The Modern Victory Garden

HARVEST MONDAY

Each Monday, Daphne’s Dandelions hosts “Harvest Monday” where everyone submits links to their blog posts summarizing their harvest for the week.   It’s fun to see what people are producing from gardens from so many different regions, and how they are using it.   Check it out and join in too!                               

Root crops that are held in the ground for fresh harvests over the winter  that are left too long in the ground once the days start warming up and the day length starts increasing will generally begin sprouting in an attempt to go into a second year of growth.   For biennials like carrots and parsnips the second year is all about seed production rather than root development.   In fact, the roots of biennial crops will actually become less edible as the second year of growth progresses.   As I mentioned earlier in the week, I am seeing some signs of increasing growth throughout the property and on Sunday I noticed that the last of the parsnips were putting out new top growth too.   This is my cue to harvest the remaining roots as they will only decrease in quality from here on out.    There really was not that many of them left in the bed, but I harvested all that remained.         

Harvest totals for the week of January 23rd through January 29th (rounded to the nearest ¼ pound).

• Parsnips 0.75 lbs

Total For Week 0.75 lbs

Total Year to Date 3.50 lbs                                                  

Eggs collected this week – 8                                                                 

SEED STARTING

I am officially into my peak seed starting season.   The onions, celery, and celeriac are all emerged and growing.    My ultra-early start tomatoes that I seeded last weekend are starting to emerge.   The plants I started for the Giving Garden have their first true leaves and will soon need regular drinks of very dilute kelp emulsion tea.   All in all, things are progressing right along and as usual, I am constantly juggling to make more room under the lights for the newest items to be seeded.   This weekend, I started cabbages (Famosa, and Parel), kale (Dwarf Siberian Improved and Beira), Tatsoi, pac choi (Ching Chiang - dwarf), and kohlrabi (Koliribi).   I started all of these items in micro soil blocks as they are fast germinators and so keeping them adequately hydrated should be easier than slower starting items.   I used an old cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil and then I marked which group of 20 was what by placing masking tape on the edges of the pan with the crop and variety name indicated.   The micro block maker does 20 small blocks which are sized to plant up later into the medium sized soil blocks.   The blocks are easier to transplant if they are cleanly separated from the other blocks in the group.   I used my dough scraper/cutting tool to help separate the blocks more after they were formed.   It is the perfect tool for the job as it has a thin sharp edge, is not overly long (6 inchs), and has a handle to hold on to at the top.                                                           

These were covered by a plastic humidity dome and placed under the grow lights along with all the other seedlings.                    

GARDEN BED TIDY UP

The weather was windy and overcast all weekend, but for the most part it did not rain and the daytime temps were in the mid 40’s.   I took advantage of the mild conditions on Saturday to do some garden bed tidy up under the long grow tunnel cover.   I removed the items that were played out, eaten too badly by slugs to be useful, or had been freeze damaged by the period of days we had two weeks ago that were in the mid 20’s.   This resulted in several large sections that are now empty under the bed.   I cultivated and weeded the entire bed, and used my sharp hoe to scrape the weeds away adjacent to the edge of the bed.        

As you can probably tell from this picture, the soil was actually pretty dry under the cover so I gave everything a good watering while I was at it.          

The kale and the swiss chard have all been previously harvested pretty hard, such that they currently do not have much usable leaves on them.    However, they are showing signs of good new growth at the central growing point and I expect they will be producing harvests again very soon.                                   

There are two small sections of this bed that have baby radish and swiss chard seedlings growing that were seeded earlier this winter.   The swiss chard starts are very small yet but appear to be holding up despite the slug attacks.   Here's a golden swiss chard plant.                                

Further on down the bed is the last of the late summer planted crop of golden beets (a rogue red beet plant appears to be in among them), and the young pac choi plants I put out several weeks ago.                          

Once the bed was weeded, cultivated, and watered, I let it sit exposed to the ventilating effects of the mild breeze that was blowing Saturday before I recovered it with the tunnel cover.                                                 

There is just over two months left before I will need to plant this bed with the current year’s potato crop – assuming reasonable weather conditions, I should be able to continue getting good harvests from these overwintered crops during that time frame.                                                     

How are things going with your season extending efforts?   Have you begun any seed starting yet?                                

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener