Garden Update: February
Depending on where you are in the world you might be thinking, “What kind of gardening is she doing in February?” Well, most of it is dreaming/planning. The seed catalogs keep arriving in the mail box and even though I’ve already done my seed purchases for the year, the pictures of veggies and flowers are so beautiful I can’t help but keep the catalogs out and peruse through them. Want to know which companies I like? Check out My Favorite Seed Companies post from a few years ago. The list is still the same!
We have gotten some things started under grow lights. Mainly onions and our tomato cuttings. Last year we had an epic fail with our tomato cuttings. Either we mixed them up or the plants mutated, who knows, but our whole crop last year instead of being awesome sauce tomatoes was watery beefsteak tomatoes and they rotted before they would ripen due to grasshopper damage. Out of 15 plants only one was the sauce tomato we’ve been saving for years. We took cuttings from that and have let the cuttings grow since September. They are now flowering and some even have little tomatoes! Which is fantastic because it confirmed that we have the right cuttings this year. Soon we’ll be taking cuttings from those cuttings and potting them up so we are ready to put them right into the high tunnel come mid May.
Onions we seeded back in January. Onions are a very, very long season crop. They take quiet a while to size up enough to be planted out. They should be about the size of pencil when you plant them out. Any thinner than that and they will have transplant troubles. Be it wind or pests. Many people just buy onion starts at their local nursery or feed store, which is definitely the easiest way if you don’t care much what variety of yellow or red onion you grow. We’ve been growing onions in our big garden long enough to find out that only a couple varieties grow really well here so we always start from seed.
We’ve also got some lettuce and cilantro growing. The lettuce was just me really wanting fresh greens in the winter. I really should just do sprouts in the winter. It will give me the same nutritional boost of fresh greens but with more taste. Greens grown indoors really aren’t as flavorful as greens grown outside. Our lettuce has become naturalized in the garden anyway. We just let it come up where it will in the spring and eat from those plants.
With March coming on fast we’ll soon be seeding the brassicas: kohlrabi, kale, broccoli and cabbage. If you’ve never tried a fresh kohlrabi I highly recommend it. It’s so crunchy and juicy. It’s the perfect spring vegetable, plus it grows super fast compared to broccoli and cabbage.
As for my herb garden, it’s still sleeping for the most part. We’ve been getting atmospheric river after atmospheric river that keep delivering wintery mixes of rain, snow and sleet. I did go out there today after the sun came out and noticed that just at the surface of the soil some of the mint family plants are starting to wake up and send out new growth. I like knowing that my plants have made it through the winter. If you don’t pull things out of the ground and put them in pots inside to overwinter than it’s a game of rolling the dice and hoping you put enough leaves on them and the snow cover did it’s insulating job on the lowest temperature nights. So far so good! Let’s keep our fingers crossed until the end of March.
~ How is your garden doing? Thinking of starting a garden this year? Leave me a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.
