Summer Seedlings: day 14

I'm following the summer crops that have been seeded in the Aerogarden seed starter.

We've just reached the 14-day mark, and I've re-filled with water and added nutrients.  We should be good for another two weeks.

Foliage

Here is what they look like on day 14:

Top view:

It appears like there is good solid growth on most species.  I would say that the Nasturtiums are doing less well than the others with yellowing of some leaves even while they continue to produce more leaves.

 Roots

The view from the underside tells more of the story:

Tomato root growth is abundant, as is the growth from the Dill and Basil.  These roots are lengthy and intertwined, possibly reaching the maximum needed for seed starting.  The pepper roots are coming along nicely, but they still have some development left

Tomatoes

The first thing that stands out is that the tomatoes have exploded.  They aren't too leggy yet, and they are not pressed up against the lights, but they have certainly grown effusively.  As I look closely, I can see that most cells germinated 3 and 4 seeds, leading to an abundance of stems.  I knew that I would have to thin, and that moment is obviously upon me.

So I trimmed the tomatoes back to 2 stems per cell and this is the result:

They're not noticeably different, but are in a better place for the future.  All seedlings are putting out their 3rd set of leaflets.  Some of these leaflets are protruding out beyond the grow lights.

 Roots like these are long, branching, and intertwined.  Some rootlets will be broken when separating them for transplanting.

Putting all the information together:

• Weaker stems have been removed, so we are down to the two strongest plants per cell
• Each plant is on its 3rd true leaf.
• Plant height is ample - not quite touching the overhead lights.  This is well beyond all other crops
• Leaves are beginning to extend beyond the lights, where they will probably wither from lack of light.
• Roots are well developed, branched, with fine rootlets.
• Any further root growth will likely be lost when separating the cells, due to breakage.

At the same time:

• the tomatoes will require me to raise the lights soon, even while other plants (like the basil) would benefit from having the lights closer.  
• the tomatoes are beginning to overshadow their neighbors, possibly restricting their growth.
• I am beginning to suspect that the tomatoes are hogging all the nutrients that the nasturtiums would like to use, leading to some yellowing

Taking all this information together, it looks like for the tomatoes, it is time to transplant them to pots under the fluorescent lights.  Any time this week they will be ready to go.  I would like for them to grow another leaf so that they have 4 true leafs before transplanting from the pot to the outside garden.  And some of these are destined for containers.

Herbs

 Meanwhile, the rest of the plants are developing nicely.  Peppers have modest leaf production above ground, and a few exploratory roots below the surface.  These plants look like they are good for another week or more in the Aerogarden.

The dill and nasturtiums are doing well, with good root growth and leaf development that is obviously a little further along than the peppers.  Any time after this weekend (day 21) these will be available for transplant into pots.

Summer Seeds

The time of the Cool Season crops is nearly over. My napa cabbage is going to seed, although the bok choi is beautiful. I know it's only a matter of time for it as well, though. I have been harvesting whole heads of cabbage and lettuce, recently, to hit the 1/3 target by the end of April, and that's mostly been achieved.
 April Challenges:
1. Remove and safely store the row covers. Well, the covers are removed, but I cant get a solid day of sunshine to dry them out for storage. So they are lying flat in the back yard.

2. Harvest at least 1/3 of your cool season crops. This has not been achieved. I've brought in 1/3 of my napa cabbage and butter crunch lettuce, but very little of the Bok Choi, Chard, and Kale. The last two freeze rather well. I definitely need to be more aggressive with my harvest.

3. Sow warm season seeds. Here, however, I've done much better.

 

Here, I have Tomatoes on the far right, Peppers in the center, Nasturtiums on the middle left, and a row of Dill on the far left.  Once again, I have been tremendously impressed with the Aerogarden's ability to sprout nearly everything.

Below are the dill, nasturtiums and peppers. Several of the Nasturtiums have come up, but not all of them have spread full cotyledons.  All the Dill is up, and most of the peppers but there are at least 2 cells that have produced nothing.

 

On the other side, the many rows of tomatoes are growing well.  I have three rows of tomatoes, with the third row (from the right) a patio cherry tomato that is designed to be self-dwarfing.  Other tomatoes include Roma, Better Boy.  Basil is in the fourth row.

 

I can see that 2-4 seeds sprouted per cell, so some painful thinning will have to take place in the future.  This is at about 7 days since sowing

April Harvest update

This month is the payoff of the winter garden.

Throughout the last two weeks, my harvest has been ongoing.  The lettuce, kale, cabbage, and chard have been abundant.  I have been snipping off individual outer leaves and it doesn't look like I have really made a dent in the lettuce.  It's gotten to the point where I have had to remove entire heads just to thin out the bed a bit.  The butter crunch lettuce is starting to form heads, which is very cool to see. I usually grow leaf lettuce and I wondered what arcane mystery was involved in this heading lettuce: it turns out the mystery happens all on its own.

I have removed the plastic row covers from the raised beds.   On the 17th, we had a low of 32 F. and on the 21st, we had a low of 36 F.  At this point, any danger of frost is over, and the cool evening temperatures would actually help these crops, to keep them from bolting.  The greater temperature concern now is from very high daytime temperatures inside the tunnel.

The other reason for the row covers is to give shelter against desiccating winds and soaking rains.  With the plants as substantial as they are, that is less of a worry.  The water table is lower so drainage is much better.  And the garden could probably benefit from any rainfall, at this point.

Hardening

Just wanted to confirm that I began hardening the Bok Choi outside for 2 hours.  It was an overcast day, with light drizzle that made it easy for the plants to start the journey outside.

Tomorrow, I will extend their stay into the evening, probably from 5 to 8pm.

the other plants are doing remarkably well, and the garden center starts are almost mature.  I mumbled something about waiting 2 weeks before harvesting, but I am nipping off outer leaves of the butter crunch lettuce already.

My replacement plugs arrived in the mail, and I purchased seeds to start in the Aerogarden.  This is the dilemma:  a package of seeds costs between $1.50 and $2.50.  With my limited garden space, I only have room for 5 or 6 tomato plants, total.  And when you consider the varietes, I really only need 1 or 2 cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, beef steaks, and so on.  So I could spend $2.50 on my cherry tomato seed pack and then look at another 6 weeks of hopeful watching, tending, and transplanting, or I could pay $3.50 for a really nice and good sized nursery plant and start it directly in the garden when growing conditions were optimal.

If I was going to plant 20 paste tomatoes for my tomato sauce kitchen factory, it would absolutely make sense to start them from seed.  But if I only need 2 roma tomatoes for my garden this year, it might make sense to go to Home Depot and pick out one or two of the best, even if they are at a premium price.

Much of this answer depends on how easy it is to start seeds in the Aerogarden.  With the limited success I was having with the Jiffy pots, this was an open question, and the Minimalist Gardener in me had no trouble providing an answer;  let the garden center take the risk.  But considering how easy the Aerogarden started my leafy greens (bok choi and swiss chard) and how eagerly they took to transplanting in 3" pots and from there to the raised beds, it might be a simple decision to make after all.

This first test with tomatoes and peppers will be very informative.

April Garden Update

Last post, I talked about the seedlings, some of which were added to the outside raised beds.  But there are a few crops already planted and growing well.  At the very end of February I planted butter crunch lettuce, and this is what it looks like after 5 weeks of growing:

There are a couple of the new arugula transplants at the bottom right.

According to the planting information, the lettuce will be ready in 60 days, which would put it at the end of April. Realistically, I could begin harvesting individual outer leaves in about 2 weeks.












The Kale and Chard are at about the same place, having been planted a couple days later:

Transplant March 5

And the Napa cabbage trailed by about a week so it will be ready in early May.

Growing for 30 days - April 4

I harvested a few of the outside leaves this evening for some greens to stuff my gyros.  Perfectly sweet and tender. 

Seedling Update

So we are a little over two weeks since our last post, and I was mentioning that I would need to re-pot the Aerogarden soon, because the seedlings were outgrowing the current situation.   The post was on a Thursday, and I did, indeed transplant about half of the seedlings into larger pots that weekend.  These went out under the 4-tube fluorescent fixtures in the garage.

This included all of the Bok Choi, Some Arugula, and two Swiss Chard.  I planted the plugs into a larger plastic garden pot, using generic potting soil.  When I opened the Aerogarden, the roots had grown together into a thick matted tangle, which I had to separate out with careful fingers.  Roots were snapped along the way, and I had to coil some around the pot to make them all fit.  This suggests to me that I probably should have re-potted sooner.

I didn't loose any of them, though, and they all seemed to like the new light, on an 18-hour cycle.  I also gave them a weak feeding of miracle-gro.  After two weeks in the larger pots, they became as you see them above, still rather compact, but pressing on the lights.

Emboldened by their eagerness, I took a small sample of 4 Arugula and 2 Chard and planted them in my outside garden, after a couple of days of hardening.  The garage is not heated, so they hadn't been in a climate controlled area for many days, and I still have the low tunnels up to enhance the microclimate So we'll see how they do.

This is what they look like in the raised bed.

The Arugula above is definitely looking a little ragged and I'm hoping a bit of space will help them even out.  The spatulate leaves seem to be yellowing, but new leaves are showing in the interior that are deeply lobed in the Rocket style, and are a much nicer shade of deep green.

The chard, to the right, is in beautiful shape. With a rich red color on the stems and veins.

Both of these had roots throughout the pot, growing out the bottom and up the sides, so two weeks seemed to be plenty to get them ready for outdoors.

These were seeds that I planted in the Aerogarden on March 4th.  It's about 5 weeks later and they are ready for transplanting into the garden.  My calendar for their progress looks like this:

• Week 1: planted seeds into aerogarden plugs.  By the end of the first week, all the bok choi, arugula and chard had germinated.  One week for germination
• Week 2-3: weeks two and three, the seedlings grew well.  Water and nutrients were cycled and light was on a 24 hour cycle
• Week 4: In the middle of this week, I transplanted the Bok Choi, Chard and Arugula into small pots.  2.5 weeks in the Aerogarden as seedlings.
• Week 5: Grew for 1.5 weeks in transplant pots under fluorescent lights.  At the end of this week, I transplanted into the garden the first half of the re-potted seedlings.
• Week 6: This is the transplant's first week in the raised beds.  I still have all the bok choi in pots for one more week, giving them the full 6 week start cycle.

That gives me about 6 weeks from planting seed to transplanting into the raised bed.  And these are for simple plants.  It is likely that other plants (like tomatoes and peppers) take longer to germinate and require a longer growing out period before they are ready for the garden.

So that means that if I want to plant tomatoes and peppers in the first week in June, I need lead time of at least 6 weeks to prepare seedlings.  If that's true, I should be preparing to seed peppers and tomatoes soon.

SeedWatch Day 14

Day 14 in the AeroGarden has seen a little change from when we left it a week ago.  The Bak Choi and the Arugula have been thriving.  Here it is at day 14 and you can see true leaves that are well developed

Germination was at 100% and I've known for a week that thinning would be necessary.  I seeded three seeds per cell and it was a simple, though not comfortable, task to pick the weakest of the plants to cull.  Here it is after reducing the herd:

The rocket was only double seeded and I didn't make any reductions there.  For each of these plants, the second set of true leaves is just beginning to emerge. 

These seeds were sown 14 days ago, and they germinated in about 4 days, so they have just 10 days growth on them, but they look like they are ready to be transplanted now.  In 4 days, they will have two weeks growth on them and could be transplanted then.  But to where? 

Put them directly in the Garden  I have a raised bed prepared for them, with a little napa cabbage growing at one end.  I could harden them off and plant the cell plug directly in the garden.

Re-pot them to a larger cell inside.  I could transfer them to a larger container of potting mix and grow them inside for another two weeks.  The clear drawback is that I don't have a place set up with as much light as they are getting in the AeroGarden now.  I'm not sure that another week of less adequate light will do them any favors. Perhaps I need to invest in another LED grow light for larger plants.

Re-pot them to a larger cell outside.  My raised beds have plastic low tunnel covers. Does it make sense to transfer them to larger potting cells and then grow them outside under the tunnel, rather than just planting them directly?  I think that would only make sense if I didn't already have space prepared to plant them directly.

Now, on the other side of the house, the Chard has had a limited germination, and the spinach has failed completely. 

Four out of the five cells of Chard germinated.  But the growth has been satisfactory, with a second set of leaves developing now

After doing a lot more reading, I'm beginning to understand the spinach problems.  The AeroGarden recommends that after germination, the lights should be run 24 hrs/day.  This gives the new seed leaves an abundance of energy, and keeps the true leaves from stretching and becoming spindly.  This has certainly been the case for the leafy greens I have right now.

Swiss Chard on day 14 after thinning.

But, the Bok Choi came up almost immediately and I had to turn on the lights. I have no doubt that this overheated the soil and prevented the spinach from germinating.  It was just too warm.  I've read the care gardeners exercise in germinating spinach, with paper towels in ziploc bags with alternate days in the refrigerator.  I wonder if I could germinate them first, and then transfer them to the AeroGarden cells to grow out.