Whats in a Name?

So green!

I always hate when they change the name of a family. The Apiaceae family will forever be the Umbelliferea family to me. I have a bed of miscellaneous Apiaceae in one bed. I love their different green textures.

The fennel has been slowly sizing up. I pick a few each week to use in my salads. Since these were sort of self sown - I tossed old seed heads on the bed - the plants are way too close together. So eating is my way of thinning. Eventually I'll let some of them go and flower.

The celery on the other hand were sown indoors and spaced fairly far apart. Celery hasn't done so well for me in the past. I've gotten the plants to grow but they never produced that much. This year I have a lot more plants and I've given each one ore space. They are growing better. I've started harvesting the outer most stalks. each week. So far they have been small, but the newer stalks are getting much bigger.

Also in the bed is some celeriac that won't be harvested until fall. But the parsley right near it is doing very well. I pick a few leaves every couple of days to use in the kitchen. I keep a bouquet of them on the counter so I have some fresh during dinner. I find I'm more apt to use it if it is always there.

I'm obviously not the only one to like this family of plants. I've got a small praying mantis patrolling for bugs. I've seen them here and there in the garden earlier on when they were tiny. It is nice to see them growing. I also saw one in the raspberry patch today. When they get full sized they will freak me out a bit. They do get huge. And they look so much like sticks from a distance that I won't notice them until I'm almost touching them. Gack! But I love them anyway. They are such cool creatures.

I do have a plant from another family in this bed. The peas which are in the Fabaceae family. Again they changed the name on me. The name legumes are in common usage here, but it is no longer Leguminosae. Why oh why do they do that? Since I can't eat the peas, they are going to be pulled out. I was just waiting for some seeds to show up.

And they did today. I wanted some amaranth seed. Ones that were bred for greens and not flowers. Though I'm sure their flowers are pretty enough. I've been wanting to try them. I figured if they had calliloo in their names they would make good greens. I've had calliloo in the Caribbean, but most of the time they made it with dasheen leaves. I wanted to know what dasheen looked like and one of my guides pointed out the plants. I'd always called them taro and hadn't a clue until then that you could eat the leaves too. I always thought it was a root vegetable.

I think tomorrow I'll get out and plant my seeds. Though I'm still contemplating starting them indoors first. I could always do it both ways and see what works. I have absolutely no experience with these plants. I just hope I can keep them small enough. The packet says three feet apart, but they are talking about for seed. Hopefully if I keep cutting it, it will stay smaller. Or I can start new ones on occasion. If anyone has any hints, let me know.

Planting Celery and Brassicas

This morning was warm but rained a bit. After the rain stopped I decided it was nice enough to plant some more seedlings. The parsley, celery, and celeriac were a bit overgrown as it was. The bed at the end was partly frozen still, but the section I needed for these was thawed. Yesterday the soil on the far end of the bed by the brick path even got to 60F (15C) yesterday when it was sunny. That last foot by the fence though still doesn't see anything but very early morning sun, so that ice takes a while to melt out. But I'm not putting any transplants there. I'm going to let the fennel pop up on its own from seed heads that I tossed there last fall.

I had two extra celery plants left over and put them right next to the other ones. That area is supposed to get peas in a week or two, but I don't mind losing some space to more celery.

Next up was to decide which of the brassica flats to go in today.

I decided on the baby Asian greens. They were more tangled and I didn't need them to get worse with time. Also since they produce so quickly keeping them longer in the blocks tends to make them bolt more easily. They are the first of the brassicas to produce and I want them to get going quickly. With the weather so nice and warm it will really jump start them.

When I put the window box plants in this bed I didn't measure. It made it a pain as doing a grid lets me get the plants in without crowding better. Those window box plants didn't fit my grid well. So there is a bit of unused space in there. Maybe I should have just crammed them in tighter.

I still have 24 more little plants growing upstairs under lights. In a couple weeks they will need to go in. I'm hoping the window box plants will be at least partially harvested by then as I don't have anywhere near that space for 24 more plants. But worse comes to worse I can shove them in or just toss them. I might just pick some at the baby stage to free up room. They are already baby Asian greens as it is - small plants naturally. There isn't much to them if you don't let them size up. But I'll cross that bridge in a couple of weeks.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll get to the other flat of brassicas and the alliums. I'm not great at taking care of the poor plants that need to be watered at least once a day and sometimes twice on really sunny warm days. Sometimes I let them wilt too much. They are always happier planted.

In Hope of Spring

Making soil blocks

My schedule says on January 20th I should seed the parsley. I decided to do it today. A day or two, or even a week won't matter much to such a slow growing plant. And smelling the wet warm soil is so therapeutic on a cold day.

Seeded and covered in plastic to germinate

Last year I did the celery and celeriac very late comparatively. But they tend to be slow growing just like parsley. And like parsley they tend to be planted in mid April. I'm not sure the planting date will hold up with the cold weather we have had, but maybe the pattern will change before then. And maybe the snow will melt sooner than I think.

Labeled

Because of the possible late spring I planted some lettuce, bok choy, and mizuna early. That may seem counterintuitive, but I'm guessing I'll be chomping at the bit in spring and I might want to plant up some easy to grow greens in pots so that I can put them on the back steps to grow. I can bring them in easily at night if it gets cold and I would still get some early greens. I'm still not sure if I'm going to or not, but it gives me the option. If the weather changes radically and we get the warm temperatures the western part of the country has seen, they will just go into the ground in a month. But I really doubt it.

Shallots

The shallots and bunching onions are up. The onions germinated a couple of days ahead of the shallots. And the onions have a lot more plants in their container. So I won't have a ton of shallots this year, but it will make a good trial to see how they grow and store here.

Emptying the Beds

These last few days were busy in the garden. We are expected to get a good freeze on Friday and Saturday nights. The ground may or may not thaw out again this year, so I needed to get all those root crops out of the ground.

Tuesday was beautiful so I wanted to get a good chunk of the carrots done. I got half of them picked and stored. I did the rest today. I'm not going to talk about that much as I'll do a carrot post soon.

Wednesday I cleaned up the broccoli bed and picked the last broccoli. I didn't put compost on that bed because if I can get a chance this year before it all freezes up, I want to double dig the bed. Afterwards it will get its share of compost. I also cleaned up the celery and celeriac section of one bed (the rest had already been cleaned out). Of the four celeriac plants I put in during the spring, only two survived. And one had a rotten root. So I harvested just one rather small bulb. I hope it was worth it. I'm fairly sure the seed was contaminated with celery mosaic virus. And then it spread to my celery plants. I'm not too happy about that as mosaic virus never goes away. If I try it again I'll get it from a different seed source.

Also on Wednesday I did a lot of cleaning up. The bamboo poles got put in their silver tarp to protect them from the wet over the winter. The freeze thaw would pretty much destroy them, and I don't want to put them in the basement, so every year they get wrapped in a tarp and put on top of the early corn bed. I like that bed because I won't need it until May, so the poles can stay there a long time if necessary. I removed the hose and reel from the front yard and did the garden area hose late today once all the roots were harvested and cleaned. In addition to the hoses all the filters, flow controllers, and sprinklers were put in the basement. All the little things like knives, scissors, and trowels (which I keep all over the garden) where put away in the shed. Except where it is still protecting the soil (from the cats) all the rebar was put in the shed too along with the short bamboo poles. The shed isn't tall enough for my big poles.

Today in addition to the second half of the carrot bed, I picked the parsnip bed.

It had parsnips, turnips, and beets. The parsnips did just OK. I had a few really good ones. Most were small. I have some rot in the ground that turns the outside orange. Usually it is just skin deep which is good, but I'm guessing they won't last long in storage.

The turnips were also small. They probably had enough time, but the parsnips were right next to them and were so big they blocked the sun. I'm a little surprised they grew as well as they did. I didn't get a lot, but I'll appreciate what I have. Next year I'll grow the parsnips in a square block and leave the other half of the bed for turnips. This year the parsnips were down the middle of the bed. This was a problem for two reasons. During the early season, the early turnips shaded a lot of the parsnips out. And during the later season the parsnips shaded the next seeding of turnips out. I think 4' x 4' blocks of each will work much better.

So I think I'm all set for the cold spell to hit. I have just three beds in production now. The spinach bed, the kale bed, and the bok choy/chard bed. And my refrigerator is full of root vegetables, mainly carrots. Hopefully later this week I'll get a post up about those carrots. But for now I'll just say they did really well. They are my favorite of the root crops. So I'm happy even if the others weren't all that stellar.