Getting Ready for the 2024 Garden

Hello there, gardeners and other interested hivers! These charming little flowers are a sign! It's that time again. We gardeners are starting to get stir crazy, looking outside, and getting overly excited whenever the weather gets nice. It's quite early but not too early to start planning and even planting certain cold weather crops indoors.

Cold Weather Crops?

Yes, some vegetable crops very much enjoy the cold and even benefit from a frost or two. And if you plant them in the summer, ask they will do is bolt (go to flower) Which crops are these?

Things like:

Cilantro, believe it or not
Spinach
Lettuce
Swiss chard
Radishes & beets

and pretty much the whole Brassica (cabbage) family, including but not limited to:

Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, collard, kohlrabi, mustard, etc.

I don't consider potato to be cold loving, but you can also plant them in spring/late summer due to it's long growing season.

Like I've said before, I don't normally plant brassicas because they attract cabbage butterflies, whose larvae voraciously feed on the foliage. However, I remember a plant I tended when I worked at the aquarium which the animals loved and I loved harvesting.

This brassica can grow enormous! I am very excited. I actually went on a little gardening shopping spree.

The vermiculite and coco coir are for some serious soil mixing I have to do for a raised bed and for transplanting my pineapple.

The flowers are for a pollinator chaos garden I'm planting around my dead maple tree. Last year, I tried to layer my plantings so that taller plants would be in the back and short ones in the front.

It didn't really work as a lot of the flowers didn't even sprout. So this year I'm acknowledging that sometimes things just work better and more prolifically without such careful planning and coddling.

Besides my normal ongoing white bean experiments indoors, I've been trying to propagate my trees by cuttings.

Here's one citrus cutting. Lately, I've been putting my cuttings in soil because they seem to do better, at least initially. Although we all like to see the roots form before our eyes, this setup is better. My favorite part is the dome to keep humidity levels high but they are limited and bulky.

My time has also been dedicated to terrarium building.

This is my newer one. I call it, "Faerie's Rest Stop". I've planted various chunks of moss around and even a small woodsorrel plant (after this photo was taken). The woodsorrel may not last but it's already been a week. I stocked this habitat with numerous springtails but I think some predatory mites got in. That's what's not letting the springtail population properly explode in my original terrarium.

I always find myself hunting for and abducting more wild springtails. So I finally got around to building their own enclosure. It's nothing fancy. A springtail farm just consists of a small container with lid with some all natural lump charcoal in it and about an inch of water at the bottom. Pretty soon I'll have an endless supply.

I think I want to try to cultivate isopods as well... I'm not new to the idea, I just never got into it but now I'm trying it. I made an enclosure but I did not pre-stock it with springtails! So now there is a runaway mold problem that the budding springtail population cannot keep up with. It is also very moist in there so the isopods in there might die. That's ok there's less than 10 in there and they're just Armadilidium vulgare from my back yard. This is a cosmopolitan species that has followed man from Europe to all suitable corners of the world. I don't see myself paying for these little crustaceous arthropod. Especially not $200 for 5 individuals that are supposed to look like "rubber duckies".

On Saturday I've been hired to give a talk about starting seeds! It is the first of three gardening workshops I will be hosting. I'm excited but it's also a bit nerve-racking. Wish me luck!

As the last tidbit for this post, I actually did harvest something this week. I did? Yes!

Yes, looks like ginger bit it is......

Sunchoke!

This tuberous sunflower relative can be harvested throughout the year, provided the soil is not frozen solid. It grows over 7 feet tall and to keep it from spreading all you can do is harvest it!

We used the tuber to make hashbrowns and another time we added it to ravioli. It can be used just like a potato except it has 0 starch!

This cold growing season is going to be great! I can't wait but I also need more hours in the day! There's so much to do. I'd better get back to it. So much watering and planting to do!

Until next time!