Start Your Own!
Update: Upon further examination, we find there are a few small green beans on the bush bean plants.
by John Weckerle
With the hoop house repair nearly complete (all that remains is to reattach the door and the bird netting), we find ourselves eagerly awaiting some warmer weather for planting, even if it’s just cool weather crops. To get a head start on the growing season, we bought a couple of inexpensive shop lights for starting plants. Shown here are several varieties of bush beans (Maxibel, Contender, and Blue Lake), mustard and collard greens, broccoli, and oregano. The white window box in the back contains basil, dill, and cilantro. Not yet under the lights because they haven’t sprouted yet are this year’s tomatoes. As we mentioned previously, we’re going with Romas plus four heirloom varieties. A total of 18 starter pots have been primed with three seeds each, and we hope to see sprouting within a week or two.
Our early seed starting efforts are yielding results.
The beans have done very well – they’re already beginning to flower – but the greens are having a tough time. For some reason, they have been repeatedly attacked by aphids. We’ve knocked these back a couple of times, but they showed up again recently. We’ll keep fighting them but we’re looking forward to hardening the plants off and getting them in the ground.
Last year’s kale has already started putting out leaves (one plant actually stayed active all winter, and we’re nearly ready for kale and white bean stew). The carrots we didn’t harvest in the fall have also started sending up greens, and early taste tests have been positive. On the herb front, the tarragon and parsley have begun leafing out, and the sage stayed awake through the winter. Additions to the herb bed this year will include basil, dill, cilantro, chives, and maybe a few others. We’ll take another run at rosemary, although we don’t think we’ll put it in the herb bed given that it does tend to get pretty big and makes a nice stand-alone shrub.