April 2013 New England

sorry to hear you all are still in the cold and having a late spring

Camp that pic of your garlic is awesome!!

hope it starts to warm up there and you all can get out to the garden!!

hugs
rose

This IS an awesome garlic pic! When is that snow supposed to be gone?

Still cloudy, 40 and very windy here. I can't get out to plant Carrot Week carrots coz my eyes water as soon as I step outside...can't see worth a darn. Maybe later today.

CC

Sunny & gorgeous now, after I planted my Carrot week carrots.

Check this out - all tom seedlings are the same age. Plants on the left were potted up into the old spent MM I used for seed starting. I potted those up about week before potting up the batch on the right into brandy new MM:


Just goes to show ya the power of compost!
...which we already knew. Nice to have a visual tho.

CC

All my covered transplants did fine thru the frosty nite and tonite I'll cover them again.
My grson, the darling, tugged that kale root a few times and out it came from the bed. I couldn't budge it. Says a lot about being young and strong.
I sowed my carrot week seeds today, some spinach and radishes and transplanted my Tokyo bekana in the A-frame so I can cover it tonite.
The forescast should improve tomorrow when I'll try to transplant kale and chard and maybe broccoli and pot up some pansies. The nites won't be hitting frost for at least 7 days.
I hope everyone is making some headway in their New England gardens, if only to clear them out, compost and rake them in preparation for sowing and transplanting.

This is the first year I'm doing SFG. I got my beds filled with Mel's mix that my husband helped me put together. That tarp method of mixing is exhausting! So glad I only have to do it once. The finished product feels great though! No wonder plants love it!

I was hoping to have more stuff ready to transplant this weekend. My tomatoes are doing well, but it's a little early for them.

I started 2 broccolis indoors also, and they were doing great until my 3yo daughter decided to pick one. I had just moved them from under a grow light to our enclosed porch to start the hardening off process, and I hadn't had a chance to explain to her not to pick them. Oh well, they grow quickly enough so I started another. And the other one is still okay.

My eggplant took forever to germinate, and I'm not sure it's doing anything any more. I might try again on a heated mat on the porch instead of under the grow light. Hopefully it's not too late.

My chives aren't doing anything under the grow lights either. I had great success last year just tossing the seeds in a whiskey barrel planter. Maybe they just prefer being direct seeded.

Ah, well, this is a pretty rural area. Anything that I'm not able to start from seed I can probably get transplants for locally. It's just not quite as satisfying.

ddemeo wrote:My tomatoes are doing well, but it's a little early for them.

Your family avatar is beautiful, Dawn! Yes, the Mels Mix is amazing, isn't it? So easy to work in.

I grew tomatoes from seed for the first time this year and am very interested in what others in NE are doing with them. Quiltbea is doing an early tomato planting experiment to try to eat a fresh tom by July 4th. I thought I'd join her. When will you be putting yours out? Do you have a photo of them?

CC

Beauty of a day here in Maine this afternoon. I transplanted broccoli, cabbages, kale, mizuna and planted shallots today. I got out my poles for enclosing my tomatoes but my back is aching too much to do justice to putting in the ultra early tomato experiments today.
They are sitting outside in the sunshine and just loving it all day. Its at the top of my list for tomorrow instead.
While raking out a bed, I accidently found my last years parsnips that I didn't harvest so I'll look for the rest of those tomorrow as well. I dug up 3 good ones and 3 teeny weeny ones with my rake.

The brassica bed with Calabrese Broccoli (supposed to be very early), Brussels sprouts and at the very top are some Parel and Red cabbages. The left column is the north side for later Sugar Snap Peas.

Explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line...I'm sick to my stomach.

I wanted to post some pot up photos but not feeling like it just now...

But I'd like to ask, do we pot up peppers the same a toms? Taking off the first leaves and adding soil as they grow up?

CC

Cape....Yes, peppers are buried deeper like tomatoes, though not as much. They grow roots all along what's buried.
I haven't watched any TV so I'll have to go see about the Marathon.

We have peepers!

Lesson #3 with my garden this year: Only put FINISHED compost in the beds. I tried composting directly in the beds so as not to lose any nutrients in leakage into the ground, but now my beds are in rough shape and it makes it difficult to transplant tender little seedlings into a rough patch. It might work, but I think transplanting would be easier with a completely friable soil.

Other than that, I transplanted half the peas today (it was too busy of a day to do them all) and I have other things to transplant. I've had other things going on so I'm sure I've missed seed starting dates, have to get to that.

Oh, Lesson #4 would be: Don't try to plant so many new things in one year. I have buckwheat to put in, bee attractant wildflowers, I ordered a grape vine that I want to plant at the chicken run, I recently said yes to a bee bee tree, I planted asparagus crowns in my hugel pile. Plus I have 4 ducks coming next month AND picking up a new package of bees this weekend that I still haven't assembled the hive for, hoping now I can just grab some supers from the existing 2 hives, I'm pretty sure they don't need all their supers so it might hold me over. Oh, and the seed potatoes are waiting for me at a friend's house, and I went in on a sweet potato order to experiment with this year.

There are only so many summers, esp. as you get older, it's kind of a rush to get EVERYTHING IN NOW. ha.

We have a pond in our woods, but no peepers yet.

CapeCoddess wrote:

ddemeo wrote:My tomatoes are doing well, but it's a little early for them.

Your family avatar is beautiful, Dawn! Yes, the Mels Mix is amazing, isn't it? So easy to work in.

I grew tomatoes from seed for the first time this year and am very interested in what others in NE are doing with them. Quiltbea is doing an early tomato planting experiment to try to eat a fresh tom by July 4th. I thought I'd join her. When will you be putting yours out? Do you have a photo of them?

CC

Thanks, CapeCoddess!

I spoke too soon, I'm afraid. Yesterday afternoon, while I had my seedlings getting some sun on our enclosed porch, my 3-year-old decided she'd try her hand at gardening. I only had one each of Celebrity and Big Beef since I'm starting small this year. I guess I should have planted extra, because she picked the Celebrity. I had already transferred it from a seed starter to a flat pack, so it was beginning to send out new roots. I tried putting it back into the soil hoping it'll take, but I don't know. I also started a new seed of that one, plus another Big Beef. You'd think I'd know to have backup after she picked one of my 2 broccoli seedlings a week ago!

I was originally planning on transplanting them to the raised beds around May 1st, but now they'll probably be delayed. I think the farm I have my CSA membership at carries both those varieties as seedlings though, so I might just cheat.

If you're interested in seeing the pictures, I started a tumblr page yesterday chronicling my (mis)adventures in SFG.

http://sfgadventures.tumblr.com

DD, it may be worth it to just go buy a plant at the nursery that is strong and well established. In New England there does come a point where it is too late to start plants from seeds. I think I am going to have to buy aubergine plants, again. When will I learn?

Update from this mornings visit to the garden:

Newly sprouted - beets, 2nd square of radishes, daikon, bush peas, 2nd batch of sprouted peas to replace the 1st batch that never came up but did right after the 2nd batch was planted.

Bush peas & celery stumplings:


In need of thinning and/or transplanting - Grand Rapids lettuce, chard, spinach
Here's the spinach in the center w/ batch 1 & 2 of peas on right and newly sprouting daikon on left:

Hanging out and doing fine - kale, collards, Romaine & Buttercrunch, celery stumplings, onions, cabbage, last years kohlrabi/kale shown here:

Newly planted this morning - more kale babies
Waiting to see any sign of life - carrots seeds

Potted up indoors - kale, tomatillo, tomatoes, peppers


And on the bad news side, something ate my brandy new strawberry plants that I put in last week...ate all the leaves right off them. Talk about pissed! What would do that?

CC

I've got my greenhouse up but the cover wasn't the one advertised. The video showed one with the insect netting when you opened the plastic. Mine doesn't have that and the plastic unzips along the sides almost the whole way to the top from the bottom.
I emailed the company to see if they will send me the cover they advertised.

Here it is with zippered vented openings near the peaks on both sides. This cover has wider side openings since it zips open along both sides so the bottom can be rolled up and tied out of the way. That is a good feature and I'm sure I can cope with it by putting netting across the openings from side to side. If they can't replace it, I'll make do.
The good things, the plastic is a nice weight. The zippers are sturdy. It was so easy to put together without any tools. I think the frame took me 10 minutes.

As you can see, it fits snugly over my 4 x 4 with stakes that bury in the ground to keep it in place. I like it.

I. Love. It. quiltbea.

I so want some of those.

camprn, are you still planning on getting potato onions for next spring?

I just transplanted 288 onion seedlings - youch. Like planting blades of grass. We'll see how that goes. But I have my eye on potato onions for next spring, will have to order early from Fedco.

edit: I found this nice document about potato onions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jnqst7-9YfWFovhqjARtcZZVJC0TPzKsow_5mdAwnyA/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1

I'm planning for them NHG.! Thanks for reminding me....

One reason I'm reminding you is to remind me, because I had forgotten all about them until I was post-transplant-anxiety researching to make sure I transplanted the onions right, and came across them again.

Now it's memorialized.

I would guess ordering them in August is best. September may be too late, as I found out last year.

Hmm camprn, Fedco has them as a spring order only. I think we talked about that in a thread, that that was your feeling all along, unless it was the other way around.

Somehow I lost my email thread notification again. I'll have to look in preferences, but last time I looked, it was checked.

I read that potatoes go in 2 weeks after last frost - for zone 5a that would be about the first of June.

Does that sound right?

Hm, I cannot remember, but I think they need to grow more. I'll have to check when I get home from Boston.

Frost warnings over the next few nights and I'm in too much bursitis pain to go out and cover. Could be the end of my celery stumplings...and my latest planting of Rainbow Chard since I noticed that it likes frost about as much as I do - zero amount! So glad I didn't plant my Rosa lettuces yet.

Anyone else have any concerns?

CC