Tag Archives: Carrots

Another Year Begins

Last year I missed the leeks at the garden center so I decided to seed some leeks rather than try to buy some starts. I used one of those plastic salad containers that you get greens in. They have a lid and are about 6″x8″ and about 4-6″ deep. I’ll kept them in front of the sliding glass door where they will get bright but indirect light for the most part until they sprout.

January has been a dark, cold and wet month. Today was my first trip to the garden this year. No real work today, still recovering from surgery in late Dec., this was an ‘OMG I have to get out of the house lets go to the garden’ trip.

The garlic is up about 4-6 inches and looks good considering. I ended up losing all but a couple of the green onions and half of the shallots which was disappointing. The Egyptian Walkers seem to have made it though.

There are 4 or 5 Russian kale plants from last fall that seem to be doing well. We found clubroot not far from where they are planted so how they will do remains to be seen. A couple of the curly leaved variety are laying over and not looking very well. I’ll probably end up removing them during my first real work trip.

I seeded some greens last fall that didn’t end up making a showing but are up now. I’ll have to look back at what they were.

I ended up pulling the overwintered carrots. Very chewed up with root maggot I suppose. I think carrots are one of those ‘more trouble than they are worth’ here. I suppose I could cover them but it never seems to happen.

The horseradish I planted in the sunken clay pot is poking up. Darn, I had hoped to get it dug before it started growing again. I pulled the pot to take it home to deal with later.

All in all it was a great trip. If nothing else a learning experience. It was nice to get in the fresh air and get my hands dirty if only for a little bit.

Downtime

September came and went without much going on garden wise. The temps cooled and the rains made a regular showing. Fred kept creeping along to the point of needing his own zip code. Helda kept putting out beans like crazy, more clubroot was found in the broccoli planted this spring and the zucchini kept getting larger and larger as the number of visits per week declined. One a positive note, large zucchini can be treated like eggplant (bake the slices instead of frying them) and made into a wonderful zucchini parmesan.

The milder temps were not soon enough for the spinach tho. It all bolted and ended up being dug into the garden to help enrich the soil. That is new for me. Typically garden refuse would go into the compost pile. This year I made trenches and dug it back into the garden. Everything went in except the brassicas (clubroot) and anything with seeds like the few large cucumbers I ended up missing over the summer. The lettuce I planted at about the same time also bolted. I cut it off at the ground level to see if there would be any chance of getting anything decent once the temps cooled. Doubtful but worth a try.

figlets2015-09-13 All of the three fig cuttings I started last Spring have figlets and are about a foot tall. I started with a bag of dormant 6″ long cuttings from the Brown Turkey and Petite Nigra container plants a dear friend adopted. Looking at these I’m thinking they are all BT. This is fine as I do prefer their flavor over PN.

The second round of carrots I planted ended up with little holes through most of them. A root maggot of some kind. Need to research that one. I’m thinking a floating row cover would be a good idea next time.

The Iditarod tomatoes took forever to start producing but once they did were pretty consistant and had a good flavor. The Celebrities were gone at about the time they started so we have had a good run of tomatoes from the two plants on the balcony.

The horseradish I planted in a clay pot and buried is HUGE. While I did have a horseradish plant I had never harvested any of it so that will be new for me. I know it is one whose ability to regrow from the smallest piece of root left behind. For this reason it was planted in a clay pot and buried. It remains to be seen whether or not that will work. There is, after all, a drainage hole at the bottom.

Lessons learned: 1. Wait to plant spinach and lettuce for fall. Mid July was much too early.