Winter Defiance II – Transplant Op
After a week away in chilly Washington DC, the balcony seems positively quite balmy. The plants disagree. With little growth or progress, I decided I might try a bit of transplanting to help their cause.
Kale on right (85% sure):
Without too much compost reserves, I decided to reuse the ex sunflower and salad leaves containers. The back of the seed packets said transplant lettuces 12″ apart and the kale 9″ apart. I used some liberal mathematics and round this down to 6″ apart (15 cm – let’s be progressive here). I kept the seedlings that I didn’t transplant as insurance as usual.
Kale post-transplant:
Three lettuces transplanted:
The lettuce has held up not quite as well as the kale. Also, note the old stems of the sunflowers. A smarter gardener might have removed them completely. Oh well!
Again, pushing the boundaries of what is permissible in the confines of our apartment, the transplants are going to be kept inside for a while at least. The soil was very cold and that seemed like something that wouldn’t be good for the tiny guys in a new home. That’s the last time I personify the plants, honest.
The corn salad leaves are doing quite poorly so I left them alone for the moment. Hopefully they will sort themselves out. They are on the balcony in the other room so they are easier to ignore:
Similarly, the oregano isn’t looking too hot but I did thin out the 50 or so seedlings down to 7. Maybe it’s just a slow grower, right?
Pre-thinning:
and post… meagre pickings!
All in all, everything is going very slowly, but I guess that is to be expected heading into winter. Hopefully at least some of these transplants will work and I can move them outside or into the greenhouse.
Either way, I made provision for such a situation, which is why I am prepared to shift focus for the winter months to cheese-making. The kit arrived today so hopefully I will have my first lash at it soon!
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Tags:germination, kale, lettuce, oregano, seedlings, thinning, transplanting, winter
Thinning without gyming
After reading a lot of blogs and online articles, I’m not convinced my winter defiance plan is going to work but I have resolved to soldier on regardless. This evening I thinned out the kale and lettuce and they seem fine. 2 inches seems like a good return for a week and a bit. I aimed for about two seedlings per 3/4 cm squared. I am not going to transplant all that is left but that’s for another day.
At the weekend, I hit another couple of garden centres (Atlantic in Blanch and one on the N3) and came away with a big pot and oregano seeds. I have two big outdoor pots now I can transplant into outside. The only problem is transporting the compost for the big pots to the apartment. I brought up 100 litres at the weekend only to have pointed out at the apartment that I had bought soil enricher by mistake. Hopefully I can work a half and half mixture with the compost when it comes down to it.
I don’t like oregano much as I think it makes everything taste like pizza. One thing I do hear time and time again is that it is better dried so it might make for an interesting herb drying challenge. I think it might be nice to have a bunch of oregano drying on the dresser in the kitchen though there are probably shedding and mould issues I haven’t considered. One thing of note is that the oregano seeds were very small. I put in a tiny amount in a pot which may have been about 50-100 seeds for all I know. I wanted to put in about 10 seeds but I couldn’t psychologically trust that that many seeds would do they trick. Hey if I don’t make these mistakes I will never learn right?
Before thinning, lettuce on left (I think, hope!)
After:
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Tags:kale, lettuce, micro gardening, oregano, seedlings, thinning, urban farming, winter
Winter Defiance! (1st attempt)
OK, so maybe my efforts to Florence Nightingale the basils in the window box were slightly misguided. I decided to let my sensibility govern my stubbornness (for once) and removed all of the basil from the ground up. Leaving the roots intact adds needed nitrogen to the soil. Or so I read somewhere.
Not wanting to let the cold spat get the better of me (stubbornness slowly kicking in again), I scoured Newland’s Cross for packets of seeds that suggested the contents were not a stranger to the colder seasons. I picked up:
- Kale – big demand for this in our apartment. Kale Dwarf Green Curled to be precise. “Hardy” apparently.
- Corn Salad Cavallo – some kind of “winter” salad leaves.
- Lettuce – “Sow at any time of year”. I’ll be the judge of that.
In order to find a home for the Kale and Lettuce seeds, at least for their infancy, I fashioned a mobile seed tray box. It consists of two seed trays on some waterproof plastic (bin liner) raised inside a cardboard box. I thought it wise to go for a transportable solution so during you’returningourapartmentintoafarm type disputes it would facilitate rapid retreat to the other room or the greenhouse outside. Our living room has been still getting a good deal of sun and regularly hitting 20+ degrees Celsius in the evening, despite the weather. At the moment the seed trays are occupying pride of place by the window. Let’s see how long that lasts.
In the other room, I planted the corn salad leaves where the basil used to be. I only covered the left half the window box with the aim being to populate the right half in a few weeks and ensure some kind of continuous harvest. I expect “harvest” might be a little ambitious for what happens but ah sure we’ll see anyway. Updates due in a few weeks when we have to look at thinning and then transplanting.
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Tags:corn salad, halloween, kale, lettuce, salad greens, salad leaves, seed, winter
