Grow-Along Week 7

Howdy friends!

The grow-splosion is still going on strong at the Micro-Farm! Green things are popping up everywhere! It is tough to keep up with it all in pictures, but we are trying our best to keep you updated on all the excitement. Spring brings such amazing and busy energy and we just love it!

We have had some friends who are new to gardening ask us for help identifying the seedlings that are popping up in their gardens as weeds or plants that they intentionally planted. So, the biggest focus of today's Grow-Along update will be helping you all to identify your little plantlets by showing you pictures of ours. We hope that our pictures will give you a good representation of what seedlings for common garden varieties look like so that you don't accidentally weed out the good plants.


So, we'll start with our first little outdoor plants to come up: peas! In our climate, peas are generally the first seeds that can be planted directly into the ground. This year we have three varieties in our garden, Blauschokker, Half-Pint, and Super Sugar Snap. Despite the fact that they are all different varieties that grow to different sizes and will produce slightly different pea pods, they all look the same from the start. Pea seedlings are probably the most distinctive seedlings in the garden as they come up quickly and often will come up with more than one set of leaves whereas most other plants start off with a single pair of leaves when they first come up. Once your peas sprout, you will need your trellis system in place quickly, as peas are very vigorous growers and will tangle quickly and irrevocably with each other if you do not train them to a trellis early.

These peas will need trellises very soon!

The next seeds that could be planted in our area were onions. We have 2 varieties of Cipollini onion growing this year as they are a smaller type of onion with a shorter growing season. Full sized onions like the ever popular WallaWalla onion grow better in an area with a longer warm season than we have. We are growing our Red Marble Cipollinis from seed (our first year to try this) and our Borettana Cipollinis from starts. Onion seedlings look a lot like little grass seedlings with the exception that their leafy parts are rounded instead of flat. Depending on the variety, they can also take longer to sprout. The tops of onions can be used in cooking similarly to the way you would use scallions, however, keep in mind that cutting the tops may negatively affect the bulbing of the onion. Ours are pretty small yet, but here's an idea of what you can expect.

Our most recently planted seeds are our lettuces and spinach. We grow a variety of leaf lettuces and miniature head lettuces in order to give us ongoing fresh salad as well as a nice variety of flavor and crispness. Lettuce seeds are extremely tiny, so for our leaf lettuces, we plant a long furrow and thin the seeds out as they grow in. For head lettuces, we plant with the goal of growing 4 heads to a square foot, seeding each spot with a small pinch of seeds and thinning to just the strongest single plant. To thin the plants, just use a pair of clean, sharp scissors and snip the plantlet at the soil line. The leaves make fine mulch and whatever root matter there was will help to loosen your soil. Alternatively, if you have rabbits or chickens, the thinned out seedlings make a nutritious snack for either animal. (Just make sure you don't give any plants from the Nightshade family to chickens or rabbits as they are toxic - tomatoes, peppers, eggplants. )

Leaf Lettuce

Head Lettuce

Cute baby lettuces all in a row. :)

So far, that's the most we have to show as far as seedlings go since our carrots and scallions haven't come up yet and in our region, we haven't started our cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, beets, flowers, or tender herbs yet. We'll add to the knowledge base as we go along, though. :)

On an exciting note, we got a bunch of packages the other day that contained our new baby blueberry bushes (not pictured yet) and the new Honeycrisp apple tree and Native Plum trees that we will be planting to replace the trees that didn't survive the winter. The fruits have yet to be planted as the blueberries will be potted into either raised beds or 1/2 whiskey barrels and we needed to get some mulch before planting the trees. On the same day, we also got our Borettana Cipollini starts and got them planted in the onion bed alongside the Red Marble seedlings. Anyway, since we like to show off our growing food garden, we snapped some pics of the newbies for you. Elsewhere around the yard, Nate's herbs have taken off full-blast and are filling in quite nicely. We were amused to find what appears to be cat fur (not from any of our 3 indoor only cats) all over his Catnip. Apparently someone has found "the goods".  ;)

Honeycrisp and Native Plums

Borettana Cipollini starts

Herbs (Furry Catnip on bottom)

Our 2 Dogwoods and some Peony Buds

Indoors, the tomatoes and peppers continue to thrive. Some of the tomatoes have even decided to send up flowers already! I think we're going to have a bumper crop this year! We've begun the process of hardening them off since they will all be transplanted outside in a few weeks. The little plants are being transported outside to our covered upstairs porch for increasingly longer lengths of time each day to help acclimatize them to outdoor conditions like wind, temperature fluctuations, and sunlight. We couldn't be happier at how big and strong they have all gotten and you can see that it will be time to move them up to the next size pot to get them ready for their big move outside. :) Also, our Voodoo Lily collection is putting up some impressive growth as well. The Saroumatum venosum that flowered earlier this spring has put up its leaf stalk and is measuring in at a rather stunning 39 1/2". It hasn't opened its leaf all the way yet, but we are expecting a rather showy display when it does. Its little brothers and sisters are poking their heads up from the soil and appear to be deciding to leaf out this year instead of flowering - not a huge surprise since some of them are very small as yet. Shaun (of the Dead), the Amorphophallus riveri is still giving us hope for a big, beautiful, smelly flower in the future. He has finally grown up through the soil in his pot and we have high hopes that despite the fact that he is taking his time about growing, he'll put on a rare and lovely show for us sometime soon.

Just look at those tomatoes grow!!

The Peppers are looking great

 My "Little Stinkers"

Jamie and Kenny Bass have a lot of excitement going on at their budding homestead as well! They have a lot of seedlings popping up from their lovely red Georgia soil, and they also just welcomed home their first chicks, six little Buff Orpington girls who will be providing them with a source of lovely fresh eggs in the future.

Their daughter, Kerrigan
loving on a chickie

Just look at those little cuties!

Clockwise from top left:
Tomatoes and eggplants, buttercrisp lettuces,
pea sprout, broccoli sprout

Pumpkin bed
Newly tilled bed

Stell also sent us an update this week, we're delighted to see some color popping up for her in the North! Crocuses are always a sign that the warm days are on the way!

• That's it. That's all I've got. Well, that, and I'm going to dump some Jerusalem Artichokes into my compost corner. Maybe they'll grow, maybe they won't. No skin off my nose either way.
  It snowed last week, rained all weekend, and hasn't really warmed up any this week. I'm still getting very easily chilled, so haven't done anything outside. It sounds like most gardeners in my area aren't planning on doing much for another couple weeks or so, so I'm not in a big hurry. We get frost all the way through May anyway. 
  
  Stell Michelsen

Until next week, Happy Growing!

If you want to join us in the Grow-Along, simply send us your gardening plans, pictures, or progress via Facebook, email, or in the comments below. We welcome everyone to the adventure! It is never too late to join us! :)