Design

Winter greens I'm juggling tomato and pepper seedlings at the same time that I'm harvesting greens.  Yikes. I up-potted all of the tomato seedlings this morning and took them with me for spring break care in the coming week.  They'll have to go inside and outside from the 'mechanical' room at night to daytime temperatures and sun outside, instead of their cosy heating mat and shoplight on a timer. Hmm.  I'm also worrying about the unseasonably warm weather, as pleasant as it may be.  I may need to dash down from the mountains in the middle of the week to the Piedmont to water.  Hmm. a collard relative But the winter greens in my raised beds in the mountains were a welcome sight this afternoon. Spinach, peas, mustards, and mesclun sown in late February have emerged well, as well as a mystery mustard that I failed to record.  (It's doing very well in the lower raised bed). purple kale Arugula, purple kale, and collards are ready to harvest.  It's a good ...

A quick trip to a local big-box home supply store required an initial detour through the garden center's display of vegetables and herbs (not the point of the excursion!) It looked like there were more plants than the last time I visited. I wasn't surprised with the array of hardy kale, cabbage, and other transplants. Even the herb varieties offered up looked OK, although cilantro and arugula transplants are decidedly unsuited to the warm spring weather that's just around the corner here. But I've got to give the transplant producing company credit for being proactive and imaginative; they had snap pea transplants (!) for sale (also labeled as sweet peas...), onion plants in 6-packs, and a number of other things that I hadn't seen offered before in previous seasons. Now snow peas are very easy to sow directly, and best grown that way, but geez, what a clever idea to try to get folks to buy a 6-pack for more than the price of a packet of seeds? They were attrac...

Um, I love to look at seed catalogs, and seeds are really CHEAP, as hobbies go. I've been cataloging mine in a spreadsheet (an uncharacteristic activity) to see what I have to grow as transplants for an upcoming Garden event to encourage people to grow some of their own vegetables. We represent lots of partners: the SC Botanical Garden, Upstate Locavores, CU's Sustainable Ag program, CU's Home and Garden Information Center, SC Master Gardeners, and local community groups. This will be a free event, with lots of info about how to grow vegetables (as a revived Victory Garden sort of thing). Many Americans are enthused about giving vegetable gardening a try; I'm seeing much more interest now. Hooray. But, here's the list (uh, I did say I like seeds, right). Donating these seeds or transplants gives me the opportunity to buy more. Hmm, and I'll probably be enticed to buy transplants to support the cause, too! Not a bad thing. What a nice list to contem...