The garden has been moving along rather quickly since we bounced back, and I’ve gotten a little behind in the posting. It ought to take me this week just to catch up. There are a number of stages in this process that are particularly exciting, and sewing seeds is one of them (harvesting, of course, is another).
Last weekend, we amended the soil in plot #2 and chopped it into a grid for some square foot gardening action. We also planted a few starters and dumped a whole lotta seed into the thick, black dirt. In the photo below, you’ll see the three broccoli plants along the right side toward the back, with two white onions, then two beet plants, then two more onion plants along the inside.
The large empty swaths of soil you see are already planted. We seeded up two squares of spinach and two squares of arugula along the left side there. The leafy greens will hopefully yield a good nine plants per square foot, and we’ll plant another square of each every month or so to keep us in the leafy greens. Since both spinach and arugula require a lot of leaves to really do anything in the kitchen (if you’re going to cook them down), we need to be able to pull a few plants at a time (hence the two squares each, which will hopefully yield 18 plants per crop).
The raddish and carrots you see noted on there were planted across two full squares. I’ll be amazed if our technique works, but everyone recommends it, so who am I to argue? It’s quite clever really: radishes germinate and grow to maturity in about the same time it takes carrots to germinate at all. So, you plant your carrot seeds at about 1/2″ down, and then sprinkle a little dirt to cover, and plant your radish seeds. As the radishes grow, they loosen up the soil for the carrots to move into. Once the radishes are mature, you pull ‘em out and the carrots take over.
Because of this quick cycle of the radish, people who do this sort of thing recommend using them as filler crops all over the place; their leafy greens help keep weeds down and their root systems keep the soil loose and aerated.
Above, you can see the very first sprouts of arugula popping through! The following day we returned to find the first handful of radish breaking through. Days to germination:
- Arugula: 5 days
- Radish: 6 days
Ah, the fun begins.
