,
they will get a head start and then be stronger and more developed when
assaulted with all those microbes?  But I wonder if they’ll have been
too coddled and will just die when exposed to that stuff.  Kind of like
kids who grow up in overly sterile environments developing a lot of
allergies.  I choose to go not-sterile. Which means sometimes I get
mold and damping off sometimes.  If I do, I just try again, or do
without the seeds that didn’t make it, and the next year I plant more
of the stuff that seemed hearty and resistant to the particular bunch
of fungus and mold living in my soil and my house.  If I do find that
white fuzzy mold growing in my seed pots, which I do, I scoop it out
with my fingers or a spoon and throw it away, to avoid spreading it
unnecessarily throughout the dirt.  I doubt it really matters, though,
because if the spores are there, they’re there, and the important thing
is keeping the dirt wet enough for plants but not wet enough for mold
and fungus.  Also keeping enough good stuff living in there, like good
bacteria, worms and microbes, to out-compete the fungus.  I do this
with a lot of homemade compost. 

As
for the peas, I bet they will be fine.  I have always thought that peas
didn’t need to be started indoors, you can plant them outside in the
early spring - but I am not having good luck with mine this year!  I
planted them more than two weeks ago now outside in flower boxes on my
porch, and they haven’t sprouted yet!  Probably some combination of
using old seeds, and it being so damn cold.  So maybe it’s a good idea
you started yours inside, maybe I should have tried that!  In any case,
I wouldn’t worry too much about it - if your plants get the damping off
there’s not much you can do except take the cover off and let them dry
out a little, and just start again with new plants if they do die.  But
I’ve never noticed that fuzzy white mold actually kill any of my plants.

There’s
this famous tomato gardener in Maine who says that the way she prevents
damping off is to mound the seed starting soil up above the top edge of
the container.  She says the little space that most people leave
between the top of the soil and the top of the container is a tiny
little micro-climate that pools cool air and encourages damping off,
and that if you mound the dirt up over the top they get better air
circulation that way.  I haven’t actually tried that before but the
logic seems reasonable, I guess.  You could try that. 

Right, and bottom-watering is definitely
the way to go.  If you find that your soil mix is not getting wet on
top after an hour of sitting in some water, you probably haven’t tamped
it down enough.  That used to happen to me when I left the soil too
loose because I thought the seeds would like it better that way.  I
still keep a mister near the seedlings and do mist them sometimes, but
only in the morning when I know the sun will dry them out.  When I used
to mist my seedlings as the primary way of giving them water, they used
to get damping off much more often.  Now I mostly just bottom water
them. 

Never used any fungicide sprays myself, so can’t weigh in on that one.

Sorry
for rambling, but I was working at a computer today (I don’t always)
and I love to think about and write about gardening more than most
other things…

Good luck,
Stacey

Laurel Kirtz wrote: it’s called damping off
when seedlings develop mold

take the top off to dry the plants and soil a little, while it’s in the sun

switch to bottom watering if you can, find a tray that can fit the thing and
water the tray…

and get a fungicide spray
just in case
mahoney’s in alston
maybe allendale - call first.

mold could spread. a quick spritz of spray may cause furthur damage from
happening.

i forwarded my response to stacey C. to see if she has any bits of wisdom.

love from laurel

ps: baton twirling at around 11 tonite at the middle east for whats up
benefit!

> From: Meg Rotzel
> Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:20:47 -0400
> To: Andi Sutton Sutton , Laurel Kirtz Kirtz
> ,
Susan Sakash Sakash
> Subject: mold on my sprouts?
>
> Hey Gals-
> A little help here- I just transplanted my sweet pea sprouts into 2
> pots (organic potting soil)- and watered them slightly- I don’t think
> I over watered them. Today I went to water the other spouts that live
> in one of those 72 slot baby sprout incubator green houses. The spot
> where the pea sprouts used to live have some fuzzy mold in it- and
> when I inspected my pea pots they had evidence of mold too. The other
> wells with my other sprouts didn’t have mold and needed some light
> watering, which I did. I then plowed under the mold in my pea pots
> with my fingers, checking on the moisture of the pots. It all seemed
> OK, slightly damp… but dry along the edges of the pots…
>
> Any case for worry? The fuzzy mold was only in a couple of small
> patches, only associated with
the peas, and only near the stems where
> I may have over watered them….
>
> Lemme know what you think!
> THANKS fellow gardeners!
> Mega
>

Introduction to my garden

The plan for 2007 goes like this:

On the porch roof at my house, there will be tomatoes as usual.  This year I got a bunch of awesome heirloom tomatoes.  I didn’t mean to get so many, I only wanted one really, the black krim.  We get lots of tomatoes from our CSA and don’t really need many more.  But the place I ordered from had a minimum order, so I had to get 5 kinds.  I started them kind of late, on March 29.  It’s been kind of cold, and they are not actually germinating all that great.  I tried not to get carried away this year, I only planted three seeds of each kind, because all I really wanted was one plant of each (maybe 2 of the black krim).  Any extra seedlings are going to Ivanna because she won’t be back in Boston in time to start her own seedlings.  Anyway, these fancy seeds are not germinating all that great.  I’ve got one out of three germinating in each little pot.  Maybe the rest will still come up as it gets warmer. 

Also on the porch roof: I’m planning on growing eggplants for the first time this year, Rosa Biancas, which are supposedly less bitter than regular eggplants, and also white with lavender streaks.  Also cayenne peppers and paprika peppers, because someone once said "you’ve NEVER had paprika until you’ve grown your own!" and I want to try it.  The eggplants and peppers have not sprouted yet, and I’m getting anxious about them.  I wish it would get warmer, I don’t have the money or inclination to set up an artificially warmed and lighted seed starting place, I only have my bathroom window.  Finally, there will be lots of basil up there with the tomatoes and eggplants and peppers, as per usual.  Basil is the only thing I’m really good at growing.  Two of my plants from last year are still living in the upstairs bathroom, we’ve had fresh basil whenever we wanted all winter.  Genovese and Thai basil are sprouting happily.  I will have some to give away if anyone wants some. 

This year I’m planning on establishing an herb garden in my tiny little patch of a front yard, near the ornamental cherry tree.  I think I’ll dig a small bed, outside of the drip line of the tree, and put some other stuff in pots, inside the drip edge.  That’s so the tree roots don’t grow into the garden and hog all the water and compost.  I already dug up and gave away the little bush that was there, a pretty little pink-blooming spirea shrub.  It’s nice, but it was in the only sunny spot, and I can’t eat it.  It went to a good home at JP Cohousing.

I already planted some sugar snap peas in window boxes on the front porch, with hemp twine strung up to the porch roof for them to climb on.  But they haven’t sprouted, and it’s been nearly two weeks!  I’m real bummed out.  I dug in the dirt, looking to see what the seeds are up to, whether they’ve died and rotted or what.  But they’re there, all plump and green, just not sprouting yet.  I guess it’s just been too cold.  I’ll keep waiting.  The seeds were old, maybe that’s slowing them down.  I’m also planning on planting some snow peas as well, and have been wishing I’d planted them sooner, but apparently it doesn’t matter since the others haven’t come up yet.  I’ll get around to it soon.  Apparently I made a mistake with the hemp strings - I anchored them to rocks in the bottom of the window boxes, so the string goes right down into the dirt.  Duh.  My super duper compost rich container mix rotted the hemp string and now they are just floating in the breeze.  If any of these peas come up I will have to come up with another way of anchoring the strings to the window boxes.

 

My super-duper hemp-rotting compost, freshly sifted:

In my community garden on Oakdale Street, I’ve already got 80 heads of garlic growing, that I planted last October.  I haven’t checked on them lately.  They probably started growing in that warm spell in early March, then got stunted.  It’s been so cold at night, I hope they haven’t been damaged by frost.  I gave them a good layer of mulch back in the fall - once it warms up more I’ll pull it back and let the sun shine directly on the dirt to warm it up.  The plan for the rest of the Oakdale garden is Jacob’s Cattle beans (which apparently tolerate some shade, and there is some shade there), and maybe some edamame, which grew well there last year. 

The Oakdale garden also has a shared orchard.  My favorite tree, the old peach tree, is on its last legs and needs to be cut down.  There is another peach tree sapling that can be dug up and moved into its place, but it’s a lot of work and almost too late to do it (here’s one place where the cold spell is actually helping out).  Maybe next weekend.  I can use volunteers for that. 

I will find out on April 14 if I made the cut for a second community garden plot, at the BUG garden on Lamartine Street.  Crossing my fingers, because I’ve got about 200 onion seedlings that need a home, and while I love Oakdale garden, my plot there is really small (about 4′ by 16′) and kind of shady.  Clear Dawn storage onions are the ones I’m most excited about, also shallots and red onions.  I’ve got tons of red onions because…  I planted them as an afterthought.  They were old seeds, and onion seeds are only supposed to last one year.  So I planted basically a whole packet of red onions, thinking I’d get maybe 10? 20? to germinate.  It looks like the whole pack germinated though, I think there’s a hundred.  Which is a problem because these are not storage onions, you have to eat them as they come.  If I plant them all we’ll have too many.  Let me know if you want some!  I planted my onions on Feb. 25 and they’re looking pretty good.  They didn’t get enough light in the bathroom window (nothing does), so got too tall and started flopping over.  I read that you should trim them back to 3" if they get too tall, which I was scared to do but went ahead and did it, and they look very happy about it.  The onions and broccoli seedlings are spending their days outside even though it’s cold - they need the sunlight more than the warmth right now, and they seem to be surviving OK.  I’m not leaving them out overnight yet, TOO COLD!

 

The onions seedlings before their haircut:

And the broccoli as little runts:

The plan was that the BUG garden would have onions and bushy beans.  I’ve got some swedish browns that I’m pretty excited about, and some favas.  I thought I’d also do a mini-wampanoag three sisters garden (minus one sister): scarlet runner beans trellised up some Oaxacan green dent corn.  Problem is apparently you’re not supposed to plant onions and beans together, aargh!  I haven’t been able to find out why exactly.  Maybe it’s because beans fix nitrogen in the soil, but onions don’t like too much nitrogen?  I’ve been thinking of planting a buffer plant between them, something both plants can live with, like mustard.  But I don’t know how far away the plants have to be before they have a negative effect on each other, and none of my gardening books will tell me.  So I’ll experiment, and see how it goes.  And it may be irrelevant if I don’t get the garden space. 

One last thing: I’ve got some spring broccoli coming up, and the plan is to grow a couple of plants in large tubs in the backyard.  It doesn’t get much sun back there, but that should be OK for broccoli, which likes it cool and tolerates some shade.  I’d like to fill in the rest of the tub in the early period with some spinach and/or beets, but so far have not been able to sprout any spinach.  Most of my old spinach seed won’t sprout.  The one that will (Space) is getting diseased and dying.  We’ll see if any make it.  If they don’t, maybe I’ll just stick with the beets.  I’ll plant them in the tub with the broccoli just as soon as it gets warm enough!  Then in the fall I’d like to do more brassicas in tubs - more broccoli, collards, and brussels sprouts, which I just barely grew last year and would like to try again. 

Oh and the plan for my shady backyard involves ostrich ferns (the ones that make fiddleheads!), ramps (wild leeks), and a couple of token plants you can’t eat: Soloman’s Seal and Jack in the Pulpit, just because they’re native, tolerant of full shade, and weird looking.  I may also get around to sawing up an oak log out of the playground of the nursery school where I work on the maintenance crew.  Apparently oak logs are the best for growing shitake mushrooms!  We’ll see if I actually motivate for that…

I’m going to be facing a major shortage of containers and good dirt this year, with all my gardening ambitions.  Last year my landlord threw away a whole trash barrel, full to the top, of my own homemade container mix, loaded with compost from our kitchen scraps.  I actually cried.  Right now I’ve got maybe 8 gallons of finished compost, and a trash barrel full of almost finished that needs to be sifted.  But it’s not going to be enough, and the composter is only half full right now.  I’m going to be potting up plants into gradually bigger and bigger pots - I won’t be able to put the tomatoes, eggplants, and broccoli into their big containers until I get enough potting soil together!  Which is kind of hazardous because small containers dry out faster, and the plants get rootbound.  I have killed lots of plants by not getting them into big enough pots fast enough.  So I’m on the lookout for big pots (anything over 12") and lots of compost and other soil amendments.  My potting mix is 1/2 last year’s potting mix, and 1/2 a mixture of fresh compost, coir, and vermiculite. 

I don’t know if this friendster blog thing allows people to comment on what I’ve written, but if so, I’d love comments, suggestions…